The same evening, in spite of my fatigue, I procured a guide to conduct me to the theatre, wishing to pass immediately from the sanguinary reality of the circus to the intellectual emotions of the stage. The contrast was striking; the one was full of life and noise, the other was deserted and silent. The house was almost empty, only a few spectators being scattered here and there over the melancholy benches; and yet the entertainments consisted of "The Lovers of Ternel," a drama by Don Juan Eugenio Hartzembusch, and one of the most remarkable productions of the modern Spanish school. It is the touching and poetical story of two lovers, who remain unalterably faithful to one another, in spite of a thousand various seductions and obstacles. Notwithstanding all the author's endeavours—which are often very successful—to vary a situation that is always the same, the piece would appear too simple to a French audience. The passionate portions are treated with a great deal of warmth and impulse, occasionally disfigured by a certain melodramatic exaggeration, to which the author abandons himself too easily. The love of the Sultana of Valencia for Isabel's lover, Juan Diego Martinez Garces de Marsilla, whom she causes to be drugged with a narcotic and brought into the harem; the vengeance of this same Sultana when she sees that she is despised, the guilty letters of Isabel's mother, which are found by Roderigo d'Azagra, who uses them as a means of marrying the daughter, and threatens to show them to the deceived husband, are, perhaps, rather improbable incidents, but they afford an opportunity for touching and dramatic scenes. The piece is written partly in verse and partly in prose. As far as a foreigner can judge of the style of a language, all the niceties of which he can never fully appreciate, Hartzembusch's verses struck me as being superior to his prose. They are free, bold, animated, and offer a great variety in their form; they are also tolerably free from those poetical amplifications into which the facility of their prosody often leads the poets of southern countries. His prose dialogue appears to be imitated from that of modern French melodramas, and offends by its heavy, bombastic style. "The Lovers of Ternel" is really a literary work, far superior to the translations, arranged, or deranged, from the pieces played in the Boulevard theatres of Paris, and which inundate the Peninsula. In "The Lovers of Ternel," you perceive traces of the old ballads and great Spanish dramatists; and it is greatly to be desired that the young poets on the other side the Pyrenees would pursue this course rather than translate a quantity of wretched melodramas into a Castilian more or less pure.
A very comic saynete followed the serious piece. It set forth the troubles of an old bachelor, who takes a pretty servant of "all-work," as the advertisements say. The little rogue first introduces as her brother a great strapping Valencian, six feet high, with enormous whiskers, a tremendous navaja, an insatiable appetite and inextinguishable thirst; she then brings into the house a cousin, who is quite as wild a gentleman as her brother, and is bristling with an unlimited number of blunderbusses, pistols, and other dangerous arms. The said cousin is followed by an uncle, who is a smuggler, and carries with him a complete arsenal and a face to correspond, to the great terror of the old man, who is very repentant for his improper levity. All these various rascals were represented by the actors in the most truthful and admirable manner. At last, a nephew appears, who is a well-behaved young soldier, and delivers his uncle from the band of ruffians who have taken up their quarters in his house, embraced his servant while they were drinking his wine, smoked his cigars and pillaged his dwelling. The uncle promises never to be served for the future by any but old men-servants. The saynetes resemble our vaudevilles, but the plot is less complicated, sometimes consisting merely of detached scenes, like the interludes in Italian comedies.
The performances terminated with a bayle nacional, executed by two couples of dancers and danseuses, in a very satisfactory manner. Although the Spanish danseuses do not possess the correct and accurate precision, or the elevated style of the French danseuses, they are, in my opinion, vastly superior to them by their graceful and fascinating appearance. As they study but little, and do not subject themselves, in order to render their bodies supple, to those terrible exercises which cause a professional dancing-room to resemble a chamber of torture, they avoid that race-horse sort of thinness which makes our ballet-dancers look rather too deathlike and anatomical; they preserve the outlines and fulness of their sex; they resemble women dancing and not danseuses, which is a very different thing. Their style has not anything in common with that of the French school. In the latter, the immovability and perpendicularity of the upper part of the body are expressly recommended, and the body never takes part in the movement of the legs. In Spain, the feet hardly leave the ground; there are none of those grand pirouettes or elevating of the legs, which make a woman look like a pair of compasses opened to their fullest extent, and which, in Spain, are considered revoltingly indecent. It is the body which dances, the back which undulates, the sides which bend, the waist which moves with all the suppleness of an Almee or a serpent. When a Spanish danseuse throws herself back, her shoulders almost touch the ground; her arms, in a deathlike swoon, are as flexible and limp as a floating scarf; you would think that her hands could scarcely raise and rattle the ivory castagnettes with their golden strings, and yet, when the proper moment is come, this voluptuous languor is succeeded by the activity of a young African lion, proving that the body as soft as silk envelopes muscles of steel. At the present day, the Moorish Almees follow the same system; their dancing consists of a series of harmoniously wanton undulations of the bust, the hips, and the back, with the arms thrown back over the head. The Arabian traditions have been preserved in the national dances, especially those of Andalusia.
Although the Spanish male dancers are but mediocre, they have a dashing, bold, and gallant bearing, which I greatly prefer to the equivocal and vapid graces of ours. They are taken up neither by themselves nor the public, and have not a look or a smile for any one but their partner, of whom they appear passionately enamoured, and whom they seem ready to defend against all comers. They possess a ferocious kind of grace, a certain insolently daring demeanour, which is peculiar to them. After wiping off their paint, they would make excellent banderilleros, and might spring from the boards of a theatre to the arena of the circus.
The Malagueña, which is a dance confined to Malaga, is really most poetical and charming. The cavalier appears first, with his sombrero slouched over his eyes, and his scarlet cloak thrown round him, like that of some hidalgo walking about in search of adventures. The lady then enters, draped in her mantilla, and with her fan in her hand, like a lady who is going to take a turn in the Almeda. The cavalier endeavours to catch a glance of the mysterious siren, but she manœuvres her fan so coquetishly, and so well, she shuts and opens it so opportunely, she twists it about so promptly on a level with her pretty face, that the gallant is completely baffled, and retires a few steps to think of some new stratagem. He rattles the castagnettes under his cloak. Directly she hears them, the lady pricks up her ears; she smiles, her breast heaves, and the tip of her little satin shoe marks the time in spite of her; she throws aside her fan and her mantilla, and appears in a gay dancing costume, glittering with spangles and tinsel, with a rose in her hair, and a large tortoiseshell comb at the back of her head. The cavalier then casts aside his mask and cloak, and the two personages execute a deliciously original dance.
As I returned along the beach, and looked upon the sea which reflected in its mirror of dark steel the pale visage of the moon, I reflected on the contrast between the crowded circus and the empty theatre,—on the eagerness displayed by the multitude for brutal reality, and its indifference for the speculations of the mind. As a poet, I could not help envying the gladiator, and I regretted having given up action for reverie. The day before, at the same theatre, they had played a piece of Lope de Vega, which had not been more attractive than the work of the younger writer; so that ancient genius and modern talent were not worth a thrust from the sword of Montes!
Nor are the other theatres in Spain much better attended than that at Malaga, not even the Teatro del Principe in Madrid, although there is a very great actor there,—namely, Julian Romea—and an excellent actress, Matilde Diez. The course of the old Spanish drama appears to be hopelessly dried up; and yet never did a more copious stream flow in a broader channel,—never did there exist a more profound and inexhaustible amount of fecundity. Our most prolific vaudeville writers are still far behind Lope de Vega, who never had any one to assist him, and whose works are so numerous that the exact number is not known, and there is hardly a complete copy of them to be found. Without including his comedies de cape et d'épée, in which he has no rival, Calderon de la Barca has written a multitude of autos sacramentales, which are a kind of Roman-catholic mysteries, in which strange profundity of thought and singularity of conception are united to the most enchanting and luxuriously elegant poetry. It would require a whole series of folio catalogues merely to enumerate the titles of the pieces written by Lope de Rueda, Montalban, Guevara, Quevedo, Tirso, Rojas, Moreto, Guilhen de Castro, Diamante, and a host of others. The number of theatrical pieces written in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries surpasses all that we can imagine: we might as well endeavour to count the leaves in the forest or the grains of sand upon the sea-shore. They are almost all composed in verse of eight feet, varied by assonants, and printed in two columns quarto, with a coarse engraving as a frontispiece, each forming a book of from six to eight leaves. The booksellers' shops are full of them; thousands may be seen hung up pell-mell in the midst of the ballads and legends in verse sold at the bookstalls in the streets. Without any exaggeration, the epigram written on a too prolific Roman poet, who was, after his death, burnt upon a funereal pile formed of his own books, might be applied to most of the Spanish dramatic authors. They possess a fertility of invention, an abundance of incidents, and a complication of plot, of which no one can form any idea. Long before Shakspeare the Spaniards invented the Drama; their works are dramatic in the broadest acceptation of the word; and, with the exception of some few erudite puerilities, they copy neither from the Greeks nor the Romans, but, as Lope de Vega says in his "Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias in este Tiempo,"—
" ... Cuando he de escribir una comedia
Encierro los preceptos con seis llaves."
Spanish dramatic authors do not seem to have paid much attention to the delineation of character, although fine, cutting instances of observation are to be met with in each scene. But man is not studied philosophically; and in their dramas you seldom find those episodical figures so frequent in England's great tragic poet,—those life-like sketches which are only indirectly connected with the action of the piece, and have no other object than that of presenting another phase of the human soul, another original individuality, or reflection of the poet's mind. The Spanish author rarely allows the public to perceive anything of his own peculiar character until he asks pardon, at the conclusion of the drama, for the faults of which he has been guilty.