But if Bensaken was kind in his judgment of the ancient Queen, whose guilt or innocence will never be made the subject of inquiry before a court of impeachment in this world, he was less inclined to say a good word for the women of Spain. And in this matter he was no harder on them than others who have lived long enough in this demonstrative country to know the facts in the case. The women of Spain are, as a nation, more beautiful than those of any foreign country in which I have travelled, and this average beauty covers the peasant classes as well as the better-born. This is to be mentioned in connection with the fact stated by all who are familiar with Spain, that virtue is scarcely known. It is impossible, without disregard of the proprieties, to go into the statistics which an illustration of this fact would require. I was repeatedly assured that ladies would regard it as a reproach, an evidence that they were slighted, if they had not an acknowledged lover besides their legal lord. Of course the men are worse than the women, if worse can be, and little or no disgrace can be said to accrue when the vice is so common that virtue is an exception, and is despised at that. If it be asked, how can such a state of things be, when the church embraces in its bosom all the people, young and old, and confession is required of all who commune? the answer is easy. The forced celibacy of the priests tends to corruption, and they have no moral power over the people, unless it be a moral power for evil. And this vice is not necessarily a vice of a Roman Catholic people: it is the vice of the climate: as genial to the south as intemperance in drink is to the north. We must be charitable in our judgments of our neighbors and our fellow-sinners everywhere. It is a very common impression that the sins of a people are fashioned by the type of the religion they profess; and that this vice, which prevails all over the south of Europe, has some relation to the Roman Catholic religion, which is also the ruling influence of church and state. Doubtless the reformation of the church would reform the state also, but human nature will remain substantially the same, and the vices peculiar to the climate would still discover themselves to a greater or less extent. Under the Protestant influences of the north of Europe, intemperance prevails fearfully. So it does in our country, in spite of the highest moral culture and the best opportunities of education. Religion in its purest forms does not reach the masses of mankind in any country so as to save all of them from vice, and in its imperfect development, as in Romish or half-reformed countries, it is even less powerful to deter the multitude from evil.
CHAPTER XIV.
GRANADA.
WHEN we came down this evening from the Generaliffe, we found a curious group in the vestibule of the inn where we were lodged, and a picture of troubadour and gypsy life in Spain was before us suddenly. A dwarf, so stout and short as to be a monster in his appearance, and two or three girls to sing and play with a rude tambourine, made hideous dancing. The landlord and landlord’s wife, the two daughters of the landlord and their husbands,—two lazy fellows who helped one another do nothing all day long,—were seated around, enjoying the scene. The short fellow was short mainly in his legs, which, indeed, were not much longer than his neck; and the antics he cut up were grotesque and ludicrous in the extreme. But who could refrain from joining in the dance to the music, rude as it was? The landlord’s daughters could not, and with a little coaxing the dandy husbands were brought upon the floor; other young people, hearing the fun, dropped in, the frolic became general, and we were treated to an impromptu Spanish fandango, of which I do not propose to be the reporter. It was not amusing merely, but interesting also to observe the phase of lower life among these people, and to see how easily they could find entertainment without going out of doors to get it. The ugly dwarf went through the company, cap in hand, gathered a few pence, and with his little troupe hobbled off to try his luck at some other place. They told me that he lives in the mountains, many leagues away from Granada, but comes down to town, during the season of company, to exhibit himself. And in this, too, he is not unlike the degraded in other parts of the world, who are always willing to make a living by their deformities, if they can get a chance.
THE ALHAMBRA (From the Generaliffe).
The gypsies held a horse fair in Granada to-day. We found them in great numbers, from distant parts of the country. It was a new scene and phase of life. Gypsies are seen in England, in America, in Germany, in Italy, indeed there is hardly a country unvexed by gypsies. Wandering over the world, having no continuing city or abiding place, like the frogs of the land from which they get their name, they find their way into king’s houses and everybody’s house,—lying, cheating, stealing, peddling, and meddling, a nuisance and a curse. But the gypsies of Spain are a race by themselves, and not the ancestors nor the children of the gypsies of the other lands I have named. They have indeed a language with many words in common, and their habits are similar all the world over, but these gypsies of Spain are a race by themselves. Where they came from, and who they are, it is hard to say. They are usually spoken of as from Egypt, and being once called Egyptians, then gyptians,—the name easily runs into gypsies in the English tongue. But they are called gitanos in Spanish, and the race has no relations with the wandering tribes or families that roam throughout Europe and the Western World.
They are, as a people,—at least they seemed to me,—larger and stouter than the Spanish; and by no means so well-favored. Dark complexions, black eyes, long straight black hair, high cheek-bones, and short noses, they resemble North American Indians more than any European race. They are not cleanly in their persons, nor their dwellings; their roaming habits lead them to eat and sleep anywhere, with their dogs and donkeys; they dwell in caves if no better houses are at their command, and the hill behind the city, which we see from the towers of the Alhambra, is pierced with holes that lead into the chambers where they make their homes. They have also one quarter of the town where they have dwellings, but the walls of a city are not agreeable to the freedom of their wills, and they prefer the hills and the country.
They have no moral principle. There is but one virtue known among them, and that is so rare in Spain, and so remarkable among such a people, that it must be set down to their credit at the very start. The women are chaste, and that to a degree that perhaps no other people in the world can claim. It is the one feature of their character that redeems them from the curse of utter and hopeless vagabondism, and, standing out as it does like an ivory tower in the midst of a waste of moral ruin, its beauty is the more lovely and its existence the more wonderful. I cannot say what I would of the care with which mothers guard their daughters from contamination with their own race and the outside world; and I cannot add another word in their praise. They live by fraud. Known to the world as swindlers and liars and thieves, they are nevertheless tolerated, and perhaps because feared; their ill-will being dreaded, and their friendship supposed to be conciliated by complying with their demands.
They get power over people in the same way that spiritualists do: by appealing to that latent superstition which lurks in almost every human bosom, and is much stronger in some than others, and is often strongest in those who would be the least suspected of such a weakness. Thus the women of this gypsy race are fortune-tellers. The young women of Spain, like the young women of every country that I have seen, have some curiosity and credulity, upon which a shrewd impostor will easily play and extort money as the reward of her trickery. To these young women lovers are promised, and when the pride or the passion of the young is tickled with the promise, the prophet is not very sharply questioned or judged. One very common trick performed by the gypsy women in Spain has been reproduced in our country and in England again and again, and will be repeated as long as rogues can find fools to be duped. As love is the ruling passion of the young, avarice is of older people, and to make a heap of money out of a handful is the great desire of the soul. The gypsy woman promises a lady to teach her how to make a trunkful of gold out of a few hundred dollars. The lady is to take all her gold, and to get as much as she can, and tie it up in a white handkerchief in the presence of the gypsy, then to keep it carefully by her side, night and day, for three days, then the gypsy is to return and they are to deposit it in a trunk over which the gypsy is to say her form of words, and then the trunk is to be carefully locked and guarded for three weeks, and when opened is to be found filled with gold. The gypsy, returning after three days’ absence, comes with a bundle of rubbish tied up in a white handkerchief concealed under her mantle, and easily substitutes it for the one which the lady has watched for three days, and after the other is well locked up she disappears, to be heard of no more in that quarter. A trick so stupid and silly one would hardly believe could be practised once; but it is played every year, upon many victims, in all countries. Last summer a spiritualist woman in Paris assured a gentleman that large treasures were buried in the grounds about his house, and he spent thousands and thousands in tearing up his place to find it. The woman got the most of the money spent, and he is hunting yet. But these gypsies are not mere fortune-tellers, they are traders and tinkers; they deal in horse-flesh particularly, and are a striking illustration of the curious fact that trading horses, buying and selling horses, all the world over, has some affinities with trickery. Why it is, perhaps, the attention of psychologists has not been sufficiently long directed to the subject to say; but gypsies and jockeys are usually reckoned as belonging to the same class, and nobody is expected to trust either.
Bensaken went with us among these strange people, and as he understood their language, he made our visit among them exceedingly entertaining, and the facts that we gathered from him and them of their haunts and habits are perhaps as reliable as those which Borrow and others have furnished. I could not learn that they have any religious system. They believe in one God, but they have more to do with the devil, whether they believe in him or not. They have no faith in anybody. Why should they, or rather how could they? Intending to keep faith with nobody, and living only to deceive, they cannot be expected to believe. If they are not lineal descendants of Ishmael, they are like the Arabs, a nomadic race, and their hands are against every man, and every man’s against them.