CHAPTER X

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Barbarism of Tauromachy--A Surreptitious Ticket--The Novillos--Islington _not_ Madrid--Apology for Cock-Fighting--Maudlin Humanity--The Espada a Popular Idol--In the Bull-Ring--A Precious "Ster-oh"--The Trumpets Speak--The Procession--Play of the Quadrille--The Defiance--"Bravo, Cucharra!"--"Bravo, Toro!" The Blemish of the Sport--An Indignant English Lassie.

Constantine, the porter at the Fonda de Paris, asked me one forenoon would I like to take a ticket for a bull-fight. He had an excellent one (excellent batch, he meant) to dispose of "in the shade." I stared at him indignantly, nodded my head in the same vein, but winked as I passed through the hall and sprang up the stairs. An English clergyman and his daughter, who had expressed an abhorrence for tauromachy in my presence, had overheard Constantino's temptation, and hence my behaviour.

"Tauromachy!" the dear old minister argued. "What can you expect, sir, from a people who have to buckle two languages in double harness to find a name for their brutal practice? 'Tis illegitimate, sir, like the derivative. _Taurus_ is Latin, [Greek: machê] is Greek; the compound is barbaric."

I bowed, for Emmeline was seemly, with a delicate elegance, and she looked up with a pleased and almost triumphant look, as much as to say, Papa is not one of your common persons, but a mighty learned dignitary indeed.

That was why Constantine waited his opportunity to slip the ticket into my hands in a corridor, explaining that a seat in the shade was a privilege not to be despised, as the sun at the other side flung a glare on the spectator that dazzled his view; besides, it was broiling and headachy to sit for hours in its rays.

"I knew you would go the first chance you had," said Constantine; "I read it in your eyes as you gloated over the pictures of the sport in the hall. They make a magnificent fan, or you could hang them up on the wall in your house in England; I can let you have a lot a bargain. I was sure of it when you stopped opposite the placard of the corrida outside, and shook yourself with joy."

Constantine was a good judge of human nature. I would as soon think of visiting Madrid and not seeing a bull-fight, as of visiting Constantinople and not hunting after the dancing dervishes; Kandy, and not gazing on the Perra Harra procession; London in the season, and not going to the Military Tournament.

But, as I afterwards learned, the weather was still too cold for the genuine game; this might be regarded as a rehearsal, but was patronized by the connoisseurs, as there were openings for criticism on the style of novices, and estimates as to who had in them the stuff of coming men. The bull wants the ardent heats of midsummer to fire him for the combat. The true season begins with a late Easter-tide, when the kings of the herd, fresh from the meadows, have arrogant blood careering in their veins, and are supple in the limbs. To stimulate them now, the dogs or the banderillas de fuego, both alien to true tauromachy, would have to be called in. This is but the heyday of the novillos, the unripe beasts, with india-rubber or wooden balls blunting their half-developed horns, who are sent into the arena to be at the mercy of youths ambitious to become chulos. The novillos prance and frisk and toss their adversaries; it is a frolic and no more. Months afterwards I saw a band of blind mendicants armed with long sticks descend into the ring at Murcia, and succeed, some of them, in keeping off the novillos. As well as giving youngsters the favour of familiarizing themselves with the capa, used to irritate the bull, this practice puts the animal himself into good wind, and teaches him what he has to expect when he is admitted into the pit of the amphitheatre for the final tussle. Your common bull is not apt for these duels; he must be a bull of race, haughty and high-spirited, before he is welcomed as a gladiator _moriturus_. There are stock-breeders in Castile and Andalusia renowned for the superb stamp of their cattle; and of these, not the least renowned is a noble count who bears the name and is a descendant of Christopher Columbus. But the immature tomfoolery has no more resemblance to the stern, actual diversion than a donkey-race has to the Derby. The description in "Childe Harold" is spirited, but has been pared down to accommodate itself to the exigencies of rhyme. Byron when he wrote it must have had a spasm of squeamishness. But that must have been a gorgeous function at the marriage of Isabella, when a public square was converted into an amphitheatre, Toro was monarch for days consecutive, and the bonniest cavaliers of Spain, clad in jackets glimmering with gems, entered the lists against him.

In England, where patronizing leading-articles are indited about those semi-civilized Spaniards, whenever a toreador is injured in the exercise of his profession, nothing would seem to be really known about the sport, and yet there is a self-sufficient assumption among persons called "well-informed" that they know all about it. Speaking once with a colleague of the press at Madrid, the representative of a very great English paper, I was told almost the only instructions he had received on leaving London were not to write anything of bull-fighting, or "hackneyed rubbish of that sort." Yet no nearer approach to bull-fighting has ever been witnessed in England than a silly simulacrum at the Agricultural Hall. The first calf that was enlarged from the make-believe toril on that occasion quietly proceeded to nibble a scrap of paper on the tan. The toreadores were real toreadores, but the bulls were not of the fiery breed of Andalusia. If they had been, the agents of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have thought twice before venturing into the same enclosure with them to bar the entertainment on the score of cruelty. Still, the enterprising public caterer who had brought over the quadrille of bull-fighters was wise in his generation. Had the legitimate article been given, there was enough foretokening of patronage on the opening night to prove it would have been a great success.

I call bull-fighting a glorious pastime. In my mental vision I can mark the rising gorge of some splenetic Briton of the philanthropic school as he reads this phrase, "glorious pastime," wipes his glasses and reads it again. How am I wrong? It is savage, bloodthirsty, and debasing, he will say. Therein I join issue with him, though I may bring a censorious pile of cant crumbling and clattering about my ears. Cock-fighting was once popular in these islands, and that not so long ago. I have often played truant from school, and challenged a thrashing, to drain the high pleasures of a well-contested main. The late Admiral Rous and the late Lord Derby were admirers of the sport, and if I am not mistaken the rules governing a London pit sometimes patronized by royalty had a place in the earlier editions of Hoyle. The best apology for cock-fighting I ever heard was made by an eccentric uncle of mine, who asked his censor, "Why did God put the fighting drop into the game-cock's veins but that he might fight when he got the chance?"

There is cruelty, peradventure, in attaching long steel spurs, keen as bradawls, to the cocks' legs, as there is in supplying men-at-arms with swords and rifles instead of letting them wage war against one another with teeth and feet and fists--the weapons of nature. Chanticleer of the martial breed should be put into the ring with his natural spurs.

Well, in Spain he is, for the sport flourishes there still; and one of my recollections of my last day in Madrid is having sacrificed a meal to be present at the Circo de Gallos, the recognised building where combats of the kind are carried on in a well-filled amphitheatre, with roped platform in the centre, and seats in tiers around. The roadway in front was lined with equipages, and the curled darlings of the Madrilene aristocracy stepped in to witness the tournament and bet on the result; but I own the gentler sex I never met there. There are rules to regulate the conduct of the matches posted conspicuously on the walls; there are scales to weigh the combatants, lemons to clean their spurs, a regular staff of heelers, time-keepers, and umpires; the fixtures are given in the newspapers in the same column as the theatrical programme, and the guardians of public order are always in attendance. On the same principle bull-fighting is conducted, and the same argument holds good in favour of its retention.

This babble of cruelty is veriest wind-bag humanity, and, logically, has not a leg to stand upon. To confront the king of the herd in the arena is bolder and braver than to course the hare at Altcar, or shoot pigeons at Hurlingham, or make a battue of pheasants in a Norfolk preserve--sports to which our patricians are disposed, sports which are chronicled in the fashionable organs with apparent approval. There is more risk to those who share in a bull-fight than in knocking ponies about on the polo-ground at Preston, sawing their mouths and breaking their shins, or in worrying the fox over the pastures of Leicestershire. As for that cold-blooded, cowardly, treacherous recreation of the contemplative man, flinging bait to a harmless defenceless fish, and luring him to a painful end, it is a piece of deliberate barbarism not to be mentioned in the same breath with bull-fighting. And yet Mr. John Bright, who has the reputation of being a gentleman of chivalrous temper and pacific instincts, is said to be passionately fond of this recreation. Observe to what the reasoning of those who frantically protest against the national pastime of Spain reduces itself. So far, I wish it to be understood that I am arguing with the intent of establishing a _reductio ad absurdum_. If coursing, hunting, shooting, and fishing are justifiable--and I hold that they are--then on the like grounds are cock-fighting and bull-fighting justifiable. The beasts on the earth, the birds of the air, and the fishes in the sea, are all created for man's use and benefit. To kill them is no crime, if the killing be not attended with the infliction of wanton pain. The destiny of the minor order of creation is to minister to the appetites or necessities of the lord of creation; and pleasurable excitement is a necessity. The objections to the position here taken up are untenable, except by maudlin and maundering humanitarians, who think more of the life of a pet poodle than of the life of their fellow-man, and by that lost section of mild lunatics, the vegetarians.

Having said so much in defence of bull-fighting, I may be permitted, in entering into details of the diversion, to anticipate experiences and knowledge which did not come to me until later on. The further my acquaintance with the ring extended, the more convinced I became that tauromachy will last as long as Spain lasts. It has blemishes, like other recreations. To my thinking, the chief is that Toro goes into the sanded arena foredoomed to die. No matter how pluckily he fights, no matter what play he shows, the cachetero awaits him. Then there is torture, but an unavoidable torture, in the mode in which horses are killed. I well remember what an acclimatized aficionado, M. de Coutuly, of the Paris _Temps_, said to me in a discussion on the point:

"These horses are under capital sentence when they are helped to the grace of a historic death in the amphitheatre; they are rescued _en route_ to the knacker's-yard; but, bah! it is useless to try to convince men with English prejudices. With you, the horse is more valuable than the man."

Thorough garrons these horses are in old Spain; but in the South American countries, colonized from Spain, I am told they bring spirited barbs into the ring, who can bite and kick, and take their own part generally, and who sometimes clear the bull at a bound, as he advances to the attack.

If tauromachy will last in Spain as long as Spain lasts, so likewise will those who practise the art he held in honour. No names are guarded in fonder reverence there to-day than those of Montes, Pepete, and Pepe-Hillo; and when Frascuelo was wounded, his residence was besieged by sympathizing inquirers. The bulletins of his health were read as anxiously as if they were issued from a royal palace. Bouquets, pastry, and billets-doux were laid in tribute on the mat of his bedchamber, and the sweetest and proudest dames of the sweet and proud patrician houses of Castile--houses with sangre azul unsuspicious in their veins, and thirteen grandees in their pedigree--sent to inquire after the condition of the famous espada. Tom Sayers was never more idolized in England than Frascuelo is in Spain. And so, in like manner, are his compeers, Lagartijo, and the rest. This liking for them is pushed to excess, much as the cult for heroes of the prize-ring was with us in a past generation. Once I was roused from a nap by Liberato, a faithful body-man, shuffling his feet to the sprightly movements of a bolero. His eyes twinkled like laughing fire, his gitano-tinted cheeks had a tawny-purple grape-flush. He was under a high-pressure of exhilaration, and instinctively sought to relieve himself by dancing.

"Liberato?"

"Caballero."

"What devil possesses thee? Hast got a tress of thy ama's hair, or fallen upon a treasure-box of Boabdil?"

"Señor, I am proud as a hidalgo this day. You know Frascuelo?"

"Si, si."

"I have seen him; I have heard him speak."

"Dios mio! If it be not a poor jest on thy part, thou'rt a happy man."

"No jest, señor; and hearken!" approaching and lowering his voice: "he sat at the same table with me, and," this impressively and confidentially, "he shook hands with me as we parted!"

"Caramba! Let me shake that hand."

Laugh at this anecdote, but did not a New York hack-driver make a small fortune by letting out for osculatory purposes the hand that helped Jenny Lind from her carriage? Have not strawberries touched by the lips of Lydia Thompson fetched a guinea each at a dramatic _fête_, and photographs of Sara Bernhardt, signed with her sign-manual, run up to an alarming figure at the Albert Hall? Have I not myself been privy to the offer by a British matron of sums incredible for the straw through which the Prince of Wales had sucked a sherry-cobbler at the Paris Exhibition of 1867?

"Ster-oh!" ejaculated the negro waiter with open mouth. "Why, bress you, dat's no use, we trowed it away; but, as yer a nice ole lady, heah's a dozen for nuffin!"

The spectacle in the Plaza de Toros, the spacious unroofed area surrounded by stone benches rising one above another, away to the sheltered balconies up high at the back, is one of the most enlivening that imagination can conceive on the afternoon of a corrida, when male and female humanity, all jubilant bustle and expectancy, make a prismatic girdle around. Fans move with an incessant tremulous flutter; there is a continuous susurrus of voices, broken by occasional hoarse bursts of laughter at some mishap, or hoarse roars of welcome as some favourite enters; the regal sun discharges his fierce messages of light from his throne of blue, and the costumes of every colour, wavering with the pulsations of the throng, are an active kaleidoscope, most vivid and variegated. We are in our places. We have stepped up the Alcalá at the heels of the picquet of armed militia charged with the maintenance of order. We have threaded our way through the rough maze of passages to our palco, peeping at the stable where the sorry horses are kept, at the room where the toreadores dress themselves, and at the little oratory where the matador prays before he stalks into the palestra. We are in our places, and everybody is in his place; the Governor of the city in his box of state yonder. While the music races over the assemblage in glad alternation of rush and ripple, let us look below. There is a strong wooden barrier some six feet high around the arena, and at knee-height, on the inner side of this barrier, there is a berme to help the pursued chulo to a footing as he vaults over into the surrounding lane formed by this interior and an exterior barrier. This lane is guarded by policemen, and is so narrow that a bull has not room to turn in it; for bulls sometimes bound over the inner barrier. When that occurs, and I have seen it occur not seldom, they are driven round until they reach one of the gates opening into the ring. The trumpets and tymbals speak warning; a profound silence falls upon the crowd for an instant, and then from a side passage enters the cavalcade we have awaited--enters to a stately martial march. First, the mounted alguazil in his ancient garb, plumed, cloaked, funereal; then the chulos, lithe, young, graceful; then the picadores on their garrons, Mexican-looking in their saddles, with tall pummel and crupper and shovel-shaped stirrups, wide-leafed sombreros, their short jackets tagged all over, their yellow breeches and their high boots lead-lined; then the banderilleros, and then the matador, the chieftain of the troop. The alguazil beseeches the key of the toril from the Governor, receives it, turns it in the lock; and as the bull with dazed vision enters into the sunshine at one gate, he disappears at an amble through another.

The bull! What a noble specimen of his race!--broad-browed, clean-horned, and clean-limbed; high courage in his bloodshot orbs, his dilated nostril, and his lashing tail! On the right and left the quadrille arrange themselves, the picadores, each with a spike at the end of his long shaft, and a kerchief bandaging one eye of his horse; the chulos, pretty fellows in turban, loose embroidered jackets, ruffled shirts, kneebreeches of coquettish hue and texture, silken hose and buckled shoes, standing, with their cloaks, nearer to the centre of the ring. All these toreadores are men of symmetry and power, all wear chignons in nets, and are close-shaven, except as to side-whiskers of the brief "mutton-chop" order, and all bear themselves as if they were proud of their vocation. The bull waits. The chulos give challenge. They rush upon him, shaking their gaudy little cloaks, and as he charges they scamper to the sides, while one takes up the running from another. In short, they tease him as much for the sake of tiring him out as of testing his disposition. But by-and-by one chulo ingeniously leads the charging bull towards a horse. Toro rushes head-foremost. The picador is unequal to keep him off with his spike; the horse is gored in the belly and overthrown, the rider falling under. The chulos cluster to the rescue, with their fluttering cloaks, and draw the bull away confused. The picador is extricated; the horse is taken out, and in a few moments after re-enters, his entrails packed inside and stomach sewn up, and is once more offered to the maddened brute, always on his blind side. We shall hurry over this episode of the tournament; I do not like it, nor do you. But here is something really fine. The banderilleros enter, with barbed shafts decked with ribbons, poised in each hand, and make a feinting advance on the bull, and as he runs to meet them they deftly hurl their shafts and elude him by a demi-volte. The act of doing this well is to plant one banderilla on each side of the bull's neck, close by the streaming favours that mark the herd from which he is furnished--the colours of his stable, so to speak--to plant them evenly and at equal distances from his crest, and when this is skilfully accomplished there are frantic yells of praise, and caps and cigars are showered into the arena. When the banderillero is awkward, they rain on him with potatoes. These banderilleros incur hazard. I have seen one so keenly chased by the bull that he was pinned against the barriers by the bull's horns as he was in the act of vaulting over. Pinned, but not in the flesh; the branching horns stuck in the wood at either side, just above the calf of one leg, and imprisoned him until he had to be sawed out.

This is but the prologue; now for the play. Toro by this time is in a white rage; there is foam at his chaps, his steaming sides are laced with blood. Cucharra of Puerto Santa Maria is the matador. Majestically he strides towards the Governor's box, stoops in obeisance, and in a loud voice makes proclamation: "Brindo por Puerto Santa Maria, por toda su compañia, por el vulgo de Madrid; voy á matar ese bicho ó el bicho me mata á mi;" an address which may thus be freely rendered: "I pledge myself to Puerto Santa Maria and all its society, and to the people of Madrid; and now I am ready to kill this animal, if the animal cannot kill me." He removes his turban, and, with a graceful jerk with his right hand from behind his back over his left shoulder, flings it into the Governor's box, as a gage of his boasted prowess. He takes his straight keen-tempered sword and his cloak of offensive scarlet, and advances towards the bull. Now is the supreme trial, now is the time when men let their lighted cigarettes drop from their mouths and clench their teeth; now is the time when women close their fans and draw long breaths. Cucharra faces Toro at a yard's distance. They regard each other. Cucharra hides his sword under his cloak, and presents it to the bull. Toro lowers his head, shuts his eyes, and charges, but the toreador gracefully slips aside and saves his life by a turn of the heel. Three times he repeats the feat of this risksome pirouette; but woe to him if he is an instant too late in his movements, or if the soil is treacherous. The fourth time, as the bull lowers his head, Cucharra lifts himself on his toes, and with one sure swift blow plunges the blade, almost to the hilt, into the spine of his antagonist. The bull stands; there is a shout of "Bravo!" the bull still stands, ten seconds, twenty, thirty; there is a howl of disappointment; but Cucharra gazes contemptuously around; he knows he has done his work well, and, my faith, he has. Toro quivers and drops, and Cucharra plants a foot on the neck of his prostrate enemy. The bull has died of internal hæmorrhage; not a drop of blood has distilled from his mouth. Bravo, Cucharra!

This death at the first thrust--death without drip of the crimson fluid from the mouth--is the artistic death. When the sword pierces at the wrong spot, is displaced by the shaking of the bull, and sent flying, gore-wet, through the air, it is awkward workmanship.

But Toro showed "mucho fuego" before he was so neatly pierced in the medulla. Bravo, Toro! And now the cachetero stoops over him, and, with one dig of his sharp knife in the neck, makes assurance doubly sure. The team of mules trot in, and trot out again with the dead champion at their heels; and the urchins outside are dancing on his carcase as the drums and tymbals give prelude to the entrance of a second champion into the enthusiastic circle.

The slimy pools in the arena are promptly strewn with sand, and the fresh bull is ushered into the lists, either against the same quadrille, or against another espada with his special troop of assistants. Some of the brutes are self-possessed, as that "proud and stately steer" Harpado of Xarama, who was matched with Ganzul the Moor.

"Dark is his hide on either side, but the blood within doth boil, And the dun hide glows, as if on fire, as he paws to the turmoil, His eyes are jet, and they are set in crystal rings of snow; But now they stare with one red glare of brass upon the foe."

All in vain, Toro. Thy fate is sealed. Useless to prance round with defiance, to bellow with unsatisfied wrath, to churn the sand with furious hoof and flash hither and thither the flaming arrows of thy glance. Thou art foredoomed, and wilt fall as surely after brave struggle as thy mate, less eager for the strife, who has to be pricked up to anger, and drops at last bewildered amid the derision of the crowd. That is where I find fault with the sport. Toro who shows good fight should get his respite, like the Roman gladiator who pleased the multitude.

Still, is his fate to be deplored? Confess, is it not rather to be envied? He gives up his vital principle in the rapture of battle; he feels no wound but the grievous one to the combatant that he can beat down no more foes; he yields breath with a bold front; there is threat in his agony as he sinks, still with challenge in his port, amid the applause of admiring thousands. There is something of martyr-heroism in this ending. It is grander, nobler, happier than to fall by the butcher's plebeian mallet in the slaughter-house, or to succumb to the slow miseries of rinderpest. Whoso denies it will downface me next that it is fitter for the warrior to die of podagra in a four-post bed than to perish on the field with harness on his back--that dropsy at St. Helena was more to be coveted than a bullet at Waterloo!

Tauromachy, I repeat, will last as long as Spain lasts. It will have its school and its dialect, its canons of skill expatiated upon in elaborate treatises; its honoured exponents; its impassioned amateurs and its munificent patrons; its historiographers and poets. In my devotedness to it I have sacrificed the favour of a comely English maiden, for Emmeline, who has seen through my hypocrisy in the hall, averts the light of her countenance as we sit down to dinner. I am sorry for it, for I had inclinings towards that lady, she was so attentive to her father, and she had confided to me with such a pretty frankness that she sighed for the days when Mohammad-al-Hamar was throned in Granada.

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NOTE BY THE WRITER'S DAUGHTER.--The conceit of you. Emmeline, I think, was quite right to cut you, after your brutishness. No doubt you think the glorification of bull-butchery a piece of fine writing, and so original, you know. I'm up to the games of you authors; but if I were the printers I would not print one single line of it. I should just like to put a pen in the bull's hand and read _his_ description of the fight.

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