Dagonet Abroad

by George R. Sims

One day a governor of a gaol who went to a bull-fight was astonished to see several of his prisoners who were under sentence of death enjoying themselves at the spectacle. There is always a golden key to a Spanish prison, and you can generally get a day or a night out if you are on good terms with the officials, and give your word of honour that you will come back again. I dare say a good many people will credit me with giving an extra throw to the hatchet, a stronger pull than usual at the long-bow; but the truth of my prison story is amply borne out by a sensational crime which has startled all Spain, shaken the Puerta del Sol to its foundation, brought lumps of the Generaliffe rolling down the Alhambra hill, caused the Alcazar of Seville to contemplate suicide in the Guadalquivir, and shaken up the coffins of the Kings of Spain in the gloomy Pantheon of the Escorial.

One night an old lady was found murdered in Madrid. She had been first killed, and then saturated with petroleum and set on fire, but the fire had gone out before it had done its work, and the wounds which had caused death were visible. I need not repeat all the incidents, but after suspicion falling on various persons, the crime has at last been brought home to the old lady’s son, who was supposed at the time the murder was committed to be a prisoner in close confinement in the Madrid gaol.

Here is a shilling shocker with a vengeance. The young gentleman had, it was proved, actually got out of prison with the connivance of the authorities, spent the night at liberty, and returned early in the morning very much the worse for liquor. Yet not a word was said by the officials of the place who knew the facts, because they knew it would get them into hot water. The story reads like an invention of the romancer, but it is only a series of facts. Spain still remains one of the most remarkable countries in Europe, and its manners and customs are more worthy of the ‘Arabian Nights’ than modern history.

It was at one of the minor theatres that I heard one of the performers imitate an actor with a peculiar voice and mannerism. The audience recognised the imitation, and encored it again and again. ‘Ah,’ said I to myself, ‘Spain has its Henry Irving. I must find him out.’ I made my inquiries, and the result was that I booked a stall to sit out a four-act Spanish drama at the Teatro Español written by one of the great dramatists of to-day, Don José Echegaray, and entitled ‘Haroldo el Normando.’ When the principal actor, Rafael Calvo, stepped upon the stage and gave off his first speech, I recognised the original of the caricature in a moment, and I knew by the reception and the bursts of applause that I was seeing Spain’s favourite tragedian. Calvo’s acting and declamation were splendid, but his voice was disagreeable; his gestures were natural, but his mannerisms were marked enough to enable me to give a good imitation of him after one visit to the theatre.

Calvo, who is only a little over thirty, is not a handsome man, but he is very intense and powerful, and is the great exponent of the modern natural school. His great rival is Antonio Vico, who is of the old and stilted school. Vico also has a bad voice, a defect from which many of the Spanish actors suffer.

At many points in the play the ladies wept and the gentlemen used their pocket-handkerchiefs. The mounting and dresses were beneath contempt, and there was not a line of comedy or a laugh from beginning to end of the play.

The audience was not a large one, considering the size and sumptuous embellishments of the theatre. I inquired of a Spanish friend why the legitimate drama was not better patronized. He told me that there was never a great house when Echegaray was the author. Ladies were afraid of him. His plays were so dreadfully miserable, they cried for a week after seeing them. He would spring scenes of horror on his audience without a moment’s preparation. Suddenly the scene would change, and you would see a mother weeping over two dead children on the stage. Nothing that could harrow the feelings was spared, and the author persisted in leaving everybody miserable at the end. After a new play by Echegaray everyone in Madrid asks, ‘Well, how many deaths are there in it?’ He is a grand writer, full of nervous force and poetic thought, but his plays make people so wretched that those who do not enjoy the luxury of a good cry stop away. Everybody says, ‘What a splendid writer!’ The newspapers laud him to the skies. The critics point to him as a man who maintains the prestige of Spanish dramatic literature. But the Spanish people, like the English people, decline to take out their theatrical amusement in essays and sermons delivered from the stage. They go to the theatre to be amused, not to study literature, and so, in spite of the abuse of the critics, who are some of them authors themselves of neglected ten-act tragedies in blank verse, the Spaniards flock to operettas, farces, comedies, reviews, medleys, pieces of any sort so long as they are laughable or interesting, and they leave the legitimate drama and the plays of misery by Señor Echegaray to the amateur and professional critics, who think, because they choose to sit at a theatre as in a church, that there should be no more cakes and ale.

But to return to the Spanish custom of taking a play at an act a night. Of course you may wish to see a play through in one evening. In this case you buy tickets for the second and third ‘funcion,’ and keep your seat. A man comes round between each act and collects the tickets for the next. Say you want to see the whole four ‘funcions’ out, you purchase four tickets. The ticket is a slip of paper—half of it is for your numbered seat, another half your entrance ticket. You must buy four entrance tickets and four tickets for your seat to entitle you to sit out the whole performance. The tickets are different colours, so that the checktakers may recognise at once for which funcion they are issued. The first audience comes in with green tickets, the second with pink, the third with white, and the fourth with yellow. The great draws at the present moment at three of the theatres are local reviews in rhyme, and full of topical allusions. The singing and dancing are good, and the points are taken up all over the house in a manner which would gladden the hearts of our burlesque writers. ‘La Fiesta de la Gran Via,’ which is being played at the Eslava, has beaten all previous records. I assisted at the 41,500th performance! Where are our long runs after that?

The piece is played twice a night, and on Sundays and fête days, of which there are scores in Spain, four times—twice at the morning and twice at the evening performance.

The anti-Conservative demonstrations in Madrid and other Spanish towns, which have been lately of such a violent character as to make some people think we were on the eve of another Spanish revolution, are really volcanic in their origin. The Spaniards are not a very demonstrative people. As a rule, if you offered them a perpetual pension they wouldn’t utter a shout or wave a hat. But every now and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, without any previous warning, Castilian pride and Moorish stolidity give way to the wildest excitement and the most utter disregard of the conventionalities of life. Be the offending party a Cabinet Minister, a bishop, or a bull, the Spaniard has but one cry, ‘Muerta!'—death! It does not mean all that it says. It is the language of the bull-ring carried into public life, and that is all. The bull-ring enriches Spanish language as the racecourse enriches the English.