The bull! What a noble specimen of his race!—broad-browed, clean-horned, and clean-limbed; high courage in his bloodshot orbs, his dilated nostril, and his lashing tail! On the right and left the quadrille arrange themselves, the picadores, each with a spike at the end of his long shaft, and a kerchief bandaging one eye of his horse; the chulos, pretty fellows in turban, loose embroidered jackets, ruffled shirts, kneebreeches of coquettish hue and texture, silken hose and buckled shoes, standing, with their cloaks, nearer to the centre of the ring. All these toreadores are men of symmetry and power, all wear chignons in nets, and are close-shaven, except as to side-whiskers of the brief "mutton-chop" order, and all bear themselves as if they were proud of their vocation. The bull waits. The chulos give challenge. They rush upon him, shaking their gaudy little cloaks, and as he charges they scamper to the sides, while one takes up the running from another. In short, they tease him as much for the sake of tiring him out as of testing his disposition. But by-and-by one chulo ingeniously leads the charging bull towards a horse. Toro rushes head-foremost. The picador is unequal to keep him off with his spike; the horse is gored in the belly and overthrown, the rider falling under. The chulos cluster to the rescue, with their fluttering cloaks, and draw the bull away confused. The picador is extricated; the horse is taken out, and in a few moments after re-enters, his entrails packed inside and stomach sewn up, and is once more offered to the maddened brute, always on his blind side. We shall hurry over this episode of the tournament; I do not like it, nor do you. But here is something really fine. The banderilleros enter, with barbed shafts decked with ribbons, poised in each hand, and make a feinting advance on the bull, and as he runs to meet them they deftly hurl their shafts and elude him by a demi-volte. The act of doing this well is to plant one banderilla on each side of the bull's neck, close by the streaming favours that mark the herd from which he is furnished—the colours of his stable, so to speak—to plant them evenly and at equal distances from his crest, and when this is skilfully accomplished there are frantic yells of praise, and caps and cigars are showered into the arena. When the banderillero is awkward, they rain on him with potatoes. These banderilleros incur hazard. I have seen one so keenly chased by the bull that he was pinned against the barriers by the bull's horns as he was in the act of vaulting over. Pinned, but not in the flesh; the branching horns stuck in the wood at either side, just above the calf of one leg, and imprisoned him until he had to be sawed out.
This is but the prologue; now for the play. Toro by this time is in a white rage; there is foam at his chaps, his steaming sides are laced with blood. Cucharra of Puerto Santa Maria is the matador. Majestically he strides towards the Governor's box, stoops in obeisance, and in a loud voice makes proclamation: "Brindo por Puerto Santa Maria, por toda su compañia, por el vulgo de Madrid; voy á matar ese bicho ó el bicho me mata á mi;" an address which may thus be freely rendered: "I pledge myself to Puerto Santa Maria and all its society, and to the people of Madrid; and now I am ready to kill this animal, if the animal cannot kill me." He removes his turban, and, with a graceful jerk with his right hand from behind his back over his left shoulder, flings it into the Governor's box, as a gage of his boasted prowess. He takes his straight keen-tempered sword and his cloak of offensive scarlet, and advances towards the bull. Now is the supreme trial, now is the time when men let their lighted cigarettes drop from their mouths and clench their teeth; now is the time when women close their fans and draw long breaths. Cucharra faces Toro at a yard's distance. They regard each other. Cucharra hides his sword under his cloak, and presents it to the bull. Toro lowers his head, shuts his eyes, and charges, but the toreador gracefully slips aside and saves his life by a turn of the heel. Three times he repeats the feat of this risksome pirouette; but woe to him if he is an instant too late in his movements, or if the soil is treacherous. The fourth time, as the bull lowers his head, Cucharra lifts himself on his toes, and with one sure swift blow plunges the blade, almost to the hilt, into the spine of his antagonist. The bull stands; there is a shout of "Bravo!" the bull still stands, ten seconds, twenty, thirty; there is a howl of disappointment; but Cucharra gazes contemptuously around; he knows he has done his work well, and, my faith, he has. Toro quivers and drops, and Cucharra plants a foot on the neck of his prostrate enemy. The bull has died of internal hæmorrhage; not a drop of blood has distilled from his mouth. Bravo, Cucharra!
This death at the first thrust—death without drip of the crimson fluid from the mouth—is the artistic death. When the sword pierces at the wrong spot, is displaced by the shaking of the bull, and sent flying, gore-wet, through the air, it is awkward workmanship.
But Toro showed "mucho fuego" before he was so neatly pierced in the medulla. Bravo, Toro! And now the cachetero stoops over him, and, with one dig of his sharp knife in the neck, makes assurance doubly sure. The team of mules trot in, and trot out again with the dead champion at their heels; and the urchins outside are dancing on his carcase as the drums and tymbals give prelude to the entrance of a second champion into the enthusiastic circle.
The slimy pools in the arena are promptly strewn with sand, and the fresh bull is ushered into the lists, either against the same quadrille, or against another espada with his special troop of assistants. Some of the brutes are self-possessed, as that "proud and stately steer" Harpado of Xarama, who was matched with Ganzul the Moor.
| "Dark is his hide on either side, but the blood within doth boil, |
| And the dun hide glows, as if on fire, as he paws to the turmoil, |
| His eyes are jet, and they are set in crystal rings of snow; |
| But now they stare with one red glare of brass upon the foe." |
All in vain, Toro. Thy fate is sealed. Useless to prance round with defiance, to bellow with unsatisfied wrath, to churn the sand with furious hoof and flash hither and thither the flaming arrows of thy glance. Thou art foredoomed, and wilt fall as surely after brave struggle as thy mate, less eager for the strife, who has to be pricked up to anger, and drops at last bewildered amid the derision of the crowd. That is where I find fault with the sport. Toro who shows good fight should get his respite, like the Roman gladiator who pleased the multitude.
Still, is his fate to be deplored? Confess, is it not rather to be envied? He gives up his vital principle in the rapture of battle; he feels no wound but the grievous one to the combatant that he can beat down no more foes; he yields breath with a bold front; there is threat in his agony as he sinks, still with challenge in his port, amid the applause of admiring thousands. There is something of martyr-heroism in this ending. It is grander, nobler, happier than to fall by the butcher's plebeian mallet in the slaughter-house, or to succumb to the slow miseries of rinderpest. Whoso denies it will downface me next that it is fitter for the warrior to die of podagra in a four-post bed than to perish on the field with harness on his back—that dropsy at St. Helena was more to be coveted than a bullet at Waterloo!
Tauromachy, I repeat, will last as long as Spain lasts. It will have its school and its dialect, its canons of skill expatiated upon in elaborate treatises; its honoured exponents; its impassioned amateurs and its munificent patrons; its historiographers and poets. In my devotedness to it I have sacrificed the favour of a comely English maiden, for Emmeline, who has seen through my hypocrisy in the hall, averts the light of her countenance as we sit down to dinner. I am sorry for it, for I had inclinings towards that lady, she was so attentive to her father, and she had confided to me with such a pretty frankness that she sighed for the days when Mohammad-al-Hamar was throned in Granada.
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