Cuchares died in the Havana, and left no
provision for his family.
There is a curious naivete in the play-bill of a bull-fight, the only
conscientious public document I have seen in Spain. You know how we of
Northern blood exaggerate the attractions of all sorts of shows,
trusting to the magnanimity of the audience. "He warn't nothing like so
little as that," confesses Mr. Magsman, "but where's your dwarf what
is?" There are few who have the moral courage to demand their money back
because they counted but thirty-nine thieves when the bills promised
forty. But the management of the Madrid bull-ring knows its public too
well to promise more than it is sure of performing. It announces six
bulls, and positively no more. It says there will be no use of
bloodhounds. It promises two picadors, with three others in reserve, and
warns the public that if all five become inutilized in the combat, no
more will be issued. With so fair a preliminary statement, what crowd,
however inflammable, could mob the management?
Some industrious and ascetic statistician has visited Spain and
interested himself in the bullring. Here are some of the results of his
researches. In 1864 the number of places in all the taurine
establishments of Spain was 509,283, of which 246,813 belonged to the
cities, and 262,470 to the country.
In the year 1864, there were 427 bull-fights, of which 294 took place in
the cities, and 13 3 in the country towns. The receipts of ninety-eight
bullrings in 1864 reached the enormous sum of two hundred and seventeen
and a half millions of reals (nearly $11,000,000). The 427 bull-fights
which took place in Spain during the year 1864 caused the death of 2989
of these fine animals, and about 7473 horses, - something more than half
the number of the cavalry of Spain. 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. It was enough to make Illo turn in his bloody grave.
"Why, my young friend, I remember when bulls were a dignified and
serious matter; when we kept account of their progress from their
pasture to the capital. We had accounts of their condition by couriers
and carrier-pigeons. On the day when they appeared it was a high
festival in the court. All the sombreros in Spain were there, the ladies
in national dress with white mantillas. The young queen always in her
palco (may God guard her). The fighters of that day were high priests of
art; there was something of veneration in the regard that was paid them.
Duchesses threw them bouquets with billets-doux. Gossip and newspapers
have destroyed the romance of common life.
"The only pleasure I take in the Plaza de Toros now is at night.
