Heroic Spain
by Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly · English · Gutenberg #39246 · 618,217 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Heroic Spain
Author: Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly
Release date: March 24, 2012 [eBook #39246]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39246
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEROIC SPAIN ***
Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
HEROIC SPAIN
[Illustration: A SPANISH HIDALGO, BY EL GRECO]
HEROIC SPAIN
BY
E. BOYLE O'REILLY
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY
1910
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY DUFFIELD AND COMPANY
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION: PRACTICAL HINTS 1
ESPAÑA LA HEROICA: VERSES 12
IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY: LOYOLA 13
BURGOS AND THE CID 33
VALLADOLID 55
OVIEDO IN THE ASTURIAS 79
THE SLEEPING CITIES OF LEON 104
GALICIA 121
SALAMANCA 142
SEGOVIA 159
SAINT TERESA AND AVILA 183
EVENING IN AVILA: VERSES 212
MADRID AND THE ESCORIAL 213
TOLEDO 229
CORDOVA AND GRANADA 258
VIGNETTES OF SEVILLE 274
A CHURCH FEAST IN SEVILLE 293
HOLY WEEK IN SEVILLE 302
CADIZ 316
A FEW MODERN NOVELS 326
ESTREMADURA 351
ARAGON 369
MINOR CITIES OF CATALONIA 385
BARCELONA 395
GERONA AND FAREWELL TO SPAIN 420
ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
A Spanish Hidalgo, by El Greco Frontispiece
Burgos Cathedral from the Castle Hill 36
The Façade of San Gregorio, Valladolid 58
The Cathedral of León 108
View of Salamanca from the Roman Bridge 142
Façade of the University Library, Salamanca 154
The Alcázar of Segovia 182
House of the Duque de la Roca, Avila 196
Isabella of Portugal, by Titian 223
Prado Gallery, Madrid
Tomb of Bishop San Segundo, by Berruguete, Avila 256
Los Seises, Cathedral of Seville 299
St. Francis of Assisi 327
A wood-carving by Carmona, Museum of León
A Roadside Scene in Spain 354
The Cathedral of Sigüenza 374
Cloisters of San Pablo del Campo, Barcelona 403
A Street Stairway, Gerona 420
_HEROIC SPAIN_
"_Let nothing disturb thee,_
_Nothing affright thee,_
_All things are passing,_
_God never changeth._
_Patient endurance_
_Attaineth to all things,_
_Who God possesseth_
_In nothing is wanting,_
_Alone God sufficeth._"
MAXIMS OF SAINT TERESA
"All national criticism in bulk is misleading and foolish, and I look on
the belief of Spaniards that Spain ought to be great and strong as the
most promising agency of her future regeneration."
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
_As Minister to Spain, in a letter Oct. 20, 1877_
INTRODUCTION
PRACTICAL HINTS
Travel in Spain to-day is attended with little hardship and no danger
whatever. Even if one barely knows a word of the language, it is not
foolhardy to explore the distant provinces. Commit a few simple
sentences to the memory and have courage in using them, for Spanish is
pronounced just as it is spelled, with a few exceptions soon observed.
The merest beginner is understood.
When a trip into Spain is planned it would be well to send for
information about the kilometric ticket to the _Chemins de Fer
Espagnols_, 20 Rue Chauchat, Paris. They will mail you, gratis, a
pamphlet with a map of the country, where is marked the number of
kilometers between the cities; from this it is easy to calculate how
large a ticket to buy. The more kilometers taken at one time, the
cheaper it is. Thus a ticket of 2,000 k. costs 165 pesetas; one of 5,000
k. costs 385 p., and so on. We got a 10,000 kilometric ticket for two
people, first class, good for ten months, paying for it 682 pesetas. If
the ticket is bought outside of Spain you pay for it in francs, whereas
if bought in Spain, you pay in pesetas, which are about fifteen per cent
less than francs. Provide yourself with your photograph, and at the
first Spanish town--Irún, if you come from Paris, and Port-Bou if from
Marseilles--as there is always a pause of some hours on the frontier for
the customs, it is a simple matter to buy your _carnet kilométrique_ in
the station. It is only on one or two short local lines that these
tickets are not accepted. Unfortunately the new rail from Gibraltar up
to Bobadilla, by way of which many tourists enter Spain, is one of these
disobliging minor lines. In fact many who start their trip from the
south have found difficulty in procuring a kilometric ticket till they
reached Seville or Granada; this confuses the traveler, and makes him
decide the ticket is too complicated for practical use. If he comes to
visit merely the southern province of Andalusia, which is what most
people see of Spain, with a run up to Madrid for the pictures, then,
unless several are traveling as one family, there is little gained by
the _carnet_, since a few hundred unused miles are sometimes wasted. But
for the complete tour of Spain the kilometric ticket is the most
satisfactory arrangement. Besides the reduction it makes in the fare, it
saves the confusion of changing money in the stations. You go to the
ticket office before boarding a train, have the coupons to be used torn
off, and are given a complementary ticket to hand to the conductor on
the train. It is well to buy the official railway guide as it saves
asking questions, for Spanish trains, though they crawl at a snail's
pace, start at the hour announced, and arrive on the minute set down in
the time-table.
Thirty kilos, about sixty-six pounds, are allowed free in the luggage
van, but for an extensive tour it is better to send trunks ahead by some
agency, and travel with only the valises taken with you in the carriage.
These the _mozo_, or porter, carries directly from the train to the
hotel omnibus, which--another good custom of the country--is always in
waiting, no matter at what hour the arrival. First class travel in Spain
is about the same as second class elsewhere; second class is like third
class in France, except on the express route from Paris to Madrid, and
in Catalonia, where second class is comfortable.
A hasty sketch of our tour may help later travelers. We entered from the
north, by Biarritz, a far better way of seeing the country in its
natural sequence than the usual landing at Gibraltar. One feels that the
north of Spain, in the truest degree national, untouched by the Moor,
has never had justice done it. If a transatlantic liner touched at one
of the northern ports, such as Vigo, Santander, Bilbao, it would open
up an untrodden Switzerland with fertile valleys and noble hills. No
pleasanter summer tour, on bicycle or afoot, could be made than through
the Basque provinces, Asturias, the national cradle of Spain, or in
beautiful Galicia with its trout rivers. In summer the climate is cool
and pleasant, and the most isolated valleys are so safe that any two
women could travel alone with security.
Our first stop was at Loyola in the Basque country; then a week in
Burgos; a short stay at Valladolid and Palencia; over the Asturian
Mountains to Oviedo; back to León City, and from there across other
hills to Galicia, seeing Lugo, Coruña, and Santiago in that province;
from Coruña to Santiago by diligence, as no rail yet connects the two
cities. We returned to León province from Galicia, skirting the Miño
River which divides Spain and Portugal; stopped a night at Astorga, some
days in Salamanca, and made a short pause in Zamora.
Time must not be a consideration in touring these unfrequented cities of
middle Spain, for their local trains are few and far between. Only twice
a week is there direct communication between Salamanca and Medina del
Campo, the junction station on the express route. But if you accept once
for all the slowness of the trains, the occasional odd hour of arrival
or starting, the inconvenience of a distantly-set station, you cease to
fret and scold as do most hurried travelers. We ended by finding the
long railway journeys rather restful than otherwise. Usually we had the
_Reservado para Señoras_ carriage to ourselves, except on the express
line from Paris to Madrid, and we soon learned how to make ourselves
comfortable for a whole day's journey, seizing the chance of taking
exercise during the long pauses in the stations, and enjoying the
human-hearted scenes there witnessed; for a Spaniard greets and bids
farewell with the same unconsciousness, the same absence of mauvaise
honte as when he prays or makes love.
Also I found the topography of the country of endless interest during
the long train trips; to climb up to the great truncated mountain which
is central Spain, to see how the still higher ranges of mountains
crossed it, how the famous rivers flowed, the setting of the historic
cities,--I never tired of looking out on it all. Somehow I have got
tucked away a distinct picture of Spain's physical geography, no doubt
due to the leisurely railway journeys, which are not so slow that the
proportion of the whole is lost, as foot or horse travel would be, nor
yet so fast as to jumble the picture, as with the express trips in some
countries.
Spain is not beautiful like Italy, nor of the orderly finished type of
England or France; she has few of Germany's grand forests. There is no
denying she is a gaunt, denuded, tragic land; the desolation of the vast
high steppes of Castile is terrible. Only the fringing coasts along the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean are fertile. Nevertheless, unbeautiful as
is the landscape, it possesses an unaccountable magnificence that grips
the mind; we never took a night trip unless forced to it, so strangely
interesting were the hours spent in looking from the car window.
After Salamanca we went to Segovia, then across the Guadarramas to the
Escorial, and slightly back north by the same mountains to Avila.
Segovia and Avila are true old mediæval cities of the inmost heart of
the race, _España la heróica_ incarnate. Again passing through the
hills, whose cold blue atmosphere Velasquez has made immortally real, we
went to Madrid. From there, south, we struck the beaten tourist track
with pestering guides and higher prices in the hotels. Up to this we had
driven, on arrival in a town, to the first or second hotel mentioned in
Baedeker, and the average charge had been seven pesetas a day, all
included. The provincial hotels gave a surprisingly good table;
excellent soups, fresh fish, the meats fair, and all presented in a
savory way; the fact that many men of the town use the hotel as a
restaurant has much to do with the generous menu. The rooms were cold
and bare, but clean, for not one night of distress did we spend during
the eight months' tour. Of course certain modern comforts were
completely lacking, but we were grateful enough for clean beds and
wholesome food. The taking of money for hospitality is thought degrading
by this chivalrous people, so the traveler should not judge them by the
innkeeper class with whom he comes in contact. I found courtesy as a
rule and honesty even in the inns; having valises that could not lock, I
yet lost nothing. From Toledo on, we began to go, not to the best hotel
mentioned in the guide book, for that now had an average charge of
twenty-five francs a day, but we chose some minor inn, such as the Fonda
da Lino, in Toledo, once the first hostelry in the city before the
"Palace" variety was started for the American tourist.
We had spent October and November in seeing the northern provinces whose
piercing cold made us only too glad to settle for the four winter months
in Andalusia; a day at Cordova, a fortnight in Granada, a trip to Cadiz,
and the bulk of the time in Seville, the best city in Spain for a
prolonged stay, though Barcelona also can offer good winter quarters. In
April we went north into Estremadura to see the Roman remains, then
returned to Madrid for another sight of its unrivaled gallery, and also
because all routes focus from the capital like the spokes of a wheel. We
continued east to Guadalajara and Sigüenza, stopped some days at
Saragossa, then descended by Poblet to the warm fertile coast again, to
tropical Tarragona and that industrial anomaly in an hidalgo land,
Barcelona. After spending some weeks there, in the beginning of June we
left Spain by the Port-Bou frontier, stopping at Gerona on the way out.
Thus we had seen some twenty-five Spanish cities--some twenty-five
glorious cathedrals!--in a leisurely journey of eight months. Any spot
along the southern fringe is suitable for the winter, any spot along the
northern coast for the summer, but in high cold middle-Spain travel for
pleasure must be limited to early autumn or late spring: we froze to
death in Burgos and Salamanca during October, and again shivered and
chattered with the April cold of Guadalajara and Sigüenza.
As to guide books, Baedeker is as good as any, though the Baedeker for
Spain is not equal to that firm's guides for the rest of Europe.
Murray's "Hand-book" is more entertaining, but is rather to be kept as
amusing literature than used as a guide book, much of it being the
personal opinions and prejudices of Richard Ford, and bristling all over
with slurs at Spain's religion. It does not seem reasonable for
English-speaking travelers to see this original country through the eyes
of a clever but crochety Englishman who wandered over it on horseback
eighty years ago: we should not like a European to judge America by
Dickens' notebook dating back to the forties.
There are two bits of advice I would give to those who would thoroughly
enjoy traveling in the Peninsula. Pick up as soon as possible something
of the tongue or you miss shadings that give depth and strength to the
impression. If one knows Latin or French or Italian, it is easy to read
Spanish. And I would beg every unhurried traveler to carry in his pocket
the "Romancero del Cid," Spain's epic, and "Don Quixote," her great
novel, the truest-hearted book ever written. I defy a man to while away
a winter in Spain with _el ingenioso hidalgo_ his daily companion, or
sit reading the "Cid" above the Tajus gorge at Toledo, and not learn to
love this virile, ascetic, realistic, exalted, and passionate land,
where a peasant is instinctively a gentleman, where a grandee is in
practice a democrat, where certain small meanesses, such as
snobbishness, close-fisted love of money, are unknown.
The second advice is to bring to Spain some smattering of architectural
knowledge, or half the charm of lingering in her old cities is
lost,--also is lessened one's chance to catch unaware the soul of this
mystic, profoundly religious race. Here I should end, as I head these
lines of introduction with the words: _Practical hints_. And yet, just
as it is well nigh impossible in Spain to dissociate the churches
themselves from the religious scenes daily witnessed under their
Romanesque or Gothic arches, so I cannot help begging the traveler,
along with his smattering of architecture to bring a little liberality
toward a faith different perhaps from his own, a little openness of
mind. To one who goes to Spain in the holier-than-thou attitude, she is
dumb and repellent,--she who can be so eloquent!
In each of her cities is a cathedral built when faith was gloriously
generous and untamable, and in them one feels, unless blinded by
prejudices of early environment or birth, that here indeed man is bowed
in the humble self-abasement of worship, here is not only æsthetic
beauty but a burning soul; the incense, the lights, the inherited lavish
wealth speak with the spirituality of symbols, of ritual, that utterance
of the soul older than hymns or voiced prayer.
This record of the journey through Spain will be called too partial, and
yet I started without the slightest intention of liking or praising her.
A month before going to Spain, on reading in the Bodleian Library
certain accounts of St. Teresa, about whom I had but vague ideas, I
exclaimed in distress, "What a morbid mind!" I went far from
sympathetic, but bit by bit my prejudices dropped away. With the cant
and smug self-conceit of northern superiority, I expected among other
jars a shock to my religious belief. And after eight months I left Spain
with the conviction that magnificently faulty though she is with her
bull-fights, a venal government, and city loafers, she can give us
lessons in mystic spirituality, in an unpretentious charity, in heroic
endurance, in a very practical not theoretic democracy.
ESPAÑA LA HEROICA
Deep learned are the poor in many ways,
Their hearts are mellowed by sweet human pain,
And she has learned the lesson of the waifs,
This sadly-ravaged, stern, soul-moving Spain!
Rugged and wild, wind-swept, and bleak, and drear,
She has a ruined splendor all her own,
It seizes even while you ask in fear
The reason man should choose this waste for home.
Her cities rise, ascetic, lofty, proud,
Forever haunted by high souls that dare,
And from her wondrous churches rings aloud
A heaven-storming radiance of prayer;
With psalm, with dance, with ecstasy's white thrill,
Her mystics dared to lose themselves in God,
Theirs was unflinching faith, fierce, _varonil_,
A force as true to nature as the sod.
Reward must come: perhaps from her to-day
May spring the needed saint, to think, to feel,
To grope triumphantly, to point the way
To altars where both Faith and Science kneel.
Upon her ashy mountain height she stands,
Eager to step into the forward strife,
Her eyes are wide with hope, outstretched her hands
To meet the promise of new coursing life:
Steadfast her cities to the desert face,
Snow mountains loom across the silent plain:
Take courage, O exalted tragic race!
Courage! Christ's always faithful grand old Spain!
Castile, 1908.
IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY: LOYOLA
"The only happy people in the world are the good man, the sage, and
the saint; but the saint is happier than either of the others, so
much is man by his nature formed for sanctity."--JOUBERT.
"Whoever has been in the land of the Basques wishes to return to
it; it is a blessed land."--VICTOR HUGO.
The Basque is still one of the sturdy untouched peoples of the earth;
they make still the unmixed aborigines of Spain. Their difficult dialect
remains a perplexity to the etymologist, some believe it to be of Tartar
origin. They themselves claim to be the oldest race in Europe and that
their language came to Spain before the confusion of tongues at Babel.
They derive their name from a Basque phrase meaning "We are enough,"
that fittingly describes their character of self-sufficiency; the mere
fact of being born in the province confers nobility. Life for centuries
in the isolated valleys that never were conquered by Moor or foreign
invader has bred in the Basque a passionate independence. He would never
join with the neighboring kingdoms of Navarre and León until his
special privileges were ratified; and though these privileges were the
important ones of exemption from taxes and military service, he
succeeded in keeping them intact until his sympathies with the
Pretenders in the Carlist wars lost him his ancient rights. To-day the
Basques must pay taxes and serve in the army like the rest of Spain, but
their soldiers are usually employed in the customs, or as aids to the
local police. Their red cap, like the French béret, and brilliant red
trousers are a familiar sight among the valleys.
Of the three Basque provinces with their 600,000 people, the smallest,
Guipúzcoa, is a good epitome of national characteristics. The sinuous
valleys now serve as the passageway for the rushing mountain river, now
spread out into a plain where the villages are set. Each town has its
shady _alameda_, its plaza, and a court for playing _pelota_, a kind of
tennis, the game of the province. There are frequent _casas solares_,[1]
or family manor houses; one of these I remember wedged in with its
neighbors, in Azcoitia, unnoticed by the guide book, only by chance we
looked up and found it looming above the narrow pavement; blackened with
age and scarred as if crashed with blows of warring times, it was a
speaking record of old Basque life. In any other country but Spain, the
carelessly rich and unrecorded, such a fortress-house would be a lion in
the district,--from this very unexpectedness Spanish travel is of
unflagging charm. The strong primitive Guipúzcoans cling to their
patriarchal customs. The men and boys sit before their doors making the
cord soles used in peasants' shoes; the women in groups of twenty or
more, wash clothes in the public trough or down by the river. The
industry of all is unflagging. The roads are among the best built in
Spain, along them go creaking carts, each wheel made of a solid block of
wood bound in iron and emitting a prolonged agonizing squeak. The
cream-colored oxen that drag them have their yokes covered with
sheepskin, another century-old custom. The carts sometimes carry
pigskins filled with wine, three legs in the air, and the unique casks
are mended with a kind of pitch that lends a disagreeable flavor to the
wine, but these highlanders will not yield an old usage.
No sooner did we cross the _Puente Internacional_ that connects France
with its neighbors over the Bidassoa River--scene of historic
meetings--than we found ourselves in the wooded Basque provinces of the
northern Pyrenees. The country was fertile, the small farms cultivated
with activity; on the hills were heavily-laden chestnut trees, in the
valleys, orchards: we often passed trainloads of red apples carried
unpacked in the open cars like coal. Not far from the frontier the train
skirted what appeared to be an inland lake surrounded by hills, when
suddenly I noticed an ocean steamer and some fishing smacks lying at
anchor, and looking closer I saw that a narrow passage led through the
hills to the ocean breaking outside,--another of Spain's unheralded
effects. This was the beautiful inland Bay of Pasajes, the port from
which young Lafayette sailed for America.
At San Sebastián, the most fashionable summer resort in Spain, and still
gay with Madrid people, for the season holds till October, we saw the
first bull-ring, a circular building of red and yellow brick in the
Moorish style. To find a _plaza de toros_ here in the north was
disconcerting. Spain's national game has withstood the will of kings,
Papal bulls, the dislike of a large proportion of the Spanish people who
petitioned the Cortes in 1878 for its abolishment, and the odium of
foreign races. Until this debased _cosa de España_ is done away with it
will remain a stumbling block to even the most sympathetic of travelers.
At Irún, the frontier town behind us, we had taken our tickets for
Zumárraga, two hours away. There we were to leave the railway and drive
into the valleys to Loyola, where in an old castle the hidalgo
vizcaíno, Don Iñigo de Loyola, was born. Our guide book gave but the
slightest information. It was raining drearily. With trepidation and
sinking hearts we looked out at Zumárraga as the train drew near. Would
this, the first night in Spain, cold and wet, be spent in some miserable
tavern in a town of a thousand inhabitants, and perhaps the next morning
would a rickety diligence take us up the valley? We stepped from the
train reluctantly; at the last minute we were tempted to turn back. But
a porter had seized our valises, and muttering something
incomprehensible about Loyola and an automobile hurried us through the
station. And there, beyond, stood the wonderful thing, sign manual of
modern comfort--a great red automobile with a gallant chauffeur! We sat
down on our luggage and burst into a hearty laugh. It began to dawn on
us that perhaps the tour of Spain was not going to be the series of
hardships and privations we anticipated.
For the sum of three pesetas each (fifty-four cents) we were whirled up
the winding valley. The mountains rose precipitously from the road and
its accompanying river, reminding me of the valley in the Pistoiese
Apennines that leads down to the Bagni di Lucca. In the motor diligence
with us were a few courteous Basques; an elderly architect, with the
finely-chiseled features of the country, pointed out a sight here and
there, among others the birthplace and statue of Legazpi, conqueror of
the Philippines. I think he took us for countrywomen of his young queen,
and, trying to emulate his politeness, we were silent as to our
nationality; later we discovered that this was quite unnecessary, for
there is not the slightest prejudice in Spain against the United States.
We passed a building by the river and were told it was an electric
power-house; almost every part of the country is now lighted by
electricity. "You are very up-to-date!" we exclaimed. He replied by a
shrug of delighted self-depreciation, a proud smile of conscious
superiority aping the humble, not out of place in a Basque whose
mysterious language Adam spoke, so ancient and difficult a tongue that
the devil who once tried to learn it, they say, had to give up in
despair. Our opposite neighbors in the diligence, countrymen whose loss
of teeth made them appear aged, sought also to show some courtesy. Each
wayside shrine was named with glistening eyes,--St. Anthony; the
hermitage on the hill above, St. Augustine; here, St. John. One began to
understand religion was no mere Sunday morning service with this people.
After six miles the valley opened out and we came to Azcoitia, a town of
some five thousand inhabitants where is manufactured the _bóina_, the
typical cap of the province. The automobile went slowly through the
narrow cobbled streets, under the high houses and the cliff-like church,
then sped over two miles of a beautiful valley, with mountain rising
behind mountain in the evening light, and at length we reached Loyola.
Here one of the great discoverers of new strength, of untried powers in
the human soul, one of the holiest men of Christendom, saw the light in
1491, the year before the discovery of America: in the life of St.
Ignatius are several coincidental dates to give us pause. Surely it was
to these peaceful Basque hills that his thoughts turned when, a knight
in the worldly court that surrounded Ferdinand and his second wife
Germaine de Foix, Ignatius in gazing at the stars would feel with sudden
potency the pettiness of man's grandeur, and during his religious life,
when he craved at the sunset hour to be alone to meditate, he must have
recalled this lovely valley of his birth. With emotion I saw in the
distance the huge quadrangle of the convent that now surrounds the
_Santa Casa_: the thought of what this spot has given to the world, of
the thousands of chosen souls linked to-day by one will to work for good
in every land, can well make Loyola a place to stir the heart.
At a little past six we left the automobile which was to run farther up
the valley, and a porter from the inn led us through the park the
Jesuits have planted for the people. The _Hospedería de Loyola_ was a
large building with a porticoed entrance at right angles to the convent,
more like a monastery than a hotel, with polished staircase and
corridors, neat bare rooms, and a long white refectory. The table was
excellent, one course followed another at the one o'clock luncheon and
the eight o'clock dinner. There was fresh fish from San Sebastián (to
which daily another motor diligence ran), there were home-made
preserves, and we had our first taste of the universal _garbanzos_[2] of
Spain, a chickpea shaped like a ram's head. The waitress, the first of
many Carmens and Dolores, was a wonderful old woman who grew so intent
on teaching us her language that she would insistently repeat the name
of each dish she passed. She managed to convey to us by pantomime, for
our Spanish as yet was of the meagerest, that there were eight ladies
from Madrid in the hotel, living upstairs in retirement as they were
making a Retreat. They had come last Saturday;--talk, talk, talk,--and
the animated little woman gesticulated to show. Then the Retreat
began,--did we know what "the Exercises" were? Off she walked with bowed
head and downcast eyes. So it would be all week. The next Monday we
should see them, they would come to table with us, and it would be talk,
talk, talk again. During the week we occasionally saw a lady in black,
her head covered with a veil, cross from the hotel to the _Santa Casa_
where the meditations were held. In the convent the Jesuits were
conducting another Retreat attended by fifty men from different Spanish
cities: these lived in the seminary with the priests.
At table with us were some Spanish people of a kind the tourist does not
usually meet. One of them, a deeply religious man from Barcelona, on his
first visit to the _Santa Casa_, following the example of St. Francis
Borgia, knelt to kiss the floor of the room in which the patron of the
Basques was born. Another, an elderly woman fond of lace and jewels, and
probably longing for the gayeties of San Sebastián, was waiting in this
quiet spot while her daughter made the Retreat. When the eight days were
ended we met this daughter, a beautiful girl with the charm of manner
and quickness of intelligence that we found as a rule among Spanish
women. The afternoon the two Retreats closed was a pleasant sight. The
valley was fragrant from the rain, on the mountains the chalets stood
out strangely near in the clear air. Carriages and touring-cars rolled
up, pretty wives to fetch their husbands to claim their wives. All were
happy and natural, but one felt around one the atmosphere of the higher
things of life, an exaltation that only religion can give. Religion is
ineradicably woven into the every-day life of this race: a Spaniard is
half mystic by inheritance. The power to understand the spiritual is not
the gift of a few but of all. It gives to the peasant woman, to the
uncouth lad serving Mass, an intelligence above themselves.[3] Before
the late dinner that last evening in Loyola, a tall Spanish woman with
her four daughters automobiled over from San Sebastián; she came to join
her husband who had been following the "Exercises." He now sat with us
at table, a man of the grave dignity and fine presence we were later to
meet frequently. That night when passing through the corridors we heard
the sounds of prayer in their rooms, the wife and children making the
responses to the man's deeper voice.
The convent of Loyola is the center of civilization for the countryside.
All day there is a ceaseless come and go to the church, or to the
_Santa Casa_ for silent prayer. At one each day troops of children go to
the door of the convent with baskets and tins, and food is given them to
carry to the aged and decrepit of the town. An hour later some dozens of
lads in blue smock and _bóina_, playing their ceaseless _pelota_, flock
into the building for a half hour of _doctrina_. Then at three the young
novices come out gayly for their ramble over the mountains and as they
pass before the church each instantly removes his hat as walking they
repeat together a prayer. Happy those whose formative years are passed
in hardy discipline among these uncontaminated Basque hills! The
peasants of the valley, when the bell sounds the hours, pause to remove
their caps in salutation. Every morning they cross the fields from
Azpeitia on the raised path beside the river, or they come from
Azcoitia, two miles down the valley, to attend the morning services. No
one who has not seen a Spanish priest's attitude of devotion can
understand its appealing beauty. These Jesuits and their attendant young
novices (there are about two hundred students in the seminary) approach
the altar with solemn reverence, without a trace of self-consciousness,
and slowly and beautifully say the Mass. "The Jesuit seems to love God
from pure inclination, out of admiration, gratitude, tenderness, for the
pleasure of loving Him," wrote that subtle critic, Joubert: "In their
books of devotion you find joy because with them nature and religion go
hand in hand." A Basque congregation is worthy of such ministers. All
kneel without bench or chair, the men on folded handkerchiefs, the women
on the circular straw mats scattered over the pavement. We were
fortunate enough to attend a late Benediction, not a customary service
in Spain as we found later. The thrilled exaltation of the singing in
which all joined, the aged as well as children, is impossible to
describe. It was a triumphant full-hearted adoration trying to voice the
inexpressible; the organ ran riot, strained to its utmost, to accompany
the ecstatic singing.
Every Sunday the peasants drive in from the mountains to attend the
afternoon service, and after it they stand to chat for a placid hour on
the wide steps of the church. Arm in arm the young girls stroll up and
down in the park before the convent. I looked on at this scene of
contentment that told of frugal, upright living, with the sad thought of
France deprived of such wholesome beauty, of the peasants round the
Grande-Chartreuse, poverty-stricken and desolate since the industrial
monastery was closed. Happily for the future of Spain, she has at hand a
neighbor to give her the lesson in time.
The convent of Loyola was built by the Austrian wife of Philip IV to
enclose and preserve the _Santa Casa_, and it was by her presented to
the Jesuits. The church whose dome overtops the convent is in imitation
of the Pantheon. Unfortunately, as are most Jesuit churches in Europe,
it was erected in a bad period, and overloaded with ornament. The
Company of Jesus was not founded until the golden age of architecture
was well past; Churriguera, archmaster of bad taste, was in vogue when
they built. But at Loyola if the twisted pillars of decorated marble are
hideous, the ample flowing staircase that leads to the church is a
beautiful feature, reminiscent of Italian villas.
The soul of the valley is naturally the _Santa Casa_ itself, the _casa
solar_ of the saint's fore-fathers. The lower story is of rough-hewn
stone, and once the whole building was the same, but a jealous king
leveled the fortress-houses of the Basque nobles and the upper stories
were rebuilt in ancient brick. Above the entrance door the arms of the
family are carved, two wolves and a pot. The tradition is that the
knights of Loyola were so generous to their retainers that even the
wolves came to share their hospitality. In many of the rooms daily
Masses are said; the four stories have been inlaid with mosaic, carved
wood, and gold leaf, the gifts of devotees of the Basque patron. One
room is pointed out as the saint's before his conversion, another as
the one in which St. Francis Borgia said his first Mass, giving up a
brilliant career, as viceroy, admiral, Duke of Gandía by inheritance,
favorite of Charles V, to consecrate himself to the service of the
altar. At this memorable Mass he gave communion to one of his sons,
married to an inheritor of the _Santa Casa_, a niece of St. Ignatius. So
many were the communicants another day that the Mass lasted from nine to
three. Such rare instances of Christian perfection make the ancient
house a chosen spot.
The story of St. Ignatius' life is told throughout his _casa solar_. On
the staircase is a window showing him as a courtier. He was skilled in
knightly exercises, fond of the saddle and equally fond of rich attire:
good-looking, high-spirited, truthful, and brave, he was a favorite with
his soldiers. The scene of his wounding at the siege of Pamplona is
given; he lies on the ground with his leg shattered. A long year of
convalescence followed, and we see him reading the books that wrought
his marvelous change of heart. He sought the monastery of Montserrat,
above Barcelona, to beg counsel of a learned man concerning the vocation
he felt within him. His military training made him dream of forming a
spiritual knighthood to battle for the salvation of souls: "Company of
Jesus" is a military term. At Montserrat he performed the vigil of the
armor, like a true knight watching till dawn before the altar; then
exchanging his fine robes with a beggar he went forth, "_el pobre ignoto
peregrin_." In a cave of Manresa he lived in seclusion and prayer,
verifying on himself in agony of spirit the knowledge which was later to
guide the troubled souls of others who sought light. "His experience in
this solitude was an epitome of the psychology of the saints; and it
smote him all the more intimately because he was utterly without
foreknowledge of the spiritual life, and fought out his fight alone,
like the first Fathers of the Desert." In the cave of Manresa was forged
his Excalibur (to use again the vivid phrase of Francis Thompson, own
brother to Crashaw in his flashes of celestial intuition), there
originated the "Spiritual Exercises," the work used to-day in the
Retreats. "It has converted more souls to God," wrote St. Francis de
Sales, "than it contains letters."
Eighteen years were to pass before St. Ignatius founded his Order. They
were years filled with wanderings in Spain and Europe, a student at
universities, a humble but joyous pilgrim to Jerusalem. One day while he
was reading the eighteenth chapter of St. Luke the words, "And they
understood none of these things" brought before him with sudden force
the realization of his own untrained mind, the fact that he must be
educated himself before he could help others. So at thirty this
remarkable man began his scholastic studies in Barcelona, in Cardinal
Ximenez's famous university of Alcalá, in Salamanca. One day, in the
streets of Alcalá, as he was led to prison on a false accusation, the
proud young grandee of Gandía passed him. This was the first sight
Francis Borgia had of the man who later was to lead his life. Then
followed some years of study in Paris. 1530 found him in London at the
time of the agitation of Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon,
again a coincidence in Ignatius' life that he should visit at this
critical moment the land soon to desert a church for which he was
destined to raise so powerful a defense. There was another notable
Spaniard in England then, not a humble summer student begging his way
like the Basque hidalgo, but a scholar of Corpus Christi College,
distinguished and lauded, to attend whose lectures the King and Queen
used sometimes to spend a few days in Oxford. This was Juan Luis de
Vives, born in the great year 1492, the precursor of Bacon and
Descartes, a man of such vast erudition and impartial judgment that he
has been called with Erasmus and the French prodigy, Budé, the intellect
of his century. Vives stood forth courageously as defender of his
country-woman when the divorce question arose; he was imprisoned for a
short time, forfeited his position and pension, and finally left England
altogether.
Loyola now took his degree as Master of Arts in Paris, and gathering
round him some young men of earnest life--among them the future apostle
and martyr in the East, St. Francis Xavier from Navarre--the memorable
band of seven students made the vows of poverty and chastity in the
crypt of a church on Montmartre on the Feast of the Assumption, 1534.
Thirty years later the remembrance of that hour made one of the seven,
Rodríguez, feel his heart swell with ineffable consolation. Literally
these ardent souls fulfilled the letter of the Gospel for the way of
perfection: "If thou wilt be perfect go sell what thou hast, and give to
the poor." "If any man will come after me let him deny himself, and take
up his cross and follow me." "Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's
sake." Their founder with superhuman perspicacity prayed it might be so.
The world's hate is their alembic of purification.
Ignatius returned to Spain to arrange with Xavier's family--he also was
of the northern mountain race of Spain--and with the kindred of three
others of his followers. He crossed the Pyrenees by footpaths, and
descending to his own valley of Loyola preached down by the river in
Azpeitia. Later in Italy the band of Montmartre met again, working in
hospitals, preaching, and converting souls to God. It was in Venice,
many years after his wounding at Pamplona, that Ignatius Loyola was at
length ordained priest, and in Rome, in the church of Santa Maria
Maggiore said his first Mass. When the projects of the small band were
submitted to the Pope, he had the inspired wisdom to discern in humble
beginnings a future great movement and exclaimed: "_Digitus Dei est
hic!_"--truly the finger of God. The new Order approved, Loyola was
elected its general; like a military company, the first law was the
unhesitating obedience of the soldier to his leader, the unbreakable
power that lies in many working as one. The _Compañía_ spread over the
world, reforming monasteries, giving help to the poor, persuading the
rich to purer lives, reconciling husbands and wives. Within a few years
Francis Borgia gave up his dukedom to join them, and his accession
brought to the Order many Spaniards of high rank. The founder continued
to live in Italy between Rome at the Gesù and Tivoli: he died in Rome in
1556.
In the _Santa Casa_ we followed this remarkable life in scene after
scene. There is a touching picture of the grown man at school among
lads half his age, of the crypt of Montmartre, and of the final scene
in Rome. His face was said by St. Philip Neri to have shone with
compelling personality. In speech he was grave and admirable, a
never-tiring student of the Bible; that, and the "Imitation of Christ"
were the only books he much valued. "To see Father Ignatius was like
reading a chapter of the 'Imitation,'" they used to say of him.
We lingered for some days in the beautiful Basque valley, following the
winding paths among the mountains, loitering in the two little towns
near by in the pleasant discovery of rare old windows and portals. Most
of the houses had a picture of the Saviour on the entrance door. Each
new-born child is brought to the parish church of Azpeitia where St.
Ignatius was baptized, and each boy is called by his name, though only
the eldest in a family has the privilege of using it. The saint's hymn
is the national hymn of the Basques.
It was a raw autumn morning when we left Loyola. The light was just
filling the valleys as we passed the sweeping steps of the church up
which the peasants were mounting to beg a blessing on their working
hours. The influence of their loved patron is as vivid as if he had
lived but yesterday, so truly can one human mind, touched by divine
grace, with no thought of self, in sublime earnestness, rouse mankind
to shake off its apathy, to aspire to the highest. If only another such
knight might arise to-day to fight the modern battle of Christianity!
BURGOS AND THE CID
"The epochs in which faith prevails are the marked epochs of human
history, full of heart-stirring memories and of substantial gains
for all after times. The epochs in which unbelief prevails, even
when for the moment they put on the semblance of glory and success,
inevitably sink into insignificance in the eyes of posterity which
will not waste its thoughts on things barren and
unfruitful."--GOETHE.
Passing through the fertile Basque valleys, the train mounts the
Pyrenees by a series of skillfully-engineered tunnels. This natural
barrier between France and Spain, is far from being the straight rampart
of school geographies. It is a wide expanse of ramifying hills and
intricate valleys, a jumble of mountains that explains why Spain
remained isolated from northern Europe until the days of the railway.
When we reached the crest of this watershed between the Bay of Biscay
and the Mediterranean, we had a noble view of the villages far beneath.
Around us was a strange outcrop of white rock, and the descent to
Vitoria was barren too: with every mile the scene grew bleaker till the
rustling woods of the Basque valleys behind seemed a dream.
Beyond Miranda, the first town of old Castile, the desolate scene
appeared in its full awfulness. The plain lay like brown dunes of sand,
"as for the grass, it grew as scant as hair in leprosy." It was indeed
the haunting landscape of "Childe Roland." Passing over this wide
stretch, the train again mounted, this time not to cross another range
of hills, but to climb to the great truncated mountain which forms the
center of Spain. Three-fourths of the area of this imagined orange-laden
land is this tragic central plateau, comprising Old and New Castile,
León, and Estremadura. Most of the historic cities are on this bleak
upland, almost 3,000 feet above the sea, wind-swept, wintry, and made
still colder by the snow mountains that cross it from east to west.
Riding for days through the monotonous scene you begin to wonder not
that Spain should be poor, but rather that she, an agricultural land,
should have made so good a fight against such heavy odds. The guide
books that so harshly criticise, saying hers is a land where Nature has
lavished her prodigalities of soil and climate yet shiftless man has
refused her bounty, seem to forget that only one-fourth of the country
is the traditional rich south. The fruitful provinces form but the
fringe of the Peninsula.
It was early October when we mounted the Pass of Pancorbo. A fierce wind
was blowing. It suddenly blew open the door of our compartment, and
flung it back, smashing the glass. It was impossible to draw it to in
the fierce gale, and this little incident added to the desolation round
us. We looked down through the open door on the white road of the Pass,
over which Napoleon's armies poured a hundred years before to plunder
Spain with ruthless cruelty, and yet, so hidden is the guidance of
things, that seeming disaster waked the country from its long abasement.
Having reached the great central steppes, the same melancholy scene
continued. The land was scorched and calcined. Everything was a dull
brown. Villages were undistinguishable from the plain, and the churches
from the villages; man, his ass, and his dog, were all the same dull
tone. Even the brown deserts of Egypt failed to give me as powerful a
sensation of the forsaken. The plateau was treeless, except for an
occasional wind-threshed poplar, and an isolated moth-eaten poplar can
be the final touch of desolation. At times, miles from any village, a
solitary figure guided his oxen and plow in a stony field, or
silhouetted against the sky a tandem of five or six mules slowly crawled
along. Since the villages are far apart, each worker must leave his home
long before dawn to reach his distant field, and after sunset plod back
patiently to the _aldea_.
Forlorn as it all appeared one saw that every inch of the soil was
under cultivation. The peasants are as attached to their cheerless
tract, which has its one hour of green bloom in the spring, as are the
Basques to their beautiful valleys. The fields are passed from father to
son, and are acquired with the same zest as are teeming English farms; a
stern soil and still sterner climate has made a peasantry full of grit
and courage. Hardy and undepressed they gathered round the train with
pleasant greetings, for the long pauses in the stations are moments of
sociability from one end of Spain to another. The sad landscape
continued up to Burgos, one might say to its very gates if it were not
that the townspeople have planted avenues of trees near the city.
As we approached we had a splendid view of the Cathedral towers
dominating the town. There was something magnificent in the souls of the
old builders who made a temple such as this in the midst of a desert, as
if they defied the arid desolation to conquer their soaring faith. The
great structure rose doubly impressive from the juxtaposition of
richness and sterility, of the spirit's triumph over the material that
makes Burgos as impressive in its way as Toledo with its more imposing
setting.
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1910 by Underwood & Underwood_
BURGOS CATHEDRAL FROM THE CASTLE HILL]
"_Nuestro país es el país de las anomalías_" says the critic De Larra,
and the first step in Spain strikes this note. She is a land of
violent contrasts; level plain and broken sierra, elysian garden of
Andalusia and tractless wastes of Castile, frosty Burgos and sunny
Seville. She is the home of the hidalgo and home of the strongest
existing democracy between man and man, only equaled by early Rome. It
was in Burgos we first noticed what we later saw frequently, the
_labrador_ who drove his master's carriage, enter the inn with him and
sit at the same table to eat, master and man alike in their dignity. She
has a peasantry beyond praise for its virile industry, and she has a
class of city loafers the idlest that ever encumbered a plaza. Cradle of
exalted mystics and mother of realistic painters, this land of racy
personalities never allows one's interest to flag.
We spent a week in Burgos, and not once did the sun shine. The cold was
piercing. At the corner of every street a biting wind seized and
buffeted one about; besides being on a mountain, there are still higher
mountains near, and snow has been known to fall in June. Wind and cold,
however, were soon forgotten once inside the Cathedral. Our first visit
was within the hour of arrival, at dusk when details were hidden. The
great temple rose around us mysterious and awe inspiring. Though almost
with the first breath of wonder came a sense of bewilderment,--what was
this heavy wall rising some thirty feet in the center of the church,
that hid the altar and blocked up the nave so that only an encircling
aisle was left free? So confusing was it I could not at first tell by
what door we had entered, where was the east, where was the west end?
Books of travel all tell of this placing of the choir, or _coro_, in the
nave of Spanish cathedrals, but one can read them and imagine nothing
like the reality. I had pictured an open platform running down the
center of the church, whereas high walls are built round the _coro_ as
well as round the _capilla mayor_, thus making a smaller church within a
larger one. Wherever the inner church opens on the other, they have
placed a towering metal screen called a _reja_. A narrow passageway,
fenced by an open rail, usually runs from the altar enclosure to the
_coro_, and the people gather close to this, under the transept-crossing
tower; thus, practically, the priest at the altar and the canons
chanting in the choir are separated by the congregation. It is hard to
make the picture clear. I feel that no explanation can prevent this
arrangement of Spanish cathedrals coming as a surprise to the traveler.
The evening of our first visit, we wandered round in the dusk bewildered
by the blocking _coro_, and at length entered the chapel of St. Anne,
where a service was going on. The side chapels of Burgos are churches in
themselves, they often belong to private individuals, this of St. Anne
being, for instance, the property of the Duke of Abrantes. It was now
crowded with people of all kinds,--officers in uniform, a few ladies in
hats but the bulk of the women in black veils. From a small balcony on
one side the litany was sung.
Before the altar was what appeared to be a black covered bier, so I
thought we must have stumbled on some special service for the dead. This
would account for so large a gathering on a weekday, for at first one
fails to grasp the every-day religious attitude of the Spaniard. Looking
closer at the bier before the lighted altar a human figure was outlined
under the dark pall. How displeasing, I thought, not to use a coffin!
Suddenly the head of this recumbent figure unmistakably moved. With a
shiver I looked round me. No one appeared to notice what was to me so
terrifying, yet they were gazing over the bier at the altar. Strange
visions floated through my imagination, made up of memories of Charles
V's funeral before his death, and of contorted accounts of Spain and her
ways. Perhaps it was not an unusual custom here, thus morbidly to sample
beforehand one's own funeral service. Then, as the litanies continued,
now the solo from the choir, now the full-voiced responses of the
people, I realized these sweet evening melodies could hardly be the
dirges of a burial. The supposition of a living corpse was too bizarre
in the midst of this composed crowd.
I fastened my eyes on the round head of the bier, and again it moved,
but this time so thoroughly moved that the mystery was solved. With a
breath of relief I knew this was indeed a quiet evening service and what
had seemed a bier was merely one of the many marble tombs before the
altars of old churches, covered over with a dark mantle as they
sometimes are. What I had imagined the round head of a corpse, or future
corpse, was the veil-draped head of a living woman, seated on a higher
chair than usual between the tomb and the lighted altar. So ended my
first and only romantic episode in Spain.
I mention it as showing with what vague notions of terror the average
English-speaking tourist enters this harmless land. He comes full of the
prejudices inherited from the days of the Invincible Armada, when a
Spaniard was to an Englishman his satanic majesty incarnate, and this in
an age of which Froude himself, the enthusiastic chronicler of Drake,
says: "Perhaps nowhere on earth was there a finer average of
distinguished and cultivated society than in the provincial Castilian
cities."
Strange how tenaciously we cling to disproved ideas, I thought, as the
next day we examined the beautiful tomb of Bishop Acuña which had
caused my fright. Spain is as safe to-day as any civilized country. Yet
we met two Californian ladies traveling with pistols, about as needed
here as firearms in the lanes of Surrey or the brigand-infested hills of
Massachusetts. Little by little the traveler who keeps an open mind
learns that the cruel and morbid Spaniard of the popular fancy has no
existence except in his imagination. Unfortunately there will always be
some travelers here who see the heads on death biers move and carry away
the gruesome tale to swell the old prejudices, who will not wait long
enough nor look deep enough to find their living corpse a noble old
bishop in alabaster who has lain in peace some hundred years.
Every day of our week in Burgos found us several times in the Cathedral.
I used to arrive for the High Mass at nine, though before daybreak until
nine there had been many services in the side chapels; it is still the
custom with most Spaniards to kneel in recollection every morning.
Strangely enough, I soon grew reconciled to the clumsy _coro_. It
enabled the people to approach close to the altar in a peaceful secluded
spot. Here at Burgos one can kneel on the altar's very steps, beside the
big sanctuary lamp and the silver candlesticks that rise higher than a
man. The onlooking tourist, who often spoils Italian churches for those
who go to pray not to sightsee, in Spain is not permitted his ill-timed
liberty. He can wander freely through the outer cathedral, but during
the Mass, he cannot enter this inner temple unless he conforms to the
accustomed usages. All must kneel at the moment of the Elevation or else
leave. The lesson was taught us soon, for when the first morning in
Burgos a lady near by in the chancel inadvertently began to read in her
guide book, a verger in red plush cloak, bearing an authoritative silver
staff, approached, and kindly but firmly showed her out.
The richness of Spanish cathedrals at first is overpowering, that they
are too rich and overloaded is a criticism which is quite justified, but
it is the profusion of strength, not the cluttering of details to hide a
weak understructure; it is a profusion that speaks the nation's
character, her burning faith, her oriental generosity. In antique
silver, jewels, vestments, wood carvings, tombs, they are veritable
museums of art. A Spaniard has given generously to the church in all
ages. Though even when prosperous he is content to live with a frugal
simplicity hardly understood by our luxury-loving time, it is a law of
his nature that his ideas of grandeur and of beauty should find their
free expression in the House of God. I often had the sensation that the
beggar kneeling in these truly royal churches felt himself a part of
them; his own poor home was but one side of the picture, he could claim
this other home as well.
It was at Burgos we first met in the churches minor features that are
essentially Spanish. The organ pipes flare out like trumpets; the
reredos, or _retablo_, made up of carved wood panels, rises sometimes to
a hundred feet behind the altar; and there is the metal-work of the
great screens or _rejas_. This last was an art _de propia España_, and
her churches would lack half their sublimity without the massive
fretwork of iron or brass that shuts in the richly-decked altars. At
Burgos we especially noticed the _reja_ of the Condestable chapel, with
graceful wind-blown figures at the top. In the choir, round the lectern
were piled ancient psalm books, some of them three feet high, their
calfskin covers strengthened with metal claspings. The naturalness with
which these priceless books are treated shows how happily bound to
preceding generations, with no break of revolution and destruction, is
this old land. This thought of the antiquity of her usages is a very
potent one to every Spaniard, and the stranger too finds the purple
robed canons chanting in their choir-stalls more impressive because for
six hundred years in this same Cathedral they have intoned daily these
same psalms.
Another national talent is her carving in wood. The choir-stalls here
were a revelation. The masters of this art, Berruguete, Vigarni,
Montañés, may not be known to the rest of Europe, but they are locally
very famous. Their intense realism appeals to the popular mind, and
though in later centuries this realism degenerated into the bad taste of
hanging the statues with robes, enough of earlier art remains to make
one overlook these lapses. Should not a poet be judged by his best
lines? Why must an image in wig and jewels blind one to the remarkable
carved statues found side by side with it?
The wood carvers of Spain speak the same language of sincerity as the
mystic writers, and a knowledge of Luis de León, St. John of the Cross
and St. Teresa, makes one better appreciate the sculptors. Not that they
too are mystical. They do not soar so high. It is only a few chosen
souls here and there through the centuries who can walk that perilous
path, and probably they can express themselves only through the more
intangible medium of speech. But these wood carvings are the fruit of
men who understood the mystics and who worked in a like spirit of
intense faith. I should say it was not in her paintings that the
religious essence of this race was to be found, not in the somewhat
posing monks of Zurbaran, nor in the gentle religiosity of Murillo's
madonnas. Though a master of color, Murillo is too often akin in spirit
to Carlo Dolce and Sassoferrato. It is the fashion to call these
typically religious painters. But in the carved biblical scenes of
_retablo_ and _sillería_ is shown more truly the inner spiritual
intelligence of the serious Spaniard. Velasquez spoke for the reality of
his time, its chivalry, its material force; and these masters of wood
carving in more halting speech expressed the religious aspirations of
the people. They worked with a realism that is often painful, yet the
intensity with which they felt the scenes they depicted links them with
the mystics. The wood carvings have not had justice done them, perhaps
because they are for the most part painted, which certainly detracts
from them. Fortunately choir-stalls were left in the natural wood, those
at Burgos being a rich dark walnut with the polish that time only can
give. We spent many happy hours studying this twelve years' work of the
sculptor Vigarni. The seats are carved with grotesque, fantastic
creatures, half man, half beast, the arm of the chair now made by an
acrobat bent double backward, now by a monster with a tail in his mouth,
or some bat-like demon. There is a frieze of Old Testament scenes too
high to be well seen, but below them the New Testament story is told
from the Annunciation to the Doubting Thomas after the Resurrection.
Though the simpleness of earlier times is shown in the miniature devil
that passes from the possessed man's lips, and in Mary Magdalene's
dropped jaw of surprise when she meets her risen Lord, these carvings
are not merely curious, they are soul-touching and beautiful. The type
of face is the high-boned one the Spaniard prefers, with well-cut brows
and aquiline nose. Notice the solemn beauty of Christ's face in the _qui
ci ne pecato_. In the panel, the blind cured, seldom has the expression
of absolute faith been better rendered than in the raised face of the
old blind man. Do not pass by the Garden of Gethsemane with the three
Apostles lying heavily asleep, the human shrug of the shoulder and
outstretched hand of the Master: "Could ye not watch with me one hour?"
While the Cathedral of Burgos shows much florid later work, especially
the central tower and that of the Condestable chapel, under the too
ornate additions the ancient purer church is plainly perceptible. It
belonged to the Gothic of the Northern-France type, for pilgrims to her
shrines and to fight in her crusades, brought foreign ideas to Spain at
so early a date that it is useless to speculate about what a native
architecture might have been.
Some of the smaller churches of the town are worth visiting, such as San
Nicolás, with a stone _retablo_ which is a tour de force of handicraft;
San Lermes, and facing it the hospital of San Juan, where we first met
the escutcheoned doorways of Spain, which, if kept within bounds, are
arrogantly effective and national. Throughout the city are good examples
of domestic architecture, such as the Casa del Cordón, built by the
Constable of Castile, Don Pedro Fernández de Velasco, whose sumptuous
tomb lies in the center of the Condestable Chapel, and whose pride as a
Castilian speaks in the family proverb:
"_Antes que Dios fuese Dios,_
_O que el sol iluminaba los peñascos,_
_Ya era noble la casa de los Vélascos._"
"Before God was God, or the sun shone upon the rocks, already was the
house of Velasco noble."[4] Above the entrance to his house the girdle
of St. Francis connects his arms with those of his wife, as proud as he,
for she was a Mendoza. One rainy afternoon we spent in the _Museo_ over
the Gateway of Santa María, and there, step by step, traced Spain's art
history,--statues from the former Roman city of Clunia in this
province, a remarkable enameled altar-front of the Byzantine period,
Romanesque and Gothic relics from the monasteries out on the plains, a
Moorish arch found _in situ_, and tombs of that transition time from
Gothic to Renaissance which in Spain was so flourishing a phase of art.
Much as there is to hold one in the town, the bleak uplands outside have
a desolate fascination that calls one out to them. There is an excursion
to be made not far away to the Monastery of Miraflores, where Isabella
built for her parents "the most perfectly glorious tomb in the world."
Personally I prefer the quieter art of a Mino da Fiesole to this work of
Gil de Siloe, rich though it is. The tomb is white marble, octagonal in
shape, with sixteen lions supporting it. The weak Juan II lies by the
side of his queen, who is turned slightly from him to read in her Book
of Hours, in a natural attitude, as if she said pleasantly, "Now do be
silent, I must read in peace for a few minutes." At Miraflores is a
wooden statue of St. Bruno, with a keen and subtle face of the same
ascetic type as that of the young monk we watched praying quite
oblivious of the gaping tourists. It is of this statue that Philip IV
remarked: "It does not speak, but only because he is a Carthusian monk."
The indifference to strangers in the mystic young penitent before the
altar was our second meeting with a trait found in the average
Spaniard. He does not care an iota what the stranger thinks of him. He
is not like the Italian, inclined to put his best foot forward. He will
not change his ways because they are criticised; you can admire or you
can dislike, it makes little difference to him; and this quiet poise, in
peasant as well as grandee, is not fatuous, for its root lies in an
innate self-respect. He feels he is loyal to his God, to his King, and
to himself,--what better standards can you have?
Avenues of trees lead out to another house of the Benedictine rule, a
convent for nuns founded by the sister of Richard C[oe]ur de Lion. Many
ladies of the royal line have retired to Las Huelgas, the nuns brought
their dowries, and the mitered abbess held the rank of Princess-Palatine,
with the power of capital punishment. The church has outside cloisters
for the laity; the cloisters within the convent are never seen except on
the rare occasions of a king's visit, when all who are able crowd in at
the moment he enters. We were standing before the chancel where so many
knights had performed the vigil of the armor--among others Edward I of
England was knighted here--when a nun entered the _coro_, and in her
trailing white robes bowed toward the altar--rather it was the slow
courtesy of a court lady. We shrank away with the feeling that we had
intruded uninvited on a ceremony, that the days of the abbess,
Princess-Palatine, were the reality and we, inquisitive guide-book
tourists, the anacronism, a sensation not uncommon in Spain.
Burgos is the birthplace of the national hero, the Cid Campeador, "God's
scourge upon the Moor." This contemporary of William the Conqueror, whom
the erudites of the eighteenth century tried in vain to prove a mythical
character,[5] may be said to dominate Spanish literature. Spain's epic,
the "Romancero del Cid," has made its hero the historic Cid for all
time, just as Shakespeare's genius vitalized a Henry V. Don Roderick
Díaz de Bivar was born under the castle hill of Burgos in 1026, some
small monuments standing on the site of his _casa solar_. He was a
champion of popular rights, generous, chivalrous, faithful ever to his
wife Jimena, a true guerrilla warrior, like the men of his age,
sometimes crafty and cruel. The Cid was every inch a man, as his fellow
countrymen are eminently _varonil_, his hold on the heart of the people
is secure. There are no poems in the world whose lines ring and clang
more valiantly than the "Romancero." Here is untamed red blood and
courage:
"With bucklers braced before their breasts, with lances pointing low,
With stooping crests and heads bent down above the saddle-bow,
All firm of hand and high of heart, they roll upon the foe.
And he that in a good hour was born, his clarion voice rings out,
And clear above the clang of arms is heard his battle-shout,
'Among them, gentlemen! Strike home for love of charity!
The Champion of Bivar is here--Ruy Díaz--I am he!'
Then bearing where Bermúez still maintains unequal fight
Three hundred lances down they come, their pennons flickering white;
Down go three hundred Moors to earth, a man to every blow;
And when they wheel, three hundred more, as charging back they go.
It was a sight to see the lances rise and fall that day;
The shivered shields and riven mail, to see how thick they lay;
The pennons that went in snow-white came out a gory red;
The horses running riderless, the riders lying dead;
While Moors called on Mohammed, and 'St. James' the Christians cry."[6]
Wandering minstrels sang these _chansons de gestes_ for centuries, till
they were a very part of the nation. The wooing of Jimena is strong with
the unconscious vigor of those times. The Cid had slain her father in
combat:
"But when the fair Jimena came forth to plight her hand,
Rodrigo gazing on her, his face could not command;
He stood and blushed before her; then at the last said he,
'I slew thy sire, Jimena, but not in villany:
In no disguise I slew him, man against man I stood,
There was some wrong between us, and I did shed his blood.
I slew a man, I owe a man; fair lady, by God's grace,
An honored husband thou shalt have in thy dead father's place.'"
And to the end the free-lance warrior proved a gallant husband. The
ballad of their wedding feast was often in my mind in the silent streets
of Burgos.
"Within his hall of Burgos the king prepares the feast,
He makes his preparation for many a noble guest,
It is a joyful city, it is a gallant day,
'Tis the Campeador's wedding, and who will bide away?
They have scattered olive branches and rushes on the street,
And the ladies flung down garlands at the Campeador's feet,
With tapestry and broidery their balconies between,
To do his bridal honor, their walls the burghers screen.
They lead the bulls before them all covered o'er with trappings,
The little boys pursue them with hootings and with clappings,
The fool with cap and bladder upon his ass goes prancing
Amid troops of captive maidens with bells and cymbals dancing."[7]
The old poet must have written with his eye straight on his subject;
those eleventh century urchins baiting the bulls are startlingly
realistic. When the Cid died, at Valencia, in 1099, still called on the
maps Valencia del Cid, he was placed in full armor on his battle horse,
Bavieca, and brought to San Pedro de Cardeña, eight miles from Burgos.
Thither Jimena retired, and on her death was laid with her husband. The
faithful horse, famous in the "Romancero" as Jimena herself, was buried
under a tree of the convent near his master. For the Cid had left word,
"When you bury Bavieca, dig deep. For shameful thing were it that he
should be eaten by curs who hath trod down so much currish flesh of
Moors." To-day Bavieca's master does not lie in the quiet dignity of San
Pedro. After various vicissitudes his remains are kept in a chest in
the city hall of Burgos, not the most appropriate of sepulchers for a
national hero.
On the last day of our stay in the old Gothic city, we climbed the hill
from which it doubtless got its name, Burg, a fortified eminence. The
castle where the Cid was married is a complete ruin, for when the French
evacuated the fort in 1813 they blew it up. On every side stretched the
level melancholy plain, and silhouetted against it was the elaborate
stone lace-work of the Cathedral. For long I looked out on the
remarkable landscape, so far from beautiful yet so thought arousing.
Little by little I was learning how a race can be ascetic to its inmost
core yet express itself in grandiose architecture; exalted in soul yet
the most realistic people in Europe; serious and dignified, yet
childlike in their zest of life. Here was man in his unsubtle vigor, not
so liberal that he had no creed left, not so polished that he had lost
the power of first wonder and emotion. Life was lived here, not analyzed
and missed.
VALLADOLID
"They have no song the sedges dry
And still they sing,
It is within my heart they sing as I pass by,
Within my heart they touch a spring,
They wake a sigh,
There is but sound of sedges dry
In me they sing."
GEORGE MEREDITH.
From Burgos to Valladolid the monotonous Castile plain continued,
unbroken by any hill and hardly a tree. Yet evening on the level steppes
has a charm of its own. Like sunset at sea, nature has a free sweep of
canvas on which to paint her pageant; details eliminated, the essential
remains. One carries away many such memories from the silent plateau,
till little by little the affection of the grave Castilian for his home
is understood.
On leaving Burgos there had occurred an amusing station scene. The man
at the ticket office told us we could not start till the following day,
as the train, on the point of arriving, was already full. So in
discouragement we turned back to the distant hotel. Half way there a
messenger from the station overtook us to say they had telegraphed
ahead that there would be a few seats in the second class. We returned
in time to board the packed train, and since it was the express to
Madrid the second class carriages were excellent. As was the custom all
over Spain, the hotel bus at Valladolid was waiting, and drove us
immediately to the inn, where we had the usual bare but clean rooms, and
the usual well-cooked generous dinner: if the trains were to pick us up
as they chose, at any rate we were not going to starve or be eaten
alive.
It is well to have the first view of Valladolid by night as we did,
under an early moon, for in the daytime it is modern, flat, and
unpicturesque, a sharp contrast to Burgos. The moonlight soon tempted us
out to explore the town. In the Plaza Mayor all was animation, an
unbroken promenade of people under the arcades before the gay shops,
officers in bright uniforms, and ladies in Parisian hats; it might have
been any provincial city in Europe. Apart from this active lung of the
town, the quiet streets were so deserted that our footsteps roused a
startling echo. We passed under the huge fragment of the Cathedral, a
nave only; the transepts stand roofless, and a new ruin is as depressing
a thing as there is in life. The architect of the Escorial who designed
this, Herrera, gave his name to the pseudo-classic style, "art made
tongue-tied by authority," that followed the Plateresque abuse of
ornament, just as his in turn was succeeded by the fantastic prancing
art of Churriguera, again a reaction. An example of this last, the
University, stood in the square near the Cathedral, and even the kindly
moonlight could not soften the overladen meaningless mass; the cold
severe lines of Herrera were dignified and regrettable in comparison.
For me a Churrigueresque building is the ne plus ultra of bad taste in
architecture, and Spain has a wealth of them. That man can raise a
Santiago and a León, and some four hundred years later a San Isidro of
Madrid, that the same race can carve a Pórtico de la Gloria and the
Transparente of Toledo, show interesting possibilities of retrogression!
Alas! we thought, after the strong old Gothic of Burgos, is Valladolid
going to be just barren like its Cathedral and chaotic like its
University? We went on in the moonlight and came to a white gleaming
plaza where a church of the thirteenth century stood isolated, Santa
María la Antigua, with a beautiful Lombard tower, and also that feature
peculiar to Romanesque art in Spain, an outside cloister for the laity.
This was decidedly better.
The next morning when we came to explore the town, though we found no
Gothic, we had our first introduction to a phase of architecture which
is confined to the Peninsula. It coincided with Isabella's reign, and
was a characteristic outburst of its new wealth and conquests,
appropriately efflorescent and grandiose, though if carried one step
beyond it would be decadent. This short period is called Plateresque,
from _platero_, silversmith, for its elaborate surface decoration of
scrolls, medallions, and heraldic ornament is sublimated smith's work.
It occurred during the transition from Gothic to Renaissance, so it
combined itself with either one or the other of these styles. It may be
dull to give these pedagogical details and yet, as I hinted, if one is
to understand Spain, one must have some smattering of architecture.
Valladolid is worth stopping to see on one's entrance to Spain, if it
were only for the clear-cut summary it gives of the different schools,
always excepting Gothic. As it and Salamanca were the two places where
the silversmith's art flourished, so they are the two centers for the
best Plateresque buildings. They happen to be, unfortunately, the two
cities that suffered most from the French invasion. Their churches and
colleges were pillaged and battered, and though in modern times they
have been restored, the first touch of perfection, "the first fine
careless rapture" can never be recaught.
[Illustration: THE FAÇADE OF SAN GREGORIO, VALLADOLID]
Valladolid has three notable examples of Plateresque, San Pablo, San
Gregorio, and the Colegio de Santa Cruz. If you have a weakness for
the art of the builder this introduction to the rich and admirable
expression of Spain at the zenith of her material power is an occasion.
There is an excitement in coming on something original which has not
been hackneyed by photograph. Thus, when I first entered the square
where San Pablo's façade rises, I stood still in astonishment; I had
never seen anything like this, and at first I could not tell if I liked
it or not. Tier on tier soared the carved shields and crests, bizarre
but nevertheless stately. Close by was the even stranger façade of San
Gregorio, one vast crest with elaborate arabesques and statues. Being
founded by the great primate of Toledo, Cardinal Ximenez, it was
appropriate to meet here in the courtyard with some Mudéjar work,
Christian and Moorish elements combined. It was in this convent that the
Dominican, Bartolomé Las Casas, "Apostle of the Indians," spent the last
twenty years of his energetic, troubled life, writing his history of the
Colonies. He died at the advanced age of ninety-two, "A man who would
have been remarkable in any age of the world," says Ticknor, "and who
does not seem yet to have gathered in the full harvest of his honours."
The third of the Plateresque buildings, well within Renaissance lines
this last, the College of the Holy Cross founded by Cardinal Mendoza,
now contains a grammar school, a library of some thousand volumes open
to the public, and the Museum of the city.
On no account should the _Museo_ be missed, for it holds a wonderful
collection of wood carvings, an art which is to Spain what Italy's
frescoes are to her: these statues were gathered chiefly from convents
sacked by the French. Valladolid was personally associated with this
national development, for most of the master-carvers lived at one time
or another in the city. Spain's best sculptor, Berruguete, worked for
years for the monks of San Benito, the _retablo_ of whose church is now
in detached statues in the museum. He had studied under Michael Angelo,
and though he had a distinct personality of his own, he plainly showed
Italian influence. His pupil, Esteban Jordán, lived here, also the
exaggerated Juan de Juní, and a more famous master, Alonzo Cano, painter
and architect too. Cano, who died a canon in Granada Cathedral, is said
to have fled the town--his house is still pointed out--when accused of
the murder of his wife, though later investigations have thrown doubt on
the whole story. This irascible master, one of the warmest hearted of
men underneath, taught drawing to the Don Baltasar Carlos whom Velasquez
painted, and I fear the infante found him very cross at times. Velasquez
and Cano were friends and must have talked over that charming little
prince. Cano was indeed a character. When a corporation demurred at the
price of a statue he had made for them he shattered the image with a
blow; and on his death bed he could not bring himself to kiss an
inartistic crucifix, saying, "Give me a plain cross that I may venerate
_Jesucristo_ as he is pictured in my own mind."
The room of coarsely-carved statues, formerly used in the Holy Week
processions, should be passed with a glance, but the collection of
smaller works deserves long study. The most beautiful group I thought
was the Baptism in the Jordan by a later carver, Gregorio Hernández, of
Galicia, who died in Valladolid in 1636. His art is not classic, indeed
most Spanish sculptors cared little for the ideal perfection of the
human body, their strength lay in the individual portrait, not in
rendering a type. Hernández softened the crudity or the realist school
to which he belonged by depicting nobility of face and bearing. The
scene of the Jordan is a panel with the two chief figures life-sized in
full relief. The Baptist, his well-modeled limbs strong from life in the
desert, leans forward to pour the river water on the head of his Lord,
with an expression of such vivid rapture and awe that it holds you
spellbound. There is little in art that can surpass this in emotional
sincerity. The story of the Gospel is told to its fullest possibility.
What the sculptor felt in every fiber he has succeeded in making others
feel, and though an expression so poignant may not be highest art, it
justifies itself by its direct appeal to the human heart. It is told of
Hernández that he never undertook a work till he had first prayed. He
has here also a statue of St. Teresa, spoiled by the heavy paint, and a
bust of St. Anne, successfully colored. Even if you are prepared to find
the wood carvings painted it frets you; it almost spoils the statues,
but it was the custom and must be accepted. "_Es la costumbre_" is a
closing argument in a country whose link with the past has never been
rudely broken.
If her remarkable wood carvings come as a surprise, so will some of the
practical developments of this small progressive city. The hospital that
looks out on the leafy park of the Magdalena is run in approved modern
fashion. A brisk young doctor who spoke English, having learned from a
friend in the English College here, showed us over the wards with
legitimate pride. They radiated from a big central rotunda; on both
sides of each ward were large windows and at the end of each a pretty
altar. There were five hundred public beds, and private rooms were to be
had for the sum of two dollars a week! The greeting between doctor and
patients was a pleasant thing to see,--he chatted and joked with the
children, and, as we left, stopped at the door to lift with real
kindness an ill man who had just arrived in a gayly-painted country
cart. The newcomer was a gentle-faced Castilian, whose sons had brought
him in from the plains; as the stalwart boys carried the trembling old
man I thought of another touching hospital scene. Perhaps Rab and his
friends came to my mind because bounding round us on our visit to the
hospital was a beautiful Scotch collie. "Laddie" was an unfamiliar sight
on a Spanish street; he belonged to the English College and is a great
pet of the seminarians.
In Valladolid are two foreign institutions: the Scotch college, founded
by a Colonel Semple in 1627; and the English, which continues the
foundation of St. Albans, and has relics of its name-saint of the third
century. It was endowed in Spain by Sir Francis Englefield, who retired
here after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Some forty English
students are educated for the priesthood and return on their ordination
for work in their native land. Naturally the great hour of this college
was during the religious persecutions under Elizabeth, when it was death
to be a priest in England. Twenty-seven from this one small group were
executed. Their portraits hang along the cloisters: Cadwallader, Stark,
Bell, Walpole, Weston, Sutheron,--each of the heroic band started from
these quiet halls to meet a martyr's death.
Controversy is out of date, I hope, to-day. But there is such a thing as
fair-mindedness, and a visit to Spain at every step shows she has not
had her share of it from English-speaking peoples. With every chapter of
our guide book railing at the Inquisition, I could not help feeling that
these martyred Englishmen should not be so completely forgotten. Not
that the _tu quoque_ argument excuses persecution on either side. But an
age should be judged by its own ethics or true views of history are
impossible. The New Englanders who, two hundred years later than
Isabella's institution, hanged a few Quakers on Boston Common were none
the less moral men; and General Robert E. Lee fighting for slavery in
the nineteenth century is a man we have a right to admire. The mere fact
of the Inquisition being founded by that magnanimous woman called by
Bacon "an honor to her sex and the cornerstone of the greatness of
Spain" should tell us its motives were sincere. Her age had not yet
learned the lesson, which we have acquired slowly, bit by bit through
experience, that political or religious existence is possible with
divided factions, not only possible but that a nation is more vigorous
because of them. As Bishop Creighton wisely says: "The modern conception
of free discussion and free thought is not so much the result of a
firmer gasp of moral principles as it is the result of the discovery
that uniformity is not necessary for the maintenance of political
unity." Isabella's age agreed that persecution was necessary to preserve
Christianity. And since only Spain was in immediate contact with Islam,
and centuries of crusade against the invading infidel had the natural
result of making the Spaniard sternly orthodox, it was there that the
Inquisition flourished.
It dragged on for over three centuries, and from 1481 to 1812, 35,000
people were burned,[8] these numbers being Richard Ford's, to whom the
Inquisition was as a red rag to a bull. The German scholar Schack
acknowledges that all the Moors and heretics burned in Spain by the
Holy Office do not equal the women witches burned alive in Germany
during the seventeenth century alone. In France, in the one night of St.
Bartholomew, almost as many victims fell as during the whole three
hundred years of the Inquisition. Of England the publishing of recent
investigations makes it needless to speak; blood flowed in torrents
there. Besides those well known ones who met death under Mary Tudor, the
Catholic martyrdoms give such details as the "Scavenger's Daughter,"
that cramping circle of iron; "Little Ease," where a prisoner, could not
sit or stand or lie down; needles thrust under the nails; the
rack-master of the Tower boasting he had made Alexander Briant longer by
a foot than God had made him; the general custom of cutting down the
victim from the gallows while still alive to tear out his heart and
quarter him,--accounts that put the _Autos da Fé_ in the shade. In the
annals of Spain is not a scene that equals the blood curdling horror of
the martyrdom in Dorchester, England, of Hugh Green in the year 1642.[9]
Yet an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, if fanaticism or cruelty are
mentioned, makes his inevitable trite reference to the Spanish
Inquisition. It has been made the scape-goat of all religious
persecution. Abuse has so fixed the idea that it was a barbarous machine
controlled by contorted natures to whom bloodshed was a revelry that any
effort to place it in a truer light is sure to be called retrogression.
I am far from attempting a defense of this painful aberration of the
Christian mind, but what I hold is, if a student went to the records of
Alcalá and Simancas, open free to all, not to search out the hundred
mistaken cases from the ten thousand proven ones, the method up to this,
but, following the first law of intellectual work, investigation without
preconceived bias, if he tried to understand this phase of man's slow
development _per errorem ad veritatem_, then the thin-lipped,
gleaming-eyed, bloodthirsty Inquisitor of the popular fancy would be
taken from the pillory where he has been pelted these centuries past,
and his mistaken sincerity stand justified by the conditions of his
time.
The records prove that the Holy Office was used seldom against scholars
but against relapsed Mohammedans and Jews, false _beati_, sorcerers, and
witches. "_Ningún hombre de mérito científico fué quemado por la
Inquisición_," is the clear statement of one of the greatest of living
scholars, Menéndez y Pelayo, and he who would cross swords with that
erudite champion must be sure indeed of his assertions. Not one Spanish
thinker or statesman, such as Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More, the
Carthusian priors, Houghton, Webster, and Laurence, the poet Robert
Southwell, the scholarly Edmund Campion, and a host of others,[10]
graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, executed for their faith during the
hundred and fifty years of religious persecution in England, not one man
of like standing was put to death in Spain. Had he been, some righteous
hater of the "ferocious Inquisitors," would ere this have produced his
name and works. Archbishop Talavera was accused but was finally
justified; if the poet Luis de León was imprisoned, he was set free on
examination. It was not his own countrymen but Calvin in Geneva, who had
the Spanish scholar, the Unitarian, Miguel Servet burned alive, and it
was the mild Melanchthon who wrote to the reformer saying: "The Church
owes thee gratitude. I maintain that the tribunal has acted in
accordance with justice in having put to death a blasphemer." In Germany
at that period the civil courts inflicted capital punishment on sorcery,
blasphemy, and church robbery; had the same law held in Spain the
number of the Inquisition executions would be appreciably lowered. Lord
Bacon, who was a just and humane man, mentions as a matter of course
that in his time the English civil courts used torture: the Peninsula
was not ahead of its time in this respect.
As for that debated subject the effect on the Spanish character of the
_Santo Oficio_, prejudices have built up so twisted a labyrinth that the
best way out for one who would keep his level-headed balance is to hold
fast to the thread of internal evidence. Unconscious of writing history
for the future, hence his unassailable veracity, Cervantes tells in
detail of the life in court and tavern, in the town and on the desolate
highways after the Inquisition had flourished for more than a century.
Does he portray a degraded race, finger on lips whispering, "Hush, or
you will be overheard"? If the Spaniard was ground down in fear and
deceit why is it that to-day, of all the peoples of the continent, he is
the most independent in character? It has been said that a burgher of
Amsterdam does not differ more from a Neapolitan, than a Basque from an
Andalusian, yet in this trait of sturdy independence all Spaniards are
alike; the historian Ticknor wrote during his stay in Spain, "The lower
class is, I think, the finest _material_ I have met in Europe to make a
great and generous people." If under the Inquisition "every
intellectual impulse was repressed,"[11] how dared theologians and
philosophers, such as Vives, Isla, and Feijóo boldly attack with their
pens superstitions and degenerated religious customs? Is the poetry of
Juan de la Cruz, Luis de León and the prose of Teresa, the work of souls
who feared to adore their God freely? And is it not undeniable that the
two golden centuries of Spanish art and literature flourished under this
bugbear horror, this "_coco de niños y espantajo de bobos_," as Menéndez
y Pelayo calls it?
Used chiefly against Judaism and Islamism, occasionally the Inquisition
became the tool of a tyrannic king for private vengeance. Indeed, there
are some historians such as von Ranke, Lenormant, de Maistre, who hold
it to have been more a royal than an ecclesiastic instrument, fostered
by the Hapsburgs to augment their autocratic rule.[12] Certainly all
confiscated property went to the Crown.
Man's slow development _per errorem ad veritatem_, slow indeed one may
say, in the face of certain realities of our own time. Happily the
generations of cant and holier-than-thou are passing, and we are looking
history more honestly in the face. It is dawning on us that religious
persecution in 1492 is no more frightful than slavery in 1860 or an
Opium War in 1843.
Modern Spain realizes the wrong of persecution, the farce of a religion
of love using the sword, as thoroughly as does every other civilized
country. Outside the church of St. Philip Neri in Cadiz is a tablet
proudly commemorating the abolition of the Inquisition within its walls
in 1812.
To return to less nettlesome themes. The little English College, so
interesting a memorial of past history, a forgotten haven of refuge in
Old Spain, must be a peaceful memory to look back on by priests whose
later lives are spent in Birmingham or London slums. The pleasant
sitting-room of each inmate, the recreation hall with its theater, the
library, with the latest English books jostling old Spanish tomes,--all
spoke of contented full days. We turned the parchment leaves where the
college records for its three hundred years in Spain have been kept,
where each student is mentioned, from the troubled first days down to
the group of ten who had arrived from England a week before our visit,
among them a young Reginald Vaughan, nephew of the Cardinal.
With up-to-date hospital and busy manufactures, Valladolid does not seem
like an ancient capital of the Spanish court. We would read in our guide
book that the miserable Juan II had his favorite of a lifetime, Álvaro
de Luna, beheaded in the big square; that here Juan's noble daughter
married Ferdinand of Aragon; and that, seated on a throne in the Plaza
Mayor, Charles V pardoned the remaining Comuneros, the rebels who had
dared assert the federal principle against his centralization of
government, Spain's last outcry before she sank under the blighting
tyranny of her Hapsburg and Bourbon rulers. Such past happenings were
interesting, but they would have the same meaning if read of in London
or Boston. However, there were two memories of Valladolid that were
vivid enough to haunt one as one walked about its hum-drum streets: they
are associated with the saddest hours of two supreme men.
No. 7 Calle de Cristóbal Colón is the insignificant house where
Isabella's High Admiral died in 1506, in obscurity and neglect, his
patroness dead, and Ferdinand ungrateful. A hundred years later, in
another small house, now owned by the government, Cervantes lived in
poverty. Unknown and undivined he walked these streets, looking at the
passers-by with his wise, tolerant eyes. Fresh, perhaps, from writing
the monologue on the Golden Age, delivered by the Don over a few brown
acorns of inspiration, Cervantes in threadbare cape went to his humble
scrivener's work, the golden time of justice and kindness existing only
in his own gallant heart. It was in Valladolid that the ladies of his
household, widowed sisters, niece, his daughter and wife, sewed to gain
their daily bread, and as if penury were not enough, here they were
thrown into prison because a young noble, wounded in a street brawl, was
carried into their house to die.
Cervantes' life reads like one of the romantic tales he loves to digress
with in his great novel, when grandee, barber and priest, court lady,
Eastern damsel, and _labrador's_ daughter, gather round the inn
table--the servants a natural part of the group--in the easy meeting of
the classes which is still a reality in Spain. Born at Alcalá,
Cervantes' first bent was toward literature, but having gone to Rome in
the suite of a cardinal, in Italy he joined the army against the
infidel. He fought at Lepanto, where his bravery drew on him the notice
of Don John of Austria, that alluring young leader of whom one of his
state council wrote, "Nature had endowed him with a cast of countenance
so gay and pleasing that there was hardly anyone whose good-will and
love he did not immediately win." It makes a pleasant picture, the visit
of this high-spirited young hero to his wounded soldier in the hospital
of Messina. Later, Cervantes fought at Naples, at Tunis, in Lombardy,
making part of his century's stirring history, and all the while storing
his mind with the culture of Italy. It was when returning to Spain that
some Algerian pirates took him prisoner. His five years' captivity in
Africa stand an unsurpassed exhibition of grandeur of character, proving
that the highest gifts of mind and heart go together in perfect accord.
Loaded with chains, twice brought to be hanged with a rope around his
neck, his knightly spirit rose above all misery. There were twenty-five
thousand wretched Christians then in bondage in Algiers. Cervantes
waited on the sick, shared his food with the more destitute, encouraged
the despairing,--a Christian in the fullest sense of the word is the
testimony of a Fray Juan Gil, who, belonging to a brotherhood for the
redemption of prisoners, worked for his release. In this harsh school
"_donde aprendió a tener paciencia en las adversidades_"--the
adversities that were to follow him all his life--was chastened to
self-effacement and a sublime patience an ardent spirit that by nature
chafed against wrong.
What wonder that the late flowering of this man's soul, the book written
when past middle age, should be of chivalry all compact, a nobility of
sentiment exposed half seriously, half in jest! What wonder that in the
midst of laughter the voice breaks with tenderness for the lovable
_caballero andante_! His Quixote is Cervantes' own unquenchable spirit.
A bitter experience of life never deadened his faith in man nor dulled
his heroic gayety. With exquisite humor he realized the alien aspect of
such trust and love and faith in the disillusioning realities of life,
so he veiled it all under the kindly cloak of a cracked-brained knight.
The wandering adventures of a fool make the wisest, most human-hearted
book ever written.
Toward the end of his slavery, when Cervantes passed into the hands of
the viceroy of Algiers, Hassan Pasha, his force of character gained
influence over the tyrant. But he asked too high a ransom for the
captive's family to pay. The priest who had watched the young soldier on
his deeds of mercy, worked indefatigably for his release. A letter was
sent to Philip II to beg aid for a soldier of Lepanto. At length three
hundred ducats were raised. Hassan Pasha asked a thousand. Already was
Cervantes chained to the oar of a galley, bound for Constantinople, when
at the last hour Father Gil, helped by some Christian merchants,
succeeded in raising five hundred ducats, which ransom the Viceroy
accepted.
At thirty-four years of age, Cervantes again stepped on Spanish soil.
But the world was then much as it is now; years had passed since
Lepanto,--he was forgotten. His patron Don John of Austria had died in
Flanders two years before his release. He joined the army once more and
fought in the expedition against the Azores; then seeing there was no
chance of advancement, he returned to his first career, that of letters.
His plays and poems had small success: a pathetic phrase in the scene
where the _cura_ burns Quixote's books and comes on an epic by one,
Cervantes, "better versed in poverty and misfortunes than in verses,"
has deeper meaning when his checkered career is known.
Twenty-five years of obscurity and abject poverty succeeded each other,
his lot so lowly it is hard to trace his steps. Whole years remain a
blank. The brave heart never flagged, no bitterness tinged his kindly
tolerance. This Castilian hidalgo of ripe culture earned his bread in
the humblest ways. 1588 found him in Seville as commissary victualer for
the Great Armada. Tradition says he visited La Mancha, the desert he was
to immortalize, to collect tithes for a priory of St. John, and that the
villagers in anger cast him into prison, where he conceived the idea of
his novel. This child of his wit he hints to us was born in a jail. The
sad years in Valladolid followed, and there in 1605, at fifty-eight
years of age, he published the first part of "Don Quixote."
Its success was immediate. The grace of the style, the inimitable humor,
and the underflowing current of mellow wisdom, made it from the start,
what Sainte-Beuve called it, "the book of humanity." However, its
publication did not much better Cervantes' fortunes. He retired to
Madrid, where he lived on a small pension from the Archbishop of Toledo.
A French noble visiting Spain asked for the famous author, and was told,
"He who had made all the world rich was poor and infirm though a soldier
and a gentleman."
In 1613 appeared his "Novelas Exemplares," a remarkable collection of
tales which gave Scott the idea of the Waverley novels. The second part
of "Don Quixote," equal to the first in vigor and charm, appeared when
Cervantes was sixty; "his foot already in the stirrup," he gives us in a
preface, the moving description of himself. In the latter part of his
life, according to a custom of the time, he became a tertiary of the
Franciscan Order, and on his death in 1616 they buried him humbly in the
convent of nuns in Madrid, where his daughter was a religious. Ill
fortune still pursued him, for to-day there is no trace of his last
resting-place.
It is with thoughts of this heroic life--this man lovable as his own
Don, with a gentle stammer in his speech, and the kindly wise look in
his eyes, his left hand maimed from Lepanto, his shoulders bowed and his
chestnut hair turned to silver by the ceaseless calamities of life--it
is with such memories one looks down from the high-road on the small
house where he wrote his masterpiece. Columbus on his deathbed, and
Cervantes in poverty writing "Quixote"--two such associations make a
visit to Valladolid memorable.
OVIEDO IN THE ASTURIAS
"It is perfectly ridiculous to pretend that, because they dress the
Madonna and saints in rich robes, the Spaniards are ignorant that a
statue is but a symbol. They sing their faith, we whisper ours, but
the words have the same meaning, and the same thought is in the
mind ... Draw a bias line enclosing the Basque provinces,--Navarre,
Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, and you have there old religious Spain
as she appears in history, with a vivid and practical faith, an
irreproachable clergy, a piety of the heart reflected in the
manners."--RENÉ BAZIN.
We left Valladolid toward evening, in order to stop over a night in
Palencia, before going north to Asturias. The cathedral of Palencia is
well worth the pause, even though the visit may be limited to a night in
the Continental Inn and a hasty daybreak visit to the church; the small
cities of central Spain are of so individual a character that each
stamps itself separately and indelibly on the memory.
The dawn was just breaking on a raw, rainy morning when we walked
through the silent streets of the town. In spite of the early hour, near
each of the water fountains stood a long row of antique-shaped jars,
some of red clay, some like old silver. For each housewife places her
jar in line, and when the drinking water is turned on, each fills her
crock in turn, according as it was put in the row. At the biblical wells
of Palestine the Syrian women to-day use ugly, square Rockefeller oil
cans, but happily conservative Spain is not partial to innovations. It
was on this early morning walk that I first noticed the white palm
leaves, some six feet in length, fastened to the balconies or above a
window. One finds them all over the country. They are from the palm
forests of Elche in the south, and each Easter new ones are blessed and
hung out on the houses, some say to guard against lightning. Later, in
Madrid, we saw one decorating the King's palace.
The Cathedral of Palencia is of the same tawny yellow as the plains
about it. The east end is early Gothic, the western part of a later,
weaker period. Like Salisbury it has the uncommon feature of two sets of
transepts; the clearstory is carried round the church, unbroken by rose
windows at the west or transept ends. The interior in the dim light of a
rainy October morning was picturesque past description. There are times
when the chances of travel bring one to a spot at just its perfect hour.
Thus we saw this church in a moment of such exquisite half light and
quietude that its memory is a possession for life. Behind the High Altar
rose an isolated chapel, set detached in the midst of the ambulatory,
and through its iron _rejas_ were seen the blurred glimmer of candles,
the veiled kneeling figures of the people, an aged white-haired priest
at the Altar; high upon the wall the coffin of the ancient Queen Urraca.
The effect was indescribable,--austere, ascetic, yet with a passionate
glamour essentially Spanish. A masterpiece could an artist make of this
detached chapel, lighted for divine service each day at dawn with such
unconscious naturalness.
Architects may say that Spanish cathedrals are exaggerated and
overloaded, that they lack the restraint and purity of line of Chartres,
Amiens, and the Isle de France churches which are the world's best
Gothic. All this may well be true, yet Spain can smile securely at
criticism. She has a soul in her places of worship, a soaring exaltation
of the imagination that imparts the assurance of a living faith. Firmly
and ardently she believes in Jesus Christ, her Redeemer, and with all
her lofty intensity she prostrates herself in worship.
We wandered round the dusky aisles, deciphering tombs, some of whose
effigies held their arms raised in prayer,--only a Spaniard could endure
to look even at such a tiring attitude! But the time for loitering was
limited. The transept clock, a knight, a Moor, and a lion, sounded the
warning we must heed if we were to catch the early train for the North.
The thoughtful innkeeper had saved us some precious minutes by sending
the hotel omnibus to wait outside the Cathedral, and we rattled--in its
literal sense--to the distant station. The city was at last fully awake,
and each water jar had now an owner; one by one they followed each other
at the pump, with pleasant greetings and chatter.
Then again stretched the tawny plains. The fields of León were tractless
wastes of mud from the rain of the past weeks. Seen from the car window,
each village on the truncated mountain was the exact copy of its
neighbor, the same monotonous note of color in adobe wall and denuded
steppe. It was in vain to look for some distinction to mark one group of
mud houses, called Paredes de Nava, birthplace of Spain's best sculptor
Berruguete, from a similar mud-emblocked place called Cisneros, feudal
home of Cardinal Ximenez's family; the imagination had to supply the
difference.
Every one must come prepared for Spanish trains to go at a leisurely
pace--about fifteen miles an hour is the average of the express route.
From Palencia to Oviedo was a twelve-hour trip, and the distance covered
was a hundred and sixty miles. Of course one crossed the Cantabrian
mountains, the continuation of the Pyrenees along the northern coast,
and they are no slight barrier since they sometimes rise to a height of
8,000 feet.
We passed the city of León toward noon, when there came a respite from
the dull treeless plain, for, beyond the town stretched a thinly-wooded
district which gave the first reminder since leaving the Basque valleys
that the season still was autumn. After central Spain, the bleak hills
that now began seemed positively beautiful,--so many pleasures are
relative.
Slowly the train climbed the mountain wall that from earliest times has
protected the Asturian principality from the invader. Near the summit,
emerging from a tunnel several miles long, we looked out over a glorious
panorama, the beauty not being relative this time, but as truly
magnificent as some of Switzerland's show views. The storm had covered
the peaks with freshest snow, the sky was a frosty dark blue, mountain
rose behind mountain for miles, the white road was flung a sinuous
ribbon round the folds of the hills; below lay fertile valleys of
greenest grass with greenest trees and happy nestling farms. The secure
mountain wall gave the Asturian courage to build a home wherever his
whim chose. He was not forced like the Castilian by centuries of Moorish
inroads to herd in a compact town.
As the puffing train waited for breathing space on the crest of the
pass, a group of peasants boarded it. They wore the white wooden clogs
of the province that differ from ordinary clogs by having stilts, a
couple of inches high, to lift them above the mud; and they brought with
them, on a sledge, as wheels are of no use up these steep hills, an
antique curiosity of a trunk. We began to hope that old costumes and
customs still held in this isolated corner of the world, though the
engineering of the road in the descent was disturbingly up-to-date,--a
series of loops, cuts, and sharp turns; sometimes three parallel lines
of rail over which we were to pass lay one below the other, sometimes
directly across the valley we saw our trail; a distance of twenty-six
miles is covered where a crow would fly seven.
The principality of Asturias has given its name to the heir apparent of
the Spanish crown since the 14th century, when a daughter of the Duke of
Lancaster married the Spanish king's eldest son, and her father claimed
for her a title equal to that of Prince of Wales to the English throne.
The connection by marriage between Spain and England has been a frequent
one. It began in the 12th century, when Henry II's daughter married
Alfonso VIII of Castile; later the Plantagenet Edward I had for wife a
Spanish infanta. From the two daughters of Pedro the Cruel, who married
into the English royal family, on one side descended Henry VIII, from
the other, by a marriage back again in Spain, sprang Isabella the
Catholic. After the ill-fated union of Isabella's daughter with Henry
VIII and that of Mary Tudor and Philip II, connection by marriage
between Spain and England ceased for centuries. To-day, as all the world
knows, the young queen of Spain, Doña Victoria, with the same blonde
hair as Isabella, is an Englishwoman, and a rosy little prince bears the
title of these distant mountains.
It is a fitting title for the heir to the throne, since this province is
the cradle of Spanish nationality, and never was vassal to Roman or
Moor. The people are a mixture of the aboriginal Iberians and the
Visigoths who were here finally merged in one people and here
reconstructed the Spanish monarchy. So proud is an Asturian of his
origin that he thinks, like the Basques, that his mere birth confers
nobility; every native of the province is an hidalgo. Did not the
Asturian lady, the duenna of the Duchess, remark to Don Quixote that her
husband was _hidalgo como el Rey porque era montañés_?
When in 711 the last of the Gothic kings, Roderick, was defeated by the
Moors who had lately crossed from Africa, a remnant of the Christian
army took refuge in these northern mountains. At Cavadonga, an historic
defeat was inflicted on the Moslem army in 718, by Pelayo, Spain's
first king, chosen leader because he was the bravest of the people. The
Moorish chronicle, too close to the struggle to see its vital issues,
speaks of "one Belay, a contemptible barbarian who roused the people of
Asturish."
Without Cavadonga the face of Europe had been changed. Had not the
Mussulmans from Africa met this repulse, they had pushed on beyond the
Pyrenees before the Franks were strong enough to withstand them. Often
rose this thought when reading the sentimental regrets for the Moors in
Spain found in guide books and histories. Had Spain not warred for eight
hundred years against the invader, had she not endured with such Spartan
courage the insecurity of life and property caused by ceaseless forays
from the south, European civilization had been put back for centuries.
Like most virile nations, she has the defect of her qualities, and when
the final victory was hers she went too far. But this should not blind
us to the nobility of the _Reconquista_.
Within reach of Cavadonga, sacred to every Spaniard as the cradle of his
race and religion, I could not help asking the cause of the ceaseless
regret for the Moor. A lover of the picturesque, like Washington Irving,
has a right to gloss over the days of the Alhambra, but it seems strange
for serious history to hold up the Mohammedan in Spain as a model of
cleanliness, industry, and tolerance in contrast to the Christian, in
face of the centuries of piracy by sea, the barbarity of African prisons
where thousands of Spaniards languished in chains, and also--a thought
that often came to me when walking through the filthy, narrow streets in
Moslem countries--if the Moor in Spain is to be so regretted, why are
not the northern cities of Africa models for modern Christians to
emulate? The Moor came from them, and many of his race left Spain to
return to them. I would not belittle the Arab civilization in the
Peninsula, for under the Ommiade dynasty, Cordova reached a
distinguished height of culture, but what I object to is the partisan
spirit that places Moors on one side to be praised and extenuated, and
Spanish Christians on the other to be condemned. Facts are so distorted
that many think the re-conquest of Andalusia meant the substitution of
backward ignorance for an enlightened rule, whereas the Moors
themselves, long before the coming of their northern conquerors, had
destroyed their own higher civilization. The flower of their culture
(always an exotic, for Islamism as hitherto interpreted is incapable of
strengthening it) was withered before Alfonzo VI and the Cid had set
foot further south than Toledo.
Under the Ommiade caliphs, for about five generations, life probably
resembled the golden picture drawn for us as typical of Moorish sway. A
few able rulers disguised the fact that the government was never
anything else but a despotism. This _siglo de oro_ was well over by
1030. Some barbarous warrior tribes, from Africa, the Almoravides, swept
away the feeble remains of Ommiade rule, to be in their turn routed by
other African invaders, the fanatic Almohades. These last persecuted
Averroës as holding views too liberal for a true Mohammedan, and the
scholar died in misery and exile, just as in the same century the
remarkable Spanish-Jew, Maimonides, was accused of teaching atheism by
his fellow Israelites. Rejected by his own people, the fame of Averroës
came later through his study by European Schoolmen. His teachings, like
most of what is of value in Arab learning, was of Greek origin, and had
reached him by way of Persia, which never wholly conformed to the set
tenets of Islam. Why do the anti-Spanish historians never mention that
in the same era in which Averroës, the philosopher, was persecuted by
his fellow-believers, a college of translators under the patronage of
the Archbishop Raimundo of Toledo, from 1130 to 1150, put into Latin the
most scientific works of the Moors?
Mohammedan civilization in Spain, from decay within, was completely
disintegrated by 1275. The caliphs of Granada led the lives of weak
voluptuaries, artistic but decadent; no rose-colored romancing can veil
their essential decline. Isabella's court, traveling with its
university, with the learned Peter Martyr instructing the young nobles
in Renaissance lore, so that a son of the Duke of Alva, and a cousin of
the King are to be found among the lecturers of Salamanca, presents a
noble contrast. When the _Reconquista_ was achieved, and after three
thousand seven hundred battles, the Spaniard was again master in his own
land, grievous mistakes were made, until finally, in 1609, in a panic of
fear that the corsairs of Africa were uniting with their co-religionists
along the Spanish coasts, the Moriscos were expelled. Spain inflicted
this blow on herself at an ill moment, since already from the enormous
emigration to the New World, her crying need was population. But this
act of bad government whereby she threw away over half a million of her
inhabitants (always remember, however, far more Moorish blood remained
than was lost, for nine centuries of occupation had well infiltered it
through the southern provinces) did not drive out the intellectual and
moral backbone of the land as we are given to understand. The Moors of
Isabella's day were not the liberal-minded, cultivated people they had
been under the Ommiade caliphs four centuries earlier, and the
persecuted Moriscos of Philip III's time were far lower in standing.
Also it cannot be questioned that Valencia, the province that expelled
them, whose rich soil to-day supports a crowded population, quickly
filled up, and soon showed with its irrigation the same industry that
seemed peculiar to the Moors. It was central Spain, eminently "old
Christian," that when its people flocked as adventurers to America,
could offer neither fertile soil nor inviting climate to lure new
settlers. The quotations usually cited to prove that Valencia was
irremediably devastated by the Expulsion are taken from men who wrote
within a few years of the disaster; it would be an easy matter,
following the same sophistry to quote aspects of our South a generation
ago that could make the Civil War appear an irremediable blight.
Seeking for the cause of the tendency to overrate the Moor at the
expense of his hereditary enemy, it seems to me it is to be traced to
that period of rancor, the Invincible Armada, when religious and
political passions ran so high that it was forgotten that the hated
Spaniard was before all else a Christian, and on his heroic struggle for
the Cross had hung the civilization of Europe.
The capital of the Asturian province is Oviedo. Alfonso II, the eighth
king that followed Pelayo, made it his chief city, but in spite of its
antiquity it is a disappointing town. I had pictured an unspoiled bit
of the past, locked in as it is by mountains whose valleys reach to the
city gates, with curiously-named saints still serving as titulars, with
the oldest remains of Christian architecture in the Peninsula. But the
reality is a smug, commonplace, successful little city of slight local
color. The mansions are Renaissance, not mediæval; if you stumble on an
ancient street it soon brings you to a straight new boulevard. Children
in English clothes and ladies dressed like Parisians walk in the park
facing a line of pretentious apartment houses. I asked in the shops for
pictures of the _Cámera Santa_. They could only give me postcards of the
model prison and the model insane asylum. Sleepy little Palencia, with
its rows of classic water jars waiting--time no consideration--till the
water was turned on in the fountains, it seemed hardly possible we had
left it only that morning. The remote old world may be found in central
Spain, but as this is the land of anomalies, the mountain provinces of
the north are busy to-day with mines and commerce. It remains but a
question of time for Bilbao, Santander, Gijón, Coruña, and Vigo, the
northern harbors, to become commercial centers. They are awake at last
and keen to enter the struggle.
This industrial tendency is what we agree in calling progress, and Spain
has been censured for her backwardness in entering the world's
competition, so it is not justifiable to regret the unambitious past.
But who can be consistent in the home of _el ingenioso hidalgo_! From
the moment of entering Spain till we left I leaned now to one side, now
to the other, glad and proud one day to see her new industries, a model
hospital or asylum, and scoffing the next, at a hideous new boulevard
that had relieved a congested district. This land of racy types and
vigorous humanity may be doomed to have factory chimneys belching smoke,
to have lawless mobs of socialists and pitiful slums in cities where now
is frugal poverty, where a beggar lives contentedly next door to a
prince, because he feels the prince recognizes him as his fellow
countryman and fellow Christian: progress and wealth are bought with a
price. Oviedo, just entering the competition, and fast sweeping away its
picturesque past, made me glad to be in time to see something of the old
ways of Spain.
The lion of the city, the Cathedral, adds to this inconsistent feeling
of disappointment. It is the only cathedral of the twenty and more we
were to see that has removed the choir from the nave and placed pews
down the center of the church. At Burgos the heavy blocking mass of the
_coro_ in the nave had startled and bewildered me, but soon I grew so
accustomed to this Spanish usage that a church without it seemed
incomplete. Oviedo has modernized its side chapels, recklessly sweeping
away carvings and sarcophagi. It thought the tombs of Pelayo's
successors, the early kings, were cluttering rubbish, so a good plain
stone, easy to decipher, has been put up in place of the ancient
memorials!
The Cathedral is perpendicular Gothic of the 14th century. The west
façade has a spacious portico, whose effect, however, is lessened by the
church being set so that you descend to it from the street. On one side
of the portico rises the tower, bold and graceful, showing from its base
to its open-lace stone turret an easy gradation of styles. This is the
tower that runs like an echo through a powerful modern novel set in
Oviedo, "La Regenta," by Leopoldo Alas. "_Poema romántica de piedra_,"
he calls it, "_delicado himno de dulces líneas de belleza muda_." Out of
the south transept open cloisters that made, the first day of our visit,
a charming picture in the sunshine after the weeks of cold rain; the red
pendants of the fuschia bushes caught the long-absent warmth with
palpable enjoyment. The shafts of the pillars here were oval shaped, not
a wholly successful change, as in profile view they appeared
unsymmetrical. Out of this south transept also opens the gem of the
church, the _Cámera Santa_, which has escaped the general renovation as
being too closely bound to the historical and religious past of Spain to
be tampered with. Alfonso _el Casto_ in 802 built this shrine, raised
twenty feet from the church pavement to preserve it from damp. A small
room with apostle-figures serving as caryatids leads to the sanctum
sanctorum where the famous relics are kept. They were brought here in a
Byzantine chest from Toledo when the Moors conquered that city, and
probably there are few collections of old jewelers' work equal to them.
Here is kept the cross Pelayo carried as a standard at the battle of
Cavadonga more than eleven hundred years before. Few can help feeling in
Spain the charm of continuous tradition. Never were her treasures
scattered by revolution; that this was Pelayo's very cross is not
problematic but a fact assured by unbroken record.
A printed sheet describing the sacred objects in the _Cámera Santa_ is
given to each visitor. It would be easy to turn many of these relics of
a more naïve, less logical age, into ridicule. To one, however, who
tries to see a new land with comprehending sympathy, to which alone it
will reveal itself, these relics, brought back from the Holy Land by
crusading knight or warrior bishop, are tender memorials of a great hour
of Christian enthusiasm. One of the strongest traits of Spanish
character is reverence for all links that bind it to its past,
especially its religious past, and happy it is for such old treasures
that they find shelter in a land where a _Cámera Santa_ is still a
shrine, not a museum. "_¡Triste de la nación que deja caer en el olvido
las ideas y concepciones de sus majores!_"
If Oviedo itself is disappointing to those who seek the antiquely
picturesque, the countryside that encircles it is doubly lovely. On a
bright Sunday morning we walked out a few miles to see the church of
Santa María de Naranco, built by Ramiro I back in 850. It was a steep
scramble up the mountain side, for the road was like a torrent bed.
Peasants on donkeys passed, on their way into the town for their day of
rest, some with brightly decorated bagpipes groaning out their
merriment. To avoid the sea of mud in the high road, we took short-cuts
up the hills, following a peasant who, seated sideways on her donkey,
balanced on her head a huge loaf of bread. And her bread, round and
flattened in the center, was the exact shape of the loaves chiseled,
centuries before, in the Bible scenes of Burgos choir-stalls. The old
woman smiled and nodded as she smoked her cigarettes, watching us pick
our way with difficulty where the tiny hoofs of her ass trod lightly.
What cares a Spanish peasant whether the road is good or bad when he has
a sure-footed donkey to carry him!
At length we reached the small church built by the third king after
Pelayo. It is a room thirty-six by fifteen feet, with a chamber at the
east and another at the west end. Along the north and south walls are
pillars from which spring the arcades, and these pillars and arches make
the support of the building; the walls merely fill in. This is the
earliest example in Spain of the separation into active and passive
members; whether the idea came from Lombardy or was of native birth is
not known.
We climbed still higher up the red sandstone hill, among gnarled old
chestnut trees, to where the ancient church of San Miguel de Lino
stands. The oriental windows, being in Spain, would naturally be thought
of Moorish origin, but their Eastern source antedates the Moor. They
came from the Byzantine East, by way of the Bosphorus, not the Straits
of Gibraltar. They are reminiscent of the time when the Goths, before
their invasion of Spain, lived around the Danube.
On July 25th the scene near these two churches is a striking one. The
village of Naranco is emptied of its folk that pious morn, as the
peasants, in the same tranquil beauty as in old Greece, lead their
garlanded oxen and heifers up to San Miguel. So unchanging are Spain's
customs that the festival is paid for out of the spoils taken at the
battle of Clavigo (in 846), where tradition says the loved patron of the
Peninsula, the Apostle St. James, "_él de España_," came to fight in
person. We were not so fortunate as to see this feast of Sant Jago, but
we stumbled on a beautiful minor scene. As we returned by Santa María de
Naranco, a group of peasants stood round the priest on the raised porch
of the church, the center of interest being a baby three days old. Few
women can resist a baptism, that solemn first step in a Christian life,
so we drew near. The father was a superb-looking youth of about twenty,
in a black velvet jacket; his crisp curly hair, his glow of color, and
the proud outline of his features made him fit subject for the artist.
The godmother, his sister it seemed from the resemblance, was a buxom
girl in Sunday finery; the godfather was a younger brother of fourteen,
who awkwardly held the precious burden. The old priest wore the wooden
clogs of the people and made a terrible racket with every step. From the
porch he led the way into the church, and after pausing half way to read
prayers,--a scuffling old sexton held aslant a dripping candle,--they
came to the baptismal font in the raised chamber at the west end. The
young father went forward to the altar steps to kneel alone, and the
godfather, with great earnestness, gave the responses. Then the _cura_
poured the blessed water on the tiny head, and to prevent cold wiped it
gently. The ceremony over, his wooden shoes clattered into the
sacristy, the sexton blew out the candle, and the agile godmother
claimed her woman's prerogative and tossed and crooned to the young
Christian as she tied ribbons and cap-strings. The two strangers who had
witnessed this moving little scene under the primitive carving of the
Visigothic church wished to leave a good-luck piece for the small
Manuela. But when they put the coin into the hand of the young parent
who still knelt before the altar, he returned it with a beautiful,
flashing smile. In halting Spanish they explained their good-luck
wishes, and in that spirit the gift was accepted.
Seen from Naranco, the red-tiled roofs of Oviedo encircled by
far-stretching mountains made a romantic enough scene. Seated on the
trunk of a chestnut tree we watched the sun set over the exquisite
valley. Immediately round us on the hillside had once stood the city of
King Ramiro, obliterated as completely as the earlier Ph[oe]nician and
Roman settlements in Spain. The dead city where we sat, the town below,
distant from the bustle of the world yet fast approaching it, the glow
and sweep of the sunset,--it is at moments such as these that the mind
enlarges to a swift comprehension, untranslatable in speech, of the
passing breath the ages are. The mountains change, the rivers
capriciously leave their beds,--especially in Spain, where bridges
stand lost in green meadows and are left undisturbed, for does not a
proverb say, "Rivers return to forsaken beds after a thousand years?"
And Spain has patience to wait! Whether it was the new-born child, the
forgotten city, the up-to-date town below, or just the sun setting over
that illimitable expanse of mountains, Santa María Naranco gave one an
hour of the higher philosophy.
In the after-glow we walked back to Oviedo. Along the way the returning
country people greeted us with ease and dignity: "_Vaya Usted con
Dios_," the beautiful salutation, "Go thou with God," heard from one end
of the land to the other. The beggar gives you thanks with it, the shop
man dismisses you, the friend takes farewell, but its pleasantest sound
is in the country, heard from the lips of clear-eyed peasants passing in
the evening light.
This peasantry is by instinct well-bred, proud of a pure descent, by
nature a gentleman, a _caballero_. A traveler's life and pocket are
absolutely secure in these unfrequented northern provinces of "dark and
scowling Spain." For a century those who have turned aside from the
beaten track have brought back the same tale of courtesy and
hospitality. There is much of Arcadian gentleness among these unlettered
people. The Spanish _labrador_ may not read or write, but he cannot be
called ignorant; statistics here do not guide one to a true knowledge.
The country people hand down in the primitive way, from one generation
to the other, a ripe store of human wisdom, that often gives them a
wider outlook on life and a deeper strength of character than that of
the educated man who shallowly criticises them. They are unspoiled and
very human, the women essentially feminine, the men essentially manly;
daily this note of virility strikes one,--one grows to love their
expressive, beautiful word, _varonil_. "The man in the saloon steamer
has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that
divide men,--diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in
the ears as in Europe. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at
all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men,--hunger, and
babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky."
When one can say a thing like that, one is born to appreciate Spain.
Will not Mr. Gilbert Chesterton go there and study some day her
untamable grand old qualities and describe her as she should be
described? If such a country population had had good government during
the past three hundred years instead of the worst of tyrannies, where
would it stand to-day? Though such a surmise is foolish, for perhaps it
is because of its isolation that the Spanish peasantry is racy and
vigorous. Knowing the hopelessness of battling against corruption in
high places in Madrid, it lived out of touch with modern life, elevated
by its intense faith, the hard-won inheritance from the
_Reconquista_,--and a peasant's faith is his form of poetry and
ideality, which when taken from him makes him lose in refinement and
charm.
Back in the Basque provinces the new idea had dawned on us that this was
not a spent, degenerate race, but a young unspoiled one, and every
excursion in the country parts of Spain made deeper the assurance of red
blood coursing in her veins. Corrupt government has deeply tainted the
city classes, has made loafers, and men who open their trusts to the
silver key, but the heart of the people is sound. It has been tragically
wounded by rulers to whom, an heroic trait, it has ever been loyal. If a
country after centuries of misrule had the same power to govern herself
as a nation that had had enlightened government for the same length of
time, would not one of the best arguments for good government be lost?
It may be a long time before Spain learns the restraint of self-rule.
But go among the vigorous mountaineers of the north, talk with the
patient, sober Castilian _labrador_, watch the Catalan men of industry
and you will see the possibility of her future. A noble esprit de corps
controls the Guardia Civil who are the keepers of law and security in
Spain, to whom a bribe is an insult. Let the same spirit extend to the
other departments,--to the post, to the railway, the civil government;
let the judge sit on an impregnable height; let the priest of Andalusia
have as solemn a realization of his office as the priest of Navarre, of
Aragon, of old Castile; let the women be given a wider education (though
may nothing ever change their present qualities as wives and mothers),
and Spain is on the right road.
Cavadonga was merely a two days' trip from Oviedo, yet we had to forego
it. The weather was too abominable; while Málaga on the southern coast
of Spain has an average of but fifty-two rainy days in the year, this
city on the northern coast has only fifty-two cloudless days. The
thought of a rickety diligence over miles of muddy roads kept enthusiasm
within bounds. After a short pause in the Asturian capital we took the
train back to León. The valleys were a veritable paradise; now we
skirted a wide river flowing under heavily-wooded hills, now we crossed
fields covered with the autumn crocus, and saw from the balconies of the
farmhouses yellow tapestries of corn cobs hung out to dry.
Some day, not so far distant as an ideal government in Spain, the lover
of independence and untouched nature will come to these northern
provinces instead of going to hotel-infested Switzerland. The temperate
climate, the trout and salmon rivers, the courtesy of the people, make
these valleys between the mountains and the sea an ideal tramping and
camping ground for the summer.
THE SLEEPING CITIES OF LEÓN
"I stood before the triple northern porch
Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings,
Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch,
Looked down benignly grave and seemed to say:
'Ye come and go incessant; we remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past;
Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot
Of faith so nobly realized as this.'"
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
There have been many efforts to divide Spain into right-angled
departments similar to those of her neighbor France. The individual land
throws off such efforts to bring her into geometric proportion: never
can her thirteen immemorial divisions, her thirteen historic provinces
be wiped out. Each is an entity with ineradicable characteristics and
customs. Their boundaries may seem confused on a paper map, but they are
reasonable in the flesh and blood geography of mountains and river
valleys, or the psychological geography of early affiliation and
conquest.
No Alfonso or Ferdinand will ever be King of Spain, but King of the
Spains, _Rey de las Españas_. _Mi paisano_, the term which stands for
the closest bond of fellowship, is used by an Aragonese of an Aragonese,
by a Catalan of a Catalan, never by an Aragonese of an Andalusian, or a
Catalan of a Castilian. The independent Basque provinces, (where the
monarch is merely a lord) the free mountain towns of Navarre,
stiff-necked Aragon, these never will merge themselves in Old Castile.
Nor can Catalonia, self-centered, humming with manufactures and seething
with anarchy, understand pleasure-loving Andalusia, that basks under
fragrant orange trees as it smiles its ceaseless _mañana_. Valencia and
Murcia, where crop follows crop in prodigal fruitfulness are the
antithesis of desolate Estremadura, and of that immortal desert of Don
Quixote the denuded steppes of New Castile, to their north. And the
mountain provinces of Galicia and the Asturias, of idyllic hill and
dale, yet with seaports fast awakening to commercial life, look with
little sympathy on the sluggish province of León that borders them.
Industrial advancement is on its gradual way in Spain, but there is not
a hint of its movement in this oldest of the separate kingdoms. Zamora,
Astorga, León, Salamanca, the romantic cities of the earlier days of
chivalry, lie asleep; the whistle of the railways has failed to rouse
them. You must lay aside all theories of modern comfort here, and make
the tour in the spirit of a pilgrim lover of the antique and
picturesque. What else could be expected in a province where the
peasantry still embroider their coarse linen sheets with castles and
heraldic lions, in a land where even the blazonry of a city rings with a
psalm, _Ego autem ad Deum clamavi_. The centuries of forays have
bequeathed a hardy endurance to the people, but they are the cause at
the same time of the scanty population of the plains, the tragic evil of
central Spain.
We got to the city of León the day of a horse fair. Fresh from
wide-awake Oviedo, it was like stepping back into an older world; here
was old Spain much as it was in the time of Guzmán[13] the Good, the
defender of Tarifa in 1294, whose _casa solar_ faced the plaza where the
fair was held. The peasants who bargained in groups, wore toga-draped
capes and wide-brimmed felt hats edged with an inch of velvet; every
horse in Spain must have been gathered there, and an equal number of
kind-eyed woolly little donkeys, essential factors of a Spanish scene.
"The Castilian donkey has a philosophic, deliberate air," wrote
Théophile Gautier on his sympathetic tour in the Peninsula seventy years
ago, "he understands very well they can't do without him; he is one of
the family, he has read 'Don Quixote,' and he flatters himself he
descends in direct line from the famous ass of Sancho Panza."
A step beyond the horse fair brought us to massive Roman walls with
frequent semi-circular towers; León's name comes from Augustus' 7th
Legion who fortified it against the highlanders of the north. Built into
the walls is the remarkable church of San Isidoro encrusted with later
work, but with the strong Romanesque lines still prominent. The pilgrims
who flocked from Europe to Santiago Compostella in the Middle Ages were
partly the means of bringing this style into Spain; thus San Isidoro is
of Burgundian origin, just as Santiago Cathedral resembles Saint-Sernin
in Toulouse, and the Catalan churches show Lombard features. Though the
Spaniard adapted the style to his own character, adding the original
feature of outside cloisters for the laity, its importation nipped in
the bud a just beginning national architecture, whose loss cannot but be
regretted. San Isidoro has a privilege seldom given, the Blessed
Sacrament being exposed every day of the year, and always before its
lighted altar one sees veiled figures kneeling. It served as the
pantheon for the kings who followed Ordoño II--twelfth in descent from
Pelayo--who removed his capital from Oviedo here, and the ancient burial
chamber still has ceilings painted in the stiff Byzantine manner with
obscure color, hard lines, and lack of perspective, probably the oldest
paintings in Spain. The "Romancero" tells how Jimena, the gallant,
golden-haired wife of the Cid, came here after the birth of her child to
attend Mass. She wore the velvet robes given her by the king on the day
of her marriage, a richly jeweled hair-net, gift of the Infanta Urraca,
her rival; around her neck painted medals of San Lázaro and San Pedro,
_santos de su devoción_, and so beautiful was she that the sun stood
still in his course to see her better. At the church door the king met
her and escorted her in honor, for was not her husband away fighting the
infidel for his monarch? There is so true a ring to the old ballads that
Jimena lives a real personage.
"_Oviedo la sacra, Toledo la rica, Sevilla la grande, Salamanca la
fuerte, León la bella_" runs an old verse on Spanish Cathedrals. And the
Cathedral of León merits its name. It is harmoniously beautiful, pure
French-Gothic, graceful and elegant, classic if the word is permissible
for the unrestrained individualism of Gothic art. Built in one age
without intermission, in 1303 the Bishop announced that no further
contributions were needed, and the centuries since have left the church
untouched. Here no cold Herrera portal usurps some lovely pointed work
and Churrigueresque extravagancies are not prominent: the late
restorations have followed the first plans.
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1910, by Underwood & Underwood_
THE CATHEDRAL OF LEÓN]
Always excepting the _Pórtico de la Gloria_ in Santiago, the west
doorways of León Cathedrals stand for the best in Spanish sculpture. The
statue of the _Virgen Blanca_ in the center is famous. Around her the
saints and apostles are grouped in appealing attitudes;--out of
proportion though they may be as to hands and feet, their sincerity
covers all flaws: here, a homely face with care-worn wrinkles of
goodness; there, one beaming in satisfaction to be standing in such a
chosen band. The lunette over the central door is delightful. On one
side, in Heaven, a clerk plays the organ, while a boy blows the bellows,
and groups stand chatting near, for a Spaniard's idea of bliss, in those
days also, took the form of ease and desultory talk. Hell, on the
opposite side, not to be outdone, has two urchins blowing bellows as
well, not to make music but to quicken a fiery caldron into which devils
are thrusting the sinners. The enjoyment of the old sculptor in his
Heaven and Hell was too keen to be confined in the lunette and he has
spread himself over the curving of the arches; in spite of time and
retouching these three doorways show exquisite detail chiseling.
"About their shoulders sparrows had built nests
And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch,
Now on a miter poising, now a crown,
Irreverently happy."
Within León Cathedral all is quiet and solemn, a true beauty of
holiness. There is no clutter of side chapels in the nave but a sheer
sweep of windows filled with the jeweled glass of Flemish masters.[14]
These windows come as a surprise in a land where churches are guarded
from the sun, and often the open triforium and clearstory, as at Avila,
are walled up later to darken the interior. The chancel and choir are
worth detail study. The _coro_ seats have panels carved with single
figures,--saints with their emblems, warriors with raised visors,
placid-faced nuns, thoughtful bishops, gallant pages with their crossed
feet gracefully poised,--all of a noble type, with high brow and
aquiline nose. Spain has comparatively nothing to show in the way of
frescoes, she had no early Masaccio, no Giotto, no Filippo Lippi, to
paint the costumes and features of his generation, but wood carvings are
her substitute; in them, and in her unrivaled tombs can be read the
contemporary history of warrior, bishop, and page. The _retablo_ of the
High Altar is of the same simple elegance as the rest of the church. The
usual towering one of carved scenes would have been singularly out of
place, it is appropriate for the big dark interior of Seville Cathedral,
but here are grace and restraint instead of grandeur and mystery, and
most suitable are the ancient paintings of varying sizes, gathered from
scattered churches and framed together. Radiating round the chancel are
chapels that give to the exterior view of the apse a truly French-Gothic
air, flying buttresses supporting the cap of the _capilla mayor_.
Romanesque, Gothic, and Plateresque are each well represented in León
City. In the last style is the noticeable convent of San Marcos that
stands isolated outside the town beside the swift blue-green river. The
Knights of Santiago built a resting-place on their pilgrimage route back
in the 12th century, but the present building is of Isabella's day, and
the architect has given free rein to his silversmith's arabesques and
medallions, and scattered pilgrim shells all over the façade of the
church. We tried to get into the Museum, now in the convent, as it
contains some good wood carvings, but an aged beggar at the door
explained "_Mañana_," the easy "to-morrow," as prevalent in León as in
Andalusia,--then rising to the occasion as only an Italian or Spanish
beggar can, he swept open his toga-draped cape, smiling as he pointed to
the entrance door: "To-morrow, after your morning chocolate, it will be
open for you."
It was sunset as we turned away. The long mass of San Marcos stood
boldly against the red glow of the sky. The horizon was outlined by the
blue mountains of Asturias. With our imagination filled with the old
days when pilgrims flocked here from England, from the forests of
Germany, from the Po and the Danube, suddenly over the ancient bridge
rode a troop of cavaliers on prancing steeds, in cloaks and plumed hats.
The kindly blessed illusion hid the fact that our pilgrim-knights were
sturdy peasants in the national _capa_, riding their long-haired horses
back from the city fair.
"Sin el vivo calor, sin el fecundo
Rayo de la ilusión consoladora
¿Que fuera de la vida y del mundo?"
asks one of Spain's poets of the 19th century, Núñez de Arce, and in his
native country it takes but little effort of the imagination to repeople
the solemn churches, the narrow city streets, or the treeless plain
with the romantic figures of the past.
The following day at dawn, after a miserable night in rooms like icy
death, a true pilgrim night of endurance, we took the train for the
west. As we entered the railway carriage _Reservado para Señoras_ a
sleepy railway-guard stumbled out of the further door; all through the
journey in the north, we roused these cozily-ensconced railway-officials,
for so rare are ladies alone on this route, that the conductors have
fallen into the habit of sleeping in the carriage reserved for them.
When our tickets were collected we were given many a severe look for
daring to upset a _cosa de España_.
On the way from León to Astorga, little over thirty miles, the
realization of the old pilgrim route is vivid. Before reaching Astorga
comes the paladin's bridge,[15] of Órbigo, where in the reign of
Isabella's father ten _caballeros andantes_ challenged every passing
pilgrim to a bout of arms; if a lady came without a cavalier to fight
for her, she forfeited her glove, if any knight declined to fight he
lost his sword and spur. The age of knight errantry which Cervantes has
haloed with a deathless charm, breathes in this historic Pass of Honour.
The leader, Suero de Quiñones, came of the great Guzmán family, to which
St. Dominic belonged, and of which the Empress Eugénie was a scion. To
show his captivity to his lady, every Thursday he wore an iron chain
round his neck, but when victor in this tourney, it was removed with
solemnity by the heralds. Suero's sword is to be seen to-day in the
Madrid Armory where in an hour more of Spain's real history is learned
than in years of reading.
The Roman walls of Astorga, seen from the railway present an imposing
appearance: here, as at León and Lugo, the frequent half-circular towers
do not rise above the crest of the walls. Astorga must have looked just
like this when the pilgrims rode by to the shrine of St. James. A closer
inspection spoils the illusion however, for the proud city that once
ranked as a grandee of Spain is to-day a very tattered and worn hidalgo,
and there is a sad air of desolation about its plaza and crumbling
walls. Whether or not it was because our ramble was by early morning
before the inhabitants were astir, at any rate I brought away a picture
of a depopulated town. There were but a few silent worshipers under the
clustered piers of the late-Gothic Cathedral, whose reddish tower is
the important feature of the distant view. What had tempted us to pause
a night in Astorga was the wood-carved _retablo_ by Becerra in the
Cathedral, but we found it by no means equal to the work of the carvers
in Valladolid. Becerra had studied under Vasari in Rome, and the
influence is shown too plainly. There is a curious weather cock on the
church, a wooden statue called Pedro Mata, dressed in the costume of a
singular tribe that lives in some thirty villages near by. The origin of
the Maragatos is involved in mystery; some say they are the descendants
of Moors taken in battle, some of Goths who sided with the Moors. During
all these centuries they have kept separate from the people about them,
like gypsies they marry only with themselves. They should not be
confounded with _gitanos_, however, for the Maragatos are honest and
industrious; they are the carriers of the countryside, with the
privilege of taking precedence on the road. Here and there in Spain one
stumbles on a strange, isolated relic of the past such as this. Astorga
was still sleeping, in the literal as well as figurative sense, when we
left; a walk on top of the walls looking out over the León plain, a
regret that we could not sketch the artistic church of San Julián, with
its faded green door and crumbling portal, and we turned south. On the
train I discovered that a five franc piece given me in change by the
innkeeper, was nothing but a bit of silver-washed brass advertising the
cakes of one Casimiro in Salamanca, and I, seeing the king's effigy, had
thought it a genuine Spanish dollar,--it is easy to be caught napping in
León.
Zamora is not many miles from Astorga and like the other sleepy towns of
the province, it too seems to feel it has a right to a long pause in
obscurity after its heroic centuries of Moorish warfare. The great hour
of the city was the time of the Cid; the "Romancero" should be in one's
pocket here. One of its stirring incidents is the death of King
Ferdinand I, in 1065, and its sequel of battles and sieges. The king
lies on his deathbed, holding a candle, great prelates at his head and
his four sons on his right hand. With the fatal propensity of Spanish
rulers to bequeath discord, he divides his kingdom among his sons; to
Don Sancho, Castile; León to Alfonso; the Basque provinces to García;
the fourth son already was of enough importance, "_Arzobispo de Toledo,
Maestre de Santiago, Abad en Zaragoza, de las Españas, Primado_." The
king's daughter Urraca, she who had given the Cid's wife, Jimena, her
jeweled hair-net, now complains bitterly that she is left out of the
inheritance, so her dying father gives her the fortress-city of Zamora,
"_muy preciada, fuerte es á maravilla_," and "who takes it from you let
my curse fall on him." In spite of which threat her wicked brother
Sancho, besieges the city,--a Spanish proverb for patience runs: "_No se
ganó Zamora en una hora._" With Sancho comes his chief warrior Roderick
Díaz de Bivar, given the title of Cid Campeador, Lord Champion, by the
Moorish envoys who here met him. The Cid had wellnigh fought an entrance
into the city when the intrepid Urraca ascends a tower--to-day called
the Afuera Tower--and delivers her famous scolding.
"¡Afuera! Afuera! Rodrigo,
El sóberbio Castellano!"
"Out! Out! Rodrigo, proud Castilian! Remember the past! When you were
knighted before the altar of Santiago, and my father, your sponsor, gave
you your armor, my mother gave you your steed, and I laced on your
spurs! For I thought to be your bride, but you, proud Castilian, set
aside a king's daughter to wed that of a mere Count!" And the ballad
tells how the Cid, hearing her upbraiding with emotion, retired with his
men.
The only present attraction of the decayed town is its Cathedral, set
high above the Duero on the edge of the bluff along which Zamora
stretches. It was built by the Cid's confessor, Bishop Gerónimo, the
dome above the transept crossing being an original feature which the
bishop was to elaborate later in the old Cathedral of Salamanca; as
Trinity Church, Boston, is copied from this last, Zamora has a special
interest for the visitor from New England. We had a four hours' pause
there, ample time to see the city. It was raining so dismally that my
fellow traveler decided not to face a certain drenching, as the
long-drawn-out town had to be traversed before reaching the Cathedral.
In an unfortunate moment I started out alone for what I supposed would
be a leisurely exploring of a venerable city. Fleeing in distress would
better describe the reality, for every hooting boy and girl in Zamora
followed at my heels. Whether it was a white ulster or an automobile
veil tied over my hat as the wind was high, or just the unaccustomed
figure of a stranger in those narrow streets, an excited crowd pursued
me the whole length of the town. In front, walking backward,
open-mouthed, went a dozen urchins, and behind came a long brigade I
hardly dared look back on, it so increased with every step. Men hastened
to their shop doors to wonder at the crowd, and the passers-by stood
still in astonishment; a feeling of horror came over me at such
publicity. In vain I fled into churches in the hope of escaping the
relentless little pests; when I emerged they greeted me with howls of
pleasure. I angrily shook my umbrella at them, but that only added to
the glorious excitement. Here and there a kind woman came to the
bothered stranger's help, and scattered the crowd. The children merely
scampered down side streets to meet me again in still greater numbers at
the next corner. It is easy to laugh now that it is over, but at the
time there is small amusement in fleeing through a foreign city pursued
by forty hooting youngsters, to have them press round you in a stifling
circle when you pause to look in your book, to have them gaze long and
seriously at you, then burst into uncontrollable laughter so that in
desperation you begin to feel if you have two noses or six eyes. We had
decided that in most of the unfrequented towns of Spain, the children
were a nuisance; in Zamora they were positive vampires. A visitor in the
future had best wear black, a black veil on the head, a black
prayer-book in the hand, as if on the way to church, then resembling
other people, the children may let her pass. But a white ulster and a
red guide book are magic pipes of Hamelin to lure every idle child in
Zamora. In spite of wind and rain, and a lengthy disappearance within
the Cathedral, it was only on reëntering the station, several hours
after they had first seized on their prey, that the unsolicited escort
left me, and even then they hung round the door till the shriek of the
engine told them the escaped lunatic who had given them so splendid an
afternoon's entertainment was out of reach.
GALICIA
"Blessed the natures shored on every side
With landmarks of hereditary thought!
Thrice happy they that wander not lifelong
Beyond near succour of the household faith,
The guarded fold that shelters, not confines!
Their steps find patience in familiar paths
Printed with hope by loved feet gone before
Of parent, child or lover, glorified
By simple magic of dividing Time."
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago,--perhaps this claims too much for the Spanish
pilgrimage shrine? It would not in the Middle Ages, when the Christians
of all Europe flocked there to pray beside the tomb of St. James the
Elder, the patron of Spain invoked in the battle cry of her chivalry for
a thousand years, "_¡Santiago y cierra España!_"--"St. James and close
Spain!" A Latin certificate used to be given to every pilgrim, and it
was kept among family records, for there were properties that could only
be inherited if one had gone to Santiago Compostella. To-day Spaniards
are the only devotees, though as I write I see that a band of English
pilgrims with the Archbishop of Westminster at its head is visiting the
far-off corner of Galicia. Though few travelers turn out of their way
there, it is one of the most characteristic spots to be seen in Spain, a
solemn old granite city, with arcaded streets and vast half-empty
caravansaries darkened with humidity and age.
It takes over fifteen hours to go from León to Santiago, but the journey
is a beautiful one, with mountains and fertile valleys, and rivers such
as the Sill and that gem of the province, the Miño. At Monforte the
railway branches, one line goes to Túy and Santiago, and the other turns
up to Lugo and Coruña. We took this last, tempted by accounts of Lugo.
It is indeed a unique little city, walled around without a break by
Roman battlements forty feet high, on the top of which is the
fashionable promenade of the town. With its walls and the view from
them, it closely resembles Lucca. Lugo was a surprise in various ways.
It had a hotel, the "Fernán Núñez," so up-to-date that it boasted a
tiled bathroom with hot water and a shower bath. Not only the
comfortable inn but the streets of the town were a model of propriety.
As always, our steps turned first to the Cathedral, spoiled outside, as
is unfortunately the way in Spain, by those two disastrous centuries,
the seventeenth and eighteenth, but within being of the lovely
transition period, Romanesque as it merged into Gothic, with the arches
just slightly pointed. The irrepressible Churriguera has worked himself
into the inside of the church too; his canopy over the High Altar is
abominable, though it would take more than that to detract from the
simple solemnity of such a church. Lugo is one of the holiest spots in
the Peninsula, like San Isidoro in León, it claims the privilege of
perpetual exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, only more privileged than
León, exposed night as well as day. So proud is the province of this
ancient custom that the Host is represented on the shield of Galicia.
No matter at what hour you enter the Cathedral, there are worshipers;
two priests always kneel before the tabernacle, and they never kneel
alone. The scenes of humble piety drew me back to the church again and
again with compelling attraction. To me a Spaniard praying unconsciously
before the altar is unequaled by any act of worship I have witnessed;
not even the touching Russian pilgrims in Jerusalem kissing the pavement
in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, nor the Arab at sunset kneeling
alone in the desert, can impress more powerfully. It seemed as if this
tranquil shrine of Lugo spread an influence of uplifting thought through
the whole contented little town; in the quiet afternoon a withered
grandmother knelt with her hands on the head of a little tot of six who
repeated the prayers that fell from the old lips, or three young women
of the upper class sought a retired corner of the church to repeat
together their daily chaplet; now in a side chapel, a peasant thinking
herself unobserved, in a glow of devotion, encircled the altar on her
knees.
On leaving the west door of the Cathedral, we ascended the inclined path
that leads to the promenade on top of the walls. It was sunset, an
exquisite hour to look out on the well-wooded countryside, through which
meandered the trout-filled Miño. In the distance were mountains. No
wonder the Romans, who ferreted out most of the choice spots of Europe,
used to come to this city for the thermal baths. The handsome modern
Lugonians strolled around the ramparts, pausing to chat here and there
in the semicircles made by the numerous towers of the wall. Now a
white-haired matron draped in the national mantilla, loitered leisurely
by, with some of the higher ecclesiastics of the Cathedral; now a mother
and two grave, pretty daughters passed, watched discreetly by the young
beaux. Evidently far-off little Lugo, tucked away in the unknown
northwestern corner of Spain, had a social life that sufficed for
itself, with no envy of Madrid and San Sebastián. The local contentment
found everywhere in the country struck me as admirable. Will "progress"
unsettle it? We could have stayed a month in Lugo. To fish in the Miño,
to ramble over the fertile country, to feel about one peaceful,
contented human beings, would make a summer there a happy experience.
When we went on to Coruña, a commercial town that, like seaports the
world over, has a rough populace, we were glad to have first seen Doña
Emilia Pardo Bazán's loved province at pretty Lugo. In travel there must
always be, I suppose, some places that one slights; one knows if one
stayed long enough they might show a pleasanter side. We treated Coruña
in this way. Sir John Moore, buried at midnight during the Peninsula
War, was our association with the town before going there, and for all
we saw of it Sir John will remain the chief association of the future.
We only saw the flat, commercial district that skirts the bay, not the
headland where the old town lies. Slatternly beggars pestered us, bold,
bare-legged girls stood mocking at the unaccustomed sight of foreign
women traveling; it was with relief we took the diligence that started
at noon for Santiago.
I shall never cease regretting that we did not wait till the following
day, when an electric diligence makes the journey, for that eight hours'
trip over the hills to the capital was for us the only horrible
experience of our tour in Spain. I wish I might blot out its memory, but
as I am setting down frankly everything that occurred, this scene of
cruelty must be told of, too. In the omnibus with us were but two other
people, and there were five horses; there seemed no reason to foresee
trouble. For the first relay of twelve miles all went well, and we
enjoyed looking back from the hills on the blue Atlantic where the
headland of Coruña jutted boldly out. Our drivers treated the horses
with consideration and dismounted at every ascent. But, alas, for the
second relay, we changed men and changed animals. Two young vagabonds
were now on the box, driving four such miserable, bony nags that it tore
the heart to see the sores the rope harness had made. We protested at
the use of such horses, but in vain. Twelve miles lay behind,
twenty-four were ahead, there were no inns, so we hesitated to desert
the diligence, but had we realized the two hours of purgatory we were to
face, we had dismounted and walked back to Coruña.
One young wretch drove with loud cries and slashing blows; the other
alighted to beat the quivering animals up the hills. They guided so
recklessly that we were once dashed down the bank into the gutter, and
soon after run into a hay-cart and the wheels unlocked with difficulty.
When at length they began to strike the spent beasts over the eyes our
anger burst all bounds. In a heat of fury never before experienced, and
I hope never again, we attacked those two brutal boys. I do not think
they will soon forget that scene. At first they replied with impudence
and went on lashing the horses. But impudence soon ceased. When two
women are in earnest and are fearless of consequences, and have stout
umbrellas, they win the day. The twelve miles of their escort over, and
new horses harnessed to the diligence--those four pitiful, bleeding
victims led away!--the two scoundrels slunk off, sore on arms and
shoulders as well as shamed in spirit, for the country people who
gathered round supported our protest. The remaining miles to Santiago
finished well, with good drivers and stout horses. But never will the
horror of those two hours leave me. In fairness I must add that this was
the only scene of cruelty I saw during the eight months in Spain, and
again and again I noticed plump happy donkeys who were treated as
members of the family. It is far-fetched to account for this unfortunate
instance by the bull-fight, since in countries that have no such
spectacles, veritable skeletons are made to haul cabs, and poor jades
are used for drag horses. But I cannot help seizing on this opening for
a little tirade against the national game of Spain, which Fernán
Caballero, who loved her home with passionate affection called,
"inhuman, immoral, an anachronism in this century." The sports of other
lands are open to harsh criticism. I do not think a Spaniard is more
cruel by nature than an Englishman; in both nations is a certain
proportion of coarsened characters,--the northern country may keep them
better out of sight in the slums.
Northern Europe is to-day more humane to animals than southern Europe,
because the women of the north have had greater freedom and have entered
into philanthropic interests such as this. Kindness to animals is a
modern movement everywhere (may the shade of St. Francis of Assisi
forgive this half statement!) Spain need not be too discouraged by being
behindhand. The bony exhausted horses used within my own remembrance on
our American street-car lines, to drag cars laden each evening to twice
the beasts' strength, would not be tolerated to-day, and this change has
been wrought by societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, the
membership made up chiefly of women and children. Would that Spanish
ladies could be pricked to action by the statement of a living French
novelist, made in ignorance of late conditions in America and England,
that kindness to animals is a Protestant virtue. It is neither
Protestant nor Catholic, but common to all human societies where women
are allowed to aid with their gentler instincts in the public welfare of
their country. The bull and the man are sport and skill, that part I
can understand. It is the agony of the horses that is a disgrace to
these shows, worn-out nags who can make no resistance are used, and when
the bull gores them, their entrails are thrust back and the dying beasts
pricked on to the fray. Herein lies the great difference between
bull-fights to-day, which are debased money-making spectacles only taken
part in by professionals, and the more chivalrous sport of earlier times
when the hidalgo was _toreador_, and proper steeds that could defend
themselves were used.
The bull-fight is found in Spain so early that its origin from the Roman
period in the Peninsula, or from the first Mohammedan conquerors, is
disputed. The Cid took part in a game, and games celebrated the marriage
of Alfonso VII's daughter Urraca to the king of Navarre. During the
reign of Isabella's father, Juan II, the _corrida de toros_ was much in
vogue. Queen Isabella herself disliked the sport, and in one of her
letters she vows never to witness it. On the birth of Philip II in
Valladolid, Charles V killed a bull in the arena. The _fiestas_
continued under the Hapsburg Philips, until the advent of the French
Philip V, in 1700. He so slighted this national sport that gentlemen
ceased to take part in it, and it sank to its present level. It is now
so well paying an affair that the only way to reform it would be
through concerted action on the part of Spanish women. It is a crusade
worthy of them.
A night of rest in the hotel at Santiago and the painful scene of the
day before was somewhat dimmed. Early in the morning I started out to
explore the old pilgrim city. It has a distinct character of its own,
seldom have I felt so decided a place-influence. It is very solemn, very
gray, very stately and aloof. On many of the houses the pilgrim shell is
carved; the streets are paved with granite and the vast hospices are of
the same severe stone, moss-grown and damp; grass also grows between the
big granite slabs of the silent, imposing squares. Santiago does not
belong to our age. Modern towns do not name their streets after
twelfth-century prelates, "Street of Gelmúrez, 1st Archbishop of
Compostella," makes a novel sign.
Here, as all over the land, the Cathedral was the magnet. I walked along
the dark, arcaded streets in a Scotch drizzle, passed under Cardinal
Fonseca's college and came out in the plaza before the west entrance.
The west front is a baroque mass which those who can endure that style
say is most successful. I cannot endure that style. It seemed to me
doubly a pity that this late front should mask the chief treasure of
Galicia, the _Pórtico de la Gloria_, which stands as an open portico to
the church, fifteen feet within this west door.
Enthusiastic description had led us to expect much of what may be called
the supreme work of Romanesque sculpture, in fact, it was this portico
that had decided us for the long trip to Galicia. We were not
disappointed. "_Es la oración más sublime que ha elevado al cielo el
arte español._" Neither photograph nor words can describe it; it is one
of those matchless works that body forth the best of an age. The model
of South Kensington does not give its nobility, for it is the setting
before the lofty dim Romanesque nave that makes it a unique thing. When
later, in Constantinople, I saw Alexander's sarcophagus, the thought of
Santiago sprang instantly to my mind. Both bring a feeling of
sadness;--one, simple flowing Greek of the best period, the other,
crabbed, original, mediæval,--they are alike in the absolute sincerity
with which each embodied the highest then attainable. Over the carvings
of both are faded traces of color that give the finishing touch of the
exquisite.
The Archbishop, Don Pedro Suárez, in 1180 gave the commission for this
portico to a sculptor named Mateo, whether Spanish or foreign is not
known; he lived in Santiago till 1217. He must have been a close student
of the Bible, for his symbolism is profound and harmonious. Above the
central arch is a solemn Christ, of heroic size, at his side the four
Evangelists, figures of youthful beauty: the lion and the bull have
settled themselves cozily in their patron's lap. Large angels on either
side carry the instruments of the Passion. Very fine statues of the
Apostles stand against the pillars of the central doorway. In the
tympanum are small figures typifying the Holy City of Isaiah, and on its
arch are seated, on a rounding bench, the twenty-four ancients of the
Apocalypse, with musical instruments and vases of perfume. This is
perhaps the most beautiful part of the portico. For hours one can study
it. Some of the heads are thrown back in revery, some turned together in
conversation. "The four and twenty ancients fell down before the Lamb
having everyone of them harps and golden vials full of odours, which are
the prayers of the saints" (St. John, Rev. V, 8). The carvings of that
age were somewhat grotesque, but here the types are ideal, as beautiful
in their way as Mino da Fiesole or Rossellino. When Master Mateo had
finished his work, he made a statue of himself below the central column
of the portico, kneeling toward the altar and humbly beating his breast;
on this figure was written "architectus." Humility and a consummate
profession of faith such as this went hand in hand.
It is anticlimax, after the _Pórtico de la Gloria_, to speak of the
other sights of Santiago. On the plaza before the west end of the
Cathedral stands the dignified Hospital Real, founded by Isabella and
Ferdinand as a pilgrim inn. Two of the four patios are quaintly carved,
and probably amuse the convalescents of the modern hospital lodged now
in the building. It was a joy to find so many of Isabella's good deeds
still bearing fruit. The nuns took us down to the big kitchen,
white-tiled and spotless, where we saw the four hundred fresh eggs that
arrive daily from the country; the tidy patients on the verandas showed
clearly that no one suffered privations here. As we were leaving, the
old chaplain of the institution ran after us to beg us to return to see
something of which he was evidently vastly proud. When he ushered us
into a tiled bathing room and turned on the water that dashed up and
down and round about from every kind of new contrivance, he looked at us
with a self-complacency that was adorable, as if he said: "There, you
water-loving English, we're just as fond of it as you!" The excellently
managed institution reminds one that this province produced Doña
Concepción Arenal, sociologist and political economist, and withal a
most tender-hearted Christian, whose books on prison organization and
reform have been widely translated, and are quoted as authorities by the
leading criminologists of Europe. For thirty years this admirable woman
was inspector of prisons. She died at Vigo in 1893, and Spain has since
erected statues in her honor.
In Galicia, as in Catalonia, there has been a revival of dialect
literature. The Gallego tongue was the first in the Peninsula to reach
literary culture, and in the Middle Ages two ideal troubadours wrote in
it. Had not Alfonso _el Sabio_ written chiefly in Castilian, thereby
fixing that as the leading tongue, as Dante did the Tuscan in Italy, it
is probable that the dialect of Galicia had prevailed. Portuguese and
Gallego were the same language up to the fifteenth century, hence it is
that the great critic Menéndez y Pelayo always includes Portuguese
writers in his studies of Spanish literature.
Galicia is fortunate in having an able living exponent, the Señora
Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose novels are full of the charmed melancholy of
the province. The Gallego is derided in other parts of Spain, his name
is synonymous with boor, for he is judged by the clumsy _mozo_ who seeks
work in the south. "The more unfortunate a country the greater is the
love of its sons for it. Greece, Poland, Hungary, Ireland, prove this,
and the nostalgia is strongest in those of Celtic origin. Ask the rude
Gallegos of South America what is their ambition--'To return to the
_terriña_ and there die' is the answer."
In a collection of essays "De mi Tierra," Madam Pardo Bazán has told of
the learned Benedictine, Padre Feijóo, the Bacon of Spain, whose caustic
pen did away with so many of the superstitions of his age. It may be a
bit pedantic for me to give biographies in these slight sketches, but it
seems as if a truer idea of the race is conveyed in such lives than
could be given in any other way. This native of Galicia, Padre Feijóo,
had few equals in the Europe of his time in liberality of view. He was
born of hidalgo parents near Orense, where his _casa solar_ stands,
still lived in by a Feijóo of to-day. He entered the Benedictine Order
and in their cloisters passed most of his long life of eighty years, for
half a century living in their Oviedo house. His unflagging industry,
his clear intellect, and simple uprightness, won the admiration of all
who knew him. "After fifteen years' intimate acquaintance with Feijóo,"
wrote a scientist of the day, "never have I met, inside religion or out,
a man more sincere, more candid, more declared enemy of fraud and
deceit." Not till he was fifty did Feijóo commence to write. In 1731
appeared the beginning of his "Teatro Crítico," essays that have been
called the first step of Spanish journalism, written as they eminently
were to communicate ideas to others. He had the passion to know why, a
never-tiring love of investigation. Adopting the Baconian experimental
method, he attacked the superstitions and pseudo-miracles around him.
_¡Ay! de mí Inquisición_! Were you asleep that you did not clap this
independent thinker into your capacious dungeons? So strong was Feijóo's
influence that Benedict XIV curtailed the number of feast days on his
mere suggestion.
This learned Benedictine monk was ahead of his age in many ideas. Are
the stars not inhabited? he asked. Before Washington, he maintained that
the Machiavellian theory of government, intrigue and diplomacy, which
was then universally accepted in Europe, was inferior to friendly
loyalty and honor. He preached compassion to animals generations before
the age of our modern, humanitarian theories. With the painful
remembrance of the diligence ride in Galicia, I was glad to find one of
her sons advocating this. Feijóo stands out more prominently because of
the intellectual desert around him. "The eighteenth century was an
erudite, negative, fatigued." The Bourbons brought formality and
sterility to spontaneous Spain. A dry soulless learning killed the
creative power, and in every branch, art, music, and literature, the
artificial rococo flourished. The two exceptions of vitality were Feijóo
and the painter Goya. Had Padre Feijóo lived in our age, he might have
been that great man hailed by De Maistre: "Attendez que l'affinité
naturelle de la science et de la religion les ait réunies l'une et
l'autre dans la tête d'un homme de génie! Celui-là sera fameux et mettra
fin au dix-huitième siècle qui dure encore." How much longer are we to
wait for him,--this great man!
If the only harrowing scene of the tour in Spain is to be associated
with Galicia, so is one of the happiest, a day of such kindly chivalry
that we felt the spirit of Isabella's time still endured. It was the
chance of railway travel that introduced a modern knight to us. The
journey back to Castile from Galicia is a most trying one. Some day
perhaps an enterprising ocean line will put in at Vigo and run an
express directly across country to Madrid; we were too early for such
ease. From Santiago we had to take an afternoon train to Pontevedra, and
there spend the night. At 5 A.M. (oh, those unforgettable, dark, cold
railway stations of Spain!) we again took the train. It was dawn before
Redondela was reached, and exquisite as a dream seemed the _rías_, the
fiords of Galicia, with wooded mountains sloping to their shores. It is
not hard to prophesy that this will be a great summer resort of the
future.
At Redondela we changed trains, getting into the express for Monforte,
the only other occupant of the carriage being an elderly man, blue-eyed,
very tall and erect, with the air of distinction so frequently found
among Don Quixote's countrymen. We had noticed him the night before in
the Pontevedra hotel, and had thought him an Englishman, till in
offering some service about our luggage he spoke in Spanish. As we were
to spend fifteen hours in the same railway carriage, we soon entered
into conversation. He came from Madrid each summer with a family of sons
and daughters to spend some months in a castle among the mountains of
Galicia. Evidently he was a lover of sport and of country life, for as
we ran alongside the Miño River, with Portugal just across on the
opposite bank, for hours he sat gazing out in enjoyment, and drew each
beautiful thing to our notice. At noon we reached Monforte, where we had
dinner in the station buffet. When we called for our account, to our
astonishment the waiter told us it was settled already. We could not
understand what had been done, till the proprietor himself came to
explain. It seems it is a custom all over this generous land, for a man
when he is with a lady or has spoken to her, to pay for everything she
orders; tea, luncheon, even her shopping purchases. He does this with no
offensive ostentation, but so quietly that he often slips away unnoticed
and unthanked. Several travelers have since told me that they too met
this hospitality; it had at first embarrassed them, but as there was
not the slightest impertinence nor even the personal about it, as it was
merely an act of chivalrous respect, done with superb detachment, when
the confusion of being paid for by a stranger was over, they remembered
only the charming courtesy.
The attentions of our kind host, for he seemed to look on two strangers
in his land as his guests, did not stop at noontime, at tea he brought
us platefuls of hot chestnuts. He tried to while away the hours
pleasantly, playing games on paper in French and English; with all his
dignified gravity the Spaniard is not blasé. Our struggles to learn his
tongue rousing sympathy, it was from him we first heard of the pretty
high-flown phrases still in daily use, how you bid farewell with, _Beso
à V. la mano_ (I kiss your hand), or _A los pies de V._ (I am at your
feet); that the _Usted_, shortened to _V._, with which you address high
or low, is a corruption of "Your Majesty." Somehow there seems nothing
absurd in addressing a Spanish peasant as "Your Majesty." The love of
abbreviations is a curious trait in a people with such leisurely ways;
thus, a row of cabalistic letters ends a letter: _S. S. S. Q. B. S. M._,
which means that your correspondent kisses your hand--_su seguro
servidor que besa su mano_.
Then the interest which we evinced in the institutions and progress of
Spain made him put his cultivated intelligence at our service, and we
learned more in a day than in all the previous weeks. When I inquired
into the vexed religious question he was able to explain much. As a
rule, republicanism in Spain means avowed atheism and socialism; it has
been well said that the republicanism of all Latin countries turns to
social revolution. The socialists are a small, but well-organized band,
international in character since their movements are directed from
centers like Paris. They are chiefly in industrial cities such as
Barcelona, Valencia, and Bilbao, where secret societies of anarchists
abound, disguised as clubs for scientific study. The majority being of
the rabble, repudiating all authority, ("civilization, that is the
enemy!") their disorders would be called mob uprisings did they occur in
Chicago, but deceived by the term "republicanism," the journals of
England and America gave them too lenient a consideration. By no means
devout himself, he assured us that what we saw on every side was for the
most part very genuine religion, not sentiment with no result; for in
those places where observance had slackened there was a marked
difference in moral restraint, so potent a factor for morality was
religion still in Spain. That there were faults none denied, but he had
traveled enough to know the flaws of other countries too well to be
despairing of his own.
He wrote for us a card of introduction to the big hospital of Madrid; he
sought out a friend in another carriage, the son of the Admiral in
Ferrol, who was rather up in statistics. Had we seen the asylum near
Santiago where the insane are treated with such success that noted cures
had been obtained? Had we met the archæologist of the province, a canon
in the Cathedral? In short, from the questions and suggestions we
realized that the average tourist goes through this reserved country
half blind. Glad were we for this chance of insight. When in the dusk of
evening it came time to descend at Astorga, our stopping-place for the
night, and our fellow-traveler stood there shaking hands, with warm
friendliness in his blue eyes, we felt there was no more thoroughbred
specimen of manhood than a Spanish hidalgo.
SALAMANCA
"L'homme n'est produit que pour l'infini."
"Il y a des raisons qui passent notre raison."
"Se moquer de la philosophie c'est vraiment philosopher."
PASCAL.
Salamanca is in León province, and in comparison with the hour of its
prime, as it is to-day it too is very like a sleeping city. It is hard
to realize that this dull, small town was a _grandeza de España_,
ranking with Oxford, Paris, and Bologna, that once 10,000 students
flocked here from all over Europe, and every young Spaniard turned here
as naturally as a modern Englishman to Oxford or Cambridge; Cervantes'
"Novelas Exemplares" give the picture. To-day there are barely a
thousand students, chiefly from its own province; among the ten
universities of Spain the former leader takes a very lowly place.
Madrid, the continuation of Cardinal Ximenez' University of Alcalá, may
be called the modern Salamanca in intellectual leadership.
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1910, by Underwood & Underwood_
VIEW OF SALAMANCA FROM THE ROMAN BRIDGE]
In the Spanish Oxford one looks in vain for the numerous colleges of the
city on the Isis. Alas! Salamanca is half a ruin. The French, in the
Napoleonic invasion, destroyed the whole northwest quarter of the
town to make fortifications, undoing in a few brutal hours the work of
centuries of culture and piety. In his despatches of 1812 the Duke of
Wellington wrote: "The French among other acts of violence have
destroyed thirteen out of twenty convents and twenty out of the
twenty-five colleges which existed in this seat of learning." Twenty out
of twenty-five colleges! The thought of Oxford's tranquil, age-crowned
buildings makes one grasp the tragic wreck of the Spanish university;
never while in Salamanca could I forget the desolate tract to the west,
lying still a heap of ruins, untenanted save by wandering goats, those
nomad creatures that give the culminating note of squalor to deserted
districts.
Our train approached the city across the plains from Zamora, through
plantations of isolated trees and past droves of black sheep whose
guardian stood patiently under the rain. For some time in the distance
we saw the prominent church towers. Salamanca lay on the old Roman road,
the Via Lata, that connected Cadiz with the north, but the Roman
associations here are slight. As in Zamora, the Cid and his feats dwarf
other interests, so here it is the picturesque days of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries that fill the mind.
Go down to the Roman bridge over the Tormes and while away an hour
watching the passers-by, and the old times seem to live again. Below in
the river bed women wash and chatter from morning till night, spreading
the gayly-colored clothes, red, yellow, and purple, over the stones to
dry. If it is Sunday, into the city pour the hardy peasants for their
one day of rest from the ungrateful work of the fields: girls in pale
blue woolen stockings and smart, black pumps sit sideways behind their
cavaliers on the long-haired nags whose backs are often shaved into a
pattern; now out of the city jogs a brisk old woman on her donkey, laden
with a month's purchases, an unpainted rush-bottom chair topping the
pile; she nods to the strangers, _franceses_, she thinks, for a Spaniard
takes all foreigners for his neighbors over the frontier: now a cart
passes, whose shape and hue seem taken out of a romantic watercolor;
then a young peasant in wide-brimmed sombrero, leather gaiters, silver
buttons as big as dollars on his vest, clear-eyed and proud of carriage:
then, salt to the picture, rides a burly _cura_, sitting well back on
his tiny ass, a ridiculous figure were it not for his sublime
unconsciousness, his innate self-respect. Ever the unspoiled, the
vigorous, the untamed! Just so they came into Salamanca in the past when
students with swords and velvet capes walked the streets, and so I hope
they may do some hundred years from now, for such lives of frugal
contentment are unequaled. Localism and provinciality have been forced
on Spain by nature, and it is this very provincialism which is her charm
for the traveler. Fresh from a prosperous, new world, he may often long
for certain changes here, for more widely diffused education, for free
libraries, a more secure self-government; but such material prosperity
is bought with a price. Remember that not in the length or breadth of
this land are to be found the degraded human beings, vicious in soul and
brutalized in shape of skull and feature, such as exist by the thousands
in the slums of industrial countries. If the Spanish peasant must lose
his hardy independence, if his frugal contentment, his heroic patience
must pass with the old order of things (that lets a heap of ruins in the
heart of a city lie untouched during a hundred years!) I cannot help
wondering whether the price is not too high to pay. I am repeating
myself, but the words come to one each day--it is beyond human nature to
be consistent in Spain; she has the faculty, despite her glaring faults,
of battering down one's Philistine certainty of northern superiority.
The bridge, the plaza, and the cathedral; study your types there and you
begin to know the real Spaniard. Not soon shall I forget, at Mérida, in
wild Estremadura, as I loitered on the bridge, a countryman stepping
forward with the dignified, proud look of his class: "_¿Es más bonita
que París?_" he asked, the interrogatory note added only in courtesy, so
sure was he of my affirmative. Sleepy little Mérida, all a ruin, Knights
Templars' castle as well as Roman theater and aqueduct, to the fellow
_paisano_ of Pizarro and Cortés, was finer than Paris. It is glimpses
like this that make the prejudiced stranger judge the so-called
backwardness of the country in kinder fashion. Where else could one see
stately-moving cream-colored oxen pass unnoticed through the chief
thoroughfare of a capital, a common sight in the Puerta del Sol of
Madrid, where else will the customs officer of a big town stand to count
with a pointing finger the skipping sheep driven past him, as on the
Alcántara bridge at Toledo, where else will groups of goats be milked
from door to door in a great commercial city like Barcelona? Salamanca,
being the center of an agricultural district and off the express route,
presents daily, scenes from the Georgics.
Architecturally the old university city, despite her disasters, is of
first importance. She has two Cathedrals, the smaller more perfect one
of 1100, finding shelter by the side of its huge successor, to whom it
yielded its rights as metropolitan in 1560. The exterior of the new
Cathedral is over-rich and meaningless, it promises little for what it
holds within, where the lofty Gothic piers and arches have so impressive
an air of majesty that architectural flaws are forgotten. It proves how
much longer Gothic lasted in Spain than elsewhere in Europe. The
triforium here is replaced by an elaborately-carved balcony that runs
round the church, and high up are medallions colored with gold and
Eastern hues, an enamel-like decoration which has been beautifully and
sparingly used; the inner circle of the clearstory window and the round
windows of the west end, have jeweled chains of color that modern
churches could well imitate. As usual, the side chapels are full of
treasures, and the sacristy boasts the very crucifix the Cid carried in
battle. There is one bad defect: its apse has not the dim, mysterious
curve of a cathedral, the east end being square, like a cold secular
hall. Nestling under this gigantic pile is the loveliest thing in all
Salamanca, the _catedral vieja_, its title in the old Latin proverb
"fortis Salmantina." It is a small, Romanesque-transition church,
unused, but in good repair, left unchanged by a sensible bishop when the
services were removed to its more pretentious rival. The carvings of the
capitals are boldly massive, there is a noticeably good, painted
_retablo_, and among the numerous tombs--a Gregorovius could make a
fascinating volume of Spain's alabaster knights and bishops!--there is
one that is specially appealing. It is in a chapel opening off the
cloisters; a warrior in armor lies on his sarcophagus, beside him his
wife, with a child's innocence of face, dressed in the nun's robe worn
while her lord was fighting the Moors, with high pattens on her feet, a
dainty little Castilian gentlewoman, mother of the prelate whose stately
tomb fills the center of the chapel. The old Cathedral is so tucked in
among buildings, that only one view of the exterior can be got, from a
terrace leading from the south door of the later church, a view that a
New Englander will return to often with a homesick feeling, for just
such a scaly-tiled tower, window for window, line for line alike, rises
in Copley Square, Boston. This cupola shows Byzantine influences since
Spanish Romanesque was orientalized through Mediterranean trading.
Of all the memories of a journey in Spain the happiest are the hours
spent in her cathedrals, the starting out expectant, often with no map
or book, for there are frequent glimpses of the church towers to guide;
the first entering the noble structure which man's living enthusiasm
raised, the first passing from one chapel to another in astonishment at
the treasures they guard. Pierre Loti has a sketch on Burgos Cathedral,
seen once only on a late afternoon, just as the verger was closing it,
and he describes how unhappily he was affected by the lavish material
wealth. Pure artist that he is in his theory of seizing on a swift
impression, the test may be successful for Philae or for the Parthenon,
but it will not do for a Spanish cathedral, which is too complex, and
can well hide its soul from the hasty tourist. May M. Loti forgive me
for saying it, but certainly the way in which he saw Burgos differs
little from the lightning-flash method of the Yankee tourist he
despises. I think he must have had a cross indigestion that late
afternoon, or perhaps it was his Huguenot blood rising in protest.
Another of his countrymen, equally sensitive, "le délicat Joubert,"
gives a less on-the-surface judgment: "The pomp and magnificence with
which the Church is reproached are in truth the result and proof of her
incomparable excellence. From whence, let me ask, have come this power
of hers and these excessive riches except from the enchantment into
which she threw all the world? She had the talent of making herself
loved, and the talent of making men happy ... it is from thence she drew
her power."
Spain is richer than all other lands in church furniture: except for the
uprising of 1835 against the monasteries, a movement more political than
religious, there has been no terrible iconoclastic mania, such as in
France and England; the cities which were looted, like Valladolid and
Salamanca, during the French invasion, suffered in a different way.
Then, too, Spanish cathedrals do not part with their art treasures; the
gifts of personal and inappropriate jewels when they have accumulated
too needlessly are sometimes sold for the benefit of the church, but the
art treasures made for the service of the Altar are not parted with. In
Valencia it is told that Rothschild's agent tried in vain to buy
Benvenuto Cellini's silver pax there: $10,000 $15,000, $20,000, he
offered: "_Las cosas de la catedral no se venden_," was the answer.
"$50,000," said the agent. The Cathedral was poor and needed repairs.
"It is useless," was the firm answer of the Chapter, "We do not sell the
things of the Altar." In Salamanca the verger told us that an Englishman
had offered an immense sum for the iron screen round the tomb of Bishop
Anaya (his mother the dainty little lady in pattens) and though the
screen was in an unused chapel of the _catedral vieja_, it was refused.
These unsullied temples of the Holy Spirit, where stately ceremonials
are still an every-day occurrence, differ in every city, the carven
wealth of Burgos, the soaring grace of León, the solid grandeur of
Santiago, Toledo, a dream of His House, Seville, rising imposing past
expectation, the small, dark symmetry of Barcelona, the solemn space of
prayer before Avila's high altar, Sigüenza's tomb-filled chapels,
Saragossa, draped with priceless Flemish tapestries for the feast,
Palencia dim and holy at daybreak, worship-bowed Lugo,--indelible
memories of beauty and exaltation, the cathedrals of Spain are not mere
artistic memorials of the past, their soul is not fled. Such churches
cannot but have an influence on the people among whom they rise. If on
one of different race they impress themselves with the actuality of a
living experience, what must they mean to those whose childhood and old
age have known them in solemn moments. I came across an autobiographical
bit by the novelist Alacón, describing the influence on him of one of
these great churches of the past. He grew up in the small Andalusian
city of Gaudix, like many Spanish towns its great day being well over;
the only grandeur left, the only palace inhabited, was the _iglesia
mayor_: "From the Cathedral I first learned the revealing power of
architecture, there first heard music and first grew to admire pictures;
there also in solemn feasts, mid incense, lights, and the swell of the
organ, I dreamed of poetry and divined a world different from what
surrounded me. Thus faith and beauty, religion and inspiration, ambition
and piety were born united in my soul."
On the way to the Cathedrals each day we passed through the arcaded
plaza, which at the noon and evening hours was thronged with an
animated crowd; we noticed once more the democratic relation between the
classes, smart officers in pale blue uniforms strolled up and down
chatting with plain countrymen whose capes, tossed over the shoulder,
let the gaudy red and green velvet facing be seen. The daily walk
brought us past the House of the Shells, whose walls are studded with
the pilgrim emblem, and one day as I paused to look into the lovely
inner court, the owner came out, prayer-book in hand, on her way to
church, and with the grave courtesy of her race, she invited the
stranger in to examine her romantic dwelling. Most of the buildings in
the city are a light brown sandstone that suits the gorgeous surface
decoration of Isabella's period, here seen in its full glory. There is
no pure early-Gothic in the city; Romanesque-transition is found in the
old Cathedral, and late florid-Gothic in the new Cathedral, later still
some baroque extravagances, since Salamanca claims a doubtful honor as
the birthplace of that exponent of bad taste, José Churriguera. But the
style that is supreme here is the Plateresque, the silversmith period
when late-Gothic and Renaissance met: the façades seem as if molded in
clay, so lavish is their work. In one respect Salamanca has been more
fortunate than its rival Oxford, in having used a stone soft in
appearance, but so durable that the chiseling is almost as finished
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