The best guitars in the world were made appropriately in Cadiz by the Pajez family, father and son; of course an instrument in so much vogue was always an object of most careful thought in fair Bætica; thus in the seventh century the Sevillian guitar was shaped like the human breast, because, as archbishops said, the chords signified the pulsations of the heart, à corde. The instruments of the Andalucian Moors were strung after these significant heartstrings; Zaryàb remodelled the guitar by adding a fifth string of bright red, to represent blood, the treble or first being yellow to indicate bile; and to this hour, on the banks of the Guadalquivir, when dusky eve calls forth the cloaked serenader, the ruby drops of the heart female, are more surely liquefied by a judicious manipulation of cat-gut, than ever were those of San Januario by book or candle; nor, so it is said, when the tinkling is continuous are all marital livers unwrung.
However that may be, the sad tunes of these Oriental ditties are still effective in spite of their antiquity; indeed certain sounds have a mysterious aptitude to express certain moods of the mind, in connexion with some unexplained sympathy between the sentient and intellectual organs, and the simplest are by far the most ancient. Ornate melody is a modern invention from Italy; and although, in lands of greater intercourse and fastidiousness, the conventional has ejected the national, fashion has not shamed or silenced the old airs of Spain—those “howlings of Tarshish.” Indeed, national tunes, like the songs of birds, are not taught in orchestras, but by mothers to their infant progeny in the cradling nest. As the Spaniard is warlike without being military, saltatory without being graceful, so he is musical without being harmonious; he is just the raw man material made by nature, and treats himself as he does the raw products of his soil, by leaving art and final development to the foreigner.
ENGLISH EXAMPLE.
The day that he becomes a scientific fiddler, or a capital cotton spinner, his charm will be at an end; long therefore may he turn a deaf ear to moralists and political economists, who cannot abide the guitar, who say that it has done more harm to Spain than hailstorms or drought, by fostering a prodigious idleness and love-making, whereby the land is cursed with a greater surplus of foundlings, than men of fortune; how indeed can these calamities be avoided, when the tempter hangs up this fatal instrument on a peg in every house? Our immelodious labourers and unsaltatory operatives are put forth by Manchester missionaries as an example of industry to the Majos and Manolas of Spain: “behold how they toil, twelve and fourteen hours every day;” yet these philanthropists should remember that from their having no other recreation beyond the public or dissenting-house, they pine when unemployed, because not knowing what to do with themselves when idle; this to most Spaniards is a foretaste of the bliss of heaven, while occupation, thought in England to be happiness, is the treadmill doom of the lost for ever. Nor can it be denied that the facility of junketing in the Peninsula, the grapes, guitars, songs, skippings and other incidents to fine climate, militate against that dogged, desperate, determined hard-working, by which our labourers beat the world hollow, fiddling and pirouetting being excepted.
PHILOSOPHY OF THE CIGAR.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Manufacture of Cigars—Tobacco—Smuggling viâ Gibraltar—Cigars of Ferdinand VII.—Making a Cigarrito—Zumalacarreguy and the Schoolmaster—Time and Money Wasted in Smoking—Postscript on Stock.
BUT whether at bull-fight or theatre, be he lay or clerical, every Spaniard who can afford it, consoles himself continually with a cigar, sleep—not bed—time only excepted. This is his nepenthe, his pleasure opiate, which, like Souchong, soothes but does not inebriate; it is to him his “Te veniente die et te decedente.”
SMUGGLED CIGARS.
The manufacture of the cigar is the most active one carried on in the Peninsula. The buildings are palaces; witness those at Seville, Malaga, and Valencia. Since a cigar is a sine quâ non in every Spaniard’s mouth, for otherwise he would resemble a house without a chimney, a steamer without a funnel, it must have its page in every Spanish book; indeed, as one of the most learned native authors remarked, “You will think me tiresome with my tobacconistical details, but the vast bulk of readers will be more pleased with it, than with an account of all the pictures in the world.” They all opine, that a good cigar—an article scarce in this land of smoking and contradiction—keeps a Christian hidalgo cooler in summer and warmer in winter than his wife and cloak; while at all times and seasons it diminishes sorrow and doubles joy, as a man’s better half does in Great Britain. “The fact is, Squire,” says Sam Slick, “the moment a man takes to a pipe he becomes a philosopher; it is the poor man’s friend; it calms the mind, soothes the temper, and makes a man patient under trouble.” Can it be wondered at, that the Oriental and Spanish population should cling to this relief from whips and scorns, and the oppressor’s wrong, or steep in sweet oblivious stupefaction the misery of being fretted and excited by empty larders, vicious political institutions, and a very hot climate? They believe that it deadens their over-excitable imagination, and appeases their too exquisite nervous sensibility; they agree with Molière, although they never read him, “Quoique l’on puisse dire, Aristote et toute la philosophie, il n’y a rien d’égal au tabac.” The divine Isaac Barrow resorted to this panpharmacon whenever he wished to collect his thoughts; Sir Walter Raleigh, the patron of Virginia, smoked a pipe just before he lost his head, “at which some formal people were scandalized; but,” adds Aubrey, “I think it was properly done to settle his spirits.” The pedant James, who condemned both Raleigh and tobacco, said the bill of fare of the dinner which he should give his Satanic majesty, would be “a pig, a poll of ling, and mustard, with a pipe of tobacco for digestion.” So true it is that “what’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison;” but at all events, in hungry Spain it is both meat and drink, and the chief smoke connected with proceedings of the mouth issues from labial, not house chimneys.