A Question of Local Color

IT is not the purpose of this sketch to be critical, only truthful. Perhaps some of those superficial American observers and writers, who in bemoaning the dullness of the United States grow hysterically enthusiastic over the alleged couleur locale of Europe, particularly of Continental Europe, will find in my paper a disposition to shatter their favorite idols, but the fact is that I have no such design. I am as much disappointed as they can possibly be that the world is growing commonplace, but I see no necessity for concealing the fact any longer; nor shall any of them say truthfully that I am a dyspeptic, writing out of a disordered spleen, for I have the appetite of a roaring lion, the digestion of an Egyptian donkey boy, and I have just walked from Alicante to Almeria. Thus I am a healthy man with a well - ordered imagination and a horrible determination to tell the truth in spite of the poets.

Very recently the following paragraph in a brilliantly written article published in a fashionable American review claimed my attention: —

“It is a thousand pities that we have no types. The Irish girl still goes to Ballyshannon Fair in her jaunting car, the Irish lad swings his shillelagh, the English rough is a perpetual Bill Sykes, the Spanish Landlord with his handkerchief tied round his head is the same man who cooked the olla podrida for Sancho Panza.”

Now I am wondering if the brilliant author in question means us to believe that there is still a Spanish Landlord who ties his handkerchief round his head, — just as his grandfather used to do, you know. Let us admit that Bill Sykes still lives in the slums of London, and that the merry Irish lad — be jabers — swings his shillelagh as of yore; but as to the Spanish Landlord with his “handkerchief tied about his head ” I can speak advisedly. There is no longer any such person. He exists neither as a type in the Spanish literature of to-day nor on the stage in any modern drama, and he is not even a feature of the humblest posada. I say that I speak advisedly, for I am in the country and have been looking for him. I have crossed the montes de Malaga on a mule, within a fortnight, from Malaga to Granada, you know, up by the fuente de la Reina, around the top, over the very summit of Mt. Santo Pita, down through the defiles,around the curves and away across the stretches to Antequera, Archidona, Loja, San Francisco, Granada. I have looked for the picturesque “landlord with the handkerchief about his head” in every hotel, fonda, meson, and posada along all the lonely road, and I have not found him. He is not. He is a dissolving view, gone with the memories and the literature of the past generation, and he will come no more; for nowadays he wears an imitation Christy hat, and an imitation Piccadilly coat, and often patent leather shoes with the latest bulldog toes, a cheap four - in - hand tie, and an aggressive-looking Coney-Islandcolored shirt. This is the Spanish Landlord of the pueblos. In any of the larger cities he is dressed in garments of the same character but they are better cut, better made, more expensive, — quite a twentydollar suit from the Bowery indeed; and he wears a modish hat, very decent linen, and presentable neckwear. In fact, he looks here just about as he looks everywhere else in the world to-day, for the railways, the steamships, and the illustrated newspapers have brought down the pall of sameness upon the universe. The proprietor of the eminently third-class hotel with the aggressively first-class pretensions, in which I am just now housed in a certain famous Spanish city in northern Spain, wears a suit from Sackville Street — from Johnstone’s, if you please — cut and made as well as any eight-pound suit in London, and the good man told me in something of a languid way that he has his shirts from Biarritz, and his patent leather shoes from Seville. This then is the Spanish Landlord as he actually appears, and not as those writers who see him from a distance, in their insistence upon the couleur locale of Spain, would fain have us believe him to be. My Landlord speaks English, French, and German, besides his native Castilian, discusses foreign politics quite learnedly, and is in short something of a man of the world, although he is none the less a very poor innkeeper, in spite of the fact that there are “clean baths in the hotel,” and “Pomery-sec in the ice-box at five dollars a bottle. ” I repeat that sameness is upon the universe, and even the remotest corners of Italy and Spain are not escaping. Ten years ago the “ chamber maids ” in the Spanish hotels were male persons dressed in undershirts and bull-fight trousers: to-day they are females who wear shirt waists and leather belts and often sailor hats, and look for all the world like the same little female persons that perform a similar service in the country hotels of Indiana and Illinois.

Up to four or five years ago it was easy to distinguish the male American when one saw him on the streets of the continental towns, beating his red-hot tourist trail through Switzerland and Italy: his thin legs and carefully creased trousers, his little square bow-cravat and his wide high collar stamped him with the unmistakable stamp of Americanism. His dress was unique in Europe then, and so everybody knew him by his legs. It is not so nowadays, for creased trousers and American neckwear have become as common on the continent of Europe as in Buffalo, New York. Everybody wears them,— even the barbers of Seville. In a certain large seaport of Andalusia, the city where a friendly (or unfriendly) political destiny has commissioned me to reside temporarily, — in far-away inaccessible remote provincial Andalusia, I say, the men, with the exception of the peasants and fishermen, dress out and out, from head to foot, just as they would in any city of the same size and importance in the United States; and if they had a little more height it would not be easy to distinguish them from gentlemen of the same class in Memphis or New Orleans or any other city of the South. The midsummer Andalusian dude of the Alameda, with his turned-up flannel trousers, his straw hat, his négligé shirt and tennis shoes, his butterfly bow and leather belt, is such a banal counterpart of the Indianapolis article that the sameness of the thing is simply appalling. In this connection let me interpolate an incident which I know to be of recent and actual occurrence: two ladies of Louisville, discreet ladies and good ones, but none the less not wholly indifferent to interesting persons of the other sex, sat the other day in the rotunda of the Hotel de Madrid at Seville; they noticed a dark, slender, black-bearded young Spaniard sitting not far away; they could tell at a glance by his small feet, his dainty hands, and soft dark eyes that he was a Spaniard, and they wondered if he was a nobleman of fair Seville; and so they sat admiring him and talking about him softly in their own language, — it is a mistake to believe that Americans speak any other, although some of them think they do, — and in spite of their foreign tongue the dark-eyed young nobleman was not long in discovering that he was the subject of their conversation,for presently he arose in a languid way, and daintily throwing his cigarette into a plant pot, sauntered gracefully up to them and murmured in those soft flute-like notes for which his province is famous: —

“Say: you ladies are from Gawd’s Own Country, ain’t you ? I’m from Buffalo myself. May I sit down?” Then he told them that he was a dentist and had come abroad for his health. I have mentioned the foregoing incident just to show how Christy hats, creased trousers, and Piccadilly coats have served to make all dark little men look alike.

One night last summer I sat on the Alameda at Malaga and saw ten thousand people strolling up and down the fine promenade under the plane trees: all the men, in so far as their dress was concerned, might have been Frenchmen, Italians, or Englishmen: half the women wore hats and many of them leather belts and shirtwaists: the others wore cotton, organdy, or muslin dresses fashioned just as they might have been in any of the smaller cities of the United States, and the only distinguishing feature of dress or adornment was that many young women of the humbler class wore roses or pinks in their hair. In all the throng I failed to see a single mantilla, but there were any number of modish-looking gowns and picture hats,— quite the same as one sees on the Parisian boulevards.

But some things in Spain are still Spanish, — or at least more or less so. Yesterday, being a great feast day, all the beauty and chivalry of the town gathered at the arena to see the graceful Fuentes, and the intrepid Machaquito, lead their rival cuadrillas against the tortured bulls. Here the ladies — or at least many of them — wore their mantillas and decorated their loges, in and out, with those gay and gorgeous shawls from the Philippines which Spanish ladies love so well. The scene was a brilliant and animated one with plenty of color in it. But after all something was missing. It was the old-time picturesque dress of the men. Yesterday they wore the bourgeois habit that has come to them from beyond the Pyrenees and looked like a Boston baseball audience. Only the swarthy gypsies from the cork woods, still wearing sashes and the one-time familiar Spanish sombreros, were different from the others. One would like to think of the president of the corrida as a dashing Don in bespangled habiliments, with an epidemic of silver and gold embroidery and a flourishing red sash and many tassels. Hélas! Yesterday this eminent señor was attired in an irreproachable frock coat, perfect fitting dark-gray trousers carefully creased both fore and aft, an ascot tie, and a silk hat that might have been shaped on Dunlap’s latest block. He looked, on the whole, quite like a prosperous New York stockholder dressed for a funeral.

So much for the Spanish type of to-day: so much for Spain’s couleur locale. The fact is that all European countries — except England — are losing much of their individuality. Here in remote far-away inaccessible Malaga,for example, one can buy American sausage grinders, chewing gum, sewing machines, Chicago hams, and rye whiskey currently. The Calle de Marques de Larios, the latest modern street, looks exactly like a modern street in Barcelona : Barcelona’s modern streets are like those of Paris, and who will say that the modern streets of Paris, the Avenue de l’Opera, the Boulevard de Capucines, the Avenue Montaigne—who will say honestly—that they differ greatly in appearance from the principal streets of Washington or Buffalo ? The new Berlin is but a Teutonic edition of Chicago; Madrid looks enough like Marseilles or New Orleans; Turin is the one fine large modern Continental city of to-day that preserves its original character; its massive buildings and miles of arcades will always give it a distinctive appearance.

Even the railway trains of the Continent are losing their individuality, for on all the great express trains nowadays one sees corridor cars all built more or less on the American plan. This is particularly the case in Germany and in Switzerland.

In spite of the fact that France has been trying to introduce bull fights, Spain is still the sole conservator of this foul sport, and in that respect is the one original country of the Continent; but none the less, yesterday, after he had slain his three savage Veraguan toros at the great plaza in the presence of ten thousand applauding spectators, did not the incomparable espada, the matchless Señor Don Antonio Fuentes, Guerita’s successor as the first bull fighter of Spain, appear upon the Alameda, and was he not attired quite as you might have been, gentle reader ? Did he not wear white duck trousers, a white vest, black alpaca coat, and soft white Alpine hat ? He looked a little swarthy perhaps, and swaggered something like a popular oarsman, but one might well have mistaken him for a Louisiana member of Congress.

I do not pretend to say that I am grieved over the fading away of the couleur locale. Perhaps it is just as well to Anglicize the Continent and supply it with bath tubs, nor will this interfere largely with the charm of the changing view in Continental Europe, — the thing after all that serves most to make the Continent interesting and delightful. One leaves French Geneva at 10.30 A. M. and reaches Teutonic Berne for luncheon at 1.40. There is a new language and the architecture is no longer French, but the people dress almost the same as at Geneva and Lausanne. At Lucerne the Tyrolean warbler continues to wear his knee-breeches and white stockings as he sings in the cafés and hotel rotundas; but when he goes back home to see the old folks he dresses quite like a Bowery barber or a New England milk dealer.

From Bale to Strassburg in two hours, from Milan to Lucerne in six, from Calais to Dover in sixty-five minutes, these are some of the quickly changing views that keep Continental Europe from growing monotonous when one travels, but none the less, all the great cities look alike, and only the peasants of Brittany continue to wear wooden shoes as a steady diet. I spent two weeks in Rome last year looking for a Roman nose and failed to see a single one, — who then would still expect to see a Spanish Landlord with a handkerchief tied around his head ? Why the good man would be guyed to death by the butcher’s boy if he were even to attempt such an absurdity!