There are in every country men who accomplish their ends by romantic adventures, and this is more common in Spain than anywhere else. There it is an ancestral or fictitious adventurer, who has really no other god but his own interests, but succeeds by his audacities and a kind of native generosity in giving an air of grandeur to his exploits, a varnish of glory and poetry to his cupidity. So the favourite Spanish hero, the famous Cid Campeador, appears to us when criticism has rolled away the luminous clouds with which pure legend has surrounded him. The Rodrigo whom Corneille celebrated was only the vision of a poet; the true Cid of history was a man of prey, not troubled with scruples, ready to espouse all causes, bearing into every camp the restlessness of his moods and courage, fighting alternately for or against his prince, serving Christ or Mohammed, and, if one can believe the Arabic chroniclers, preferring a bushel of gold to a smile from Ximena. His mighty sword thrusts, his haughty bearing, his natural grandiloquence, redeemed everything; he had received from heaven the art of persuasive speech, and posterity remembers words more than intentions. The romancero relates that, being in a hurry to set out on an expedition, and having need of money, he borrowed a very large sum from a Jew, giving him as guarantee a coffer full of jewels, which coffer being opened after his departure, was found to contain only sand. On his return, the Jew reproached him with deception. “Yes, it was sand,” he answered loftily, “but this sand contained the gold of my given word.” The idea was good, albeit a trifle extravagant.
It is not with any evil intention to the memory of General Prim, to suggest that he also was a hero with too easy a conscience. Is one bound to have more convictions, more principles than the Cid? “Do you know,” said Castelar[m] when orator of the opposition, “who is General Prim’s god? It is Chance. Would you know his religion? It is Fatalism. And his ideal? The dream of always keeping power in his own hands. To that everything is brought to bear and to that everything is sacrificed. Institutions matter nothing to him; he bends them to his convenience. Laws count even less for him. They are mere spider webs, to be brushed aside by the swords of his captain-generals. Parties are as nothing, he dissolves them. Engagements have never hampered him, for he forgets them. The most inconceivable alliances are not repugnant, provided he and his are advantaged thereby.”
General Prim
But it is just to add that General Prim, when he came into power, astonished his enemies as much as his friends by the continued wisdom of his conduct. The most redoubtable trial of an adventurer is success. His ideas must grow with his fortune; having gained the coveted rank, he must break with his past, his habits and memories, so as to transform himself into a statesman. Only those who have good stuff in them lend themselves to such changes, and Don Juan Prim soon proved that the Aranjuez conspirator possessed the qualities of a politician, a quick sense of justice, a power of realising situations, skilful management of men and interests, and tact sufficient to use his authority without doing anything irregular. He could use strategy in councils, employing a sober yet nervous eloquence which went straight to the point, and possessed above the art of speaking the more useful one of being silent. A Portuguese has remarked that this last talent, strongly admired among a talkative people, made a man resemble a Gothic cathedral, and gave him the prestige of obscurity and mystery.
To be president of the council was no easy task. It was already difficult to govern an assembly composed of two parts; the difficulty was still greater when there were three. Oscillations from the Centre, who formed the necessary support for the majority, gave the minister perpetual anxiety and forced him to see-saw politics. The radicals, or democratic monarchists, led by a highly popular man, Rivero, and a man of great talent, Martos, played a very considerable rôle in the constituent cortes of 1869. They were at one with the liberal unionists in desiring a king, even as they agreed with the republicans to make a democratic constitution with all possible speed. Government could only expect a conditional support from them. It was inconvenient to satisfy them, dangerous to let them be discontented. It was necessary then perpetually to negotiate with these monarchists by circumstance. A single imprudence might have lost all.
Monarchists by conviction were themselves divided into a crowd of small parties, each having its candidate for the throne.
General Juan Prim needed all his attention and skill to maintain some degree of cohesion among so variegated a majority. He had to dominate the unruly, satisfy the ambitious by a portfolio, and the vain by a decoration; to reassure the timorous, calm the impatient, even like a good sheepdog who runs ceaselessly round a flock, heading the foremost, driving in the scattered, hastening the laggards. Each party sought to gain the general for their candidate, for Don Juan, as someone said at the congress, resembled a political zero, which, placed at the right of a figure, increased its value tenfold, and a candidature quoted at nine on the political bourse would be worth ninety when it had gained the approving smile of the president. His reigning principle was to discourage no illusion. “He knows quite well,” said the opposition, “that he cannot maintain his position much longer in this unstable equilibrium, which consists in keeping in with all parties, being against all parties, and above them all. The secret of his politics is to keep everyone hoping. He gives them no promises, for he is circumspect and never commits himself. He never betrays himself by his acts, being very reserved, diplomatic, and making no engagements; but he gives hope by his enigmas, his reticences, his air of mystery.”
Don Juan, however, was not always so reserved. When occasion demanded, he denounced to the majority the dangers which threatened them, adjuring them to seek safety in conciliatory politics, short of which only misery and disaster could be expected. If his advice was ill received, he complained that they made government impossible, and spoke of retiring. This manœuvre, executed with military precision, never failed of its effect. Thanks to his warning, his threats, and his reticences, that same majority, composed of men who never agreed nor loved one another, persisted in remaining united, a rare spectacle in Spain.[n]