To Cuba and back. A vacation voyage. |
| I. |
| II. |
| III. |
| IV. |
| V. |
| VI. |
| VII. |
| VIII. |
| IX. | CHAPTER IX. |
| X. |
| XI. |
| XII. |
| XIII. |
| XIV. |
| XV. |
| XVI. |
| XVII. |
| XVIII. |
| XIX. |
| XX. |
| XXI. |
| XXII. |
 | XXIII. |
| XXIV. |
| XXV. |
 | CHAPTER IX. To Cuba and back. |  |
CHAPTER IX.
Monday, February 2.—Rose before six, and
walked as usual, down the Paseo, to the sea
baths. How refreshing is this bath, after the
hot night and close rooms! At your side,
the wide blue sea with its distant sails, the
bath cut into the clean rock, the gentle washing
in and out of the tideless sea, at the Gulf
Stream temperature, in the cool of the morning!
As I pass down, I meet a file of Coolies,
in Chinese costume, marching, under overseers,
to their work or their jail. And there
is the chain-gang! clank, clank, as they go,
headed by officers with pistols and swords,
and flanked by drivers with whips. This is
simple wretchedness!
While at breakfast, a gentleman in the
dress of the regular clergy, speaking English,
called upon me, bringing me, from the bishop,
to all the religious, charitable, and educational
institutions of the city, and offering to conduct
me to the Belen (Bethlehem). He is
Father B. of Charleston, S. C., temporarily in
Havana, with whom I find I have some acquaintances
in common, both in America and
abroad. We drive together to the Belen. I
say drive; for few persons walk far in Havana,
after ten o'clock in the morning. The volantes
are the public carriages of Havana; and are
as abundant as cabs in London. You never
need stand long at a street door without
finding one. The postilions are always negroes;
and I am told that they pay the owner
a certain sum per day for the horse and volante,
and make what they can above that.
The Belen is a group of buildings, of the
usual yellow or tawny color, covering a good
deal of ground, and of a thoroughly monastic
character. It was first a Franciscan monastery,
then a barrack, and now has been given
by the Government to the Jesuits. The company
of Jesuits here is composed of a rector
and about forty clerical and twenty lay brethren.
scientific investigations and instruction, down
to the lowest menial offices, in the care of the
children; some serving in costly vestments at
the high altar, and others in coarse black
garb at the gates. It is only three years
since they established themselves in Havana,
but in that time they have formed a school
of two hundred boarders and one hundred
day scholars, built dormitories for the boarders,
and a common hall, restored the church and
made it the most fully attended in the city;
established a missionary work in all parts of
the town, recalled a great number to the discipline
of the Church, and not only created
something like an enthusiasm of devotion
among the women, who are said to have
monopolized the religion of Cuba in times
past, but have introduced among the men,
and among many influential men, the practices
of confession and communion, to which
they had been almost entirely strangers. I do
not take this account from the Jesuits themselves,
but from the regular clergy of other
orders, and from Protestants who are opposed
they are at work with zeal and success.
I met my distinguished acquaintance of yesterday,
the rector, who took me to the boys'
chapel, and introduced me to Father Antonio
Cabre, a very young man of a spare frame
and intellectual countenance, with hands so
white and so thin, and eyes so bright, and
cheek so pale! He is at the head of the department
of mathematics and astronomy, and
looks indeed as if he had outwatched the
stars, in vigils of science or of devotion. He
took me to his laboratory, his observatory,
and his apparatus of philosophic instruments.
These I am told are according to the latest
inventions, and in the best style of French and
German workmanship. I was also shown a
collection of coins and medals, a cabinet of
shells, the commencement of a museum of
natural history, already enriched with most of
the birds of Cuba, and an interesting cabinet
of the woods of the island, in small blocks, each
piece being polished on one side, and rough on
the other. Among the woods were the mahoganies,
the iron-wood, the ebony, the lignum
unfamiliar to me, which admit of the most exquisite
polish. Some of the most curious were
from the Isla de Pinos, an island belonging to
Cuba, and on its southern shore.
The sleeping arrangement for the boys here
seemed to me to be new, and to be well
adapted to the climate. There is a large hall,
with a roof about thirty feet from the floor,
and windows near the top, to give light and
ventilation above, and small port-holes, near
the ground, to let air into the passages. In
this hall are double rows of compartments,
like high pews, or, more profanely, like the
large boxes in restaurants and chop-houses,
open at the top, with curtains instead of doors,
and each large enough to contain a single bed,
a chair, and a toilet table. This ensures both
privacy and the light and air of the great hall.
The bedsteads are of iron; and nothing can
exceed the neatness and order of the apartments.
The boys' clothes are kept in another
part of the house, and they take to their dormitories
only the clothes that they are using.
Each boy sleeps alone. Several of the Fathers
ends of the passage-ways, and a watchman
walks the rounds all night, to guard against
fire, and to give notice of sickness.
The boys have a playground, a gymnasium,
and a riding-school. But although they
like riding and fencing, they do not take to the
robust exercises and sports of English schoolboys.
An American whom I met here, who
had spent several months at the school, told
me that in their recreations they were more
like girls, and liked to sit a good deal, playing
or working with their hands. He pointed
out to me a boy, the son of an American
mother, a lady to whom I brought letters and
kind wishes from her many friends at the
North, and told me that he had more pluck
than any boy in the school.
The roof of the Belen is flat, and gives a
pleasant promenade, in the open air, after the
sun is gone down, which is much needed, as
the buildings are in the dense part of the city.
The brethren of this order wear short hair,
with the tonsure, and dress in coarse cassocks
of plain black, coming to the feet, and buttoned
no white of collar above; and in these, they
sweep like black spectres, about the passageways,
and across the halls and court-yards.
There are so many of them that they are able
to give thorough and minute attention to the
boys, not only in instruction, both secular and
religious, but in their entire training and development.
From the scholastic part of the institution,
I passed to the church. It is not very large,
has an open marble floor, a gallery newly
erected for the use of the brethren and other
men, a sumptuous high altar, a sacristy
and vestry behind, and a small altar, by which
burned the undying lamp, indicating the presence
of the Sacrament. In the vestry, I was
shown the vestments for the service of the high
altar, some of which are costly and gorgeous in
the extreme, not probably exceeded by those
of the Temple at Jerusalem in the palmiest
days of the Jewish hierarchy. All are presents
from wealthy devotees. One, an alb, had a
circle of precious stones; and the lace alone on
another, a present from a lady of rank, is said
may be thought of the rightfulness of this expenditure,
turning upon the old question as to
which the alabaster box of ointment and the
ordained costliness of the Jewish ritual "must
give us pause," it cannot be said of the Jesuits
that they live in cedar, while the ark of God
rests in curtains; for the actual life of the
streets hardly presents any greater contrast,
than that between the sumptuousness of their
apparel at the altar, and the coarseness and
cheapness of their ordinary dress, the bareness
of their rooms, and the apparent severity of
their life.
The Cubans have a childish taste for excessive
decoration. Their altars look like toy-shops.
A priest, not a Cuban, told me that
he went to the high altar of the cathedral
once, on a Christmas day, to officiate, and
when his eye fell on the childish and almost
profane attempts at symbolism,—a kind of doll
millinery,—if he had not got so far that he
could not retire without scandal, he would
have left the duties of the day to others. At
the Belen there is less of this; but the Jesuits
deal to the popular taste.
In the sacristy, near the side altar, is a distressing
image of the Virgin, not in youth, but
the mother of the mature man, with a sword
pierced through her heart,—referring to the
figurative prediction, "a sword shall pierce
through thine own soul also." The handle and
a part of the blade remain without, while the
marks of the deep wound are seen, and the
countenance expresses the sorest agony of
mind and body. It is painful, and beyond
all legitimate scope of art, and haunts one,
like a vision of actual misery. It is almost
the only thing in the church of which I have
brought away a distinct image in my memory.
A strange, eventful history, is that of the
Society of Jesus! Ignatius Loyola, a soldier
and noble of Spain, renouncing arms and
knighthood, hangs his trophies of war upon
the altar of Monserrate. After intense studies
and barefoot pilgrimages, persecuted by religious
orders whose excesses he sought to restrain,
and frowned upon by the Inquisition,
he organizes, with Xavier and Faber, at Montmartre,
beginning, spreading upwards and outwards,
it overshadows the earth. Now, at the top of
success, it is supposed to control half Christendom.
Now, his order proscribed by State and
Church alike and suppressed by the Pope himself,
there is not a spot of earth in Catholic
Christendom where the Jesuit can place the
sole of his foot. In this hour of distress, he
finds refuge in Russia, and in Protestant Prussia.
Then, restored and tolerated, the order
revives here and there in Europe, with a fitful
life; and, at length, blazes out into a glory of
missionary triumphs and martyrdoms in China,
in India, in Africa, and in North America;
and now, in these later days, we see it advancing
everywhere to a new epoch of labor
and influence. Thorough in education, perfect
in discipline, absolute in obedience,—as
yielding, as indestructible, as all-pervading as
water or as air!
The Jesuits make strong friends and strong
enemies. Many, who are neither the one nor
the other, say of them that their ethics are artificial,
and their system unnatural; that they
to use the world without abusing it, they
reduce it to subjection and tutelage; that they
are always either in dangerous power, or in
disgrace; and although they may labor with
more enthusiasm and self-consecration than
any other order, and meet with astonishing
successes for a time, yet such is the character
of their system that these successes are
never permanent, but result in opposition, not
only from Protestants, and moderate Catholics,
and from the civil power, but from other religious
orders and from the regular clergy in their
own Church,—an opposition to which they
are invariably compelled to yield, at last. In
fine, they declare, that, allowing them all zeal,
and all ability, and all devotedness, their system
is too severe and too unnatural for permanent
usefulness anywhere,—medicine and
not food, lightning and not light, flame and not
warmth.
Not satisfied with this moderated judgment,
their opponents have met them, always and
everywhere, with uniform and vehement reprobation.
They say to them—the opinion of
irreversible sentence of time has made you a
by-word and a hissing, and reduced your very
name, the most sacred in its origin, to a syno
nyme for ambition and deceit!
Others, again, esteem them the nearest approach
in modern times to that type of men
portrayed by one of the chiefest, in his epistle
: "In much patience, in afflictions, in necessities
in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments,
in tumults, in labors, in watchings, in
fastings; by pureness, by knowledge, by long-suffering;
. . . by honor and dishonor; by evil
report and good report; as deceivers and yet
true; as unknown, and yet well known; as
dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and
not killed; as sorrowful, and yet always rejoicing;
as poor, yet making many rich; as
having nothing, and yet possessing all things."
| CHAPTER IX. To Cuba and back. | |