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

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

These Spanish peasants appear to be lively, intelligent, and wide-awake. They give a reason for doing any thing, when they are asked; and that is more than the Irish or English peasantry can do at home, or in the land of the soaring eagle. Except in Russia, there is not a people on the continent of Europe that appear more stolid and unthoughtful, more like mere cattle or machines, than the farm peasantry of merry England. This may be in appearance only; but the truth is that you can get more out of an ignorant laborer on the continent of Europe, whose language you do not more than half understand, than out of an English farm hand who is supposed to speak English.

Beer has something to do with this matter of stupidity. These southern climates in Europe and this soil are favorable to the culture of wine-grapes, and wine is the solace and stimulus of the commonest people. You may buy as good a bottle of wine for thirty cents in Spain as you would have to pay three or four dollars for in New York. And if you will not give thirty cents for it, you can have as much as you want for little or nothing. Until the railroads were built and transportation made easy and cheap, it was common, when the new vintage came in, to empty the casks that held what was left over of former years. And a church was pointed out to me that was built with mortar made with wine instead of water, there being a scarcity of water in the vicinity but plenty of wine that was to be thrown away. Sherry wine, which is the sack of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, is the leading wine of Spain, and is made now and here just as wine was made in the times of Hesiod and Isaiah; for in such climes as this the people keep on doing things as their ancestors or others did in the same place thousands of years ago. They drink wine as freely as the English drink beer, and as Americans drink rum and water. But they do not get drunk as our people do, and they are not so stupid as the beer drinkers of England are. They are stimulated, of course, and the exhilaration is carried to excess sometimes. It is not true to say there is no drunkenness in wine-growing countries, but the best informed men, who had the most abundant opportunities of learning the facts in the case, assured me that intemperance is not common; that it is very rare among the working people of Spain. This is not to be used as an argument in favor of wine raising and wine drinking in America. It would indeed be better for the health of the drinking men to drink pure wine than bad whiskey, or the vile compounds that are sold as wine in our country. But if wine were as cheap in the United States as in Spain, there would be just as much intemperance in the United States as now. The climate and the strife of such a country as ours furnish causes for the use of stimulating drinks that do not exist in Italy or Spain; and philanthropists who discuss and legislate on the subject of temperance, without regard to the physical circumstances of a people, are in the same case with the traveller who reckoned his bill without his host. It is well to multiply and fortify wholesome laws to restrain men from evil indulgence, and it is our duty to ply all possible moral agencies to reform and save our fellow-men; but our duty does not end with legislating and preaching. There are social burdens to be raised from the poor by the voluntary action of the rich, and by the application of the gospel principle of brotherhood, which will so ameliorate the condition of the lowly that they will not be tempted as now, by the pressure of weariness, care, and woe, to fly to the intoxicating cup for help to bear their load, or to forget that it is on them. But this disgression is getting dry, if it is on drinking.

A beautiful trait of character and a lovely custom of the Spanish peasantry appear in their love for parents. They yield to them obedience, respect, veneration, and love, after they are aged, and the children are men and women grown. The married children delight to have their parents to direct and govern them as in childhood, and these children even quarrel among themselves to get and keep possession of their aged parents. This trait of character is said to mark a slow country, where the past, the ancient, is held in honor; while progress has no such reverence for old age. Would to God that we had a little more Spain in young America, if it is Spanish to honor one’s father and mother.

In the Alameda, at Malaga.

CHAPTER XI.
MALAGA.

THE wind blowing from the north-west,—that is, a land breeze, at Malaga, excites the nervous system so much, that in courts of law it is held to be an extenuating circumstance in case of crime. It is therefore of great importance to know which way the wind blows when you are proposing to kill your neighbor or to commit a forgery. In our country we have hardly got to that point, but in Boston, where easterly winds prevail, the phrenologists set up a plea in behalf of the Malden murderer that was quite as absurd as the Malaga weather. In New York, the doctrine of mental and moral disturbance is held to be an extenuating circumstance in crime. And some of our eminent citizens, merchants, bankers, lawyers, doctors, and ministers have united in representing the strong excitement engendered by stock speculation, as an excuse for forgery. From all of which it is fair to infer that the guilt or innocence of a man in the New World, as well as the Old, depends very much upon the way the wind blows.

Malaga is one of the most celebrated resorts for invalids. It is not a resort of fashion, like Nice and Mentone, and perhaps Sicily is more sought by those whose maladies are partly imaginary and the other part nervous. But Malaga is a place to which intelligent physicians send hundreds of patients who are in a bad way, and yet have a fair chance of getting well if they spend a few winters in this uniform, genial, mild, but not enervating clime. The warm south wind comes in upon it from the sea, on whose shore it lies, and the mountains in the rear shield it from the northern blasts. In an ordinary room, without fire, the thermometer (Fahr.) ranges all winter long from fifty-two to seventy deg., never higher or lower, unless when an extraordinary fit of weather is on, and the average temperature is about fifty-five deg. from November to March. It is six degrees warmer than Rome, which is one of the dampest, chilliest, and most disagreeable places for an invalid to winter in. I tried hard to get well in Florence and Rome and Nice, and then fled to Spain, and found what neither Italy nor Southern France would furnish,—an equable clime; warm, but not debilitating. Nature has a laboratory for making mineral waters that chemists in vain attempt to imitate, and there are peculiar combinations of atmospheric elements in divers places, that must be tried on the spot if you would get the good of them. The invalid who wishes a climate that braces him up without exciting him to cough, will have to breathe in a great many places, perhaps, before he finds those opposite qualities blended, and if an unprofessional opinion is worth any thing, it is here given, that the south of Spain is the paradise desired. But nothing is more important for consumptives than uniformity of climate, and the argument in favor of Malaga is complete, when you learn that the range or variation of its temperature is less than that of any other place on the continent of Europe! Pau, that beautiful little nest in the Pyrenees, so sheltered by the hills that no wind visits it too roughly, has a range of no less than sixty-eight degrees during the year, and Rome has sixty-two, and even Nice, fairest of watering-places for winter, ranges sixty, but Malaga has only a range of forty-nine degrees in the year.

It rained almost every day in Rome. It rains in Florence implacably, just when you wish it would not. Nice is fairer, but not always fair. Malaga is so uniformly pleasant, that a day without sunshine is very unusual in the months of November, December, and January. Good authority says there are not, during the whole year, more than ten days on which rain would prevent an invalid from taking exercise. It seemed to me that the winter weather in Malaga is more nearly like to that of Cairo, in Egypt, than any other place, and there are but four degrees of difference in the average temperature.

But take it summer and winter through, and in the last nine years it has rained only 262 times, or thirty-nine times in the course of each year: and think of it, O ye dwellers in London, or Paris, or New York, it has been foggy or misty but sixteen days in three times three years! And this bright, beautiful atmosphere gives a blue sky so deep and pure, that it would take a poet of more than average fancy power to invent a firmament of superior glory, or to find a sunset in Greece or Italy to be mentioned in the same day with the gorgeous splendors that clothe the skies of Southern Spain at shut of day.