Castilian Days | Page 3

Riego. The

Cancan has taken its place on the boards of every stage in the city,
apparently to stay; and the exquisite jota and cachucha are giving way
to the bestialities of the casino cadet. It is useless perhaps to fight
against that hideous orgie of vulgar Menads which in these late years
has swept over all nations, and stung the loose world into a tarantula
dance from the Golden Horn to the Golden Gate. It must have its day
and go out; and when it has passed, perhaps we may see that it was not
so utterly causeless and irrational as it seemed; but that, as a young
American poet has impressively said, "Paris was proclaiming to the
world in it somewhat of the pent-up fire and fury of her nature, the
bitterness of her heart, the fierceness of her protest against spiritual and
political repression. It is an execration in rhythm,--a dance of fiends,
which Paris has invented to express in license what she lacks in
liberty."
This diluted European, rather than Spanish, spirit may be seen in most
of the amusements of the politer world of Madrid. They have classical
concerts in the circuses and popular music in the open air. The theatres
play translations of French plays, which are pretty good when they are
in prose, and pretty dismal when they are turned into verse, as is more
frequent, for the Spanish mind delights in the jingle of rhyme. The fine
old Spanish drama is vanishing day by day. The masterpieces of Lope
and Calderon, which inspired all subsequent playwriting in Europe,
have sunk almost utterly into oblivion. The stage is flooded with the
washings of the Boulevards. Bad as the translations are, the imitations
are worse. The original plays produced by the geniuses of the Spanish
Academy, for which they are crowned and sonneted and pensioned, are
of the kind upon which we are told that gods and men and columns
look austerely.
This infection of foreign manners has completely gained and now
controls what is called the best society of Madrid. A soiree in this circle
is like an evening in the corresponding grade of position in Paris or
Petersburg or New York in all external characteristics. The toilets are
by Worth; the beauties are coiffed by the deft fingers of Parisian
tiring-women; the men wear the penitential garb of Poole; the music is
by Gounod and Verdi; Strauss inspires the rushing waltzes, and the
married people walk through the quadrilles to the measures of Blue
Beard and Fair Helen, so suggestive of conjugal rights and duties. As

for the suppers, the trail of the Neapolitan serpent is over them all.
Honest eating is a lost art among the effete denizens of the Old World.
Tantalizing ices, crisped shapes of baked nothing, arid sandwiches, and
the feeblest of sugary punch, are the only supports exhausted nature
receives for the shock of the cotillon. I remember the stern reply of a
friend of mine when I asked him to go with me to a brilliant
reception,--"No! Man liveth not by biscuit-glace alone!" His heart was
heavy for the steamed cherry-stones of Harvey and the stewed terrapin
of Augustin.
The speech of the gay world has almost ceased to be national. Every
one speaks French sufficiently for all social requirements. It is
sometimes to be doubted whether this constant use of a foreign
language in official and diplomatic circles is a cause or effect of
paucity of ideas. It is impossible for any one to use another tongue with
the ease and grace with which he could use his own. You know how
tiresome the most charming foreigners are when they speak English. A
fetter-dance is always more curious than graceful. Yet one who has
nothing to say can say it better in a foreign language. If you must speak
nothing but phrases, Ollendorff's are as good as any one's. Where there
are a dozen people all speaking French equally badly, each one
imagines there is a certain elegance in the hackneyed forms. I know of
no other way of accounting for the fact that clever people seem stupid
and stupid people clever when they speak French. This facile language
thus becomes the missionary of mental equality,--the principles of '89
applied to conversation. All men are equal before the phrase-book.
But this is hypercritical and ungrateful. We do not go to balls to hear
sermons nor discuss the origin of matter. If the young grandees of
Spain are rather weaker in the parapet than is allowed in the nineteenth
century, if the old boys are more frivolous than is becoming to age, and
both more ignorant of the day's doings than is consistent with even their
social responsibilities, in compensation the women of this circle are as
pretty