Castilian Days | Page 5

desolate table-land in the windy waste of New Castile; on the
north the snowy Guadarrama chills its breezes, and on every other side
the tawny landscape stretches away in dwarfish hills and shallow
ravines barren of shrub or tree, until distance fuses the vast steppes into
one drab plain, which melts in the hazy verge of the warm horizon.
There are no villages sprinkled in the environs to lure the Madrilenos
out of their walls for a holiday. Those delicious picnics that break with
such enchanting freshness and variety the steady course of life in other
capitals cannot here exist. No Parisian loves la bonne ville so much that

he does not call those the happiest of days on which he deserts her for a
row at Asnieres, a donkey-ride at Enghien, or a bird-like dinner in the
vast chestnuts of Sceaux. "There is only one Kaiserstadt," sings the
loyal Kerl of Vienna, but he shakes the dust of the Graben from his feet
on holiday mornings, and makes his merry pilgrimage to the lordly
Schoen-brunn or the heartsome Dornbach, or the wooded eyry of the
Kahlenberg. What would white-bait be if not eaten at Greenwich? What
would life be in the great cities without the knowledge that just outside,
an hour away from the toil and dust and struggle of this money-getting
world, there are green fields, and whispering forests, and verdurous
nooks of breezy shadow by the side of brooks where the white pebbles
shine through the mottled stream,--where you find great pied pan-sies
under your hands, and catch the black beady eyes of orioles watching
you from the thickets, and through the lush leafage over you see
patches of sky flecked with thin clouds that sail so lazily you cannot be
sure if the blue or the white is moving? Existence without these
luxuries would be very much like life in Madrid.
Yet it is not so dismal as it might seem. The Grande Duchesse of
Gerolstein, the cheeriest moralist who ever occupied a throne,
announces just before the curtain falls, "Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime,
il faut aimer ce qu'on a." But how much easier it is to love what you
have when you never imagined anything better! The bulk of the good
people of Madrid have never left their natal city. If they have been, for
their sins, some day to Val-lecas or Carabanchel or any other of the
dusty villages that bake and shiver on the arid plains around them, they
give fervid thanks on returning alive, and never wish to go again. They
shudder when they hear of the summer excursions of other populations,
and commiserate them profoundly for living in a place they are so
anxious to leave. A lovely girl of Madrid once said to me she never
wished to travel,--some people who had been to France preferred Paris
to Madrid; as if that were an inexplicable insanity by which their
wanderings had been punished. The indolent incuriousness of the
Spaniard accepts the utter isolation of his city as rather an advantage. It
saves him the trouble of making up his mind where to go. _Vamonos al
Prado!_ or, as Browning says,--
"Let's to the Prado and make the most of time."
The people of Madrid take more solid comfort in their promenade than

any I know. This is one of the inestimable benefits conferred upon
them by those wise and liberal free-thinkers Charles III. and Aranda.
They knew how important to the moral and physical health of the
people a place of recreation was. They reduced the hideous waste land
on the east side of the city to a breathing-space for future generations,
turning the meadow into a promenade and the hill into the Buen Retiro.
The people growled terribly at the time, as they did at nearly everything
this prematurely liberal government did for them. The wise king once
wittily said: "My people are like bad children that kick the shins of
their nurse whenever their faces are washed."
But they soon became reconciled to their Prado,--a name, by the way,
which runs through several idioms,--in Paris they had a Pre-aux-clercs,
the Clerks' Meadow, and the great park of Vienna is called the Prater. It
was originally the favorite scene of duels, and the cherished
trysting-place of lovers. But in modern times it is too popular for any
such selfish use.
The polite world takes its stately promenade in the winter afternoons in
the northern prolongation of the real Prado, called in the official
courtier style _Las delicias de Isabel Segunda,_ but in common speech
the Castilian Fountain, or _Castellana,_ to save time. So perfect is the
social discipline in these old countries that people who are not in
society never walk in this long promenade, which is open