Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860




The great obstacle to the dialogue soon becomes, however, a deficit of
subjects rather than of words. Most of these ladies never go out except
to mass and to parties, they never read, and if one of them has some
knowledge of geography, it is quite an extended education; so that, when
you have asked them if they have ever been to St. Michael, and they have
answered, Yes,--or to Lisbon, and they have answered, No,--then social
intercourse rather flags. I gladly record, however, that there were some
remarkable exceptions to this, and that we found in the family of
the late eminent Portuguese statesman, Mousinho d'Albuquerque,
accomplishments and knowledge which made their acquaintance an honor.

During the intervals of the dancing, little trays of tea and of cakes
are repeatedly carried round,--astonishing cakes, in every gradation of
insipidity, with the oddest names: white poison, nuns' kisses, angels'
crops, cats' tails, heavenly bacon, royal eggs, coruscations, cocked
hats, and _esquecidos_, or oblivion cakes, the butter being omitted. It
seems an unexpected symbol of the plaintive melancholy of the Portuguese
character that the small confections which we call kisses they call
sighs, _suspiros_. As night advances, the cakes grow sweeter and the
dances livelier, and the pretty national dances are at last introduced;
though these are never seen to such advantage as when the peasants
perform them on a Saturday or Sunday evening to the monotonous strain of
a viola, the musician himself taking part in the complicated dance, and
all the men chanting the refrain. Nevertheless they add to the gayety of
our genteel entertainment, and you may stay at the party as long as you
have patience,--if till four in the morning, so much the better for your
popularity; for, though the gathering consist of but thirty people, they
like to make the most of it.

Perhaps the next day one of these new friends kindly sends in a present
for the ladies of the party: a bouquet of natural flowers with the
petals carefully gilded; a _folar_ or Easter cake, being a large loaf of
sweetened bread, baked in a ring, and having whole eggs, shell and all,
in the midst of it. One lady of our acquaintance received a pretty
basket, which being opened revealed two little Portuguese pigs, about
eight inches long, snow-white, wearing blue ribbons round their necks
and scented with cologne.

Beyond these occasional parties, there seems very little society during
the winter, the native ladies seldom either walking or riding, and there
being no places of secular amusement. In summer, it is said, when the
principal families resort to their vineyards at Pico, formalities are
laid aside, and a simpler intercourse takes place. But I never saw any
existence more thoroughly pitiable than that of the young men of the
higher classes; they had literally nothing to do, except to dress
themselves elegantly and lounge all day in an apothecary's shop. A
very few went out shooting or fishing occasionally; but anything like
employment, even mercantile, was entirely beneath their caste; and they
only pardoned the constant industry of the American Consul and his
family, as a sort of national eccentricity, for which they must not be
severely condemned.

A good school-system is being introduced into all the Portuguese
dominions, but there is no book-store in Fayal, though some dry-goods
dealers sell a few religious books. We heard a rumor of a Portuguese
"Uncle Tom" also, but I never could find the copy. The old Convent
Libraries were sent to Lisbon, on the suppression of the monasteries,
and never returned. There was once a printing-press on the island, but
one of the Governors shipped it off to St. Michael. "There it goes," he
said to the American Consul, "and the Devil take it!" The vessel was
wrecked in the bay. "You see," he afterwards piously added, "the Devil
_has_ taken it." It is proper, however, to mention, that a press and a
newspaper have been established since our visit, without further Satanic
interference.

Books were scarce on the island. One official gentleman from Lisbon,
quite an accomplished man, who spoke French fluently and English
tolerably, had some five hundred books, chiefly in the former tongue,
including seventy-two volumes of Balzac. His daughter, a young lady of
fifteen, more accomplished than most of the belles of the island, showed
me her little library of books in French and Portuguese, including three
English volumes, an odd selection,--"The Vicar of Wakefield," Gregory's
"Legacy to his Daughters," and Fielding's "Life of Jonathan Wild." But,
indeed, her supply of modern Portuguese literature was almost as scanty,
(there is so very little of it,) and we heard of a gentleman's studying
French "in order to have something to read," which seemed the last stage
in national decay.

Perhaps we were still more startled by the unexpected literary
criticisms of a young lady from St. Michael, English on the father's
side, but still Roman Catholic, who had just read the New Testament,
and thus naively gave it her indorsement in a letter to an American
friend:--"I dare say you have read the New Testament; but if you have
not, I recommend it to you. I have just finished reading it, and find it
_a very moral and nice book_." After this certificate, it will be safe
for the Bible Society to continue its operations.

Nearly all the popular amusements in Fayal occur in connection with
religion. After the simpler buildings and rites of the Romish Church in
America, the Fayal churches impress one as vast baby-houses, and the
services as acted charades. This perfect intermingling of the religious
and the melodramatic was one of our most interesting experiences, and
made the Miracle Plays of history a very simple and intelligible thing.
In Fayal, holiday and holy-day have not yet undergone the slightest
separation. A festival has to the people necessarily some religious
association, and when the Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, Mr.
Dabney's servants like to dress with flowers a wooden image in his
garden, the fierce figure-head of some wrecked vessel, which they boldly
personify as the American Saint. On the other hand, the properties of
the Church are as freely used for merrymaking. On public days there are
fireworks provided by the priests; they are kept in the church till the
time comes, and then touched off in front of the building, with very
limited success, by the sacristan. And strangest of all, at the final
puff and bang of each remarkable piece of pyrotechny, the bells ring
out just the same sudden clang which marks the agonizing moment of the
Elevation of the Host.

On the same principle, the theatricals which occasionally enliven the
island take place in chapels adjoining the churches. I shall never
forget the example I saw, on one of these dramatic occasions, of that
one cardinal virtue of Patience, which is to the Portuguese race the
substitute for all more positive manly qualities. The performance was
to be by amateurs, and a written programme had been sent from house to
house during the day; and this had announced the curtain as sure to
rise at eight. But as most of the spectators went at six to secure
places,--literally, places, for each carried his or her own chair,--one
might suppose the audience a little impatient before the appointed hour
arrived. But one would then suppose very incorrectly. Eight o'clock
came, and a quarter past eight, but no curtain rose. Half-past eight. No
movement nor sign of any. The people sat still. A quarter to nine. The
people sat still. Nine o'clock. The people sat perfectly still, nobody
talking much, the gentlemen being all the while separated from the
ladies, and all quiet. At last, at a quarter past nine, the orchestra
came in! They sat down, laid aside their instruments, and looked about
them. Suddenly a whistle was heard behind the scenes. Nothing came of
it, however. After a time, another whistle. The people sat still. Then
the orchestra began to tune their instruments, and at half-past nine the
overture began. And during all that inexplicable delay of one hour and a
half, after a preliminary waiting of two hours, there was not a single
look of annoyance or impatience, nor the slightest indication, on any
face, that this was viewed as a strange or extraordinary thing. Indeed,
it was not.

We duly attended, not on this occasion only, but on all ecclesiastical
festivals, grave or gay,--the only difficulty being to discover any
person in town who had even approximate information as to when or where
they were to occur. We saw many sights that are universal in Roman
Catholic countries, and many that are peculiar to Fayal: we saw the
"Procession of the Empress," when, for six successive Saturday evenings,
young girls walk in order through the streets white-robed and crowned;
saw the vessels in harbor decorated with dangling effigies of Judas, on
the appointed day; saw the bands of men at Easter going about with flags
and plates to beg money for the churches, and returning at night with
feet suspiciously unsteady; saw the feet-washing, on Maundy-Thursday, of
twelve old men, each having a square inch of the instep washed, wiped,
and cautiously kissed by the Vicar-General, after which twelve lemons
were solemnly distributed, each with a silver coin stuck into the peel;
saw and felt the showers of water, beans, flour, oranges, eggs, from the
balcony-windows during Carnival; saw weddings in churches, with groups
of male companions holding tall candles round kneeling brides; saw the
distribution to the poor of bread and meat and wine from long tables
arranged down the principal street, on Whitsunday,--a memorial vow, made
long since, to deprecate the recurrence of an earthquake. But it must be
owned that these things, so unspeakably interesting at first, became a
little threadbare before the end of the winter; we grew tired of the
tawdriness and shabbiness which pervaded them all, of the coarse faces
of the priests, and the rank odor of the incense.

We had left Protestantism in a state of vehement intolerance in America,
but we soon found, that, to hear the hardest things said against the
priesthood, one must visit a Roman Catholic country. There was no end
to the anecdotes of avarice and sensuality in this direction, and there
seemed everywhere the strangest combination of official reverence with
personal contempt. The principal official, or _Ouvidor_, was known among
his parishioners by the endearing appellation of "The Black Pig," to
which his appearance certainly did no discredit. There was a great
shipwreck at Pico during our stay, and two hundred thousand dollars'
worth of rich goods was stranded on the bare rocks; there were no
adequate means for its defence, and the peasants could hardly be
expected to keep their hands off. But the foremost hands were those of
the parish priest; for three weeks no mass was said in his church, and
a funeral was left for days unperformed, that the representative of God
might steal more silks and laces. When the next service occurred, the
people remained quiet until the priest rose for the sermon; then they
rose also tumultuously, and ran out of the church, crying, "_Ladrao!_"
"Thief!" "But why this indignation?" said an intelligent Roman Catholic
to us; "there is not a priest on either island who would not have done
the same." A few days after I saw this same cool critic, candle in hand,
heading a solemn ecclesiastical procession in the cathedral.

In the country-villages there naturally lingers more undisturbed the
simple, picturesque life of Roman Catholic society. Every hamlet is
clustered round its church, almost always magnificently situated, and
each has its special festivals. Never shall I forget one lovely day when
we went to witness the annual services at Praya, held to commemorate an
ancient escape from an earthquake. It was the first day of February.
After weeks of rain, there came at one burst all the luxury of June,
winter seemed to pass into summer in a moment, and blackbirds sang on
every spray. We walked or rode over a steep promontory, down into a
green valley, scooped softly to the sea: the church was by the beach. As
we passed along, the steep paths converging from all the hills were full
of women and men in spotless blue and white, with bright kerchiefs;
they were all walking barefooted over the rocky ways, only the women
stopping, ere reaching the church, to don stockings and shoes. Many
persons sat in sunny places by the roadsides to beg, with few to beg
from,--blind old men, and groups of children clamorous for coppers, but
propitiated by sugar-plums. Many others were bringing offerings, candles
for the altar, poultry, which were piled, a living mass, legs tied, in
the corner of the church, and small sums of money, which were recorded
by an ancient man in a mighty book. The church was already so crowded
that it was almost impossible to enter; the centre was one great
flower-garden of headdresses of kneeling women, and in the aisles were
penitents, toiling round the church upon their knees, each bearing a
lighted candle. But the services had not yet begun, and we went down
among the rocks to eat our luncheon of bread and oranges; the ocean
rolled in languidly, a summer sea; we sat beside sheltered, transparent
basins, among high and pointed rocks, and great, indolent waves
sometimes reared their heads, looking in upon our retreat, or flooding
our calm pools with a surface of creamy effervescence. Every square inch
of the universe seemed crowded with particles of summer.

On our way past the church, we had caught a glimpse of unwonted black
small-clothes, and, slyly peeping into a little chapel, had seen the
august Senate of Horta apparently arraying themselves for the ceremony.
Presently out came a man with a great Portuguese flag, and then the
Senators, two and two, with short black cloaks, white bands, and
gold-tipped staves, trod statelily towards the church. And as we
approached the door, on our return, we saw these dignitaries sitting in
their great arm-chairs, as one might fancy Venetian potentates, while a
sonorous Portuguese sermon rolled over their heads as innocuously as a
Thanksgiving discourse over any New-England congregation.

Do not imagine, by the way, that critical remarks on sermons are a
monopoly of Protestantism. After one religious service in Fayal, my
friend, the Professor of Languages, who sometimes gave lessons in
English, remarked to me confidentially, in my own tongue,--"His sermon
is good, but his _exposition_ is bad; he does not _expose_ well."
Supposing him to refer to the elocution, I assented,--secretly thinking,
however, that the divine in question had exposed himself exceedingly
well.

Another very impressive ceremony was the Midnight Mass on New Year's
Eve, when we climbed at midnight, through some close, dark passages in
the vast church edifice, into a sort of concealed opera-box above
the high altar, and suddenly opened windows looking down into the
brilliantly lighted cathedral, crammed with kneeling people and
throbbing with loud music. It seemed centuries away from all modern
life,--a glimpse into some buried Pompeii of the Middle Ages. More
impressive still was Holy Week, when there were some rites unknown to
other Roman Catholic countries. For three days the great cathedral was
closely veiled from without and darkened within,--every door closed,
every window obscured. Before this there had been seventy candles
lighting up the high altar and the eager faces; now these were all
extinguished, and through the dark church came chanting a procession
bearing feeble candles and making a strange clapping sound, with
_matracas_, like watchmen's rattles; men carried the symbolical bier of
Jesus in the midst, to its symbolical rest beneath the altar, where the
three candles, representing the three Marys, blazed above it. During the
time of darkness there were frequent masses and sermons, while terrible
transparencies of the Crucifixion were suddenly unrolled from the lofty
pulpit, and the throng below wept in sympathy, and clapped their cheeks
in token of anguish, like the flutter of many doves. Then came the
Hallelujah Saturday, when at noon the mourning ended. It was a
breathless moment. The priests kneeled in gorgeous robes, chanting
monotonously, with their foreheads upon the altar-steps; and the hushed
multitude hung upon their lips, in concentrated ecstasy, waiting for
the coming joy. Suddenly burst the words, _Gloria in Excelsis_. In an
instant every door was flung open, every curtain withdrawn, the
great church was bathed in meridian sunlight, the organ crashed out
triumphant, the bells pealed, flowers were thrown from the galleries in
profusion, friends embraced and kissed each other, laughed, talked, and
cried, and all the sea of gay head-dresses below was tremulous beneath a
mist of unaccustomed splendor. And yet (this thought smote me) all the
beautiful transformation has come by simply letting in the common
light of day. Then why not keep it always? Clear away, Humanity, these
darkened windows, but clear away also these darkening walls, and show us
that the simplest religion is the best!

I cannot dwell upon the narrative of our many walks:--to the
Espalamarca, with its lonely telegraph-station;--to the Burnt Mountain,
with its colored cliffs;--to visit the few aged nuns who still linger
in what was once a convent;--to Porto Pim, with its curving Italian
beach, its playing boys and picturesque fishermen beneath the arched
gateway;--to the tufa-ledges near by, where the soft rocks are
honeycombed with the cells hollowed by echini below the water's edge, a
fact undescribed and almost unexampled, said Agassiz afterwards;--to the
lofty, lonely Monte da Guia, with its solitary chapel on the peak, and
its extinct crater, where the sea rolls in and out;--to the Dabney
orange-gardens, on Sunday afternoons;--to the beautiful Mirante ravine,
whenever a sudden rain filled the cascades and set the watermills and
the washerwomen all astir, and the long brook ran down in whirls of
white foam to the waiting sea;--or to the western shores of the island,
where we turned to Ariadnes, as we watched departing home-bound vessels
from those cliffs whose wave-worn fiords and innumerable sea-birds make
a Norway of Fayal.

And I must also pass over still greater things:--the winter storms
and ship-wrecks, whose annals were they not written to the "New York
Tribune"?--and the spring Sunday at superb Castello Branco, with the
whole rural population thronging to meet in enthusiastic affection the
unwonted presence of the Consul himself, the feudalism of love;--and the
ascent of the wild Caldeira, we climbing height after height, leaving
the valleys below mottled with blue-robed women spreading their white
garments to dry in the sun, and the great Pico peeping above the clouds
across the bay, and seeming as if directly above our heads, and nodding
to us ere it drew back again;--and, best of all, that wonderful
ascension, by two of us, of Pico itself, seven thousand feet from the
level of the sea, where we began to climb. We camped half-way up, and
watched the sunset over the lower peaks of Fayal; we kindled fires of
_faya_-bushes on the lonely mountain-sides, a beacon for the world; we
slept in the loft of a little cattle-shed, with the calves below us,
"the cows' sons," as our Portuguese attendant courteously called them;
we waked next morning above the clouds, with one vast floor of white
level vapor beneath us, such as Thoreau alone has described, with here
and there an open glimpse of the sea far below, yet lifted up to an
apparent level with the clouds, so as to seem like an Arctic scene, with
patches of open water. Then we climbed through endless sheep-pastures
and over great slabs of lava, growing steeper and steeper; we entered
the crater at last, walled with snows of which portions might be of
untold ages, for it is never, I believe, wholly empty; we climbed,
in such a gale of wind that the guides would not follow us, the
steeple-like central pinnacle, two hundred feet high; and there we
reached, never to be forgotten, a small central crater at the very
summit, where steam poured up between the stones,--and, oh, from what
central earthy depths of wonder that steam came to us! There has been no
eruption from any portion of Pico for many years, but it is a volcano
still, and we knew that we were standing on the narrow and giddy summit
of a chimney of the globe. That was a sensation indeed!

We saw many another wild volcanic cliff and fissure and cave on our
two-days' tour round the island of Fayal; but it was most startling,
when, on the first morning, as we passed from green valley to valley
along the road, suddenly all verdure and life vanished, and we found
ourselves riding through a belt of white, coarse moss stretching from
mountain to sea, covering rock and wall and shed like snow or moonlight
or mountain-laurel or any other pale and glimmering thing; and when,
after miles of ignorant wonder, we rode out of it into greenness again,
and were told that we had crossed what the Portuguese call a _Misterio_
or Mystery,--the track of the last eruption. The moss was the first
primeval coating of vegetation just clothing those lava-rocks again.

But the time was coming when we must bid good-bye to picturesque
Fayal. We had been there from November to May; it had been a winter of
incessant rains, and the first necessary of life had come to be a change
of umbrellas; it had been colder than usual, making it a comfort to look
at our stove, though we never lighted it; but our invalids had gained
by even this degree of mildness, by the wholesome salt dampness, by
the comforts of our hotel with its respectable Portuguese landlord and
English landlady, and by the great kindness shown us by all others. At
last we had begun to feel that we had squeezed the orange of the Azores
a little dry, and we were ready to go. And when, after three weeks of
rough sailing in the good bark Azor, we saw Cape Ann again, although it
looked somewhat flat and prosaic after the headlands of Fayal, yet we
knew that behind those low shores lay all that our hearts held dearest,
and all the noblest hopes of the family of man.

* * * * *


MIDSUMMER AND MAY.


I.


Very probably you never saw such a superb creature,--if that word,
creature, does not endow her with too much life: a Semiramis, without
the profligacy,--an Isis, without the worship,--a Sphinx, yes, a Sphinx,
with her desert, who long ago despaired of having one come to read her
riddle, strong, calm, patient perhaps. In this respect she seemed to own
no redundant life, just enough to eke along existence,--not living, but
waiting.

I say, all this would have been one's impression; and one's impression
would have been incorrect.

I really cannot state her age; and having attained to years of
discretion, it is not of such consequence as it is often supposed to be,
whether one be twenty or sixty. You would have been confident, that,
living to count her hundreds, she would only have bloomed with more
immortal freshness; but such a thought would not have occurred to you
at all, if you had not already felt that she was no longer young,--she
possessed so perfectly that certain self-reliance, self-understanding,
_aplomb_, into which little folk crystallize at an early age, but which
is not to be found with those whose identities are cast in a larger
mould, until they have passed through periods of fuller experience.

That Mrs. Laudersdale was the technical magnificent woman, I need
not reiterate. I wish I knew some name gorgeous enough in sound and
association for that given her at christening; but I don't. It is my
opinion that she was born Mrs. Laudersdale, that her coral-and-bell was
marked Mrs. Laudersdale, and that her name stands golden-lettered on the
recording angel's leaf simply as Mrs. Laudersdale. It is naturally to be
inferred, then, that there was a Mr. Laudersdale. There was. But not by
any means a person of consequence, you assume? Why, yes, of some,--to
one individual at least Mrs. Laudersdale was so weak as to regard him
with complacency; she loved--adored her husband. Let me have the
justice to say that no one suspected her of it. Of course, then, Mr.
Roger Raleigh had no business to fall in love with her.

Well,--but he did.

At the time when Mrs. Laudersdale had become somewhat more than a
reigning beauty, and held her sceptre with such apparent indifference
that she seemed about abandoning it forever, she no longer dazzled with
unventured combinations of colors and materials in dress. She wore
most frequently, at this epoch, black velvet that suppled about her
well-asserted contours; and the very trail of her skirt was unlike
another woman's, for it coiled and bristled after her with a life and
motion of its own, like a serpent. Her hair, of too dead a black for
gloss or glister, was always adorned with a nasturtium-vine, whose vivid
flames seemed like some personal emanation, and whose odor, acrid and
single, dispersed a character about her; and the only ornaments she
condescended to assume were of Etruscan gold, severely simple in design,
elaborately intricate in workmanship. It is evident she was a poet in
costume, and had at last _en regle_ acquired a manner. But thirteen
years ago she apparelled herself otherwise, and thirteen years ago it
was that Mr. Roger Raleigh fell in love with her. This is how it was.

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