These Wasted Victims Could Have
Ploughed Three Hundred Thousand Hectares Of Land, Which Would Have
Produced A Million And A Half Hectolitres Of Grain, Worth Eighty
Millions Of Reals; All This Without Counting The Cost Of The Slaughtered
Cattle, Worth Say Seven Or Eight Millions, At A Moderate Calculation.
Thus far the Arithmetic Man; to whom responds the tauromachian
aficionado:
That the bulk of this income goes to purposes of charity;
that were there no bull-fights, bulls of good race would cease to be
bred; that nobody ever saw a horse in a bull-ring that could plough a
furrow of a hundred yards without giving up the ghost; that the nerve,
dexterity, and knowledge of brute nature gained in the arena is a good
thing to have in the country; that, in short, it is our way of amusing
ourselves, and if you don't like it you can go home and cultivate
prize-fighters, or kill two-year-old colts on the racecourse, or murder
jockeys in hurdle-races, or break your own necks in steeple-chases, or
in search of wilder excitement thicken your blood with beer or burn your
souls out with whiskey.
And this is all we get by our well-meant effort to convince Spaniards of
the brutality of bullfights. Must Chicago be virtuous before I can
object to Madrid ale, and say that its cakes are unduly gingered?
Yet even those who most stoutly defend the bull-fight feel that its
glory has departed and that it has entered into the era of full
decadence. I was talking one evening with a Castilian gentleman, one of
those who cling with most persistence to the national traditions, and he
confessed that the noble art was wounded to death. "I do not refer, as
many do, to the change from the old times, when gentlemen fought on
their own horses in the ring. That was nonsense, and could not survive
the time of Cervantes. Life is too short to learn bull-fighting. A
grandee of Spain, if he knows anything else, would make a sorry torero.
The good times of the art are more modern. I saw the short day of the
glory of the ring when I was a boy. There was a race of gladiators then,
such as the world will never see again, - mighty fighters before the
king. Pepe Illo and Costillares, Romero and Paco Montes, - the world does
not contain the stuff to make their counterparts. They were serious,
earnest men. They would have let their right arms wither before they
would have courted the applause of the mob by killing a bull outside of
the severe traditions. Compare them with the men of to-day, with your
Rafael Molina, who allows himself to be gored, playing with a heifer;
with your frivolous boys like Frascuelo. I have seen the ring convulsed
with laughter as that buffoon strutted across the arena, flirting his
muleta as a manola does her skirts, the bewildered bull not knowing what
to make of it.
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