Northern Europe is to-day more humane to animals than southern Europe, because the women of the north have had greater freedom and have entered into philanthropic interests such as this. Kindness to animals is a modern movement everywhere (may the shade of St. Francis of Assisi forgive this half statement!) Spain need not be too discouraged by being behindhand. The bony exhausted horses used within my own remembrance on our American street-car lines, to drag cars laden each evening to twice the beasts' strength, would not be tolerated to-day, and this change has been wrought by societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, the membership made up chiefly of women and children. Would that Spanish ladies could be pricked to action by the statement of a living French novelist, made in ignorance of late conditions in America and England, that kindness to animals is a Protestant virtue. It is neither Protestant nor Catholic, but common to all human societies where women are allowed to aid with their gentler instincts in the public welfare of their country. The bull and the man are sport and skill, that part I can understand. It is the agony of the horses that is a disgrace to these shows, worn-out nags who can make no resistance are used, and when the bull gores them, their entrails are thrust back and the dying beasts pricked on to the fray. Herein lies the great difference between bull-fights to-day, which are debased money-making spectacles only taken part in by professionals, and the more chivalrous sport of earlier times when the hidalgo was toreador, and proper steeds that could defend themselves were used.
The bull-fight is found in Spain so early that its origin from the Roman period in the Peninsula, or from the first Mohammedan conquerors, is disputed. The Cid took part in a game, and games celebrated the marriage of Alfonso VII's daughter Urraca to the king of Navarre. During the reign of Isabella's father, Juan II, the corrida de toros was much in vogue. Queen Isabella herself disliked the sport, and in one of her letters she vows never to witness it. On the birth of Philip II in Valladolid, Charles V killed a bull in the arena. The fiestas continued under the Hapsburg Philips, until the advent of the French Philip V, in 1700. He so slighted this national sport that gentlemen ceased to take part in it, and it sank to its present level. It is now so well paying an affair that the only way to reform it would be through concerted action on the part of Spanish women. It is a crusade worthy of them.
A night of rest in the hotel at Santiago and the painful scene of the day before was somewhat dimmed. Early in the morning I started out to explore the old pilgrim city. It has a distinct character of its own, seldom have I felt so decided a place-influence. It is very solemn, very gray, very stately and aloof. On many of the houses the pilgrim shell is carved; the streets are paved with granite and the vast hospices are of the same severe stone, moss-grown and damp; grass also grows between the big granite slabs of the silent, imposing squares. Santiago does not belong to our age. Modern towns do not name their streets after twelfth-century prelates, "Street of Gelmúrez, 1st Archbishop of Compostella," makes a novel sign.
Here, as all over the land, the Cathedral was the magnet. I walked along the dark, arcaded streets in a Scotch drizzle, passed under Cardinal Fonseca's college and came out in the plaza before the west entrance. The west front is a baroque mass which those who can endure that style say is most successful. I cannot endure that style. It seemed to me doubly a pity that this late front should mask the chief treasure of Galicia, the Pórtico de la Gloria, which stands as an open portico to the church, fifteen feet within this west door.
Enthusiastic description had led us to expect much of what may be called the supreme work of Romanesque sculpture, in fact, it was this portico that had decided us for the long trip to Galicia. We were not disappointed. "Es la oración más sublime que ha elevado al cielo el arte español." Neither photograph nor words can describe it; it is one of those matchless works that body forth the best of an age. The model of South Kensington does not give its nobility, for it is the setting before the lofty dim Romanesque nave that makes it a unique thing. When later, in Constantinople, I saw Alexander's sarcophagus, the thought of Santiago sprang instantly to my mind. Both bring a feeling of sadness;—one, simple flowing Greek of the best period, the other, crabbed, original, mediæval,—they are alike in the absolute sincerity with which each embodied the highest then attainable. Over the carvings of both are faded traces of color that give the finishing touch of the exquisite.
The Archbishop, Don Pedro Suárez, in 1180 gave the commission for this portico to a sculptor named Mateo, whether Spanish or foreign is not known; he lived in Santiago till 1217. He must have been a close student of the Bible, for his symbolism is profound and harmonious. Above the central arch is a solemn Christ, of heroic size, at his side the four Evangelists, figures of youthful beauty: the lion and the bull have settled themselves cozily in their patron's lap. Large angels on either side carry the instruments of the Passion. Very fine statues of the Apostles stand against the pillars of the central doorway. In the tympanum are small figures typifying the Holy City of Isaiah, and on its arch are seated, on a rounding bench, the twenty-four ancients of the Apocalypse, with musical instruments and vases of perfume. This is perhaps the most beautiful part of the portico. For hours one can study it. Some of the heads are thrown back in revery, some turned together in conversation. "The four and twenty ancients fell down before the Lamb having everyone of them harps and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of the saints" (St. John, Rev. V, 8). The carvings of that age were somewhat grotesque, but here the types are ideal, as beautiful in their way as Mino da Fiesole or Rossellino. When Master Mateo had finished his work, he made a statue of himself below the central column of the portico, kneeling toward the altar and humbly beating his breast; on this figure was written "architectus." Humility and a consummate profession of faith such as this went hand in hand.
It is anticlimax, after the Pórtico de la Gloria, to speak of the other sights of Santiago. On the plaza before the west end of the Cathedral stands the dignified Hospital Real, founded by Isabella and Ferdinand as a pilgrim inn. Two of the four patios are quaintly carved, and probably amuse the convalescents of the modern hospital lodged now in the building. It was a joy to find so many of Isabella's good deeds still bearing fruit. The nuns took us down to the big kitchen, white-tiled and spotless, where we saw the four hundred fresh eggs that arrive daily from the country; the tidy patients on the verandas showed clearly that no one suffered privations here. As we were leaving, the old chaplain of the institution ran after us to beg us to return to see something of which he was evidently vastly proud. When he ushered us into a tiled bathing room and turned on the water that dashed up and down and round about from every kind of new contrivance, he looked at us with a self-complacency that was adorable, as if he said: "There, you water-loving English, we're just as fond of it as you!" The excellently managed institution reminds one that this province produced Doña Concepción Arenal, sociologist and political economist, and withal a most tender-hearted Christian, whose books on prison organization and reform have been widely translated, and are quoted as authorities by the leading criminologists of Europe. For thirty years this admirable woman was inspector of prisons. She died at Vigo in 1893, and Spain has since erected statues in her honor.
In Galicia, as in Catalonia, there has been a revival of dialect literature. The Gallego tongue was the first in the Peninsula to reach literary culture, and in the Middle Ages two ideal troubadours wrote in it. Had not Alfonso el Sabio written chiefly in Castilian, thereby fixing that as the leading tongue, as Dante did the Tuscan in Italy, it is probable that the dialect of Galicia had prevailed. Portuguese and Gallego were the same language up to the fifteenth century, hence it is that the great critic Menéndez y Pelayo always includes Portuguese writers in his studies of Spanish literature.
Galicia is fortunate in having an able living exponent, the Señora Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose novels are full of the charmed melancholy of the province. The Gallego is derided in other parts of Spain, his name is synonymous with boor, for he is judged by the clumsy mozo who seeks work in the south. "The more unfortunate a country the greater is the love of its sons for it. Greece, Poland, Hungary, Ireland, prove this, and the nostalgia is strongest in those of Celtic origin. Ask the rude Gallegos of South America what is their ambition—'To return to the terriña and there die' is the answer."
In a collection of essays "De mi Tierra," Madam Pardo Bazán has told of the learned Benedictine, Padre Feijóo, the Bacon of Spain, whose caustic pen did away with so many of the superstitions of his age. It may be a bit pedantic for me to give biographies in these slight sketches, but it seems as if a truer idea of the race is conveyed in such lives than could be given in any other way. This native of Galicia, Padre Feijóo, had few equals in the Europe of his time in liberality of view. He was born of hidalgo parents near Orense, where his casa solar stands, still lived in by a Feijóo of to-day. He entered the Benedictine Order and in their cloisters passed most of his long life of eighty years, for half a century living in their Oviedo house. His unflagging industry, his clear intellect, and simple uprightness, won the admiration of all who knew him. "After fifteen years' intimate acquaintance with Feijóo," wrote a scientist of the day, "never have I met, inside religion or out, a man more sincere, more candid, more declared enemy of fraud and deceit." Not till he was fifty did Feijóo commence to write. In 1731 appeared the beginning of his "Teatro Crítico," essays that have been called the first step of Spanish journalism, written as they eminently were to communicate ideas to others. He had the passion to know why, a never-tiring love of investigation. Adopting the Baconian experimental method, he attacked the superstitions and pseudo-miracles around him. ¡Ay! de mí Inquisición! Were you asleep that you did not clap this independent thinker into your capacious dungeons? So strong was Feijóo's influence that Benedict XIV curtailed the number of feast days on his mere suggestion.