From, Time To Time It Seemed To Me I Must Be In.
Rome, And I Recovered Myself With A Pang To Find I Was Not.
Yet, as I
say, Madrid was very well indeed, and when I reflected I had to own that
I had come there on purpose to be there, and not to be in Rome, where
also I should have been so satisfied to be.
IV
I do not know but we chose our hotel when we left the Ritz because it
was so Italian, so Roman. It had a wide grape arbor before it, with a
generous spread of trellised roof through which dangled the grape
bunches among the leaves of the vine. Around this arbor at top went a
balustrade of marble, with fat _putti,_ or marble boys, on the corners,
who would have watched over the fruit if they had not been preoccupied
with looking like so many thousands of _putti_ in Italy. They looked
like Italian _putti_ with a difference, the difference that passes
between all the Spanish things and the Italian things they resemble.
They were coarser and grosser in figure, and though amiable enough in
aspect, they lacked the refinement, the air of pretty appeal which
Italian art learns from nature to give the faces of _putti._ Yet they
were charming, and it was always a pleasure to look at them posing in
pairs at the corners of the balustrade, and I do not know but dozing in
the hours of _siesta._ If they had been in wood Spanish art would have
known how to make them better, but in stone they had been gathering an
acceptable weather stain during the human generations they had been
there, and their plump stomachs were weather-beaten white.
I do not know if they had been there long enough to have witnessed the
murder of Cromwell's ambassador done in our street by two Jacobite
gentlemen who could not abide his coming to honor in the land where they
were in exile from England. That must have been sometime about the
middle of the century after Philip II., bigot as he was, could not bear
the more masterful bigotry of the archbishop of Toledo, and brought his
court from that ancient capital, and declared Madrid henceforward the
capital forever; which did not prevent Philip III. from taking his court
to Valladolid and making that the capital _en titre_ when he liked.
However, some other Philip or Charles, or whoever, returned with his
court to Madrid and it has ever since remained the capital, and has
come, with many natural disadvantages, to look its supremacy. For my
pleasure I would rather live in Seville, but that would be a luxurious
indulgence of the love of beauty, and like a preference of Venice in
Italy when there was Rome to live in. Madrid is not Rome, but it makes
you think of Rome as I have said, and if it had a better climate it
would make you think of Rome still more. Notoriously, however, it has
not a good climate and we had not come at the right season to get the
best of the bad. The bad season itself was perverse, for the rains do
not usually begin in their bitterness at Madrid before November, and now
they began early in October. The day would open fair, with only a few
little white clouds in the large blue, and if we could trust other's
experience we knew it would rain before the day closed; only a morning
absolutely clear could warrant the hope of a day fair till sunset.
Shortly after noon the little white clouds would drift together and be
joined by others till they hid the large blue, and then the drops would
begin to fall. By that time the air would have turned raw and chill, and
the rain would be of a cold which it kept through the night.
This habit of raining every afternoon was what kept us from seeing rank,
riches, and beauty in the Paseo de la Castellana, where they drive only
on fine afternoons; they now remained at home even more persistently
than we did, for with that love of the fashionable world for which I am
always blaming myself I sometimes took a cab and fared desperately forth
in pursuit of them. Only once did I seem to catch a glimpse of them, and
that once I saw a closed carriage weltering along the drive between the
trees and the trams that border it, with the coachman and footman snugly
sheltered under umbrellas on the box. This was something, though not a
great deal; I could not make out the people inside the carriage; yet it
helped to certify to me the fact that the great world does drive in the
Paseo de la Castellana and does not drive in the Paseo del Prado; that
is quite abandoned, even on the wettest days, to the very poor and
perhaps unfashionable people.
V
It may have been our comparative defeat with fashion in its most
distinctive moments of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the
dreariness of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare
with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more
determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had vowed
ourselves in coming to Spain to set the Spaniards an example of
civilization by inflexibly refusing to see a bull-fight under any
circumstances or for any consideration; but it seemed to us that it was
a sort of public duty to go and see the crowd, what it was like, in the
time and place where the Spanish crowd is most like itself. We would go
and remain in our places till everybody else was placed, and then, when
the picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the
arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we
would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away.
This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of
piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we
prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 28 of 101
Words from 27700 to 28753
of 103320
