The readers of Borrow’s inimitable ‘Bible in Spain’ will remember his hair-breadth escape from being shot for Don Carlos by the miraculous intervention of the alcalde of Corcubion, who, if still alive, must be a phœnix, and clearly worth observation, as he was a reader of the “grand Baintham,” or our illustrious Jeremy Bentham, to whom the Spanish reformers sent for a paper constitution, not having a very clear meaning of the word or thing, whether it was made of cotton or parchment. Another of the very best investigators and writers on Spain, Lord Carnarvon, was nearly put to death in the same districts for Don Miguel; Captain Widdrington, also one of the kindest and most honourable of men, was once arrested on suspicion of being an agent of Espartero; and we, our humble selves, have had the felicity of being marched to a guard-house for sketching a Roman ruin, and the honour of being taken, either for Curius Dentatus, an alligator, or Julius Cæsar,—as there is no absurdity, no inconceivable ignorance, too great for the local Spanish “Dogberries,” who rarely deviate into sense; when their fears or suspicions are roused, they are as deaf alike to the dictates of common reason or humanity as adders or Berbers; and here, as in the East, even the best intentioned may be taken up for spies, and have their beards, at least, cut off, as was done to King David’s envoyés. All classes, in regard to strangers, generally get some hostile notions into their heads, and then, instead of fairly and reasonably endeavouring to arrive at the truth, pervert every innocent word, and twist every action, to suit their own preconceived nonsense, until trifles become to their jealous minds proofs as strong as Holy Writ. In justice, however, it must be said, that when these authorities are once satisfied that the stranger is an Englishman, and that no harm is intended, no people can be more civil in offering assistance of every kind, especially the lower classes, who gaze at the magical performance of drawing with wonder: the higher classes seldom take any notice, partly from courtesy, and much from the nil admirari principle of Orientals, which conceals both inferiority and ignorance, and shows good breeding.
CAPTAIN-GENERAL’S PASSPORT.
The drawing any garrison-town or fortified place in Spain is now most strictly forbidden. The prevailing ignorance of everything connected with the arts of design is so great, that no distinction is made between the most regular plan and the merest artistical sketch: a drawing is with them a drawing, and punishable as such. A Spanish barrack, garrison, or citadel is therefore to be observed but little, and still less to be sketched. A gentleman, nay, a lady also, is liable, under any circumstances, when drawing, to be interrupted, and often is exposed to arrest and incivility. Indeed, whether an artist or not, it is as well not to exhibit any curiosity in regard to matters connected with military buildings; nor will the loss be great, as they are seldom worth looking at. The troops in our time were in a most admired disorder. If they wore shoes they had no stockings; if they had muskets, flints were not plentiful; if powder was supplied, balls were scarce; nothing, in short, was ever according to regulation. Nay, the buttons even on the officers’ coats were never dressed in file: some had the numbers up, some down, some awry; but uniformity is a thing of Europe and not of the East. At this moment, when the church is starved, when widows’ pensions are unpaid, when governmental bankruptcy walks the land, whose bones, marrow, and all are wasted to support the army, whose swords uphold the hated men in office, the bands of the Royal Guard, the Prætorian bands, do not keep tune, nor do the rank and file march in time. However painful these things to pipe-clay martinets, the artist loses much, by not being able to sketch such tumble-down forts and ragged garrisons, each Bisoño of which is more precious to painter eye than the officer in command at Windsor; while his short-petticoated querida is more Murillo-like than a score of patronesses of Almack’s.
ORIENTAL ANALOGIES.
The safest plan for those who want to observe, and to book what they observe, is to obtain a Spanish passport, with the object of their curiosity and inquiries clearly specified in it. There is seldom any difficulty at Madrid, if application be made through the English minister, in obtaining such a document; indeed, when the applicant is well known, it is readily given by any of the provincial Captains-General. As it is couched in the Spanish language, it is understood by all, high and low; an advantage which is denied in Spain to those issued by our ambassadors, and even by the Foreign Office, who, to the credit of themselves and nation, give passes to Englishmen in the French language, whereby among Spaniards a suspicion arises that the bearer may be a Frenchman, which is not always pleasant. We preserve among rare Peninsular relics a passport granted by our kind patron the redoubtable Conde de España, and backed by the no less formidable Quesada and Sarsfield, in which it was enjoined, in choice, intelligible Castilian, to all and every minor rulers and governors, whether with the pen or sword, to aid and assist the bearer in his examination of the fine arts and antiquities of the Peninsula. These autocrats were more implicitly obeyed in their respective Lord Lieutenancies than Ferdinand himself; in fact, the pashas of the East are their exact types, each in their district being the heads of both civil and military tribunals; and as they not only administer, but suit the law according to the length of their own feet, they in fact make it and trample upon it, and all in any authority below them imitate their superiors as nearly as they dare. These things of Spain are managed with a gravity truly Oriental, both in the rulers and in the resignation of those ruled by them; these great men’s passport and signature were obeyed by all minor authorities as implicitly as an Oriental firman; the very fact of a stranger having a Captain-General’s passport, is soon known by everybody, and, to use an Oriental phrase, “makes his face to be whitened;” it acts as a letter of introduction, and is in truth the best one of all, since it is addressed to people in power in each village or town, who, true sheikhs, are looked up to by all below them with the same deference, as they themselves look up to all above them. The worth of a person recommended, is estimated by that of the person who recommends; tal recomendacion tal recomendado. To complete this thing of Oriental Spain, these three omnipotent despots, who defied laws human and divine, who made dice of their enemies’ bones, and goblets of their skulls, have all since been assassinated, and sent to their account with all their sins on their heads. In limited monarchies ministers who go too far, lose their places, in Spain and Turkey their heads: the former, doubtless, are the most severely punished.
Those who wish to observe Spanish man, which, next to Spanish woman, forms the proper study of mankind, will find that one key to decipher this singular people is scarcely European, for this Berberia Cristiana is a neutral ground placed between the hat and the turban; many indeed of themselves contend that Africa begins even at the Pyrenees. Be that as it may, Spain, first civilized by the Phœnicians, and long possessed by the Moors, has indelibly retained the original impressions. Test her, therefore, and her males and females, by an Oriental standard, how analogous does much appear that is strange and repugnant, if compared with European usages. Take care, however, not to let either the ladies or gentlemen know the hidden processes of your mind, for nothing gives greater offence. The fair sex is willing, to prevent such a mistake, to lay aside even their becoming mantillas, as their hidalgos doff their stately Roman cloaks. These old clothes they offer up as sacrifices on the altar of civilization, and to the mania of looking exactly like the rest of the world, in Hyde Park and the Elysian Fields.
INDIFFERENCE TO THE BEAUTIFUL.
Another remarkable Oriental trait is the general want of love for the beautiful in art, and the abundance of that Αφιλοκαλια with which the ancients reproached the genuine Iberians; this is exhibited in the general neglect and indifference shown towards Moorish works, which instead of destroying they ought rather to have protected under glasses, since such attractions are peculiar to the Peninsula. The Alhambra, the pearl and magnet of Granada, is in their estimation little better than a casa de ratones, or a rat’s hole, which in truth they have endeavoured to make it by centuries of neglect; few natives even go there, or understand the all-absorbing interest, the concentrated devotion, which it excites in the stranger; so the Bedouin regards the ruins of Palmyra, insensible to present beauty, as to past poetry and romance. Sad is this non-appreciation of the Alhambra by the Spaniards, but such are Asiatics, with whom sufficient for the day is their to-day; who care neither for the past nor for the future, who think only for the present and themselves, and like them the masses of Spaniards, although not wearing turbans, lack the organs of veneration and admiration for anything beyond matters connected with the first person and the present tense. Again, the leaven of hatred against the Moor and his relics is not extinct; they resent as almost heretical the preference shown by foreigners to the works of infidels rather than to those of good Catholics; such preference again at once implies their inferiority, and convicts them of bad taste in their non-appreciation, and of Vandalism in labouring to mutilate, what the Moor laboured to adorn. The charming writings of Washington Irving, and the admiration of European pilgrims, have latterly shamed the authorities into a somewhat more conservative feeling towards the Alhambra; but even their benefits are questionable; they “repair and beautify” on the church-warden principle, and there is no less danger in such “restorations” than in those fatal scourings of Murillo and Titian in the Madrid gallery, which are effacing the lines where beauty lingers. Even their tardy appreciation is somewhat interested: thus Mellado, in his late Guide, laments that there should be no account of the Alhambra, of which he speaks coldly, and suggests, as so many “English” visit it, that a descriptive work would be a segura especulacion! a safe speculation! Thus the poetry of the Moorish Alhambra is coined into the Spanish prose of profitable shillings and sixpences.
FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT.
Travellers however should not forget, that much which to them has the ravishing, enticing charms of novelty, is viewed by the dull sated eye of the native, with familiarity which breeds contempt; they are weary, oh fatal lassitude! even of the beautiful: alas! exclaimed the hermit on Monserrat, to the stranger who was ravished by exquisite views, then and there beheld by him for the first and last time, “all this has no attraction for me; twenty and nine are the years that I have seen this unchanged scene, every sunrise, every noon, every sunset.” But sordent domestica, observes Pliny, nor are all things or persons honoured in their own homes as they ought to be, since the days that Mahomet the true prophet failed to persuade his wife and valet that his powers were supernatural. Can it be wondered that ruins and “old rubbish” should be held cheap among the Moro-Spaniards? or that their so-called “guides” should mislead and misdirect the stranger? It cannot well be avoided, since few of the writers ever travel in their own country, and fewer travel out of it; thus from their limited means of comparison, they cannot appreciate differences, nor tell what are the wants and wishes of a foreigner: accordingly, scenes, costumes, ruins, usages, ceremonies, &c., which they have known from childhood, are passed over without notice, although, from their passing newness to the stranger, they are exactly what he most desires to have pointed out and explained. Nay, the natives frequently despise or are ashamed of those very things, which most interest and charm the foreigner, for whose observation they select the modern rather than the old, offering especially their poor pale copies of Europe, in preference to their own rich, racy, and natural originals, doing this in nothing more than in the costume and dwellings of the lower classes, who happily are not yet afflicted with the disease of French polish: they indeed, when they dig up ancient coins, will rub off the precious rust of twice ten hundred years, in order to render them, as they imagine, more saleably attractive; but they fortunately spare themselves, insomuch that Charles III., on failing in one of his laudable attempts to improve and modernise them, compared his loving subjects to naughty children, who quarrel with their good nurse when she wants to wash them.