Part 21 (1/2)
There are many ways of killing the bull: the princ.i.p.al is when the matador receives him on his sword when charging; then the weapon, which is held still and never thrust forward, enters just between the left shoulder and the blade-bone; a firm hand, eye, and nerve, are essential, since in nothing is the real fancy so fastidious as in the exact nicety of the placing this death-wound. The bull very often is not killed at the first effort; if not true, the sword strikes a bone, and then it is ejected high in air by the rising neck. When the blow is true, death is instantaneous, and the bull, vomiting forth blood, drops at the feet of his conqueror. It is indeed the triumph of knowledge over brute force; all that was fire, fury, pa.s.sion, and life, falls in an instant, still for ever. The gay team of mules now enter, glittering with flags, and tinkling with bells; the dead bull is carried off at a rapid gallop, which always delights the populace. The _matador_ then wipes the hot blood from his sword, and bows to the spectators with admirable sang froid, who fling their hats into the arena, a compliment which he returns by throwing them back again (they are generally ”shocking bad”
ones); when Spain was rich, a golden, or at least a silver shower was rained down--_ces beaux jours la sont pa.s.ses_; thanks to her kind neighbour. The poverty-stricken Spaniard, however, gives all he can, and lets the bullfighter dream the rest. As hats in Spain represent grandees.h.i.+p, so these beavers, part and parcel of themselves, are given as symbols of their generous hearts and souls; and none but a huckster would go into minute details of value or condition.
When a bull will not run at the fatal flag, or prays for pardon, he is doomed to a dishonourable death, as no true Spaniard begs for his own life, or spares that of his foe, when in his power; now the _media Luna_ is yelled for, and the call implies insult; the use is equivalent to shooting traitors in the back: this _half moon_ is the precise Oriental ancient and cruel instrument of houghing cattle; moreover it is the exact old Iberian bident, or a sharp steel crescent placed on a long pole. The cowardly blow is given from behind; and when the poor beast is crippled by dividing the sinew of his leg, and crawls along in agony, an a.s.sistant pierces with a pointed dagger the spinal marrow, which is the usual method of slaughtering cattle in Spain by the butcher. To perform all these vile operations is considered beneath the dignity of the _matador_; some, however, will kill the bull by plunging the point of their sword in the vertebrae, as the danger gives dignity to the difficult feat.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION OF BULL-FIGHT.]
Such is a single bull-fight; each of which is repeated eight times with succeeding bulls, the excitement of the mult.i.tude rising with each indulgence; after a short collapse new desires are roused by fresh objects, the fierce sport is renewed, which night alone can extinguish; nay, often when royalty is present, a ninth bull is clamoured for, which is always graciously granted by the nominal monarch's welcome sign, the pulling his royal ear; in truth here the mob is autocrat, and his majesty the many will take no denial; the bull-fight terminates when the day dies like a dolphin, and the curtain of heaven hung over the b.l.o.o.d.y show, is incarnadined and crimsoned; this glorious finish is seen in full perfection at Seville, where the _plaza_ from being unfinished is open toward the cathedral, which furnishes a Moorish distance to the picturesque foreground. On particular occasions this side is decorated with flags. When the blazing sun setting on the red Giralda tower, lights up its fair proportions like a pillar of fire, the refres.h.i.+ng evening breeze springs up, and the flagging banners wave in triumph over the concluding spectacle; then when all is come to an end, as all things human must, the congregation depart, with rather less decorum than if quitting a church; all hasten to sacrifice the rest of the night to Bacchus and Venus, with a pa.s.sing homage to the knife, should critics differ too hotly on the merits of some particular thrust of the bull-fight.
To conclude; the minds of men, like the House of Commons in 1802, are divided on the merits of the bull-fight; the Wilberforces a.s.sert (especially foreigners, who, notwithstanding, seldom fail to sanction the arena by their presence) that all the best feelings are blunted--that idleness, extravagance, cruelty, and ferocity are promoted at a vast expense of human and animal life by these pastimes; the Windhams contend that loyalty, courage, presence of mind, endurance of pain, and contempt of death, are inculcated--that, while the theatre is all illusion, the opera all effeminacy, these manly, national games are all truth, and in the words of a native eulogist ”elevate the soul to those grandiose actions of valour and heroism which have long proved the Spaniards to be the best and bravest of all nations.”
[Sidenote: PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT.]
The efficacy of such sports for sustaining a martial spirit was disproved by the degeneracy of the Romans at the time when b.l.o.o.d.y spectacles were most in vogue; nor are bravery and humanity the characteristics of the bull-fighting Spaniards in the collective. We ourselves do not attribute their ”merciless skivering and skewering,”
their flogging and murdering women, to the bull-fight, the practical result of which has been overrated and misunderstood. Cruel it undoubtedly is, and perfectly congenial to the inherent, inveterate ferocity of Iberian character, but it is an effect rather than a cause--with doubtless some reciprocating action; and it may be questioned, whether the _original_ bull-fight had not a greater tendency to humanise, than the Olympic games; certainly the _Fiesta real_ of the feudal ages combined the a.s.sociated ideas of religion and loyalty, while the chivalrous combat nurtured a nice sense of personal honour and a respectful gallantry to women, which were unknown to the polished Greeks or warlike Romans; and many of the finest features of Spanish character have degenerated since the discontinuance of the original fight, which was more b.l.o.o.d.y and fatal than the present one.
The Spaniards invariably bring forward our boxing-matches in self-justification, as if a _tu quoque_ could be so; but it must always be remembered in our excuse that these are discountenanced by the good and respectable, and legally stigmatised as breaches of the peace; although disgraced by beastly drunkenness, brutal vulgarity, ruinous gambling and betting, from which the Spanish arena is exempt, as no bull yet has been backed to kill so many horses or not; our matches, however, are based on a spirit of _fair play_ which forms no principle of the Punic politics, warfare, or bull-fighting of Spain. The Plaza there is patronised by church and state, to whom, in justice, the responsibility of evil consequences must be referred. The show is conducted with great ceremonial, combining many elements of poetry, the beautiful and sublime; insomuch that a Spanish author proudly says: ”When the countless a.s.sembly is honoured by the presence of our august monarchs, the world is _lost in admiration_ at the majestic spectacle afforded by the happiest people in the world, enjoying with rapture an exhibition peculiarly their own, and offering to their idolised sovereigns the due homage of the truest and most refined loyalty;” and it is impossible to deny the magnificent _coup d'il_ of the a.s.sembled thousands. Under such conflicting circ.u.mstances, we turn away our eyes during moments of painful detail which are lost in the poetical ferocity of the whole, for the interest of the tragedy of real death is undeniable, irresistible, and all absorbing.
[Sidenote: PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT.]
The Spaniards seem almost unconscious of the cruelty of those details which are most offensive to a stranger. They are reconciled by habit, as we are to the bleeding butchers' shops which disfigure our gay streets, and which if seen for the first time would be inexpressibly disgusting.
The feeling of the chase, that remnant of the savage, rules in the arena, and mankind has never been nice or tender-hearted in regard to the sufferings of animals, when influenced by the destructive propensities. In England no sympathy is shown for game,--fish, flesh, or fowl; nor for vermin--stoats, kites, or poachers. The end of the sport is--death; the amus.e.m.e.nt is the _playing_, the _fine_ run, as the prolongation of animal suffering is termed in the tender vocabulary of the Nimrods; the pang of mortal sufferance is not regulated by the size of the victim; the bull moreover is always put at once out of his misery, and never exposed to the thousand lingering deaths of the poor wounded hare; therefore we must not see a toro in Spanish eyes and wink at the fox in our own, nor
”Compound for vices we're inclined to By d.a.m.ning those we have no mind to.”
It is not clear that animal suffering on the whole predominates over animal happiness. The bull roams in ample pastures, through a youth and manhood free from toil, and when killed in the plaza only antic.i.p.ates by a few months the certain fate of the imprisoned, over-laboured, mutilated ox.
In Spain, where capital is scanty, person and property insecure (evils not quite corrected since the late democratic reforms), no one would adventure on the speculation of breeding cattle on a large scale, where the return is so distant, without the certain demand and sale created by the amphitheatre; and as a small proportion only of the produce possess the requisite qualifications, the surplus and females go to the plough and market, and can be sold cheaper from the profit made on the bulls.
Spanish political economists _proved_ that many valuable animals were wasted in the arena--but their theories vanished before the fact, that the supply of cattle was rapidly diminished when bull-fights were suppressed. Similar results take place as regards the breed of horses, though in a minor degree; those, moreover, which are sold to the Plaza would never be bought by any one else. With respect to the loss of human life, in no land is a man worth so little as in Spain; and more English aldermen are killed indirectly by turtles, than Andalucian picadors directly by bulls; while, as to _time_, these exhibitions always take place on holidays, which even industrious Britons bouse away occasionally in pothouses, and idle Spaniards invariably smoke out in suns.h.i.+ny _dolce far niente_. The attendance, again, of idle spectators prevents idleness in the numerous cla.s.ses employed directly and indirectly in getting up and carrying out this expensive spectacle.
[Sidenote: PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT.]
It is poor and illogical philosophy to judge of foreign customs by our own habits, prejudices, and conventional opinions; a cold, unprepared, calculating stranger comes without the freemasonry of early a.s.sociations, and criticises minutiae which are lost on the natives in their enthusiasm and feeling for the whole. He is horrified by details to which the Spaniards have become as accustomed as hospital nurses, whose finer sympathetic emotions of pity are deadened by repet.i.tion.
A most difficult thing it is to change long-established usages and customs with which we are familiar from our early days, and which have come down to us connected with many fond remembrances. We are slow to suspect any evil or harm in such practices; we dislike to look the evidence of facts in the face, and shrink from a conclusion which would require the abandonment of a recreation, which we have long regarded as innocent, and in which we, as well as our parents before us, have not scrupled to indulge. Children, _l'age sans pitie_, do not speculate on cruelty, whether in bull-baiting or bird's-nesting, and Spaniards are brought up to the bull-fight from their infancy, when they are too simple to speculate on abstract questions, but a.s.sociate with the Plaza all their ideas of reward for good conduct, of finery and holiday; in a land where amus.e.m.e.nts are few--they catch the contagion of pleasure, and in their young bias of imitation approve of what is approved of by their parents. They return to their homes unchanged--playful, timid, or serious, as before; their kindly, social feelings are uninjured: and where is the filial or parental bond more affectionately cherished than in Spain--where are the n.o.ble courtesies of life, the kind, considerate, self-respecting demeanour so exemplified as in Spanish society?
[Sidenote: PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT.]
The successive feelings experienced by most foreigners are admiration, compa.s.sion, and weariness of the flesh. The first will be readily understood, as it will that the horses' sufferings cannot be beheld by novices without compa.s.sion: ”In troth it was more a pittie than a delight,” wrote the herald of Lord Nottingham. This feeling, however, regards the animals who are forced into wounds and death; the men scarcely excite much of it, since they willingly court the danger, and have therefore no right to complain. These heroes of low life are applauded, well paid, and their risk is more apparent than real; our British feelings of fair play make us side rather with the poor bull who is overmatched; we respect the gallantry of his unequal defence. Such must always be the effect produced on those not bred and brought up to such scenes. So Livy relates that, when the gladiatorial shows were first introduced by the Romans into Asia, the natives were more frightened than pleased, but by leading them on from sham-fights to real, they became as fond of them as the Romans. The predominant sensation experienced by ourselves was _bore_, the same thing over and over again, and too much of it. But that is the case with everything in Spain, where processions and professions are interminable. The younger Pliny, who was no amateur, complained of the eternal sameness of seeing what to have seen once, was enough; just as Dr. Johnson, when he witnessed a horse-race, observed that he had not met with such a proof of the paucity of human pleasures as in the popularity of such a spectacle. But the life of Spaniards is uniform, and their sensations, not being blunted by satiety, are intense. Their bull-fight to them is always new and exciting, since the more the toresque intellect is cultivated the greater the capacity for enjoyment; they see a thousand minute beauties in the character and conduct of the combatants, which escape the superficial unlearned glance of the uninitiated.
[Sidenote: PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT.]
Spanish ladies, against whom every puny scribbler shoots his petty barbed arrow, are relieved from the infliction of ennui, by the never-flagging, ever-sustained interest, in being admired. They have no abstract nor Pasiphaic predilections; they were taken to the bull-fight before they knew their alphabet, or what love was. Nor have we heard that it has ever rendered them particularly cruel, save and except some of the elderly and tougher lower-cla.s.sed females. The younger and more tender scream and are dreadfully affected in all real moments of danger, in spite of their long familiarity. Their grand object, after all, is not to see the bull, but to let themselves and their dresses be seen.
The better cla.s.ses generally interpose their fans at the most painful incidents, and certainly show no want of sensibility. The lower orders of females, as a body, behave quite as respectably as those of other countries do at executions, or other dreadful scenes, where they crowd with their babies. The case with English ladies is far different. They have heard the bull-fight not praised from _their_ childhood, but condemned; they see it for the first time when grown up; curiosity is perhaps their leading feature in sharing an amus.e.m.e.nt, of which they have an indistinct idea that pleasure will be mixed with pain. The first sight delights them; a flushed, excited cheek, betrays a feeling that they are almost ashamed to avow; but as the b.l.o.o.d.y tragedy proceeds, they get frightened, disgusted, and disappointed. Few are able to sit out more than one course, and fewer ever re-enter the amphitheatre--
”The heart that is soonest awake to the flower Is always the first to be touched by the thorn.”
Probably a Spanish woman, if she could be placed in precisely the same condition, would not act very differently, and something of a similar test would be to bring her, for the first time, to an English boxing-match. Be this as it may, far from us and from our friends be that frigid philosophy, which would infer that their bright eyes, darting the shafts of Cupid, will glance one smile the less from witnessing these more merciful _banderillas_.