The Alhambra and the Kremlin: The South and the North of Europe

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

Here is Murillo’s first and last page of the gospel,—the Annunciation is the first page, with the beauty and joyful hope of the motherhood of him who is the desire of all nations; the last page is the Mother of Jesus weeping over the death of him who was to have redeemed Israel. The St. Thomas giving alms, by Murillo, has been praised by the best critics as not excelled by any of his works. Wilkie placed it among the finest.

It is a question often asked, and never answered, Why can we not have these pictures, or such as these, in the Western World? Few of the many who would enjoy and appreciate them ever can come to Spain or Italy, and must they live and die without the sight of all these glorious works of art? It would be an easy matter to have copies made of the most celebrated and magnificent pictures, and transported to New York, into a national gallery. Copies may be made so as to challenge comparison with the original, and to give a fair idea of the distinctive manner of each of the artists. It does not require the same genius to make a perfect copy that it does to conceive and give birth to the original. And there are no living artists, and have been none in the last three hundred years, to paint character, soul, thought, feeling, as those men did whom we call the Old Masters. We have as great painters now as they. But not in their line of things. England and France and America have had, and now have, artists whose works could not have been produced by Da Vinci, Giotto, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, Carlo Dolce, or Murillo. But there is no one alive now to paint the Last Supper, the Judgment, the Transfiguration, the Charles V. on horseback, or the Smitten Rock, comparable with those majestic transcripts of sentiment which stand up in the world of art among man’s works, as Niagara and Mont Blanc are sublime among the works of God.

After writing the account of the bull-fight in a former chapter, it occurred to me that you might ask whether I went to see the sport myself, or relied altogether on the descriptions of the ladies and others. That is a fair question, and I am therefore obliged to say that I did not; that I have never seen a bull-fight. Three reasons prevented me from going. First, they are usually to be seen only on Sunday, and I never go to places of amusement on that day, at home or abroad. Secondly, I have no taste for sights of blood, and would rather go the other way than into the bull-ring at any time. And thirdly and lastly, in the way of reasons for not going, there was not a bull-fight while I was there! It was and is yet the winter season, when the weather is cool compared with spring and summer, and the bulls do not fight well except when the weather is hot. The “season,” which is even more distinctly marked than that of opera in Paris or New York, begins the first Sunday after Lent, and a performance takes place every Sunday afterwards, if the weather permits, till the height of summer suspends it for a few weeks when the heat is excessive. It is resumed from the latter part of August until the first of October. Then the fall and winter are made dull by its absence, and the Spaniards long for the return of hot weather and the beasts.

There is a great deal of exaggeration in the descriptions given by those who enjoy the sport. The horses selected for the sacrifice are miserable jades, that are fit for nothing else but to be killed, and the bulls are rarely so fierce as to be dangerous, unless goaded or provoked into phrensy by the tricks of the combatants. The men who go into the fight are all hired butchers or fighters, who are paid regular salaries, like actors in a theatre, and they make a business of it. And so universal is the rage of the people to see this, the national sport and pastime, that the ring must furnish seats for ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand people, and the price of admission for such a multitude readily supplies the means to meet the great expenses of the entertainment.

One of the most curious facts developed by the bull-fight is the fondness that women have for such scenes. It is no fiction that ladies, whose refinement cannot be called in question, are in raptures when the fight is the most savage and bloody. It always was so. In the amphitheatres of Italy, when martyr Christians were compelled to fight with wild beasts, the fairest and proudest of women were among the spectators, who looked on with delight when their fellow-creatures were torn limb from limb. I have often heard it said, here and elsewhere, that women are more fond of these bloody spectacles than men are. We know they are more sympathetic with suffering, and in the hospital and chamber of sickness and anguish, they minister with a long-suffering patience and fortitude from which the sterner stuff that men are supposed to be made of revolts at once, or soon shrinks worn out, “used up,” as we say.

What is the effect of these scenes of blood and butchery on the national character? In the streets the boys play bull-fight: one holds up a red handkerchief and shakes it in the face of another boy, who makes a lunge at him with his head, and then pursues him, and another sets off after him, and so the bull-ring is enacted in the highway. As all the large towns have bull-rings, and the poorest classes of people manage to get money enough to see the show, and the country boy can give his girl no greater treat than to take her to a bull-fight, the thing is in the widest sense national, and its influence reaches down to the lowest ranks, while it is the pet of the nobility and gentry. And its effect must be degrading, brutifying, and demoralizing. If there were any thing in the Spanish character to work upon, for good or evil, the influence of such a decided national pastime would be more distinctly pronounced. But the senseless pride of the Spaniard,—pride with nothing to be proud of; pride with idleness, ignorance, and poverty; pride of the meanest and most contemptible sort,—is the warp and woof of Spanish character, and there is hardly any thing more in them than there would be in a nation of peacocks.

When you have excepted the vice of intoxication, and a great exception it is, you have said all that can be said in favor of the moral habits of the Spanish people. They do not steal from one another, that I know of, any more than other people do. But they certainly commit murders more frequently than other nations do, unless the slayer is maddened by drink. In estimating the comparative morality of peoples, this matter of intemperance holds the balance. It is the prolific parent of the greater part of the crimes of a people where it is the prevailing vice, yet very few moralists are disposed to reckon it the crime of crimes. In Spain the women are said to be almost universally corrupt. As a matter of course, the men must be just as bad. I have been assured here in Granada, by those who ought to know, having long resided here and become thoroughly acquainted with the state of things, that there is no social morality among men and women in Spain: that from the highest to the lowest they have all gone out of the way, and that they are known—the women are—as divided into four classes, with different degrees of refinement in vice, but all four classes lost to virtue and without conscience of sin. It is quite probable that such a statement is to be taken with many grains of allowance. But making all deductions that one’s good nature demands, there still remains a sediment of truth that one shudders to admit. In this plane of inquiry we are met with the truth that Austria, Italy, France, and Spain are the Roman Catholic countries where the vice of licentiousness corrupts the moral of social life. The Protestant countries of Europe are in colder climes, and intemperance is the vice that among the poorer people breeds misery more ruinous to their health and prosperity.

At the railway station, when we were leaving Seville for the Alhambra by the way of Malaga, a group of natives in the costume of Andalusia presented a picturesque and not unpleasing appearance. In the cities of Europe it is rare to see any thing national and peculiar in the dress of the people. Fashion is an empire that extends over every nation, and reigns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid with resistless sway. The seat of government is in Paris, and her edicts are obeyed in free America as well as in France. But when you get into the rural districts, the people cling to an ancient régime; a fashion, indeed, who sat on the throne long years ago, and has never been put aside by any revolutions of modern invention. These rural Andalusians, in breeches and sandals, with red belt or sash, and loose jacket, and conical hat and wide rim turned up all around, are dressed as their great-grandfathers were, and as their own great-grandchildren will be, and others, for generations to come. They had been to the city on an excursion, and were now going home again, none the better, but a deal the worse for the change of life they had suffered in town.

It was a good opportunity to learn something of the life of these people, who form, after all, the great mass of any nation, and the part of the people with whom every true heart is in sympathy. The rich and the gay, the fashionable people who throng in cities, can live as they please. The poor, who live from hand to mouth, and cannot choose for themselves, but must live as they can, these are the people in every country whose condition we want to inquire into; and when we have learned of their state, we know what their country is. It is the average of human comfort that we want to get at.

And it is a real help towards one’s satisfaction with the condition of a people to know that it does not take a vast amount of the good things of this life to make one happy, if he has never had any thing more or better than the little he has been contented with. These Andalusians work on the farms of large proprietors, and get six to ten cents a day and their food, when they are working by the season. This sounds small. The wages of laboring men who find themselves, and who work by the day, will average forty or fifty cents a day. To know what such pay is worth we must know how they live, and what it costs to buy the food they have. Their food is chiefly soup of bacon oil and vegetables, with bread and fruit. They take a kettle of this thick soup, more like a pudding than a soup, to the fields with them; and day after day, year in and year out, eat substantially the same thing. And this food costs the peasants a very little more than nothing. The ground is easily worked, the climate is so favorable to growth and land so abundant, that what can be raised for food is almost as accessible to the poor as if vegetables were spontaneous and free to everybody. So it is that these poor people are quite as well off, as to the mere physical comforts of life, as those who get one, two, and five dollars a day in other lands, and have to pay so much for food and lodgings as to be sorely puzzled to do what a cat often tries to do,—make both ends meet.