Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

But alas for Madrid and her Midsummer Night's Dream! Some prosaic person got wet and tattled to the Alcalde. So when in natural agitation, on our only Verbena of St. John, we had persuaded the compassionate coachman to drive as close as close might be to the fountain, we encountered a bristling, unromantic railing, and outside of this a grim circle of police, frowning menace on that disconcerted host. Every moment more carriages, with veiled ladies and rheumatic gentlemen, dashed up, and the indignant crowd surged forward to the very buttons of authority. But midnight chimed in vain. One desperate graybeard vaulted over the railing, only to be hustled back with contumely. In general, however, that great press of people remained as meek as the lions of Cybele's chariot—a lack of spirit only to be accounted for by remembering that this midnight company was made up of the shamefaced and rejected, such an assemblage of blighted beings as, now that the last spell is snapped, earth will never see again. Even the decorous Cybele laughed in her marble sleeve.

So passes the old Madrid; but there is a new Madrid, of which a word still waits to be said.

XIV

A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

"Here you have them, the two Spains, unlike, antagonistic, squared for conflict."
—Vida Nueva.

The world-old struggle between conservatism and advance is at its most dramatic point in Spain. The united forces of clericalism and militarism work for the continuance of ancient institutions, methods, ideas, and those leaders who do battle in the name of liberalism are too often nothing more than selfish politicians. But with all these odds against progress, it is making way. The mass of the people, kept so long in the darkness of ignorance and superstition, are looking toward the light. During my last week in Madrid I chanced upon two extreme expressions of these warring principles. The first was a royal and religious ceremony, the second a monster mass meeting,—the one intent on cherishing the past, the other clamoring at the gates of the future.

I was looking over the Imparcial as I took my coffee one morning, when my eye fell on an item to the effect that there would be capilla publica en Palacio at ten o'clock. A traveller learns to jump at opportunity. Public service in the royal chapel promised to be of interest, and half-past nine found me waiting, with a miscellaneous company of gentles and tatterdemalions, natives and foreigners, on the palace side of the Plaza de Armas, the expectant throng streaming far down the paved and covered way. We were well marshalled by soldiers, who kept the crowd in form of a long troop, and banded this by military lines, with gleaming bayonets. These bands, but a few feet apart, were effectual in preventing crowding and disorder, and when at last the doors were thrown open, a double rank of soldiers closed in before the portal as often as the entering file showed any tendency to press and hurry, and thus passed us through by small divisions, so that there was no unseemly struggling on the succession of bare, plain stairways that led to the upper galleries.

For "public service in the royal chapel," I was now to discover, does not mean that the public is admitted to the chapel itself. This is small, but very Spanish, with profusion of gilding, imposing altar, and frescoed saints, the characteristic splendor being tempered with a no less characteristic gloom, an effect enhanced by austere columns of gray marble. On days of public service, which are usually high feast days, three long galleries, forming three sides of a great quadrangle, are traversed by the court in passing from the royal rooms to the chapel door, and it is to these galleries only that the public is admitted. On such occasions the gallery walls are hung with richly colored tapestries from the magnificent collection of eight hundred pieces that enriches the royal Tapiceria.

The instant I crossed the threshold these tapestries blazed upon the eye, so dazzling in their beauty that it was difficult to grasp the general situation. Civil Guards, in gala uniform, each armed with a pike taller than himself, were stationed at intervals of about six feet all along these tapestried walls, holding the carpeted way open for the passage of the royal and ecclesiastical party. The public hastened to fill in the spaces left between the guards, so that when the dignitaries paced the length of the three galleries, they walked between continuous human lines of mingled soldiery and spectators. We were of various ages, sizes, colors, and quite as picturesque, take it all in all, as the slowly stepping group on which our eyes were focussed.