The King replied that he and the Queen had come for a holiday, and did not wish to have every day filled up in advance; “and therefore,” said his Majesty, “when I want a bull-fight I will ask for it.”
The Court spent a whole month in that town, and no bull-fight took place.
Of course this, like everything else in Spain, is a political question. The Reactionaries, true to their principles, support existing institutions, while the Conservatives, Liberals, Radicals, Republicans, both reforming and revolutionary, Socialists, etc., all combine to denounce what they regard as one of the main factors in the atraso de España (the backwardness of Spain).
Foreigners who object to the bull-fight must bear in mind that an immense amount of money is sunk in it, by the owners of large estates who breed the bulls, in the building and upkeep of the bull-rings, and in the very costly apparatus of the show, and it is only natural that capitalists should fight for the institution in which their money is invested. When foreigners indignantly ask why the King does not put a stop to the barbarous “sport,” if it be true that he dislikes it, they do not realise that a constitutional King, however radical a reformer he may be, cannot by a stroke of the pen destroy the vested interests of a great and powerful section of the community. To suggest that King Alfonso should arbitrarily close all the bull-rings would be something like proposing that the King of England should, propio motu, close all the music-halls, regardless of the rights of the shareholders. And the bull-fights can at any rate plead a venerable antiquity. Their origin is not certainly known, but it is possible that they date from the days of the Liby-Tartessians, when Minos ruled and encouraged bull-fights in Crete.
What is new is the reaction against the ring, which is spreading with encouraging rapidity. One of the greatest virtues of Isabel II., in the opinion of her time, was that she “was very fond of the bulls,” and even now old ladies and gentlemen of that unlucky Queen’s generation speak of her affection for the bull-fight as one of her redeeming qualities. Whereas not the least of King Alfonso’s acknowledged claims on the respect and sympathy of the Radical and Republican sections of his subjects (and these include the mass of the working classes) is his obvious preference for other and more manly forms of sport.
The republicanism of the peasant is a curious and interesting study, and I always love to draw him out on the subject. One day when I was digging in the mountains a heavy shower came on, and I took shelter with my workmen in a chambered tomb that we had been clearing. How the subject of the Monarchy came up between them I did not notice, for I was absorbed in a dramatic shifting of the storm-scene as I saw it framed by a rough opening in the rock where a fallen stone had revealed the existence of our burial cave. The hills had been purple, almost black, against the thunderclouds, when suddenly there was a rift in the overcast sky, a streak of sunshine shot out, and through the pouring rain a great sheet of silver appeared like magic on the distant hillside, where an instant before all had been unrelieved gloom. It was only a patch of grey rock, but it was transformed by a cascade of rain-water from the peaks above into a thing of ethereal beauty which vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
A small boy—a goat-herd in his Sunday best on his way to a fair in the neighbouring town—had taken shelter with us in the cave, and at the men’s request had been singing the local songs in a shrill treble for my benefit; and when my thoughts began to wander from the company to that glorified hillside, he was wailing a love-song of which I could not make out a word. It was rather a shock to me to be brought back to earth by hearing the gentlest and most courteous of my two diggers remark that he wished he had the King and the Alcalde of the town together in the cave, so that he might throttle them both.
He explained that the Town Council owed him a considerable sum of money for a contract carried out by his father (recently dead) and himself, and his view was that if the King really was up to his work he would long ago have made an end of corruption and jobbery, and would have replaced the existing bureaucracy with honest men, who would pay poor labourers what they owed them instead of buying motors for their private amusement. And as the King had not done this, let him be throttled, or if not that, at least let us have a republic and make him the President of it.
Poor Ramón! He was suffering from a bad attack of political indigestion, and no wonder, for the unpaid bill, amounting to some hundreds of pesetas, meant a very heavy loss to a young man who had to support a widowed mother and various young brothers and sisters. I gave him a note of recommendation to the Alcalde, whom I knew to be rather better than most of his class, and I hope he got his money when the next pay-day came. But I sadly pondered over the state of Spain, administered on a system which poisons every limb of the body politic and makes it almost impossible for the local authorities to pay their workers and at the same time meet the demands of the blood-suckers who live without working, while they pull the strings that make the office-holders dance to their piping.
In a country where politics permeate and pollute everything it is not easy to keep clear of them, but I have heard many little anecdotes of the King and Queen which fortunately are free from that taint; and if most of them relate to Seville, my excuse must be that most of my life in Spain has been spent in that city.