[Footnote 29: Travelling in Spain in the Present Day. Henry Blackburn. 8vo. pp.248. London: Sampson, Low, Son & Marston.]
He too went to see a bull-fight at Madrid, and he really seemed to have enjoyed it, his chief regret, when he thinks of the performance, being that the odds were too great against the bull! If the beast had only been allowed a fair chance, he would have liked it a great deal better. He attended another bull-fight at Seville, and did not like it at all. The great attraction on this occasion was a female bill-fighter, who was advertised as the "intrepid señorita" She entered the arena in a kind of Bloomer costume, with a cap and a red spangled tunic, made her bow to the president, and then lo! to the English gentlemen's unspeakable disappointment, a great tub was brought, and she was lifted into it. It reached her arm-pits and there she stood, waving her darts, or banderillas. At a given signal the bull was let in, his horns having been previously cut short and padded at the ends. "As the animal could only toss or do any mischief by lowering its head to the ground, the risk did not seem great, or the performance promising." The bull evidently considered the whole thing a humbug, for at first he would have nothing to do with the tub, and kept walking round and round the ring. At last indignation got the better of him, and turning suddenly upon the ignominious utensil, he sent it rolling half way across the arena, with the intrepid señorita curled up inside. This seemed very much like baiting a hedgehog; but when the bull caught up the tub on his horns and ran bellowing with it round the ring, the sport began to look serious. There was a general rush of banderilleros and chulos to the rescue. The performer was extricated and smuggled shamefully out of the amphitheatre, and the bull was driven buck to his cage. The next act Mr. Blackburn characterizes by the appropriate name of "skittles." Nine grotesquely dressed negroes stood up in a row, and a frisky young bull was let in to bowl them over. They understood their duty, and went down flat at the first charge. Then they sat on chairs, and were knocked over again. This was great fun, and appeared to afford unlimited satisfaction to the bull, the ninepins, the audience, and everybody except Mr. Blackburn. The performance was repeated several times. After that came a burlesque of the picadores. Five ragged beggars, with a grim smile on their dirty faces, rode [{127}] forward on donkeys, without saddle or bridle. The gates were opened, and the bull charged them at once. They rode so close together that they resisted the first shock, and the bull retired. He had broken a leg of one of the donkeys, but they tied it up with a handkerchief, and continued marching slowly round, still keeping close together. A few more charges, and down they all went. The men ran for their lives and leaped the barriers, and the donkeys were thrown up in the air. So, with many variations and interludes, the sport went on for three hours; and at last, when night came, two or three young bulls were let into the ring, and then all the people! "We left them there," says our author, "rolling and tumbling over one another in the darkness, shouting and screaming, fighting and cursing—sending up sounds that might indeed make angels weep."
The Spaniard does not always figure in Mr. Blackburn's book as the high-bred gentleman we are wont to imagine him. Take, for example, this picture of a señor travelling: "For some mysterious reason, no sooner does a Spaniard find himself in a railway carriage than his native courtesy and high breeding seem to desert him; he is not the man you meet on the Prado, or who is ready to divide his dinner with you on the mountain-side. He is generally, as far as our experience goes, a fat, selfish-looking bundle of cloaks and rugs, taking up more than his share of the seat, not moving to make way for you, and seldom offering any assistance or civility. He is not very clean, and smokes incessantly during the whole twenty-four hours that you may have to sit next to him; occasionally toppling over in a half-sleep, with his head upon your shoulder and his lighted cigar hanging from his mouth. He insists upon keeping the windows tightly closed, and unless your party is a large one you have to give way to the majority and submit to be half suffocated." Nor is it much better at the hotels: "A lady cannot, in the year 1866, sit down to a table d'hôte in Madrid without the chance of having smoke puffed across the table in her face all dinner-time; her next neighbor (if a Spaniard) will think nothing of reaching in front of her for what he requires, and greedily securing the best of everything for himself. That is an educated gentleman opposite, but he has peculiar views about the uses of knives and forks; next to him are two ladies (of some position, we may assume; they have come to Madrid to be presented at the levée to-morrow), but their manners at table are simply atrocious. In his own house, it must be admitted, the Spaniard behaves better; but it is only among the few that one encounters the same degree of refinement and good manners that commonly prevail in England and America. The Spanish gentry read little and are very ignorant; and, as a rule, ignorance and refinement are hardly ever found together."
As a specimen of one of the lower classes take this extract: "Our beds are made by a dirty, good-natured little man, who sits upon them and smokes at intervals during the process. Our fellow-travellers, who have been much in Spain and have been staying here some time, say that he is one of the best and most obliging servants they have met with. He attends to all the families on our étage, and earns 18s. or 20s. a day! Every one has to fee him, or he will not work. We found him active enough until the end of the week, when our 'tip' of 60 or 70 reals, equal to about 2s. a day, was indignantly returned, as insufficient and degrading. The latter was the grievance: his pride was hurt, and we never got on well afterward. He had a knack of leaving behind him the damp, smouldering ends of his cigarettes; and on one occasion, on being suddenly called out of the room, quietly deposited the morsel on the edge of one of our plates on the breakfast table."
The great feature of Spanish life seems to be its laziness. Crowds of idlers, wrapped in their picturesque cloaks, stand about the plazas from morning till night, doing noting, rarely speaking, and scarcely seeming to have energy enough to light a cigarette. Sometimes they scratch their fusees on the coat of a passer-by, in a contemplative, patronizing fashion, that takes a stranger rather aback. A young Madrileño is content to lounge his life away in this manner; and if he has an income sufficient to provide him with the bare means of subsistence, with his indispensable cigarito and his ticket for the bull-fight, he will do no work. In the morning he lounges on the Puerta del Sol; in the afternoon he lounges (if he can't ride) on the Prado; in the evening he lounges in the cafe or the theatre. This is all he cares for, and about all he is fit for. The middle class—the shop-keepers—have as little energy as their betters. "We went into a confectioner s one day," says Mr. Blackburn, "to purchase some chocolate, and were deliberately told that, if we liked to get it down from a high shelf, we could have it; no assistance was offered, and we had to go empty away." Could we accept Mr. Blackburn's sketch, or Mrs. Byrne's either, as a true picture of Spanish society, we might indeed despair of the ultimate regeneration of the kingdom. But the author of Travelling in Spain at the Present Day has the candor to admit that he is only a superficial observer, and with the following honest and commendable passages from his concluding chapter, we take leave of him and our readers together:
"Spain is not a country to travel in, and there is no nation which is more unfairly estimated by foreigners who pay it only a flying visit. We have no opportunity of appreciating the Spaniards' good points, nor do we become at all aware of their latent fund of humor, their good-heartedness, and their true bonhomie. We jostle with them in crowds, we rub roughly against them in travelling, our patience is sorely tried, and we are apt, as Miss Eyre did, to denounce them as worse than 'barbarians. But we should bear in mind that Spaniards differ from other nations conspicuously in this—that they become sooner 'crystallized;' and crystals, we all no well, are never seen to advantage when in contact with foreign bodies. In short Spaniards are not as other men; and Spain is a dear delightful land of contraries, where nothing ever happens as you expect it, and where 'coming objects never cast their shadow before!'"