I
Cannot At All Remember Whether It Was Before Or After Exploring This
History That I Ventured Upon The Trackless
Waste of a volume of the
dramatists themselves, where I faithfully began with the earliest and
came down to those
Of the great age when Cervantes and Calderon and Lope
de Vega were writing the plays. It was either my misfortune that I read
Lope and not Calderon, or that I do not recall reading Calderon at all,
and know him only by a charming little play of Madrid life given ten or
fifteen years ago by the pupils of the Dramatic Academy in New York. My
lasting ignorance of this master was not for want of knowing how great
he was, especially from Lowell, who never failed to dwell on it when the
talk was of Spanish literature. The fact is I did not get much pleasure
out of Lope, but I did enjoy the great tragedy of Cervantes, and such of
his comedies as I found in that massive volume.
I did not realize, however, till I saw that play of Calderon's, in New
York, how much the Spanish drama lias made Madrid its scene; and until
one knows modern Spanish fiction one cannot know how essentially the
incongruous city is the capital of the Spanish imagination. Of course
the action of Gil Bias largely passes there, but Gil Blas in only
adoptively a Spanish novel, and the native picaresque story is oftener
at home in the provinces; but since Spanish fiction has come to full
consciousness in the work of the modern masters it has resorted more and
more to Madrid. If I speak only of Galdos and Valdes by name, it is
because I know them best as the greatest of their time; but I fancy the
allure of the capital has been felt by every other modern more or less;
and if I were a Spanish author I should like to put a story there. If I
were a Spaniard at all, I should like to live there a part of the year,
or to come up for some sojourn, as the real Spaniards do. In such an
event I should be able to tell the reader more about Madrid than I now
know. I should not be poorly keeping to hotels and galleries and streets
and the like surfaces of civilization; but should be saying all sorts of
well-informed and surprising things about my fellow-citizens. As it is I
have tried somewhat to say how I think they look to a stranger, and if
it is not quite as they have looked to other strangers I do not insist
upon my own stranger's impression. There is a great choice of good books
about Spain, so that I do not feel bound to add to them with anything
like finality.
I have tried to give a sense of the grand-opera effect of the street
scene, but I have record of only one passage such as one often sees in
Italy where moments of the street are always waiting for transfer to the
theater. A pair had posed themselves, across the way from our hotel,
against the large closed shutter of a shop which made an admirable
background. The woman in a black dress, with a red shawl over her
shoulders, stood statuesquely immovable, confronting the middle-class
man who, while people went and came about them, poured out his mind to
her, with many frenzied gestures, but mostly using one hand for
emphasis. He seemed to be telling something rather than asserting
himself or accusing her; portraying a past fact or defining a situation;
and she waited immovably silent till he had finished. Then she began and
warmed to her work, but apparently without anger or prejudice. She
talked herself out, as he had talked himself out. He waited and then he
left her and crossed to the other corner. She called after him as he
kept on down the street. She turned away, but stopped, and turned again
and called after him till he passed from sight. Then she turned once
more and went her own way. Nobody minded, any more than if they had been
two unhappy ghosts invisibly and inaudibly quarreling, but I remained,
and remain to this day, afflicted because of the mystery of their
dispute.
We did not think there were so many boys, proportionately, or boys let
loose, in Madrid as in the other towns we had seen, and we remarked to
that sort of foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities
that the children seemed like little men and women. "Yes," he said, "the
Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they
never grow up." It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught
at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism
of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many
bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far
the severity of the church characterizes manners it would be hard to
say. Perhaps these are often the effect of temperament. One heard more
than one saw of the indifference of shop-keepers to shoppers in Madrid;
in Andalusia, say especially in Seville, one saw nothing of it. But from
the testimony of sufferers it appears to be the Madrid shop-keeper's
reasonable conception that if a customer comes to buy something it is
because he, or more frequently she, wants it and is more concerned than
himself in the transaction. He does not put himself about in serving
her, and if she intimates that he is rudely indifferent, and that though
she has often come to him before she will never come again, he remains
tranquil. From experience I cannot say how true this is; but certainly I
failed to awaken any lively emotion in the booksellers of whom I tried
to buy some modern plays.
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