Part 16

A night arrival at Granada enhances the romantic effect. It is mysterious to turn in from the noisy streets of the town at the Carlo Quinto gate and under the heavy foliage of elm trees slowly to mount the Alhambra hill; there is a gurgle and rush of running water on every side, one has the feeling of being in a thick Alpine forest. The horses mount slowly, wind and turn, pass through various gates and at length you are in the small village of the citadel, and in three minutes can walk right into the Caliph's palace. Spain cannot show many such beautiful northern parks, with a growth of ivy and a shimmer of arrow-headed leaves under the elm trees where nightingales sing in season.

It was Ford I think who started the statement which most guide books have gone on repeating that the Duke of Wellington planted these elms ("the Duke" occupies more space in Murray's Hand-book than _los Reyes Católicos_ themselves!) He may have planted some, but a certain old book of travels, yellow with age, tell us that just these same elm trees were growing and just the same kind of songster singing in 1789. "The ascent toward the Alhambra," wrote the Rev. Joseph Townsend in that year, "is through a shady and well watered grove of elms abounding with nightingales whose melodious warbling is not confined to the midnight hour; here, incessant, it is equally the delight of noon."

This part of Granada is charming. But the city below is so dirty and ill-conditioned that it would spoil the Alhambra for a long stay. Even in the darkness on the night of our arrival it was easy to discern what a different aspect it had from most Spanish towns, which, while they are often poor, are frugally clean and self-respecting. In Granada the people appeared ill-tempered, if you paused anywhere, diseased children gathered in a persistent begging circle, and the fierce copper-colored gypsies were so diabolically bold in glance and act that they made a walk in any of the suburbs too dangerous to be repeated. We had often turned off the beaten track in the Asturias, in Galicia, and Castile, without the least fear, but Granada will remain for me the one thoroughly disagreeable, frightening spot in Spain.

Described as the Alhambra has been, it would be fatuous to try it again. I can only give superficial personal impressions. There is no use in disguising that this style of architecture disappointed me enormously. I could admire its extreme elegance, the details of the _artesonado_ ceilings, the _ajimez_ windows, I could acknowledge it was fairy-like, a charming caprice, exquisite jewel-box work: as a whole it left me quite cold. It was too small, it lacked height, there was no grandeur about it,--and all so newly done up with restorations! The first visit gave me an effect of trumpery, and even after I had seen it daily for two weeks, I could not forget that these mathematically correct designs, one yard very like the next, were imprinted by an iron mold on wet plaster. This was skilled artisan's work, not the intellectual thought of the architect; here was no cutting of enduring, masculine stone with the individual freedom of genius. Decorations of Cufic mottoes are effective, but they can never compete with a Parthenon frieze, with a Chartres or Santiago portal. Fantasy was here, not imagination; again I felt the bound limit of Islam.

Enough for the negative side. For praise, if the Alhambra itself is disappointing, its setting is imperial. The view on which you look out from its romantic _ajimez_ windows has few equals in the world, and accounts easily for the supremacy of this spot in man's thought. You look down on the ravine of the Darro, the white Generalife near by, across the river, the piled-up houses of Granada backed by near hills covered with cactus. From the Torre de la Vela is a grander view. The _vega_ with towns and historic battlefields lies below, and you try to pick out Santa Fé, which sprang up in eighty days to house the Christian troops, or Zubia, where Isabella was almost captured, or Puente de Pinos, which the discouraged Columbus had reached when the Queen's messenger brought him back to arrange for the great voyage. On this tower, after seven and a half centuries of Moorish rule, the first Christian standard was hoisted by Cardinal Mendoza, on January 2d, 1492, festival still of the countryside, when the fountains play again in the Alhambra, and down in the Royal Chapel the Queen's illuminated missal is used on the altar. All Christian Europe rejoiced with Spain, and Henry VII in England had a special _Te Deum_ chanted in gratitude. While on one side is this tropical _vega_ on the other is the glorious Sierra Nevada, clothed in perpetual snow. So close are the mountains that on certain days it seemed as if a short hour's walk could reach them, closer than the Jungfrau to Mürren. It is the most untarnished expanse of snow I have seen on any mountains. We often climbed the tower for the sunset, and one evening a genuine Alpine glow made the Sierras magnificent past description. "Ill-fated the man who lost all this!" Charles V exclaimed.

There was a lesser view we grew attached to, that from the strip of garden called the _Adarves_, warm in the sun under the vine-covered bastions. It was laid out by the Emperor, and it fronts the snow range looming above the green mass of park trees. Almost every day we would bring books and sewing there--December, with mountains 12,000 feet high beside us!--and the gardener would set chairs for us at the stone table. Work and books would be dropped for long minutes to look out on those astonishingly noble mountains. If only the city below were well-ordered and clean like Avila or Segovia or Seville, this would be the spot of all Spain for a long stay.

We had to descend at times to the repulsive town for sightseeing. We hunted up the Church of San Gerónimo, where the Gran Capitán, that true Castilian knight alike renowned as general and diplomatist, Gonsalvo de Cordova, was buried. Once around his tomb seven hundred captured banners were ranged, but the church since it was sacked in the French invasion has been unused. It was appropriate that the Great Captain found burial in Granada, since it was here he trained the famous legions he was to lead to victory in Italy. Isabella on her deathbed listened with thrilled interest to the news of Gonsalvo's exploits at Naples. Another day, to see the view of the Sierras from the Church of San Nicolás, we climbed the Albaicín quarter, so squalid and poverty-stricken that the very sheets hung out to dry were a fretwork of patches, and the smells of goats and pigs were awful. A swarm of deformed beggars gathered round us, and I must confess to driving them off indignantly. Then as we descended the hill, down the twisting oriental passages, I was reproached by a little episode that showed a charity wider than mine--not good utilitarian ethics perhaps, but good early Christianity--a woman, poorest of the poor, at a turning of the lane was giving her mite to one more stricken in misery. Is it any wonder Spain can win affection with her good and her evil lying close beside each other in a grand primitive way? Whenever I joined her detractors and abused her, within the hour she would offer some silent rebuke.

Still another walk was the beautiful one along the Darro, then up the steep hill between the Generalife and the Alhambra. In that deserted lane one morning as I was passing alone, suddenly the gypsy king stepped out, a startling image of brutal, manly beauty, with his blue-black hair topped by a peaked hat. He approached insolently, with a glance of contemptuous, piercing boldness, struck an attitude, and holding out a package, commanded: "Buy my photograph." With beating heart I hurried by, to turn into the safe Alhambra enclosure with a tremor of relief.

The Cathedral of Granada is a pretentious Greco-Roman building, good of its kind, but I do not like that kind. Out of it leads the Royal Chapel, where "_los muy altos, católicos, y muy poderosos Señores Don Ferdinando y Doña Isabel_" lie buried with their unfortunate daughter, Juana la Loca, and her Hapsburg husband. These two elaborate Renaissance tombs, the wood carved _retablo_ and a notably fine _reja_, make this _Capilla Real_ a unique spot. Isabella the queen left a last testament that breathes the fine sincerity of her whole life: "I order that my body be interred in the Alhambra of Granada in a tomb which will lie on the ground and can be brushed with feet, that my name be cut on a single simple stone. But if the king, my lord, choose a sepulchre in any other part of our kingdom, I wish my body to be exhumed and buried by his side, so that the union of our bodies in the tomb, may signify the union of our hearts in life, as I hope that God in his infinite mercy may permit that our souls be united in heaven." It seems as if a king whose life-long mate had been an Isabella of Castile might have had more dignity of soul than to give her a trivial successor. When Ximenez heard of her death, sternly-repressed man of intellect though he was, he burst into lamentation. "Never," he exclaimed, "will the world again behold a queen, with such greatness of soul, such purity of heart, with such ardent piety and such zeal for justice!" And the Cardinal had known her in the undisguised intimacy of the Confessional and stood side by side with her through years of difficult state guidance. The astute Italian scholar, Peter Martyr, who lived at her court, said that at the end of the fifteenth century Isabella had made Spain the most orderly country in Europe, and another foreign scholar, Erasmus, tells us that under her, letters and liberal studies had reached so high a state that Spain served as a model to the cultivated nations.

From one end of her land to the other this incomparable woman has left her mark; at Valladolid the remembrance of her marriage; Segovia whence she started out to claim her kingdom; at Burgos the tomb of her parents; Salamanca where her son was educated, and whose library façade is in her grandiose style; Avila where this only son lies buried; Santiago where her hospice still harbors the needy; Seville where she gave audience in the Alcázar; her refuge for the insane here in Granada;--hardly a city that she did not visit and endow:

"If thy rare qualities, sweet gentleness, Thy meekness saint-like, wife-like government Obeying in commanding, and thy parts Sovereign and pious, else could speak thee out The Queen of earthly queens."

VIGNETTES OF SEVILLE

"Mi vida está pendiente Solo en un hilo, Y el hilo está en tu mano, dueño querido. Mira y repara, Que si el hilo se rompe Mi vida acaba."

CANTAR ANDALUZ.

"El secreto de la vida consiste en nacer todas las mañanas."--RAMÓN CAMPOAMOR.

The outburst of spring in Seville is something unforgettable. With roses in bloom during December and January, the winter was like the summer of some places, and so we realized with surprise during February that a genuine spring was beginning. The bushes and hedges put on fresh coats of green, and barely a month after the trees had been stripped of their myriad oranges, the same trees were covered with white blossoms. To sit beside the lake in the park on a sunny March morning seemed like being in an ideal scene of the theater; hard, white pathways wound in every direction between miles of rose hedges; an avenue of vivid Judas trees led to a blue and white tiled Laiterie, where society came each morning to drink a hygienic glass of milk, and the graceful girls played _diavolo_ with young officers; the groves of orange trees filled the air with an almost overpowering scent; children threw crumbs to the ducks in the pond; high up in the palm trees they were doing the parks' spring cleaning by cutting away the spent leaves.

With such a winter climate it is strange that Seville was deserted by foreigners till the Easter rush. During the four months of our stay we had no need of fires, and sometimes there were days so warm that we did not start for the customary constitutional till toward evening. Every single day of the winter we took a walk in the same direction,--to the _Delicias_ parks. Such monotony at first seemed a very limited pleasure, but before the winter ended we had grown to be such true Sevillians that we liked the placid regularity, and whenever we went further afield the roads were so abominably kept that we were glad to return to the shady fragrance of the park. We gradually learned to sit on the benches with the contented indolence of the southerner, watching the carriages roll by, family coaches a bit antiquated, the women well-dressed but not with the Madrileña's elegance. As the same people passed day after day, we soon had favorites among them. One young girl, like a rose in her bloom of quick blushes, was having the golden hour of her life; all winter we watched her in the _Delicias_, at the theater, in church, and she never appeared without her cavalier somewhere in sight: a man in love here, like a man at his prayers, has no false pride to disguise his devotion. His carriage openly pursued hers in the park, the coachman an eager abettor of the romance. They would often alight, and while her mother and small sister loitered far behind, the happy _novios_ were allowed to ramble side by side through the lovely paths. It seemed to us that we were no sooner settled in some retired nook of the pleasure grounds than these two sympathetic young people would come strolling past, and her sudden blush in recognition of the two strangers whose interest she felt, was very charming to see,--so too thought the young man at her side, for he always paced with his head bent irresistibly to hers. Life can offer worse fates than to be in love in the springtime, under Seville's flowering trees.

This happy starting with romance has much to do with the contented marriages of the race: here, as I said before, is little of the pernicious "dot" system of France and Italy; good looks and attractive personal qualities win a husband. Spanish women make excellent wives, their first fire and passion turning to self-abnegation. They are spared the ignoble competition that luxury brings; except in Madrid and among a small set in a couple more of the big cities, most Spanish ladies dress with extreme simplicity in black; the mantilla having more or less equalized conditions. It is still the custom for a mother and her daughters to go to church before eight every morning; often I saw them returning as I sat drinking my coffee on the hotel balcony. For church they wear the black veil that so much better becomes them than the big hats donned for the afternoon drive. Strangers are inclined to take for granted the idleness of women's lives in a city like Seville. I had slight opportunity of judging for myself. From a friend, however, who happened to have letters of introduction to a Sevillian whom she thought a mere social butterfly after seeing her drive by idly every afternoon, I learned that being taken into the intimacy of this pretty, fashionable woman, it appeared that she rose before seven every day and had never once missed giving each of her four children his morning bath.

When we occasionally lingered late in the _Delicias_ at noon, we would see the _cigarreras_ from the great tobacco factory come out to spend their siesta. The proverbial beauty of these girls is much exaggerated, but the fresh flower in the hair worn by every woman of the people, old and young alike, gives a decided charm. Sometimes they would dance together under the trees, just for the mere pleasure of motion, and sing the passionate _coplas_ of the province, of the very essence of a people, impossible to translate:

"Nor with you nor without you My sorrows have end, For with you, you kill me, And without you, I die."

Or this other, a _majo_ to his chosen one:

"Take, little one, this orange From my orchard grove apart, Be careful lest you use a knife For inside is my heart."

The _majo_ of Andalusia is the peasant dandy of Spain, and truly he is superb. As he gallops in from the country on his proud-necked stocky Andalusian horse--by instinct he knows how to sit a horse--or when he walks by jauntily in his short bolero jacket, with the springing gait of youth and dominating manhood, a duchess must look at him with admiration. The city loafer of Seville is a miserable specimen, and his insolence on the street is a constant outrage, but the country _labrador_ does much to redeem him. One day we walked back across the fields from Italica, and passed many of these self-respecting peasants who gave us the proud, courteous salute of the north, but no sooner were we within the city limits than began the bold staring, the jostling and remarks peculiar to Seville alone.

All classes and conditions are met with in the park. Once a week the black soutanes and red shoulder scarfs of the seminarists of San Telmo give an added note of color. One of the lads, happening to know a Spanish acquaintance of ours, often stopped to chat. He told us details of their life, that at Easter and for the summer each returned in secular dress to his family, and if, during his years of preparation, he found he was not suited to the priesthood, he was free to leave at any time. Thus this lad had entered with ten others, of whom only three remained. "Soon only two, I fear," he added, with his clever mundain smile. "They tell me I'm too fond of society." Yet I have seen English ladies, true to their Invincible Armada traditions, shake their heads in pity when the seminarists passed, and sigh: "Poor young prisoners!"

We made other acquaintances in the placid Seville parks; the venders of peanut candy, of the delicious sugar wafers for which you gamble on a revolving machine, above all our _Agua! Agua!_ friend. This last would polish the glass with an agile turn of the wrist, then bend slightly and from his shoulder pour down the crystal stream with undeviating aim. No people on earth drink water like the Spanish; it is a national love. A tot of four will stand spellbound before the fat dolphin of a park fountain, calling in beatific ecstasy, "_Hay agua!_"

Though the _Delicias_ is the favorite haunt, one can while away an afternoon in the garden of the Alcázar, on its pretty tiled seats. When we went through the Moorish palace, its restorations seemed so gaudily done that again I felt the sensation that this was trumpery. As at the Alhambra the fact of its medium being plaster, not enduring stone, spoils Moorish art for me. Some evenings for the sunset we climbed the Giralda, the only height from which a view over the fertile country can be got, for Seville's great drawback is its flatness; there is not one high spot for loitering at the close of day as in most Italian towns. From this cathedral tower, the view down on the white roofs of the city holds one spellbound; groves of palms show the parks, neat terrace gardens on the tops of the houses, and not a vestige of a street. No wonder, for the passages called streets are barely wide enough for three to walk abreast, and they twist and bend in true oriental fashion. We used to turn in behind the Alcázar, and wander hap-hazard, past Murillo's house, round and about north of that chief thoroughfare, the _Sierpes_. For surprises and romance this town has no equal. Tucked away in the narrow lanes is patio after patio, not, like those of Cordova, merely spotless and tranquil, but imposing with white marble columns and pavements, for Italica, nearby, an obliterated city that lays claim to three of Rome's emperors, Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius, was stripped to adorn the younger Seville. The exterior of the houses is insignificant, just two or three stories of plain plaster walls, all beauty being kept for the inside, for the patio, with its central fountain and walls of colored tiles. We used often to pause at the open grille to gaze in with delight, agreeing with the old German proverb, "Whom God loves has a house in Seville." They say that in summer-time the family moves down from the upper story to live around the patio, over which an awning is stretched, and every evening animated _tertulias_ are held there. A June walk at night in these lanes must be paradise: "_Quien no ha visto á Sevilla, no ha visto á maravilla_."

All over the city are small churches that antedate the Cathedral, with noticeable twelfth century portals, timber roofs, and often a Moorish tower. The best are Omnium Sanctorum and San Marcos: and a lovely bit to sketch is the façade of Santa Paula with its Italian faience decoration. The peaceful patio of the chief Hospital--a church in the center--must be a nook of repose loved by the convalescent. I could not see that the ill or aged suffered in Spain, despite the general abuse of her institutions. What is it about Spanish ways that makes most Englishmen so pessimistic over her? It seems to me that an Englishman should be sympathetic here, for so many of his traits he has in common with the Spaniard, such as sincerity, independence, loyalty to national ideals, to their rulers and creed. A prominent London publisher, in a new series of travel books, has lately reprinted Richard Ford's "Wanderings in Spain," thereby perpetrating a grave injustice, for in this book is gathered, with no sense of proportion, the abuse expurgated (chiefly because of its length) from his "Murray's Hand-book of Spain." Ford visited Spain when she was torn by the disorders of civil war, after three centuries of ill-government. A sad picture of England could be made by the foreign visitors who happened to witness the Lord George Gordon riots or the industrial agitations of the Midlands, or who visited the poorhouses, schools, and prisons described by Dickens and Charles Reade, yet who would maintain that such a picture was true as a whole, or print such a book to represent England to-day? Why must a different justice be meted out to Spain? Ford could be enthusiastic over the Castilian peasants' manhood, over the security of life and purse throughout the northern provinces, and the gentle kindness of the country women, the hospitality of whose kitchens he sought, but when it comes to the national religion he fills his pages with false statements. "One never pelts a tree unless it has fruit on it," a Spaniard will say as he shrugs his shoulders.