The colony is perhaps in advance of the mother country. The Catholic Church, Don G—— said, has little influence in Cuba; 'she has had no rival,' he explained, 'and so has grown lazy.' I judged the same from my own observations. The churches on Sundays were thinly attended, and men smiled when I asked them about 'confession.' I inquired about famous preachers. I was told that there was no preaching in Havana, famous or otherwise. I might if I was lucky and chose to go there in the early morning, hear a sermon in the church of the Jesuits; that was all. I went; I heard my Jesuit, who was fluent, eloquent, and gesticulating, but he was pouring out his passionate rhetoric to about fifty women with scarcely a man amongst them. It was piteous to look at him. The Catholic Church, whether it be for want of rivals, or merely from force of time, has fallen from its high estate. It can burn no more heretics, for it has lost the art to raise conviction to sufficient intensity. The power to burn was the measure of the real belief, which people had in the Church and its doctrines. The power has departed with the waning of faith; and religion in Havana, as in Madrid, is but 'use and wont;' not 'belief' but opinion, and opinion which is half insincere. Nothing else can take its place. The day is too late for Protestantism, which has developed into wider forms, and in the matter of satisfied and complete religious conviction Protestants are hardly better off than Catholics.
Don G—— had been much in Spain; he was acquainted with many of the descendants of the old aristocracy, who lingered there in faded grandeur. He had studied the history of his own country. He compared the Spain and England of the sixteenth century with the Spain and England of the present; and, like most of us, he knew where the yoke galled his own neck. But economical and political prosperity is no exhaustive measure of human progress. The Rome of Trajan was immeasurably more splendid than the Rome of the Scipios; yet the progress had been downwards nevertheless. If the object of our existence on this planet is the development of character, if the culminating point in any nation's history be that at which it produces its noblest and bravest men, facts do not tend to assure us that the triumphant march of the last hundred years is accomplishing much in that direction. I found myself arguing with Don G—— that if Charles V. and Philip II. were to come back to this world, and to see whither the movement had brought us of which they had worked so hard to suppress the beginning, they would still say that they had done right in trying to strangle it. The Reformation called itself a protest against lies, and the advocates of it imagined that when the lies, or what they called such, were cleared away, the pure metal of Christianity would remain unsullied. The great men who fought against the movement, Charles V. in his cabinet and Erasmus in his closet, had seen that it could not rest there; that it was the cradle of a revolution in which the whole spiritual and political organisation of Europe would be flung into the crucible. Under that organisation human nature had ascended to altitudes of chivalry, of self-sacrifice, which it had never before reached. The sixteenth century was the blossoming time of the Old World, and no such men had appeared since as then came to the front, either in Spain or Italy, or Germany or France or England. The actual leaders of the Reformation had been bred in the system which they destroyed. Puritanism and Calvinism produced men of powerful character, but they were limited and incapable of continuance; and now the liberty which was demanded had become what the instinct of the great Emperor had told him from the first must be the final shape of it, a revolution which would tolerate no inequalities of culture or position, which insisted that no man was better than another, which was to exalt the low and bring down the high till all mankind should stand upon a common level—a level, not of baseness or badness, but a level of good-humoured, smart, vulgar and vulgarising mediocrity, with melodrama for tragedy, farce for comedy, sounding speech for statesmanlike wisdom; and for a creed, when our fathers thought that we had been made a little lower than the angels, the more modest knowledge that we were only a little higher than the apes. This was the aspect in which the world of the nineteenth century would appear to Sir Thomas More or the Duke of Alva. From the Grand Captain to Señor Castelar, from Lord Burghley to Mr. Gladstone, from Leonardo da Vinci or Velasquez to Gustave Doré, from Cervantes and Shakespeare to 'Pickwick' and the 'Innocents at Home;' from the faith which built the cathedrals to evolution and the survival of the fittest; from the carving and architecture of the Middle Ages to the workmanship of the modern contractor; the change in the spiritual department of things had been the same along the whole line. Charles V. after seeing all that has been achieved, the railways, the steam engines, the telegraphs, the Yankee and his United States, which are the embodiment of the highest aspirations of the modern era, after attending a session of the British Association itself, and seeing the bishops holding out their hands to science which had done such great things for them, might fairly claim that it was a doubtful point whether the change had been really for the better.
It may be answered, and answered truly, that the old thing was dead. The Catholic faith, where it was left standing and where it still stands, produces now nothing higher, nothing better than the Protestant. Human systems grow as trees grow. The seed shoots up, the trunk forms, the branches spread; leaves and flowers and fruit come out year after year as if they were able to renew themselves for ever. But that which has a beginning has an end, that which has life must die when the vital force is exhausted. The faith of More, as well as the faith of Ken or Wilson, were elevating and ennobling as long as they were sincerely believed, but the time came when they became clouded with uncertainty; and confused, perplexed, and honestly anxious, humanity struggles on as well as it can, all things considered, respectably enough, in its chrysalis condition, the old wings gone, the new wings that are to be (if we are ever to have another set) as yet imprisoned in their sheath.
The same Sunday morning when I went in search of my sermon, the hotel was alive as bees at swarming time. There was to be a bull fight in honour of the carnival, and such a bull fight as had never been seen in Havana. Placards on the wall announced that a lady from Spain, Gloriana they called her, was to meet and slay a bull in single combat, and everyone must go and see the wonderful sight. I myself, having seen the real thing in Madrid many years ago, felt no more curiosity, and that a woman should be an actress in such a scene did not revive it. To those who went the performance was a disappointment. The bull provided turned out to be a calf of tender years. The spectators insisted that they would have a mature beast of strength and ferocity, and Gloriana when brought to the point declined the adventure.
There was a prettier scene in the evening. In the cool after nightfall the beauty and fashion of Havana turns out to stroll in the illuminated Alameda. As it was now a high festival the band was to play, and the crowd was as dense as on Exhibition nights at South Kensington. The music was equally good, and the women as graceful and well dressed. I sat for an hour or two listening under the statue of poor Queen Isabella. The image of her still stands where it was placed, though revolution has long shaken her from her throne. All is forgotten now except that she was once a Spanish sovereign, and time and distance have deodorised her memory.
CHAPTER XIX.
Hotels in Havana—Sights in the city—Cigar manufactories—West Indian industries—The Captain-General—The Jesuit college—Father Viñez—Clubs in Havana—Spanish aristocracy—Sea lodging house.
There was much to be seen in Havana, and much to think about. I regretted only that I had not been better advised in my choice of an hotel The dining saloon rang with American voices in their shrillest tones. Every table was occupied by groups of them, nor was there a sound in the room of any language but theirs. In the whole company I had not a single acquaintance. I have liked well almost every individual American that I have fallen in with and come to know. They are frank, friendly, open, and absolutely unaffected, and, like my friend at Miss Roy's in Jamaica, they take cheerful views of life, which is the highest of all recommendations. The distinctness and sharpness of utterance is tolerable and even agreeable in conversation with a single person. When a large number of them are together, all talking in a high tone, it tries the nerves and sets the teeth on edge. Nor could I escape from them in any part of the building. The gentlemen were talking politics in the hall, or lounging under the colonnade. One of them, an absolute stranger, who perhaps knew who I was, asked me abruptly for my opinion of Cardinal Newman. The ladies filled the sitting rooms; their pianos and their duets pierced the walls of my bedroom, and only ceased an hour after midnight. At five in the morning the engines began to scream at the adjoining railway station. The church bells woke at the same hour with their superfluous summons to matins which no one attended. Sleep was next to an impossibility under these hard conditions, and I wanted more and not less of it when I had the duties upon me of sightseeing. Sleep or no sleep, however, I determined that I would see what I could as long as I could keep going.
A few hundred yards off was one of the most famous of the Havana cigar manufactories. A courteous message from the manager, Señor Bances, had informed me that he would be happy to show me over it on any morning before the sun was above the roofs of the houses. I found the señor a handsome elderly gentleman, tall and lean, with Castilian dignity of manner, free and frank in all his communications, with no reserve, concealments, or insincerities. I told him that in my experience cigars were not what they had been, that the last good one which I had smoked I had bought twenty years ago from a contrabandista at Madrid. I had come to Havana to see whether I could find another equally good at the fountain head. He said that he was not at all surprised. It was the same story as at Jamaica; the consumption of cigars had increased with extreme rapidity; the area on which the finest tobacco had been grown was limited, and the expense of growing it was very great. Only a small quantity of the best cigars was now made for the market. In general the plants were heavily manured, and the flavour suffered. Leaf of coarse fibre was used for the core of the cigars, with only a fold or two wrapped round it of more delicate quality. He took me into the different rooms where the manufacture was going on. In the first were perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty sallow-faced young men engaged in rolling. They were all Cubans or Spaniards with the exception of a single negro; and all, I should think, under thirty. On each of the tables was one of the names with which we have grown familiar in modern cigar shops, Reynas, Regalias, Principes, and I know not how many else. The difference of material could not be great, but there was a real difference in the fineness of the make, and in the quality of the exterior leaf. The workmen were of unequal capacity and were unequally paid. The señor employed in all about 1,400; at least so I understood him.