The bull pauses, stares, still flourishes his horns, keeps his enemies at a distance and then, beginning to lose consciousness, kneels down on his front knees like a cow taking a rest in a meadow. The toreros are all around him. He stares at them with glazing eyes. Then the matador plucks out his sword and the bull rolls over dead. Trumpets blow; out comes the troikas of asses, and one set is harnessed to the dead horse and the other to the body of the bull. In the circles of the amphitheater ten thousand voices are busily discussing it, but ere they have got far in talk the arena has been cleared and all are hushed as the great door opens and bull number two comes rushing on to die.
It makes a devastating impression on the heart of the Northerner; makes you, for that afternoon at least, hate Spain. It is so depressing that for days you cannot get over it. The horror of it haunts one as if one somehow had learned that humanity had gone wrong and no life anywhere was worth while.
Curiously enough, however, you meet Englishmen and Americans who have been many times. I sat next to an Englishwoman who somehow had come to enjoy the fight—thought the matadors so elegant, so wonderful, thought they ran such a risk (and so they do), excused much on the ground that the meat was sold cheap to feed the people of the slums.
And now some time has elapsed, and I can well understand it. Despite all the horror and pain of it I also feel a persistent craving to go again. There is a fatal fascination in this brutal sport. You want to see those fearsome bulls killed; want to look on at death. The last Englishman I met had been to twenty-two, yet at his first he was so ill he had almost to be carried out. Cruelty, like other lusts, grows on what it feeds on. Englishmen, though naturally they at first reject it, can take pleasure in cruelty also.
5
On the Texan Border where under United States law bullfighting is forbidden, the Spanish population still have mock bullfights at religious festivals. In these you may see Sancho Panza mounted on a turbulent ass as picador, and a lot of very broad farce. But there is often a religious element; the matador coming forth as Christ, and the bull, all in red, as Satan. A remarkable reversal of Christian symbolism this—He who returned to Malchus the ear which Peter had struck off will destroy evil with a sword! Still, it is only a game and well in keeping with the spirit of Church-plays in olden times. The parody of the bullfight is much happier than the fight itself.
A deficiency in Spanish character is humor. The Spaniard is very witty, unusually apt at repartee, but he does not easily smile. This is specially noticeable in the children. There is something of the morose in them which does not readily dissolve in laughter or tears. Perhaps this can be taken as a partial explanation of Spanish cruelty. They have somber minds.
Of course one ought not to make the mistake of placing upon the Spaniards the whole of our iniquity. There is no race that can show a history devoid of cruelty. If the followers of Cortes burned the soles of the feet of the last of the Aztec kings to find out where his gold was hidden, did not the Barons of England do the same to the Jews to furnish them with money for the Crusades; though the Inquisition caused men and women to be burned to death for heresy in Seville are not people to be found in Georgia ready to do the same to-day to Negroes for a smaller offense? Is there a page in Spanish history which shows more inhumanity to man than has been displayed in the Russian Revolution?
The Spaniard is cruel, it is admitted, and he is cruel in ways which are particularly obnoxious to the Anglo-Saxon who, when he sees a man ill-treating a horse, is almost ready to rush in and kill the man. But other peoples can be cruel also. That does not extenuate the Spaniard's fault, but it is permitted to remark without offense, he is cruel, but he has remarkably good manners; he has a greater sense of the dignity of life.