The Spanish Tragedy

“ Whatever doubts had been entertained were dispelled by these last despatches, which came like a hurricane, sweeping away the mists that had so long blinded the eyes of men, and laying open the policy of the crown, clear as day, to the dullest apprehension. The people passed to the extremity of despair. The Spanish Inquisition, with its train of horrors, seemed to be already in the midst of them. They called to mind all the tales of woe they had heard of it. They recounted the atrocities perpetrated by the Spaniards in the New World, which, however erroneously, they charged on the Holy Office. ”

“ And in an art so profound and dangerous, the masterwork is rare, even as in other æsthetic fields. But if great toreros are rare, one actor in the play is constant and is always masterful. The crowds of Spain, against the agitation of intellectuals and of Church, hold to their dear drama. In the corrida, all the desires which history has bred and then denied an issue, find an issue. Conflict is the stratified peace of the Spanish soul. For too many ages has the Spaniard lived on war to be able to do without it. In war, the lusts of the world and the lust for God became one. ”

“ The Bible, the lives of the martyrs, national traditions, the chronicles of Castile and Aragon, foreign histories and novels, even the daily incidents of contemporary Spanish life, the escapades and nightly brawls of students, the gallantries of the Calle Mayor and the Pradc of Madrid, balcony escalades, sword-thrusts and dagger-stabs, duels and murders, fathers befooled, jealous ladies, pilfering and cowardly valets, inquisitive and sprightly waiting-maids, sly and tricky peasants, fresh country girls—all are turned to dramatic account. ”

“ They noticed the disturbances in Spain as momentary troubles, occasioned by the error of the people, who never reflect, and who are worthy of commiseration when they return to their duty. The Intruder replied, that he wished to remain ignorant of these tumults, and to find none but Spanish hearts beyond the Pyrenees. In quitting a people who did justice to his government, he had made the greatest of sacrifices, he said; but, from his own feelings, he anticipated the love of the Spaniards. ”

“ She lived among men who were, for the most part, not truthful or dependable even in small things––how could they be relied on to tell the truth about de Spain’s motives and conduct? As to his deadly skill with arms, no stories were needed to confirm this, even though she herself had once overcome him in a contest. The evidence of this mastery had now a fatal pre-eminence among the tragedies of the Spanish Sinks. Where he lay he could, if he meditated revenge on her people, murder any of them, almost at will. ”

“ Spain armed herself with blood-hounds to extirpate the wretched natives of America, and we improve on the inhuman example even of Spanish cruelty; we turn loose these savage hell-hounds against our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, laws, liberties, and religion, endeared to us by every tie that should sanctify humanity.... ”

“ Yellow wax is funeral wax, and Alarcón, who sees in yellow a symbol of death and of decay, laments that it is the color of half the Spanish banner. "Ay de la bandera española!" But surely there is hope for Spain, while she has sons who, in grasp of a military tyranny which has rendered such crimes possible, contend in open field for the overthrow of the "black Spain" of the Inquisition, and still bear heart of hope for a white, regenerated Spain, where religion shall include the love of man. ”

“ Even to-day, when it seems that we have reached the last degree of abasement, offering more chance than Poland for dismemberment, no one dares attempt the conquest of this house of madmen. Men of little sense,—without any on occasion,—the Spanish will to-day, as ever, die a thousand deaths, stumbling and rising in the struggle of their inborn vices with the great qualities which they still preserve, with those which they acquire slowly, and those which Central Europe sends them. ”

“ We Spaniards have a nobler and more arduous task before us than that of slaying a defenceless foe. Our glorious land has long groaned under that worst form of bondage—the bondage which fetters the soul. ”

“ Happy—thrice happy—the reapers! Spaniards will show themselves worthy of their martyrs, and no longer appear to the world as a degenerate race, indifferent to their highest interests, or cold in the holiest cause. ”

“ If he could only be baptized before he died, he owed an unspeakable debt to any one who, by whatever cruelty, terminated his life. But if after all this cruelty he died unbaptized, that was his misfortune. The history of Spanish discovery, exploration, and colonization, so far as it concerns the relations of the invaders with the natives, is at every stage of it marked by ruthless and atrocious cruelties, by outrages and enormities of iniquity, over the perusal of which the heart sickens. ”

“ The only palliating thought which offers itself, as we read the story, is that the Spanish invaders, themselves but partially civilized, and with but a mockery of Christianity as their religion, became actually dehumanized and brutalized by the scenes and experiences around them, by a homeless and hazardous life on sea and land, under a burning sun, amid swamps and exposures, often starving, always lashed and maddened by the greed of gold and plunder. ”

“ Then haste we down to meet thy friends and foes;
To place thy friends in ease, the rest in woes.
For here though death doth end their misery,
I'll there begin their endless tragedy. ”

“ The mingled pride of race and ignorant hate of everything foreign which constitutes that singular passion called Spanish patriotism, or Españolismo, is fully called into play by the recollections of the terrible scenes of their war of independence, which drove out a foreign king, and brought back into Spain a native despot infinitely meaner and more injurious. ”

“ Nevertheless it was obvious that in a land where their converted brethren had been subject to torture, imprisonment, and death, they themselves could not long hope to escape the fury of popular fanaticism. Their wealth and their pride aroused envy and dislike so violent that their very qualities and virtues appeared to Spanish prejudice as though born of malignant design. ”

“ The Spanish have beaten us back with their sticks which speak a loud noise, and they have burned our cabins. They have ravished our wives and daughters, they have killed our children; and our hearts are heavy and ready to burst within us for shame and anguish. ”

“ The defeat of Rio Seco, the preparations of Moncey for a second attack on Valencia, the miserable plight of Saragossa, the despondency of the ablest men of Spain, and the disgust and terror generally excited by the excesses of the populace, weighed heavy on the Spanish cause: one victory more, and the moral as well as the physical force of Spain would have been crushed. ”

“ Instead, however, as we shall see, their idolatrous ways were to continue for many decades, and their attitude was to suffer a great change which, we must concede, is largely to be accounted for by Spanish brutality and bad faith. ”

“ In the Spanish conquest in America—a history scarcely less interesting in a medical than in a moral point of view—it seems that not all the cruelties of the Spaniards were more destructive than the small-pox. ”

“ In any other country somebody would be shot." This is the hopeless military creed: killing somebody is the only remedy.
Here we see a trace of that intellectual legacy which Spain has left to the New World, and which has stamped itself so indelibly on the history of Spanish America. On a later occasion in this connection I wrote as follows:
To appreciate the outcome of much soldiering, the condition in which persistent military training may leave a race, one should study Spanish America. ”

“ A great deal of sentimental ink has been shed over the wickedness of the Spaniards in crossing the ocean and attacking people who had never done them any harm, overturning and obliterating a 'splendid civilization,' and more to the same effect. It is undeniable that unprovoked aggression is an extremely hateful thing, and many of the circumstances attendant upon the Spanish conquest in America were not only heinous in their atrocity, but were emphatically condemned, as we shall presently see, by the best moral standards of the sixteenth century. ”

“ But in unhappy Spain, instead of calm progress, there has ever and anon come a violent shock, as of an earthquake, overturning loftiest houses, throwing down highest pinnacles into the dust; an upheaving of the earth which, while it destroys much that is evil, endangers much that is good. ”

“ National as it was, and because of this very quality, the Spanish drama was fated to share the lot of the people it so fully represented. At the end of the 17th century, when the Spanish throne at last became the declared apple of discord among the governments of Europe, the Spanish Decay of the national
Spanish drama.people lay, in the words of an historian of its later days, “like a corpse, incapable of feeling its own impotence.” That national art to which it had so faithfully clung had fallen into decline and decay with the spirit of Spain itself. ”

“ The troops, who had at the first panic fled, were now being brought forward; and as the day lightened, the Spaniards, sorely ashamed that so small a body of men should have made themselves masters of so great and rich a city, were plucking up heart and preparing to attack them. ”

“ To counterbalance their clear intelligence, greatheartedness, quick imagination and eloquence they have serious defects, “and especially a certain unrestfulness of spirit, a nervous irritability which prevents them from living in peace or comfort with themselves or with others, a true Spanish failing, peculiarly attached both of old and at the present day to that harsh, turbulent, strongly original character of the race which has never allowed us rest, but kept us perpetually at strife, taking umbrage at our very shadows.”... ”

“ Can any one believe that the Spaniards, cruel, hard-hearted and remorseless as the grave, who swept whole nations from the earth, sparing neither men, women nor children, could or would write a true story of their silent victims? ”

“ Nor can we tell much more of the swift spread{v2-192} of Spanish adventurers over the rest of America, outside the Portuguese reservation of Brazil. To begin with, each story is nearly always a story of adventurers and of cruelty and loot. The Spaniards ill-treated the natives, they quarrelled among themselves, the law and order of Spain were months and years away from them; it was only very slowly that the phase of violence and conquest passed into a phase of government and settlement. ”

“ The woe, the grief, the humiliation, the agony, the despair that Spain has heaped upon the helpless, and multiplied in the world until the world is sickened with it, will be piled in one avalanche on her own head. ”

“ That grim necropolis of Glasgow, with its few shy gowans under its lowering sky, those tender, turf-folded, church-shadowed graveyards of rural England, those trains of mourners, men by themselves and women by themselves, walking behind the bier in mid-street through the mud and rain of wintry Paris to the bedizened Père Lachaise or Montparnasse—such sights interpret a nation as truly as its art and history; but the burial customs of Spain, especially distinctive, are, like most things Spanish, contradictory and baffling to the tourist view. ”

“ If there were any thing in the Spanish character to work upon, for good or evil, the influence of such a decided national pastime 113would be more distinctly pronounced. But the senseless pride of the Spaniard,—pride with nothing to be proud of; pride with idleness, ignorance, and poverty; pride of the meanest and most contemptible sort,—is the warp and woof of Spanish character, and there is hardly any thing more in them than there would be in a nation of peacocks. ”

“ And they, not without Cause, the Spaniards breaking their Faith and Word, betraying the Truth and Tyrannically contrary to all Law and Justice, destroying them and the whole Country, inflicting on them great Injuries and Losses, were more reay to prepare themselves for Death, than still to fall at once into such great and irrecoverable Miseries. ”

“ These causes of decadence were accentuated by an aversion and contempt for labor, which was recognized as a Spanish characteristic, attributable perhaps to the long war of the Reconquest and the endless civil broils which rendered arms the only fitting career for a Spaniard, and accustomed him to see all useful work performed by those whom he regarded as belonging to inferior races—Jews and Mudéjares. ”

“ They go easily to extremes; Spanish intellects are apt to be either totally undeveloped, or else over-subtle in nice distinctions, and action in the same way, when it comes, comes with violence and excess, like the rivers of Spain which, parched all summer, pour down after rain in rushing torrents. The charges of cruelty and fanaticism, the bull-fight and the{38} auto-de-fé, have fixed themselves upon the Spanish. They are by nature inflexible and uncompromising, and like to carry out their principles without looking to the many delicate shades of grey between white and black. ”

“ The Spanish invaders found them living generally in towns and cities. They are so described by Spanish historians as far back as 1540. They early revolted, though without success, against Spanish rule; and in the struggle many of their towns were burnt,and much loss of life and property occasioned. ”