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THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

SKETCHES AND IMPRESSIONS IN ANDALUSIA

BY

WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM

(WITH FRONTISPIECE)

LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN

MCMV

_All rights reserved_

[Illustration]


TO

VIOLET HUNT




Contents


I. The Spirit of Andalusia

II. The Churches of Ronda

III. Ronda

IV. The Swineherd

V. Medinat Az-Zahra

VI. The Mosque

VII. The Court of Oranges

VIII. Cordova

IX. The Bridge of Calahorra

X. Puerta del Puente

XI. Seville

XII. The Alcazar

XIII. Calle de las Sierpes

XIV. Characteristics

XV. Don Juan Tenorio

XVI. Women of Andalusia

XVII. The Dance

XVIII. A Feast Day

XIX. The Giralda

XX. The Cathedral of Seville

XXI. The Hospital of Charity

XXII. Gaol

XXIII. Before the Bull-Fight

XXIV. Corrida de Toros--I.

XXV. Corrida de Toros--II

XXVI. On Horseback

XXVII. By the Road--I.

XXVIII. By the Road--II.

XXIX. Ecija

XXX. Wind and Storm

XXXI. Two Villages

XXXII. Granada

XXXIII. The Alhambra

XXXIV. Boabdil the Unlucky

XXXV. Los Pobres

XXXVI. The Song

XXXVII. Jerez

XXXVIII. Cadiz

XXXIX. El Genero Chico

XL. Adios




I

[Sidenote: The Spirit of Andalusia]


After one has left a country it is interesting to collect together the
emotions it has given in an effort to define its particular character.
And with Andalusia the attempt is especially fascinating, for it is a
land of contrasts in which work upon one another, diversely, a hundred
influences.

In London now, as I write, the rain of an English April pours down; the
sky is leaden and cold, the houses in front of me are almost terrible in
their monotonous greyness, the slate roofs are shining with the wet. Now
and again people pass: a woman of the slums in a dirty apron, her head
wrapped in a grey shawl; two girls in waterproofs, trim and alert
notwithstanding the inclement weather, one with a music-case under her
arm. A train arrives at an underground station and a score of city folk
cross my window, sheltered behind their umbrellas; and two or three
groups of workmen, silently, smoking short pipes: they walk with a dull,
heavy tramp, with the gait of strong men who are very tired. Still the
rain pours down unceasing.

And I think of Andalusia. My mind is suddenly ablaze with its sunshine,
with its opulent colour, luminous and soft; I think of the cities, the
white cities bathed in light; of the desolate wastes of sand, with their
dwarf palms, the broom in flower. And in my ears I hear the twang of the
guitar, the rhythmical clapping of hands and the castanets, as two girls
dance in the sunlight on a holiday. I see the crowds going to the
bull-fight, intensely living, many-coloured. And a thousand scents are
wafted across my memory; I remember the cloudless nights, the silence of
sleeping towns, and the silence of desert country; I remember old
whitewashed taverns, and the perfumed wines of Malaga, of Jerez, and of
Manzanilla. (The rain pours down without stay in oblique long lines, the
light is quickly failing, the street is sad and very cheerless.) I feel
on my shoulder the touch of dainty hands, of little hands with tapering
fingers, and on my mouth the kisses of red lips, and I hear a joyous
laugh. I remember the voice that bade me farewell that last night in
Seville, and the gleam of dark eyes and dark hair at the foot of the
stairs, as I looked back from the gate. '_Feliz viage, mi Inglesito._'

It was not love I felt for you, Rosarito; I wish it had been; but now
far away, in the rain, I fancy, (oh no, not that I am at last in love,)
but perhaps that I am just faintly enamoured--of your recollection.

* * *

But these are all Spanish things, and more than half one's impressions
of Andalusia are connected with the Moors. Not only did they make
exquisite buildings, they moulded a whole people to their likeness; the
Andalusian character is rich with Oriental traits; the houses, the mode
of life, the very atmosphere is Moorish rather than Christian; to this
day the peasant at his plough sings the same quavering lament that sang
the Moor. And it is to the invaders that Spain as a country owes the
magnificence of its golden age: it was contact with them that gave the
Spaniards cultivation; it was the conflict of seven hundred years that
made them the best soldiers in Europe, and masters of half the world.
The long struggle caused that tension of spirit which led to the
adventurous descent upon America, teaching recklessness of life and the
fascination of unknown dangers; and it caused their downfall as it had
caused their rise, for the religious element in the racial war
occasioned the most cruel bigotry that has existed on the face of the
earth, so that the victors suffered as terribly as the vanquished. The
Moors, hounded out of Spain, took with them their arts and
handicrafts--as the Huguenots from France after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes--and though for a while the light of Spain burnt very
brightly, the light borrowed from Moordom, the oil jar was broken and
the lamp flickered out.

* * *

In most countries there is one person in particular who seems to typify
the race, whose works are the synthesis, as it were, of an entire
people. Bernini expressed in this manner a whole age of Italian society;
and even now his spirit haunts you as you read the gorgeous sins of
Roman noblemen in the pages of Gabriele d'Annunzio. And Murillo, though
the expert not unjustly from their special point of view, see in him but
a mediocre artist, in the same way is the very quintessence of Southern
Spain. Wielders of the brush, occupied chiefly with technique, are apt
to discern little in an old master, save the craftsman; yet art is no
more than a link in the chain of life and cannot be sharply sundered
from the civilisation of which it is an outcome: even Velasquez, sans
peer, sans parallel, throws a curious light on the world of his day, and
the cleverest painters would find their knowledge and understanding of
that great genius the fuller if they were acquainted with the plays of
Lope de la Vega and the satires of Quevedo. Notwithstanding Murillo's
obvious faults, as you walk through the museum at Seville all Andalusia
appears before you. Nothing could be more characteristic than the
religious feeling of the many pictures, than the exuberant fancy and
utter lack of idealisation: in the contrast between a Holy Family by
Murillo and one by Perugino is all the difference between Spain and
Italy. Murillo's Virgin is a peasant girl such as you may see in any
village round Seville on a feast-day; her emotions are purely human, and
in her face is nothing more than the intense love of a mother for her
child. But the Italian shows a creature not of earth, an angelic maid
with almond eyes, oval of face: she has a strange air of unrealness, for
her body is not of human flesh and blood, and she is linked with mankind
only by an infinite sadness; she seems to see already the Dolorous Way,
and her eyes are heavy with countless unwept tears.

One picture especially, that which the painter himself thought his best
work, _Saint Thomas of Villanueva distributing Alms_, to my mind offers
the entire impression of that full life of Andalusia. In the splendour
of mitre and of pastoral staff, in the sober magnificence of
architecture, is all the opulence of the Catholic Church; in the worn,
patient, ascetic face of the saint is the mystic, fervid piety which
distinguished so wonderfully the warlike and barbarous Spain of the
sixteenth century; and lastly, in the beggars covered with sores, pale,
starving, with their malodorous rags, you feel strangely the swarming
poverty of the vast population, downtrodden and vivacious, which you
read of in the picaresque novels of a later day. And these same
characteristics, the deep religious feeling, the splendour, the poverty,
the extreme sense of vigorous life, the discerning may find even now
among the Andalusians for all the modern modes with which, as with coats
of London and bonnets of Paris, they have sought to liken themselves to
the rest of Europe.

And the colours of Murillo's palette are the typical colours of
Andalusia, rich, hot, and deep--again contrasting with the enamelled
brilliance of the Umbrians. He seems to have charged his brush with the
very light and atmosphere of Seville; the country bathed in the
splendour of an August sun has just the luminous character, the haziness
of contour, which characterise the paintings of Murillo's latest manner.
They say he adopted the style termed _vaporoso_ for greater rapidity of
execution, but he cannot have lived all his life in that radiant
atmosphere without being impregnated with it. In Andalusia there is a
quality of the air which gives all things a limpid, brilliant softness,
the sea of gold poured out upon them voluptuously rounds away their
outlines; and one can well imagine that the master deemed it the
culmination of his art when he painted with the same aureate effulgence,
when he put on canvas those gorgeous tints and that exquisite
mellowness.




II

[Sidenote: The Churches of Ronda]


That necessity of realism which is, perhaps, the most conspicuous of
Spanish traits, shows itself nowhere more obviously than in matters
religious. It is a very listless emotion that is satisfied with the
shadow of the ideal; and the belief of the Andaluz is an intensely
living thing, into which he throws himself with a vehemence that
requires the nude and brutal fact. His saints must be fashioned after
his own likeness, for he has small power of make-believe, and needs all
manner of substantial accessories to establish his faith. But then he
treats the images as living persons, and it never occurs to him to pray
to the Saint in Paradise while kneeling before his presentment upon
earth. The Spanish girl at the altar of _Mater Dolorosa_ prays to a
veritable woman, able to speak if so she wills, able to descend from the
golden shrine to comfort the devout worshipper. To her nothing is more
real than these Madonnas, with their dark eyes and their abundant hair:
_Maria del Pilar_, who is Mary of the Fountain, _Maria del Rosario_, who
is Mary of the Rosary, _Maria de los Dolores_, _Maria del Carmen_,
_Maria de los Angeles_. And they wear magnificent gowns of brocade and
of cloth-of-gold, mantles heavily embroidered, shoes, rings on their
fingers, rich jewels about their necks.

In a little town like Ronda, so entirely apart from the world,
poverty-stricken, this desire for realism makes a curiously strong
impression. The churches, coated with whitewash, are squalid, cold and
depressing; and at first sight the row of images looks nothing more than
a somewhat vulgar exhibition of wax-work. But presently, as I lingered,
the very poverty of it all touched me; and forgetting the grotesqueness,
I perceived that some of the saints in their elaborate dresses were
quite charming and graceful. In the church of _Santa Maria la Mayor_ was
a Saint Catherine in rich habiliments of red brocade, with a white
_mantilla_ arranged as only a Spanish woman could arrange it. She might
have been a young gentlewoman of fifty years back when costume was gayer
than nowadays, arrayed for a fashionable wedding or for a bull-fight.
And in another church I saw a youthful Saint in priest's robes, a
cassock of black silk and a short surplice of exquisite lace; he held a
bunch of lilies in his hand and looked very gently, his lips almost
trembling to a smile. One can imagine that not to them would come the
suppliant with a heavy despair, they would be merely pained at their
helplessness before the tears of the grief that kills and the woe of
mothers sorrowing for their sons. But when the black-eyed maiden knelt
before the priest, courtly and debonair, begging him to send a husband
quickly, his lips surely would control themselves no longer, and his
smile would set the damsel's cheek a-blushing. And if a youth knelt
before Saint Catherine in her dainty _mantilla_, and vowed his heart was
breaking because his love gave him stony glances, she would look very
graciously upon him, so that his courage was restored, and he promised
her a silver heart as lovers in Greece made votive offerings to
Aphrodite.

At the Church of the _Espirito Santo_, in a little chapel behind one of
the transept altars, I saw, through a huge rococo frame of gilded wood,
a _Maria de los Dolores_ that was almost terrifying in poignant realism.
She wore a robe of black damask, which stood as if it were cast of
bronze in heavy, austere folds, a velvet cloak decorated with the old
lace known as _rose point d'Espagne_; and on her head a massive imperial
diadem, and a golden aureole. Seven candles burned before her; and at
vespers, when the church was nearly dark, they threw a cold, sharp light
upon her countenance. Her eyes were in deep shadow, strangely
mysterious, and they made the face, so small beneath the pompous crown,
horribly life-like: you could not see the tears, but you felt they were
eyes which would never cease from weeping.

I suppose it was all tawdry and vulgar and common, but a woman knelt in
front of the Mother of Sorrows, praying, a poor woman in a ragged shawl;
I heard a sob, and saw that she was weeping; she sought to restrain
herself and in the effort a tremor passed through her body, and she drew
the shawl more closely round her.

I walked away, and came presently to the most cruel of all these images.
It was a _Pietà_. The Mother held on her knees the dead Son, looking in
His face, and it was a ghastly contrast between her royal array and His
naked body. She, too, wore the imperial crown, with its golden aureole,
and her cloak was of damask embroidered with heavy gold. Her hair fell
in curling abundance about her breast, and the sacristan told me it was
the hair of a lady who had lost her husband and her only son. But the
dead Christ was terrible, His face half hidden by the long straight
hair, long as a woman's, and His body thin and all discoloured: from the
wounds thick blood poured out, and their edges were swollen and red; the
broken knees, the feet and hands, were purple and green with the
beginning of putrefaction.




III

[Sidenote: Ronda]


Ronda is set deep among the mountains between Algeciras and Seville;
they hem it in on all sides, and it straggles up and down little hills,
timidly, as though its presence were an affront to the wild rocks around
it. The houses are huddled against the churches, which look like portly
hens squatting with ruffled feathers, while their chicks, for warmth,
press up against them. It is very cold in Ronda. I saw it first quite
early: over the town hung a grey mist shining in the sunlight, and the
mountains, opalescent in the morning glow, were so luminous that they
seemed hardly solid; they looked as if one could walk through them. The
people, covering their mouths in dread of a _pulmonia_, hastened by,
closely muffled in long cloaks. As I passed the open doors I saw them
standing round the _brasero_, warming themselves; for fireplaces are
unknown to Andalusia, the only means of heat being the _copa_, a round
brass dish in which is placed burning charcoal.

The height and the cold give Ronda a character which reminds one of
Northern Spain; the roofs are quite steep, the houses low and small,
built for warmth rather than, as in the rest of Andalusia, for
coolness.

But the whitewash and the barred windows with their wooden lattice-work,
remind you that you are in Moorish country, in the very heart of it; and
Ronda, indeed, figures in chronicles and in old ballads as a stronghold
of the invaders. The temperature affects the habits of the people, even
their appearance: there is no lounging about the squares or at the doors
of wine-shops, the streets are deserted and their great breadth makes
the emptiness more apparent. The first setters out of the town had no
need to make the ways narrow for the sake of shade, and they are, in
fact, so broad that the houses on either side might be laid on their
faces, and there would still be room for the rapid stream which hurries
down the middle.

The conformation of a Spanish town, even though it lack museums and fine
buildings, gives it an interest beyond that of most European places. The
Moorish design is always evident. That wise people laid out the streets
as was most convenient, tortuous and narrow at Cordova or broad as a
king's highway in Ronda. The Moors stayed their time, and their hour
struck, and they went; the houses had fallen to decay and been more than
once rebuilt. The Christians returned and Mahomet fled before the
Saints; (it was no shame since they grossly out-numbered him;) the
mosque was made a church, and the houses as they fell were built again,
but on the same foundations and in the same way. The streets have
remained as the Moors left them, the houses still are built round little
courtyards--the _patio_--as the Moors built them; and the windows are
barred and latticed as of old, the better to protect beauty whose dark
eyes flash too meaningly at wandering strangers, whose red lips are over
ready to break into a smile for the peace of an absent husband.

* * *

After the busy clamour of Gibraltar, that ant-nest of a hundred
nationalities, Ronda impresses you by its peculiar silence. The lack of
sound is the more noticeable in the frosty clearness of the atmosphere,
and is only emphasised by an occasional cry that floats, from some vast
distance, along the air. The coldness, too, has pinched the features of
the people, and they seem to grow old even earlier than in the rest of
Andalusia. Strapping fellows of thirty with slim figures and a youthful
air have the faces of elderly men, and their skin is hard, stained and
furrowed. The women, ageing as rapidly, have no gaiety. If Spanish girls
have frequently a beautiful youth, their age too often is atrocious: it
is inconceivable that a handsome woman should become so fearful a hag;
the luxuriant hair is lost, and she takes no pains to conceal her grey
baldness, the eye loses its light, the enchanting down of the upper lip
turns to a bristly moustache; the features harden, grow coarse and
vulgar; and the countenance assumes a rapacious expression, so that she
appears a bird of prey; and her strident voice is like the shriek of
vultures. It is easily comprehensible that the Spanish stage should have
taken the old woman as one of its most constant, characteristic types.
But in Ronda even the girls have a weary look, as though life were not
so easy a matter as in warmer places, or as the good God intended; and
they seem to suffer from the brevity of youth, which is no sooner come
than gone. They walk inertly, clothed in sombre colours, their hair not
elaborately arranged as would have it the poorest cigarette-girl, but
merely knotted, without the flower which the Sevillan is popularly said
to insist upon even at the cost of a dinner. And when they go out the
grey shawls they wrap about their heads add to their unattractiveness.




IV

[Sidenote: The Swineherd]


But if Ronda itself is a somewhat dull and unsympathetic place with
nothing more for the edification of the visitor than a melodramatic
chasm, the surrounding country is worthy the most extravagant epithets.
The mountains have the gloomy barrenness, the slate-grey colour of
volcanic ranges; they encircle the town in a gigantic amphitheatre,
rugged and overbearing like Titans turned to stone. They seem, indeed,
to wear a sombre insolence of demeanour as though the aspect of human
kind moved them to lofty contempt. And in their magnificent desolation
they offer a fit environment for the exploits of Byronic heroes. The
handsome villain of romance, seductive by the complexity of his
emotions, by the persistence of his mysterious grief, would find himself
in that theatrical scene most thoroughly at home; nor did Prosper
Mérimée fail to seize the opportunity, for the mountains of Ronda were
the very hunting-ground of Don Josè, who lost his soul for Carmen. But
as a matter of history they were likewise the haunts of brigands in
flesh and blood--malefactors in the past had that sense of the
picturesque which now is vested in the amateur photographer--and this
particular district was as dangerous to the travelling merchant as any
in Spain.

The environs of Ronda are barren and unfertile, the olive groves bear
little fruit. I wandered through the lonely country, towards the
mountains; the day was overcast and the clouds hung sluggishly overhead.
As I walked, suddenly I heard a melancholy voice singing a peasant song,
a _malagueña_. I paused to listen, but the sadness was almost
unendurable; and it went on interminably, wailing through the air with
the insistent monotony of its Moorish origin. I struck into the olives
to find the singer and met a swineherd, guarding a dozen brown pigs, a
youth thin of face, with dark eyes, clothed in undressed sheep-skins;
and the brown wool gave him a singular appearance of community with the
earth about him. He stood among the trees like a wild creature, more
beast than man, and the lank, busy pigs burrowed around him, running to
and fro, with little squeals. He ceased his song when I approached and
looked up timidly. I spoke to him but he made no answer, I offered a
cigarette but he shook his head.

I went my way, and at first the road was not quite solitary. Two men
passed me on donkeys. '_Vaya Usted con Dios!_' they cried--'Go you with
God': it is the commonest greeting in Spain, and the most charming; the
roughest peasant calls it as you meet him. A dozen grey asses went
towards Ronda, one after the other, their panniers filled with stones;
they walked with hanging heads, resigned to all their pain. But when at
last I came into the mountains the loneliness was terrible. Not even
the olive grew on those dark masses of rock, windswept and sterile;
there was not a hut nor a cottage to testify of man's existence, not
even a path such as the wild things of the heights might use. All life,
indeed, appeared incongruous with that overwhelming solitude.

Daylight was waning as I returned, but when I passed the olive-grove,
where many hours before I had heard the _malagueña_, the same monotonous
song still moaned along the air, carrying back my thoughts to the
swineherd. I wondered what he thought of while he sang, whether the sad
words brought him some dim emotion. How curious was the life he led! I
suppose he had never travelled further than his native town; he could
neither write nor read. Madrid to him was a city where the streets were
paved with silver and the King's palace was of fine gold. He was born
and grew to manhood and tended his swine, and some day he would marry
and beget children, and at length die and return to the Mother of all
things. It seemed to me that nowadays, when civilisation has become the
mainstay of our lives, it is only with such beings as these that it is
possible to realise the closeness of the tie between mankind and nature.
To the poor herdsman still clung the soil; he was no foreign element in
the scene, but as much part of it as the stunted olives, belonging to
the earth intimately as the trees among which he stood, as the beasts he
tended.

* * *

When I came near the town the sun was setting. In the west, tempestuous
clouds were massed upon one another, and the sun shone blood-red above
them; but as it sank they were riven asunder, and I saw a great furnace
that lit up the whole sky. The mountains were purple, unreal as the
painted mountains of a picture. The light was gone from the east, and
there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate
that one shuddered with horror of the cold. But the sun fell gold and
red, and the rift in the clouds was a kingdom of gorgeous light; the
earth and its petty inhabitants died away, and in the crimson flame I
could almost see Lucifer standing in his glory, god-like and young;
Lucifer in all majesty, surrounded by his court of archangels,
Beelzebub, Belial, Moloch, Abaddon.

* * *

I had discovered in the morning, from the steeple of _Santa Maria_, a
queer ruined church, and was oddly impressed by the bare façade, with
the yawning apertures of empty windows. I went to it, but every entrance
was bricked up save one, which had a door of rough boards fastened by a
padlock; and in a neighbouring house I found an old man with a key. It
was a spot of utter desolation; the roof had gone or had never been. The
custodian could not tell whether the church was the wreck of an old
building or a framework that had never been completed; the walls were
falling to decay. Along the nave and in the chapels trees were growing,
shrubs and rank weeds; it was curious the utter ruin in the midst of the
populous town. Pigs ran hither and thither, feeding, with noisy grunts,
as they burrowed about the crumbling altar.

The old man inquired whether I wished to buy the absolute uselessness
of the place fascinated me. I asked the price. He looked me up and down,
and seeing I was foreign, suggested a ridiculous sum. And while I amused
myself with bargaining, I wondered what on earth one could do with a
ruined church in Ronda. Half a dozen fantastic notions passed through my
mind, but they were really too melodramatic.

And now when the sun had set I returned. Notwithstanding his suspicions,
I induced the keeper to give me his key; he could not understand what I
desired at such an hour in that solitary place, and asked if I wished to
sleep there! But I calmed his fears with a _peseta_--money goes a long
way in Spain--and went in alone. The pigs had been removed and all was
silent. A few bats flitted to and fro quickly. The light fell away
greyly, the cold descended on the ruin, and it became very strange and
mysterious. Presently, the roofless chapels seemed to grow alive with
weird invisible things, the rank weeds exhaled chill odours; and in the
lonely silence a mass began. At the ruined altar ghostly priests
officiated, passing quietly from side to side, with bows and
genuflections. The bell tinkled as they raised an invisible host. Soon
it became quite dark, and the moon shone through the great empty windows
of the façade.




V

[Sidenote: Medinat Az-Zahra]


In what you divine rather than in what you see lies half the charm of
Andalusia, in the suggestion of all manner of delicate antique things,
in the vivid memory of past grandeur. The Moors have gone, but still
they inhabit the land in spirit and not seldom in a spectral way seem to
regain their old dominion. Often towards evening, as I rode through the
desolate country, I thought I saw an half-naked Moor ploughing his
field, urging the lazy oxen with a long goad. Often the Spaniard on his
horse vanished, and I saw a Muslim knight riding in pride and glory, his
velvet cloak bespattered with the gold initial of his lady, and her
favour fluttering from his lance. Once near Granada, standing on a hill,
I watched the blood-red sun set tempestuously over the plain; and
presently in the distance the gnarled olive-trees seemed living beings,
and I saw contending hosts, two ghostly armies silently battling with
one another; I saw the flash of scimitars, and the gleam of standards,
the whiteness of the turbans. They fought with horrible carnage, and the
land was crimson with their blood. Then the sun fell below the horizon,
and all again was still and lifeless.

And what can be more fascinating than that magic city of Az-Zahra, the
wonder of its age, of which now not a stone remains? It was made to
satisfy the whim of a concubine by a Sultan whose flamboyant passion
moved him to displace mountains for the sake of his beloved; and the
memory thereof is lost so completely that even its situation till lately
was uncertain. Az-Zahra the Fairest said to Abd-er-Rahm[=a]n, her lord:
'Raise me a city that shall take my name and be mine.' The Khalif built
at the foot of the mountain which is called the Hill of the Bride; but
when at last the lady, from the great hall of the palace, gazed at the
snow-white city contrasting with the dark mountain, she remarked: 'See,
O Master! how beautiful this girl looks in the arms of yonder
Ethiopian.' The jealous Khalif immediately commanded the removal of the
offending hill; and when he was convinced the task was impossible,
ordered that the oaks and other mountain trees which grew upon it should
be uprooted, and fig-trees and almonds planted in their stead.

Imagine the _Hall of the Khalif_, with walls of transparent and
many-coloured marble, with roof of gold; on each side were eight doors
fixed upon arches of ivory and ebony, ornamented with precious metals
and with precious stones; and when the sun penetrated them, the
reflection of its rays upon the roof and walls was sufficient to deprive
the beholders of sight! In the centre was a great basin filled with
quicksilver, and the Sultan, wishing to terrify a courtier, would cause
the metal to be set in motion, whereupon the apartment would seem
traversed by flashes of lightning, and all the company would fall
a-trembling.

The old author tells of running streams and of limpid water, of stately
buildings for the household guards, and magnificent palaces for the
reception of high functionaries of state; of the thronging soldiers,
pages, eunuchs, slaves, of all nations and of all religions, in
sumptuous habiliments of silk and of brocade; of judges, theologians,
and poets, walking with becoming gravity in the ample courts.... Alas!
that poets now should rush through Fleet Street with unseemly haste,
attired uncouthly in bowler hats and in preposterous tweeds!

* * *

From the celebrated legend of Roderick the Goth to that last scene when
Boabdil handed the keys of Granada to King Ferdinand, the history of the
Moorish occupation reads far more like romance than like sober fact. It
is rich with every kind of passionate incident; it has all the strange
vicissitudes of oriental history. What career could be more wonderful
than that of Almanzor, who began life as a professional letter-writer,
(a calling which you may still see exercised in the public places of
Madrid or Seville,) and ended it as absolute ruler of an Empire! His
charm of manner, his skill in flattery, the military genius which he
developed when occasion called, his generosity and sense of justice, his
love of literature and art, make him a figure to be contemplated with
admiration; and when you add his utter lack of scruple, his selfishness,
his ingratitude, his perfidy, you have a character complex enough to
satisfy the most exacting.

Those who would read of these things may find an admirable account in
Mr. Lane-Poole's _Moors in Spain_; but I cannot renounce the pleasure of
giving one characteristic detail. After the death of Abd-er-Rahm[=a]n,
the builder of that magnificent city of Az-Zahra, a paper was found in
his own handwriting, upon which he had noted those days in his long
reign which had been free from all sorrow: they numbered fourteen.
Sovereign lord of a country than which there is on earth none more
delightful, his life had been of uninterrupted prosperity; success in
peace and war attended him always; he possessed everything that it was
possible for man to have. These are the observations of Al Makkary, the
Arabic historian, when he narrates the incident:

_O man of understanding! Wonder and observe the small portion of real
happiness the world affords even in the most enviable position. Praise
be given to Him, the Lord of eternal glory and everlasting empire! There
is no God but He the Almighty, the Giver of Empire to whomsoever He
pleases._




VI

[Sidenote: The Mosque]


But Cordova, from which Az-Zahra was about four miles distant, has
visible delights that can vie with its neighbour's vanished pomp. I know
nothing that can give a more poignant emotion than the interior of the
mosque at Cordova; and yet I remember well the splendour of barbaric and
oriental magnificence which was my first sight of St. Mark's at Venice,
as I came abruptly from the darkness of an alley into the golden light
of the Piazza. But to me at least the famous things of Italy, known from
childhood in picture and in description, afford more than anything a
joyful sense of recognition, a feeling as it were of home-coming, such
as may hope to experience the devout Christian on entering upon his
heritage in the Kingdom of Heaven. The mosque of Cordova is oriental and
barbaric too; but I had never seen nor imagined anything in the least
resembling it; there was no disillusionment possible, as too often in
Italy, for the accounts I had read prepared me not at all for that
overwhelming impression. It was so weird and strange, I felt myself
transported suddenly to another world.

They were singing Vespers when I entered, and I heard the shrill voices
of choristers crying the responses; it did not sound like Christian
music. The mosque was dimly lit, the air heavy with incense; and I saw
this forest of pillars, extending every way, as far as the eye could
reach. It was mysterious and awe-inspiring as those enchanted forests of
one's childhood in which huge trees grew in serried masses and where in
cavernous darkness goblins and giants of the fairy-tales, wild beasts
and monstrous shapes, lay in wait for the terrified traveller who had
lost his way. I wandered, keeping the Christian chapels out of sight,
trying to lose myself among the columns; and now and then gained views
of horseshoe arches interlacing, decorated with Moorish tracery.

At length I came to the _Mihrab_, which is the Holy of Holies, the most
exquisite as well as the most sacred part of the mosque. It is
approached by a vestibule of which the roof is a miracle of grace, with
mosaics that glow like precious stones, ultramarine, scarlet, emerald,
and gold. The arch between the chambers is ornamented with four pillars
of coloured marble, and again with mosaic, the gold letters of an Arabic
inscription forming on the deep sapphire of the background a decorative
pattern. The _Mihrab_ itself, which contained the famous Koran of
Othman, has seven sides of white marble, and the roof is a huge shell
cut from a single block.

I tried to picture to myself the mosque before the Christians laid their
desecrating hands upon it. The floor was of coloured tiles, tiles such
as may still be seen in the Alhambra of Granada and in the Alcazar at
Seville. The columns are of marble, of porphyry and jasper; tradition
says they came from Carthage, from pagan temples in France and Christian
churches in Spain; they are slender and unadorned, they must have
contrasted astonishingly with the roof of larch wood, all ablaze with
gold and with vermilion.

There were three hundred chandeliers; and eight thousand lamps--cast of
Christian bells--hung from the roof. The Arab writer tells of gold
shining from the ceiling like fire, blazing like lightning when it darts
across the clouds. The pulpit, wherein was kept the Koran, was of ivory
and of exquisite woods, of ebony and sandal, of plantain, citron and
aloe, fastened together with gold and silver nails and encrusted with
priceless gems. It needed six Khalifs and Almanzor, the great Vizier, to
complete the mosque of which Arab writers, with somewhat prosaic
enthusiasm, said that 'in all the lands of Islam there was none of equal
size, none more admirable in its workmanship, in its construction and
durability.'

* * *

Then the Christians conquered Cordova, and the charming civilisation of
the Moors was driven out by monks and priests and soldiers. First they
built only chapels in the outermost aisles; but in a little while, to
make room for a choir, they destroyed six rows of columns; and at last,
when Master Martin Luther had rekindled Catholic piety, they set up a
great church in the very middle of the mosque. The story of this
vandalism is somewhat quaint, and one detail at least affords a
suggestion that might prove useful in the present time; for the Town
Council of Cordova menaced with death all who should assist in the work:
one imagines that a similar threat from the Lord Mayor of London might
have a salutary effect upon the restorers of Westminster Abbey or the
decorators of St. Paul's. How very much more entertaining must have been
the world when absolutism was the fashion and the preposterous method of
universal suffrage had never been considered! But the Chapter, as those
in power always are, was bent upon restoring, and induced Charles V. to
give the necessary authority. The king, however, had not understood what
they wished to do, and when later he visited Cordova and saw what had
happened, he turned to the dignitaries who were pointing out the
improvements and said: 'You have built what you or others might have
built anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the
world.' The words show a fine scorn; but as a warning to later
generations it would have been more to the purpose to cut off a dozen
priestly heads.

Yet oddly enough the Christian additions are not so utterly discordant
as one would expect! Hernan Ruiz did the work well, even though it was
work he might conveniently have been drawn and quartered for doing.
Typically Spanish in its fine proportion, in its exuberance of fantastic
decoration, his church is a masterpiece of plateresque architecture. Nor
are the priests entirely out of harmony with the building wherein they
worship. For an hour they had sung Vespers, and the deep voices of the
canons, chaunting monotonously, rang weird and long among the columns;
but they finished, and left the choir one by one, walking silently
across the church to the sacristy. The black cassock and the scarlet
hood made a fine contrast, while the short cambric surplice added to the
costume a most delicate grace. One of them paused to speak with two
ladies in _mantillas_, and the three made a picturesque group,
suggesting all manner of old Spanish romance.




VII

[Sidenote: The Court of Oranges]


I went into the cathedral from the side and issuing by another door,
found myself in the Court of Oranges. The setting sun touched it with
warm light and overhead the sky was wonderfully blue. In Moorish times
the mosque was separated from the court by no dividing-wall, so that the
arrangement of pillars within was continued by the even lines of
orange-trees; these are of great age and size, laden with fruit, and in
their copious foliage stand with a trim self-assurance that is quite
imposing.

In the centre, round a fountain into which poured water from jets at the
four corners, stood a number of persons with jars of earthenware and
bright copper cans. One girl held herself with the fine erectness of a
Caryatid, while her jar, propped against the side, filled itself with
the cold, sparkling water. A youth, some vessel in his hand, leaned over
in an attitude of easy grace; and looking into her eyes, appeared to pay
compliments, which she heard with superb indifference. A little boy ran
up, and the girl held aside her jar while he put his mouth to the spout
and drank. Then, as it overflowed, she lifted it with comely motion to
her head and slowly walked away.

By now the canons had unrobed, and several strolled about the court in
the sun, smoking cigarettes. The acolytes with the removal of their
scarlet cassocks, were become somewhat ragged urchins playing pitch and
toss with much gesture and vociferation. Two of them quarrelled fiercely
because one player would not yield the halfpenny he had certainly lost,
and the altercation must have ended in blows if a corpulent, elderly
cleric had not indignantly reproved them, and boxed their ears. A row of
tattered beggars, very well contented in the sunshine, were seated on a
step, likewise smoking cigarettes, and obviously they did not consider
their walk of life unduly hard.

And the thought impressed itself upon me while I lingered in that
peaceful spot, that there was far more to be said for the simple
pleasures of sense than northern folk would have us believe. The English
have still much of that ancient puritanism which finds a vague
sinfulness in the uncostly delights of sunshine, and colour, and ease of
mind. It is well occasionally to leave the eager turmoil of great cities
for such a place as this, where one may learn that there are other, more
natural ways of living, that it is possible still to spend long days,
undisturbed by restless passion, without regret or longing, content in
the various show that nature offers, asking only that the sun should
shine and the happy seasons run their course.

An English engineer whom I had seen at the hotel, approaching me,
expressed the idea in his own graphic manner. 'Down here there are a
good sight more beer and skittles in life than up in Sheffield!'

One canon especially interested me, a little thin man, bent and
wrinkled, apparently of fabulous age, but still something of a dandy,
for he wore his clothes with a certain air, as though half a century
before, byronically, he had been quite a devil with the ladies. The
silver buckle on his shoes was most elegant, and he protruded his foot
as though the violet silk of his stocking gave him a discreet pleasure.
To the very backbone he was an optimist, finding existence evidently so
delightful that it did not even need rose-coloured spectacles. He was an
amiable old man, perhaps a little narrow, but very indulgent to the
follies of others. He had committed no sin himself--for many years: a
suspicion of personal vanity is in itself proof of a pure and gentle
mind; and as for the sins of others--they were probably not heinous, and
at all events would gain forgiveness. The important thing, surely, was
to be sound in dogma. The day wore on and the sun now shone only in a
narrow space; and this the canon perambulated, smoking the end of a
cigarette, the delectable frivolity of which contrasted pleasantly with
his great age. He nodded affably to other priests as they passed, a pair
of young men, and one obese old creature with white hair and an
expression of comfortable self-esteem. He removed his hat with a great
and courteous sweep when a lady of his acquaintance crossed his path.
The priests basking in the warmth were like four great black cats. It
was indeed a pleasant spot, and contentment oozed into one by every
pore. The canon rolled himself another cigarette, smiling as he inhaled
the first sweet whiffs; and one could not but think the sovereign herb
must greatly ease the journey along the steep and narrow way which leads
to Paradise. The smoke rose into the air lazily, and the old cleric
paused now and again to look at it, the little smile of
self-satisfaction breaking on his lips.

Up in the North, under the cold grey sky, God Almighty may be a hard
taskmaster, and the Kingdom of Heaven is attained only by much
endeavour; but in Cordova these things come more easily. The aged priest
walks in the sun and smokes his _cigarillo_. Heaven is not such an
inaccessible place after all. Evidently he feels that he has done his
duty--with the help of Havana tobacco--in that state of life wherein it
has pleased a merciful providence to place him; and St. Peter would
never be so churlish as to close the golden gates in the face of an
ancient canon who sauntered to them jauntily, with the fag end of a
cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Let us cultivate our cabbages in
the best of all possible worlds; and afterwards--_Dieu pardonnera; c'est
son métier_.

* * *

Three months later in the _Porvenir_, under the heading, 'Suicide of a
Priest,' I read that one of these very canons of the Cathedral at
Cordova had shot himself. A report was heard, said the journal, and the
Civil Guard arriving, found the man prostrate with blood pouring from
his ear, a revolver by his side. He was transported to the hospital, the
sacrament administered, and he died. In his pockets they found a
letter, a pawn-ticket, a woman's bracelet, and some peppermint lozenges.
He was thirty-five years old. The newspaper moralised as follows: 'When
even the illustrious order to which the defunct belonged is tainted with
such a crime, it is well to ask whither tends the incredulity of society
which finds an end to its sufferings in the barrel of a revolver. Let
moralists and philosophers combat with all their might this dreadful
tendency; let them make even the despairing comprehend that death is not
the highest good but the passage to an unknown world where, according to
Christian belief, the ill deeds of this existence are punished and the
virtuous rewarded.'




VIII

[Sidenote: Cordova]


Ronda, owing its peculiarities to the surrounding mountains, was not
really very characteristic of the country, and might equally well have
been an highland townlet in any part of Southern Europe. But Cordova
offers immediately the full sensation of Andalusia. It is absolutely a
Moorish city, white and taciturn, so that you are astonished to meet
people in European dress rather than Arabs, in shuffling yellow
slippers. The streets are curiously silent; for the carriage, as in
Tangiers, is done by mules and donkeys, which walk so quietly that you
never hear them. Sometimes you are warned by a deep-voiced '_Cuidado_,'
but more often a pannier brushing you against the wall brings the first
knowledge of their presence. On looking up you are again surprised to
see not a great shining negro in a burnouse, but a Spaniard in tight
trousers, with a broad-brimmed hat.

And Cordova has that sweet, exhilarating perfume of Andalusia than which
nothing gives more vividly the complete feeling of the country. Those
travellers must be obtuse of nostril who do not recognise different
smells, grateful or offensive, in different places; no other peculiarity
is more distinctive, so that an odour crossing by chance one's sense is
able to recall suddenly all the complicated impressions of a strange
land. When I return from England it is always that subtle fragrance
which first strikes me, a mingling in warm sunlight of orange-blossom,
incense, and cigarette smoke; and two whiffs of a certain brand of
tobacco are sufficient to bring back to me Seville, the most enchanting
of all my memories. I suppose that nowhere else are cigarettes consumed
so incessantly; for in Andalusia it is not only certain classes who use
them, but every one, without distinction of age or station--from the
ragamuffin selling lottery-tickets in the street to the portly, solemn
priest, to the burly countryman, the shop-keeper, the soldier. After
all, no better means of killing time have ever been devised, and
consequently to smoke them affords an occupation which most thoroughly
suits the Spaniard.

* * *

I looked at Cordova from the bell-tower of the cathedral. The roofs,
very lovely in their diversity of colour, were of rounded tiles, fading
with every variety of delicate shade from russet and brown to yellow and
the tenderest green. From the courtyards, here and there, rose a tall
palm, or an orange-tree, like a dash of jade against the brilliant sun.
The houses, plainly whitewashed, have from the outside so mean a look
that it is surprising to find them handsome and spacious within. They
are built, Moorish fashion, round a _patio_, which in Cordova at least
is always gay with flowers. When you pass the iron gates and note the
contrast between the snowy gleaming of the street and that southern
greenery, the suggestion is inevitable of charming people who must rest
there in the burning heat of summer. With those surroundings and in such
a country passion grows surely like a poisonous plant. At night, in the
starry darkness, how irresistible must be the flashing eyes of love, how
eloquent the pleading of whispered sighs! But woe to the maid who admits
the ardent lover among the orange-trees, her head reeling with the sweet
intoxication of the blossom; for the Spanish gallant is fickle, quick to
forget the vows he spoke so earnestly: he soon grows tired of kissing,
and mounting his horse, rides fast away.

The uniformity of lime-washed houses makes Cordova the most difficult
place in the world wherein to find your way. The streets are exactly
alike, so narrow that a carriage could hardly pass, paved with rough
cobbles, and tortuous: their intricacy is amazing, labyrinthine; they
wind in and out of one another, leading nowhither; they meander on for
half a mile and stop suddenly, or turn back, so that you are forced to
go in the direction you came. You may wander for hours, trying to find
some point that from the steeple appeared quite close. Sometimes you
think they are interminable.




IX

[Sidenote: The Bridge of Calahorra]


The bridge that the Moors built over the Guadalquivir straggles across
the water with easy arches. Somewhat dilapidated and very beautiful, it
has not the strenuous look of such things in England, and the mere sight
of it fills you with comfort. The clustered houses, with an added
softness from the light burning mellow on their roofs and on their white
walls, increase the happy impression that the world is not necessarily
hurried and toilful. And the town, separated from the river by no formal
embankment, lounges at the water's edge like a giant, prone on the grass
and lazy, stretching his limbs after the mid-day sleep.

There is no precipitation in such a place as Cordova; life is quite long
enough for all that it is really needful to do; to him who waits come
all things, and a little waiting more or less can be of no great
consequence. Let everything be taken very leisurely, for there is ample
time. Yet in other parts of Andalusia they say the Cordovese are the
greatest liars and the biggest thieves in Spain, which points to
considerable industry. The traveller, hearing this, will doubtless ask
what business has the pot to call the kettle black; and it is true that
the standard of veracity throughout the country is by no means high.
But this can scarcely be termed a vice, for the Andalusians see in it
nothing discreditable, and it can be proved as exactly as a proposition
of Euclid that vice and virtue are solely matters of opinion. In
Southern Spain bosom friends lie to one another with complete freedom;
no man would take his wife's word, but would believe only what he
thought true, and think no worse of her when he caught her fibbing.
Mendacity is a thing so perfectly understood that no one is abashed by
detection. In England most men equivocate and nearly all women, but they
are ashamed to be discovered; they blush and stammer and hesitate, or
fly into a passion; the wiser Spaniard laughs, shrugging his shoulders,
and utters a dozen rapid falsehoods to make up for the first. It is
always said that a good liar needs an excellent memory, but he wants
more qualities than that--unblushing countenance, the readiest wit, a
manner to beget confidence. In fact it is so difficult to lie
systematically and well that the ardour of the Andalusians in that
pursuit can be ascribed only to an innate characteristic. Their
imaginations, indeed, are so exuberant that the bald fact is to them
grotesque and painful. They are like writers in love with words for
their own sake, who cannot make the plainest statement without a gay
parade of epithet and metaphor. They embroider and decorate, they colour
and enhance the trivial details of circumstance. They must see
themselves perpetually in an attitude; they must never fail to be
effective. They lie for art's sake, without reason or rhyme, from mere
devilry, often when it can only harm them. Mendacity then becomes an
intellectual exercise, such as the poet's sonneteering to an imaginary
lady-love.

But the Cordovan very naturally holds himself in no such unflattering
estimation. The motto of his town avers that he is a warlike person and
a wise one:

    Cordoba, casa de guerrera gente
    Y de sabiduria clara fuente!

And the history thereof, with its University and its Khalifs, bears him
out. Art and science flourished there when the rest of Europe was
enveloped in mediæval darkness: when our Saxon ancestors lived in dirty
hovels, barbaric brutes who knew only how to kill, to eat, and to
propagate their species, the Moors of Cordova cultivated all the
elegancies of life from verse-making to cleanliness.

* * *

I was standing on the bridge. The river flowed tortuously through the
fertile plain, broad and shallow, and in it the blue sky and the white
houses of the city were brightly mirrored. In the distance, like a
vapour of amethyst, rose the mountains; while at my feet, in mid-stream,
there were two mills which might have been untouched since Moorish days.
There had been no rain for months, the water stood very low, and here
and there were little islands of dry yellow sand, on which grew reeds
and sedge. In such a spot might easily have wandered the half-naked
fisherman of the oriental tale, bewailing in melodious verse the
hardness of his lot; since to his net came no fish, seeking a broken pot
or a piece of iron wherewith to buy himself a dinner. There might he
find a ring half-buried in the sand, which, when he rubbed to see if it
were silver, a smoke would surely rise from the water, increasing till
the light of day was obscured; and half dead with fear, he would
perceive at last a gigantic body towering above him, and a voice more
terrible than the thunder of Allah, crying: 'What wishest thou from thy
slave, O king? Know that I am of the Jin, and Suleyman, whose name be
exalted, enslaved me to the ring that thou hast found.'

In Cordova recollections of the _Arabian Nights_ haunt you till the
commonest sights assume a fantastic character, and the frankly
impossible becomes mere matter of fact. You wonder whether your life is
real or whether you have somehow reverted to the days when Scheherazade,
with her singular air of veracity, recited such enthralling stories to
her lord as to save her own life and that of many other maidens. I
looked along the river and saw three slender trees bending over it,
reflecting in the placid water their leafless branches, and under them
knelt three women washing clothes. Were they three beautiful princesses
whose fathers had been killed, and they expelled from their kingdom and
thus reduced to menial occupations? Who knows? Indeed, I thought it very
probable, for so many royal persons have come down in the world of late;
but I did not approach them, since king's daughters under these
circumstances have often lost one eye, and their morals are nearly
always of the worst description.




X

[Sidenote: Puerta del Puente]


I went back to the old gate which led to the bridge. Close by, in the
little place, was the hut of the _consumo_, the local custom-house, with
officials lounging at the door or sitting straddle-legged on chairs,
lazily smoking. Opposite was a tobacconist's, with the gaudy red and
yellow sign, _Campañia arrendataria de tabacos_, and a dram-shop where
three hardy Spaniards from the mountains stood drinking _aguardiente_.
Than this, by the way, there is in the world no more insidious liquor,
for at first you think its taste of aniseed and peppermint very
disagreeable; but perseverance, here as in other human affairs, has its
reward, and presently you develop for it a liking which time increases
to enthusiasm. In Spain, the land of custom and usage, everything is
done in a certain way; and there is a proper manner to drink
_aguardiente_. To sip it would show a lamentable want of decorum. A
Spaniard lifts the little glass to his lips, and with a comic, abrupt
motion tosses the contents into his mouth, immediately afterwards
drinking water, a tumbler of which is always given with the spirit. It
is really the most epicurean of intoxicants because the charm lies in
the after-taste. The water is so cool and refreshing after the
fieriness; it gives, without the gasconnade, the emotion Keats
experienced when he peppered his mouth with cayenne for the greater
enjoyment of iced claret.

But the men wiped their mouths with their hands and came out of the wine
shop, mounting their horses which stood outside--shaggy, long-haired
beasts with high saddles and great box-stirrups. They rode slowly
through the gate one after the other, in the easy slouching way of men
who have been used to the saddle all their lives and in the course of
the week are accustomed to go a good many miles in an easy jog-trot to
and from the town. It seems to me that the Spaniards resolve themselves
into types more distinctly than is usual in northern countries, while
between individuals there is less difference. These three, clean-shaven
and uniformly dressed, of middle size, stout, with heavy strong features
and small eyes, certainly resembled one another very strikingly. They
were the typical inn-keepers of Goya's pictures but obviously could not
all keep inns; doubtless they were farmers, horse-dealers, or
forage-merchants, shrewd men of business, with keen eyes for the main
chance. That class is the most trustworthy in Spain, kind, hospitable,
and honest; they are old-fashioned people with many antique customs, and
preserve much of the courteous dignity which made their fathers famous.

A string of grey donkeys came along the bridge, their panniers
earth-laden, poor miserable things that plodded slowly and painfully,
with heads bent down, placing one foot before the other with the
donkey's peculiar motion, patiently doing a thing they had patiently
done ever since they could bear a load. They seemed to have a dull
feeling that it was no use to make a fuss, or to complain; it would just
go on till they dropped down dead and their carcases were sold for
leather and glue. There was a Spanish note in the red trappings, braided
and betasselled, but all worn, discoloured and stained.

Inside the gate they stopped, waiting in a huddled group, with the same
heavy patience, for the examination of the _consumo_. An officer of the
custom-house went round with a long steel prong, which he ran into the
baskets one by one, to see that there was nothing dutiable hidden in the
earth. Then, sparing of his words, he made a sign to the driver and sat
down again straddle-wise on his chair. '_Arre, burra!_' The first donkey
walked slowly on, and as they heard the tinkling of the leader's bell
the rest stepped forward in the long line, their heads hanging down,
with that hopeless movement of the feet.

* * *

In the night, wandering at random through the streets, their silent
whiteness filled me again with that intoxicating sensation of the
_Arabian Nights_. I looked through the iron gateways as I passed, into
the _patios_ with their dark foliage, and once I heard the melancholy
twang of a guitar. I was sure that in one of those houses the three
princesses had thrown off their disguise and sat radiant in queenly
beauty, their raven tresses falling in a hundred plaits over their
shoulders, their fingers stained with henna and their long eyelashes
darkened with kohl. But alas! though I lost my way I found them not.

Yet many an amorous Spaniard, too passionate to be admitted within his
mistress' house, stood at her window. This method of philandering,
surely most conducive to the ideal, is variously known as _comer
hierro_, to eat iron, and _pelar la pava_, to pluck the turkey. One
imagines that the cold air of a winter's night must render the most
ardent lover platonic. It is a significant fact that in Spanish novels
if the hero is left for two minutes alone with the heroine there are
invariably asterisks and some hundred pages later a baby. So it is
doubtless wise to separate true love by iron bars, and perchance
beauty's eyes flash more darkly to the gallant standing without the
gate; illusions, the magic flower of passion, arise more willingly. But
in Spain the blood of youth is very hot, love laughs at most restraints
and notwithstanding these precautions, often enough there is a
catastrophe. The Spaniard, who will seduce any girl he can, is pitiless
under like circumstances to his own womenkind; so there is much weeping,
the girl is turned out of doors and falls readily into the hands of the
procuress. In the brothels of Seville or of Madrid she finds at least a
roof and bread to eat; and the fickle swain goes his way rejoicing.

I found myself at last near the _Puerta del Puente_, and I stood again
on the Moorish bridge. The town was still and mysterious in the night,
and the moon shone down on the water with a hard and brilliant coldness.
The three trees with their bare branches looked yet more slender, naked
and alone, like pre-Raphaelite trees in a landscape of _Pélléas et
Mélisande_; the broad river, almost stagnant, was extraordinarily calm
and silent. I wondered what strange things the placid Guadalquivir had
seen through the centuries; on its bosom many a body had been borne
towards the sea. It recalled those mysterious waters of the Eastern
tales which brought to the marble steps of palaces great chests in which
lay a fair youth's headless corpse or a sleeping beautiful maid.




XI

[Sidenote: Seville]


The impression left by strange towns and cities is often a matter of
circumstance, depending upon events in the immediate past; or on the
chance which, during his earliest visit, there befell the traveller.
After a stormy passage across the Channel, Newhaven, from the mere fact
of its situation on solid earth, may gain a fascination which closer
acquaintance can never entirely destroy; and even Birmingham, first seen
by a lurid sunset, may so affect the imagination as to appear for ever
like some infernal, splendid city, restless with the hurried toil of
gnomes and goblins. So to myself Seville means ten times more than it
can mean to others. I came to it after weary years in London, heartsick
with much hoping, my mind dull with drudgery; and it seemed a land of
freedom. There I became at last conscious of my youth, and it seemed a
belvedere upon a new life. How can I forget the delight of wandering in
the Sierpes, released at length from all imprisoning ties, watching the
various movement as though it were a stage-play, yet half afraid that
the falling curtain would bring back reality! The songs, the dances, the
happy idleness of orange-gardens, the gay turbulence of Seville by
night; ah! there at least I seized life eagerly, with both hands,
forgetting everything but that time was short and existence full of joy.
I sat in the warm sunshine, inhaling the pleasant odours, reminding
myself that I had no duty to do then, or the morrow, or the day after. I
lay a-bed thinking how happy, effortless and free would be my day.
Mounting my horse, I clattered through the narrow streets, over the
cobbles, till I came to the country; the air was fresh and sweet, and
Aguador loved the spring mornings. When he put his feet to the springy
turf he gave a little shake of pleasure, and without a sign from me
broke into a gallop. To the amazement of shepherds guarding their wild
flocks, to the confusion of herds of brown pigs, scampering hastily as
we approached, he and I excited by the wind singing in our ears, we
pelted madly through the country. And the whole land laughed with the
joy of living.

But I love also the recollection of Seville in the grey days of
December, when the falling rain offered a grateful contrast to the
unvarying sunshine. Then new sights delighted the eye, new perfumes the
nostril. In the decay of that long southern autumn a more sombre
opulence was added to the gay colours; a different spirit filled the
air, so that I realised suddenly that old romantic Spain of Ferdinand
and Isabella. It lay a-dying still, gorgeous in corruption, sober yet
flamboyant, rich and poverty-stricken, squalid, magnificent. The white
streets, the dripping trees, the clouds gravid with rain, gave to all
things an adorable melancholy, a sad, poetic charm. Looking back, I
cannot dismiss the suspicion that my passionate emotions were somewhat
ridiculous, but at twenty-three one can afford to lack a sense of
humour.

* * *

But Seville at first is full of disillusion. It has offered abundant
material to the idealist who, as might be expected, has drawn of it a
picture which is at once common and pretentious. Your idealist can see
no beauty in sober fact, but must array it in all the theatrical
properties of a vulgar imagination; he must give to things more imposing
proportions, he colours gaudily; Nature for him is ever posturing in the
full glare of footlights. Really he stands on no higher level than the
housemaid who sees in every woman a duchess in black velvet, an Aubrey
Plantagenet in plain John Smith. So I, in common with many another
traveller, expected to find in the Guadalquivir a river of transparent
green, with orange-groves along its banks, where wandered ox-eyed youths
and maidens beautiful. Palm-trees, I thought, rose towards heaven, like
passionate souls longing for release from earthly bondage; Spanish
women, full-breasted and sinuous, danced _boleros_, _fandangos_, while
the air rang with the joyous sound of castanets, and toreadors in
picturesque habiliments twanged the light guitar.

Alas! the Guadalquivir is like yellow mud, and moored to the busy quays
lie cargo-boats lading fruit or grain or mineral; there no perfume
scents the heavy air. The nights, indeed, are calm and clear, and the
stars shine brightly; but the river banks see no amours more romantic
than those of stokers from Liverpool or Glasgow, and their lady-loves
have neither youth nor beauty.

Yet Seville has many a real charm to counter-balance these lost
illusions. He that really knows it, like an ardent lover with his
mistress' imperfections, would have no difference; even the
Guadalquivir, so matter-of-fact, really so prosaic, has an unimagined
attractiveness; the crowded shipping, the hurrying porters, add to that
sensation of vivacity which is of Seville the most fascinating
characteristic. And Seville is an epitome of Andalusia, with its life
and death, with its colour and vivid contrasts, with its boyish gaiety.

It is a city of delightful ease, of freedom and sunshine, of torrid
heat. There it does not matter what you do, nor when, nor how you do it.
There is none to hinder you, none to watch. Each takes his ease, and is
content that his neighbour should do the like. Doubtless people are lazy
in Seville, but good heavens! why should one be so terribly strenuous?
Go into the Plaza Nueva, and you will see it filled with men of all
ages, of all classes, 'taking the sun'; they promenade slowly,
untroubled by any mental activity, or sit on benches between the
palm-trees, smoking cigarettes; perhaps the more energetic read the
bull-fighting news in the paper. They are not ambitious, and they do not
greatly care to make their fortunes; so long as they have enough to eat
and drink--food is very cheap--and cigarettes to smoke, they are quite
happy. The Corporation provides seats, and the sun shines down for
nothing--so let them sit in it and warm themselves. I daresay it is as
good a way of getting through life as most others.

A southern city never reveals its true charm till the summer, and few
English know what Seville is under the burning sun of July. It was built
for the great heat, and it is only then that the refreshing coolness of
the _patio_ can be appreciated. In the streets the white glare is
mitigated by awnings that stretch from house to house, and the half
light in the Sierpes, the High Street, has a curious effect; the people
in their summer garb walk noiselessly, as though the warmth made sound
impossible. Towards evening the sail-cloths are withdrawn, and a breath
of cold air sinks down; the population bestirs itself, and along the
Sierpes the _cafés_ become suddenly crowded and noisy.

Then, for it was too hot to ride earlier, I would mount my horse and
cross the river. The Guadalquivir had lost its winter russet, and under
the blue sky gained varied tints of liquid gold, of emerald and of
sapphire. I lingered in Triana, the gipsy-quarter, watching the people.
Beautiful girls stood at the windows, so that the whole way was lined
with them, and their lips were not unwilling to break into charming
smiles. One especially I remember who was used to sit on a balcony at a
street-corner; her hair was irreproachable in its elaborate arrangement,
and the red carnation in it gleamed like fire against the night. Her
face was long, fairer-complexioned than is common, with regular and
delicate features. She sat at her balcony, with a huge book open on her
knee, which she read with studied disregard of the passers-by; but when
I looked back sometimes I saw that she had lifted her eyes, lustrous and
dark, and they met mine gravely.

And in the country I passed through long fields of golden corn, which
reached as far as I could see; I remembered the spring, when it had all
been new, soft, fresh, green. And presently I turned round to look at
Seville in the distance, bathed in brilliant light, glowing as though
its walls were built of yellow flame. The Giralda arose in its wonderful
grace like an arrow; so slim, so comely, it reminded one of an Arab
youth, with long, thin limbs. With the setting sun, gradually the city
turned rosy-red and seemed to lose all substantiality, till it became a
many-shaped mist that was dissolved in the tenderness of the sky.

Late in the night I stood at my window looking at the cloudless heaven.
From the earth ascended, like incense, the mellow odours of summer-time;
the belfry of the neighbouring church stood boldly outlined against the
darkness, and the storks that had built their nest upon it were
motionless, not stirring even as the bells rang out the hours. The city
slept, and it seemed that I alone watched in the silence; the sky still
was blue, and the stars shone in their countless millions. I thought of
the city that never rested, of London with its unceasing roar, the
endless streets, the greyness. And all around me was a quiet serenity, a
tranquillity such as the Christian may hope shall reward him in Paradise
for the troublous pilgrimage of life. But that is long ago and passed
for ever.




XII

[Sidenote: The Alcazar]


Arriving at Seville the recollection of Cordova took me quickly to the
Alcazar; but I was a little disappointed. It has been ill and tawdrily
restored, with crude pigments, with gold that is too bright and too
clean; but even before that, Charles V. and his successors had made
additions out of harmony with Moorish feeling. Of the palace where lived
the Mussulman Kings nothing, indeed, remains; but Pedro the Cruel, with
whom the edifice now standing is more especially connected, was no less
oriental than his predecessors, and he employed Morisco architects to
rebuild it. Parts are said to be exact reproductions of the older
structure, while many of the beautiful tiles were taken from Moorish
houses.

The atmosphere, then, is but half Arabic; the rest belongs to that
flaunting, multi-coloured barbarism which is characteristic of Northern
Spain before the union of Arragon and Castile. Wandering in the deserted
courts, looking through horseshoe windows of exquisite design at the
wild garden, Pedro the Cruel and Maria de Padilla are the figures that
occupy the mind.

Seville teems with anecdotes of the monarch who, according to the point
of view, has been called the Cruel and the Just. He was an amorist for
whom platonic dalliance had no charm, and there are gruesome tales of
ladies burned alive because they would not quench the flame of his
desires, of others, fiercely virtuous, who poured boiling oil on face
and bosom to make themselves unattractive in his sight. But the head
that wears a crown apparently has fascinations which few women can
resist, and legend tells more frequently of Pedro's conquests than of
his rebuffs. He was an ardent lover to whom marriage vows were of no
importance; that he committed bigamy is certain--and pardonable, but
some historians are inclined to think that he had at one and the same
time no less than three wives. He was oriental in his tastes.

In imitation of the Paynim sovereigns Pedro loved to wander in the
streets of Seville at night, alone and disguised, to seek adventure or
to see for himself the humour of his subjects; and like them also it
pleased him to administer justice seated in the porch of his palace. If
he was often hard and proud towards the nobles, with the people he was
always very gracious; to them he was the redressor of wrongs and a
protector of the oppressed; his justice was that of the Mussulman
rulers, rapid, terrible and passionate, often quaint. For instance: a
rich priest had done some injury to a cobbler, who brought him before
the ecclesiastical tribunals, where he was for a year suspended from his
clerical functions. The tradesman thought the punishment inadequate, and
taking the law into his own hands gave the priest a drubbing. He was
promptly seized, tried, condemned to death. But he appealed to the king
who, with a witty parody of the rival Court, changed the punishment to
suspension from his trade, and ordered the cobbler for twelve months to
make no boots.

On the other hand, the Alcazar itself has been the scene of Pedro's
vilest crimes, in the whole list of which is none more insolent, none
more treacherous, than that whereby he secured the priceless ruby which
graces still the royal crown of England. There is a school of historians
which insists on finding a Baptist Minister in every hero--think what a
poor-blooded creature they wish to make of the glorious Nelson--but no
casuistry avails to cleanse the memory of Pedro of Castille: even for
his own ruthless age he was a monster of cruelty and lust. Indeed the
indignation with which his biographers have felt bound to charge their
pens has somewhat obscured their judgment; they have so eagerly insisted
on the censure with which themselves regard their hero's villainies,
that they have found little opportunity to explain a complex character.
Yet the story of his early life affords a simple key to his maturity.
Till the age of fifteen he lived in prisons, suffering with his mother
every insult and humiliation, while his father's mistress kept queenly
state, and her children received the honours of royal princes. When he
came to the throne he found himself a catspaw between his natural
brothers and ambitious nobles. His nearest relatives were ever his
bitterest enemies, and he was continually betrayed by those he trusted;
even his mother delivered to the rebellious peers the strongholds and
the treasures he had left in her charge and caused him to be taken
prisoner. As a boy he had been violent and impetuous, yet always loyal:
but before he was twenty he became suspicious and mistrustful; in his
weakness he made craft and perfidy his weapons, practising to compose
his face, to feign forgetfulness of injury till the moment of vengeance;
he learned to dissemble so that none could tell his mind, and treated no
courtiers with greater favour than those upon whose death he had already
determined.

Intermingled with this career of vice and perfidy and bloodshed is the
love of Maria de Padilla, whom the king met when he was eighteen, and
till her death loved passionately--with brief inconstancies, for
fidelity has never been a royal virtue; and she figures with gentle
pathos in that grim history like wild perfumed flowers on a storm-beaten
coast. After the assassination of the unfortunate Blanche, the French
Queen whom he loathed with an extraordinary physical repulsion, Pedro
acknowledged a secret marriage with Maria de Padilla, which legitimised
her children; but for ten years before she had been treated with royal
rights. The historian says that she was very beautiful, but her especial
charm seems to have been that voluptuous grace which is characteristic
of Andalusian women. She was simple and pious, with a nature of great
sweetness, and she never abused her power; her influence, as runs the
hackneyed phrase, was always for good, and untiringly she did her
utmost to incline her despot lover to mercy. She alone sheds a ray of
light on Pedro's memory, only her love can save him from the execration
of posterity. When she died rich and poor alike mourned her, and the
king was inconsolable. He honoured her with pompous obsequies, and
throughout the kingdom ordered masses to be sung for the rest of her
soul.

* * *

The guardians of the Alcazar show you the chambers in which dwelt this
gracious lady, and the garden-fountain wherein she bathed in summer.
Moralists, anxious to prove that the way of righteousness is hard, say
that beauty dies, but they err, for beauty is immortal. The habitations
of a lovely woman never lose the enchantment she has cast over them, her
comeliness lingers in their empty chambers like a subtle odour; and
centuries after her very bones have crumbled to dust it is her presence
alone that is felt, her footfall that is heard on the marble floors.

Garish colours, alas! have driven the tender spirit of Maria de Padilla
from the royal palace, but it has betaken itself to the old garden, and
there wanders sadly. It is a charming place of rare plants and exotic
odours; cypress and tall palm trees rise towards the blue sky with their
irresistible melancholy, their far-away suggestion of burning deserts;
and at their feet the ground is carpeted with violets. Yet to me the
wild roses brought strangely recollections of England, of long summer
days when the air was sweet and balmy; the birds sang heavenly songs,
the same songs as they sing in June in the fat Kentish fields. The
gorgeous palace had only suggested the long past days of history, and
Seville the joy of life and the love of sunshine; but the old quiet
garden took me far away from Spain, so that I longed to be again in
England. In thought I wandered through a garden that I knew in years
gone by, filled also with flowers, but with hollyhocks and jasmine; the
breeze carried the sweet scent of the honeysuckle to my nostrils, and I
looked at the green lawns, with the broad, straight lines of the
grass-mower. The low of cattle reached my ears, and wandering to the
fence I looked into the fields beyond; yellow cows grazed idly or lay
still chewing the cud; they stared at me with listless, sleepy eyes.

But I glanced up and saw a flock of wild geese flying northwards in long
lines that met, making two sides of a huge triangle; they flew quickly
in the cloudless sky, far above me, and presently were lost to view.
About me was the tall box-wood of the southern garden, and tropical
plants with rich flowers of yellow and red and purple. A dark fir-tree
stood out, ragged and uneven, like a spirit of the North, erect as a
life without reproach; but the foliage of the palms hung down with a
sad, adorable grace.




XIII

[Sidenote: Calle de las Sierpes]


In Seville the Andalusian character thrives in its finest flower; and
nowhere can it be more conveniently studied than in the narrow, sinuous,
crowded thoroughfare which is the oddest street in Europe. The Calle de
las Sierpes is merely a pavement, hardly broader than that of
Piccadilly, without a carriage-way. The houses on either side are very
irregular; some are tall, four-storeyed, others quite tiny; some are
well kept and freshly painted, others dilapidated. It is one of the
curiosities of Seville that there is no particularly fashionable
quarter; and, as though some moralising ruler had wished to place before
his people a continual reminder of the uncertainty of human greatness,
by the side of a magnificent palace you will find a hovel.

At no hour of the day does the Calle de las Sierpes lack animation, but
to see it at its best you must go towards evening, at seven o'clock, for
then there is scarcely room to move. Fine gentlemen stand at the club
doors or sit within, looking out of the huge windows; the merchants and
the students, smoking cigarettes, saunter, wrapped magnificently in
their capos. Cigarette-girls pass with roving eyes; they suffer from no
false modesty and smile with pleasure when a compliment reaches their
ears. Admirers do not speak in too low a tone and the fair Sevillan is
never hard of hearing.

Newspaper boys with shrill cries announce evening editions: '_Porvenir!_
_Noticiero!_' Vendors of lottery-tickets wander up and down, audaciously
offering the first prize: '_Quien quiere el premio gardo?_' Beggars
follow you with piteous tales of fasts improbably extended. But most
striking is the _gente flamenca_, the bull-fighter, with his numerous
hangers-on. The _toreros_--toreador is an unknown word, good for comic
opera and persons who write novels of Spanish life and cannot be
bothered to go to Spain--the _toreros_ sit in their especial cafe, the
_Cerveceria National_, or stand in little groups talking to one another.
They are distinguishable by the _coleta_, which is a little plait of
hair used to attach the chignon of full-dress: it is the dearest
ambition of the aspirant to the bull-ring to possess this ornament; he
grows it as soon as he is full-fledged, and it is solemnly cut off when
the weight of years and the responsibility of landed estates induce him
to retire from the profession. The bull-fighter dresses peculiarly and
the _gente flamenca_, imitates him so far as its means allow. A famous
_matador_ is as well paid as in England a Cabinet Minister or a
music-hall artiste. This is his costume: a broad-brimmed hat with a low
crown, which is something like a topper absurdly flattened down, with
brims preposterously broadened out. The front of his shirt is befrilled
and embroidered, and his studs are the largest diamonds; not even
financiers in England wear such important stones. He wears a low collar
without a necktie, but ties a silk handkerchief round his neck like an
English navvy; an Eton jacket, fitting very tightly, brown, black, or
grey, with elaborate frogs and much braiding; the trousers, skin-tight
above, loosen below, and show off the lower extremities when, like the
heroes of feminine romance, the wearer has a fine leg. Indeed, it is a
mode of dress which exhibits the figure to great advantage, and many of
these young men have admirable forms.

In their strong, picturesque way they are often very handsome. They have
a careless grace of gesture, a manner of actors perfectly at ease in an
effective part, a brutal healthiness; there is a flamboyance in their
bearing, a melodramatic swagger, which is most diverting. And their
faces, so contrasted are the colours, so strongly marked the features,
are full of interest. Clean shaven, the beard shows violet through the
olive skin; they have high cheek bones and thin, almost hollow cheeks,
with eyes set far back in the sockets, dark and lustrous under heavy
brows. The black hair, admirably attached to the head, is cut short;
shaved on the temples and over the ears, brushed forward as in other
countries is fashionable with gentlemen of the box: it fits the skull
like a second, tighter skin. The lips are red and sensual, the teeth
white, regular and well shaped. The bull-fighter is remarkable also for
the diamond rings which decorate his fingers and the massive gold, the
ponderous seals, of his watch-chain.

Who can wonder then that maidens fair, their hearts turning to thoughts
of love, should cast favourable glances upon this hero of a hundred
fights? The conquests of tenors and grand-dukes and fiddlers are
insignificant beside those of a bull-fighter; and the certainty of
feminine smiles is another inducement for youth to exchange the drudgery
of menial occupations for the varied excitement of the ring.

* * *

At night the Sierpes is different again. Little by little the people
scatter to their various homes, the shops are closed, the clubs put out
their lights, and by one the loiterers are few. The contrast is vivid
between the noisy throng of day-time and this sudden stillness; the
emptiness of the winding street seems almost unnatural. The houses,
losing all variety, are intensely black; and above, the sinuous line of
sky is brilliant with clustering stars. A drunken roysterer reels from a
tavern-door, his footfall echoing noisily along the pavement, but
quickly he sways round a corner; and the silence, more impressive for
the interruption, returns. The night-watchman, huddled in a cloak of
many folds, is sleeping in a doorway, dimly outlined by the yellow gleam
of his lantern.

Then I, a lover of late hours, returning, seek the _guardia_. Sevillan
houses are locked at midnight by this individual, who keeps the
latch-keys of a whole street, and is supposed to be on the look-out for
tardy comers. I clap my hands, such being the Spanish way to attract
attention, and shout; but he does not appear. He is a good-natured,
round man, bibulous, with grey hair and a benevolent manner. I know his
habits and resign myself to inquiring for him in the neighbouring
dram-shops. I find him at last and assail him with all the abuse at my
command; he is too tipsy to answer or to care, and follows me, jangling
his keys. He fumbles with them at the door, blaspheming because they are
so much alike, and finally lets me in.

_'Buena noche. Descanse v bien.'_




XIV

[Sidenote: Characteristics]


It is a hazardous thing to attempt the analysis of national character,
for after all, however careful the traveller may be in his inquiries, it
is from the few individuals himself has known that his most definite
impressions are drawn. Of course he can control his observations by
asking the opinion of foreigners long resident in the country; but
curiously enough in Andalusia precisely the opposite occurs from what
elsewhere is usual. Aliens in England, France, or Italy, with increasing
comprehension, acquire also affection and esteem for the people among
whom they live; but I have seldom found in Southern Spain a
foreigner--and there are many, merchants, engineers and the like, with
intimate knowledge of the inhabitants--who had a good word to say for
the Andalusians.

But perhaps it is in the behaviour of crowds that the most accurate
picture of national character can be obtained. Like composite
photographs which give the appearance of a dozen people together, but a
recognisable portrait of none, the multitude offers as it were a
likeness in the rough, without precision of detail yet with certain
marked features more obviously indicated. The crowd is an individual
without responsibility, unoppressed by the usual ties of prudence and
decorum, who betrays himself because he lacks entirely
self-consciousness and the desire to pose. In Spain the crowd is above
all things good-humoured, fond of a joke so long as it is none too
subtle, excitable of course and prone to rodomontade, yet practical,
eager to make the best of things and especially to get its money's
worth. If below the surface there are a somewhat brutal savagery, a
cruel fickleness, these are traits common with all human beings together
assembled; they are merely evidence of man's close relationship to ape
and tiger.

From contemporary novels more or less the same picture appears, and also
from the newspapers, though in these somewhat idealised; for the Press,
bound to flatter for its living, represents its patrons, as do some
portrait-painters, not as they are but as they would like to be. In the
eyes of Andalusian journalists their compatriots are for ever making a
magnificent gesture; and the condition would be absurd if a hornet's
nest of comic papers, tempering vanity with a lively sense of the
ridiculous, did not save the situation by abundantly coarse caricatures.

It is vanity then which emerges as the most distinct of national traits,
a vanity so egregious, so childish, so grotesque, that the onlooker is
astounded. The Andalusians have a passion for gorgeous raiment and for
jewellery. They must see themselves continually in the brightest light,
standing for ever on some alpine eminence of vice or virtue, in full
view of their fellow men. Like schoolboys they will make themselves out
desperate sinners to arouse your horror, and if that does not impress
you, accomplished actors ready to suit your every mood, they will pose
as saints than whom none more truly pious have existed on the earth.
They are the Gascons of Spain, but beside them the Bordelais is a
truthful, unimaginative creature.

Next comes laziness. There is in Europe no richer soil than that of
Andalusia, and the Arabs, with an elaborate system of irrigation,
obtained three crops a year; but now half the land lies uncultivated,
and immense tracts are planted only with olives, which, comparatively,
entail small labour. But the inhabitants of this fruitful country are
happy in this, that boredom is unknown to them; content to lie in the
sun for hours, neither talking, thinking, nor reading, they are never
tired of idleness: two men will sit for half a day in a _cafe_, with a
glass of water before them, not exchanging three remarks in an hour. I
fancy it is this stolidness which has given travellers an impression of
dignity; in their quieter moments they remind one of very placid sheep,
for they have not half the energy of pigs, which in Spain at least are
restless and spirited creatures. But a trifle will rouse them; and then,
quite unable to restrain themselves, pallid with rage, they hurl abuse
at their enemy--Spanish, they say, is richer in invective than any other
European tongue--and quickly long knives are whipped out to avenge the
affront.

Universal opinion has given its verdict in an epithet: and just as many
people speak of the volatile Frenchman, the stolid Dutchman, the amatory
Italian, they talk of the proud Spaniard. But it is pride of a peculiar
sort; a Sevillian with only the smallest claims to respectability would
rather die than carry a parcel through the street; however poor, some
one must perform for him so menial an office: and he would consider it
vastly beneath his dignity to accept charity, though if he had the
chance would not hesitate to swindle you out of sixpence. But in matters
of honesty these good people show a certain discrimination. Your
servants, for example, would hesitate to steal money, especially if
liable to detection, but not to take wine and sugar and oil: which is
proved by the freedom with which they discuss the theft among themselves
and the calmness with which they acknowledge it when a wrathful master
takes them in the act. The reasoning is, if you're such a fool as not to
keep your things under lock and key you deserve to be robbed; and if
dismissed for such a peccadillo they consider themselves very hardly
used.

Uncharitable persons, saying that a Spaniard will live for a week on
bread and water duly to prepare himself for a meal at another's expense,
accuse them of gluttony; but I have always found the Andalusians
abstemious eaters, nor have I wondered at this, since Spanish food is
abominable. But drunkards they often are. I should think as many people
in proportion get drunk in Seville as in London, though it is only fair
to add that their heads are not strong, and very little alcohol will
produce in them an indecent exhilaration.

But if the reader, because the Andalusians are slothful, truthless, but
moderately honest, vain, concludes that they are an unattractive people
he will grossly err. His reasoning, that moral qualities make pleasant
companions, is quite false; on the contrary it is rigid principles and
unbending character, strength of will and a decided sense of right and
wrong, which make intercourse difficult. A sensitive conscience is no
addition to the amenities of the dinner-table. But when a man is willing
to counter a deadly sin with a shrug of the shoulders, when between
white and black he can discover no insupportable contrast, the
probabilities are that he will at least humour your whims and respect
your prejudices. And so it is that the Andalusians make very agreeable
acquaintance. They are free and amiable in their conversation, and will
always say the thing that pleases rather than the brutal thing that is.
They miss no opportunity to make compliments, which they do so well that
at the moment you are assured these flattering remarks come from the
bottom of their hearts. Very reasonably, they cannot understand why you
should be disagreeable to a man merely because you rob him; to injury,
unless their minds are clouded by passion, they have not the bad taste
to add insult. Compare with these manners the British abhorrence of
polite and complimentary speeches, especially if they happen to be true:
the Englishman may hold you in the highest estimation, but wild horses
will not drag from him an acknowledgment of the fact; whereby humanism
and the general stock of self-esteem are notably diminished.

Nothing can be more graceful than their mode of speech, for the very
construction of the language conduces to courtesy. The Spaniards have
also an oriental way of offering you things, placing themselves and
their houses entirely at your disposal. If you remark on anything of
theirs they beg you at once to take it. If you go into a pot-house where
a peasant is dining on a plate of ham, a few olives, and a glass of
wine, he will ask: '_Le gusta_,' 'Will you have some,' with a little
motion of handing you his meal. Of course it would be an outrage to
decorum to accept these generous offers, but that is beside the
question; for good manners are not an affair of the heart, but a
complicated game to be learned and played on either side with due
attention to the rules. It may be argued that such details are not
serious; but surely for the common round of life politeness is more
necessary than any heroic qualities. We need our friends' self-sacrifice
once in a blue moon, but their courtesy every day; and for my own part,
I would choose the companions of my leisure rather for their good
breeding than for the excellence of their dispositions.

Beside this, however, the Andalusians are much attached to children, and
it is pleasant to see the real fondness which exists between various
members of a family. One singular point I have noted, that although the
Spanish marry for love rather than from convenience, a wife puts
kindred before husband, her affection remaining chiefly where it was
before marriage. But if the moralist desires yet more solid virtues, he
need only inquire of the first Sevillan he meets, who will give at
shortest notice, in choice and fluent language, a far more impressive
list than I could ever produce.




XV

[Sidenote: Don Juan Tenorio]


On its own behalf each country seems to choose one man, historical or
imaginary, to stand for the race, making as it were an incarnation of
all the virtues and all the vices wherewith it is pleased to charge
itself; and nothing really better explains the character of a people
than their choice of a national hero. Fifty years ago John Bull was the
typical Englishman. Stout, rubicund and healthy, with a loud voice and a
somewhat aggressive manner, he belonged distinctly to the middle
classes. He had a precise idea of his rights and a flattering opinion of
his merits; he was peaceable, but ready enough to fight for commercial
advantages, or if roused, for conscience sake. And when this took place
he possessed always the comforting assurance that the Almighty was on
his side; he put his faith without hesitation on the Bible and on the
superiority of the English Nation. For foreigners he had a magnificent
contempt and distinguished between them and monkeys only by a certain
mental effort. Art he thought nasty, literature womanish; he was a Tory,
middle-aged and well-to-do.

But nowadays all that is changed; John Bull, having amassed great
wealth, has been gathered to his fathers and now disports himself in an
early Victorian paradise furnished with horse-hair sofas and mahogany
sideboards. His son reigns in his stead; and though perhaps not
officially recognised as England's archetype, his appearance in novel
and in drama, in the illustrated papers, in countless advertisements,
proves the reality of his sway. It is his image that rests in the heart
of British maidens, his the example that British youths industriously
follow.

But John Bull, Junior, has added his mother's maiden name to his own,
and remembers with pleasure that he belongs to a good old county family.
He has changed his address from Bedford Square to South Kensington, and
has been educated at a Public School and at a University. Young, tall
and fair-haired, there is nothing to suggest that he will ever have that
inelegant paunch which prevented the father, even in his loftiest
moments of moral indignation, from being dignified. Of course he is a
soldier, for the army is still the only profession for a gentleman, and
England's hero is that above all things. His morals are unexceptional,
since to the ten commandments of Moses he has added the decalogue of
good form. His clothes, whether he wears a Norfolk jacket or a frock
coat, fit to perfection. He is a good shot, a daring rider, a
serviceable cricketer. His heart beats with simple emotions, he will
ever cheer at the sight of the Union Jack, and the strains of _Rule
Britannia_ bring patriotic tears to his eyes. Of late, (like myself,) he
has become an Imperialist. His intentions are always strictly
honourable, and he would not kiss the tip of a woman's fingers except
Hymen gave him the strictest rights to do so. If he became enamoured of
a lady with whom such tender sentiments should not be harboured, he
would invariably remember his duty at the psychological moment, and with
many moving expressions renounce her: in fact he is a devil at
renouncing women. I wonder it flatters them.

Contrast with this pattern of excellence, eminently praiseworthy if
somewhat dull, Don Juan Tenorio, who stands in exactly the same relation
to the Andalusians as does John Bull to the English. He is a worthless,
heartless creature, given over to the pursuit of emotion. The main
lines of the story are well known. The legend, so far as Seville is
concerned, (industrious persons have found analogues throughout the
world,) appears to be founded on fact. There actually lived a Comendador
de Calatrava who was killed by Don Juan after the abduction of his
daughter. The perfect amorist, according to the _Cronica de Sevilla_,
was then inveigled into the church where lay his enemy and assassinated
by the Franciscans, who spread the pious fiction that the image of his
victim, descending from its pedestal, had itself exacted vengeance. It
was an unfortunate invention, for the catastrophe has proved a
stumbling-block to all that have dealt with the subject. The Spaniards
of Molina's day may not have minded the clumsy _deus ex machina_, but
later writers have been able to make nothing of it. In Molière's play,
for instance, the grotesque statue is absurdly inapposite, for his Don
Juan is a wit and a cynic, a courtier of Louis XIV., with whose sins
avenging gods are out of all proportion. Love for him is an intellectual
exercise and a pastime. 'Constancy,' he says, 'is only good for fools.
We owe ourselves to pretty women in general, and the mere fact of having
met one does not absolve us from our duty to others. The birth of
passion has an inexplicable charm, and the pleasure of love is in
variety.' And Zorilla, whose version is the most poetic of them all, has
succeeded in giving only a ridiculous exhibition of waxworks.

But the monk, Tirso de Molina, who was the first to apply literary form
to the legend, alone gives the character in its primitive simplicity. He
drew the men of his time; and his compatriots, recognising themselves,
have made the work immortal. For Spain, at all events, the type has been
irrevocably fixed. Don Juan Tenorio was indeed a Spaniard of his age, a
man of turbulent instincts, with a love of adventure and a fine contempt
for danger, of an overwhelming pride; careful of his own honour, and
careless of that of others. He looked upon every woman as lawful prey
and hesitated at neither perjury nor violence to gain his ends; despair
and tears left him indifferent. Love for him was purely carnal, with
nothing of the timid flame of pastoral romance, nor of the chivalrous
and metaphysic passion of Provence; it was a fierce, consuming fire
which quickly burnt itself out. He was a vulgar and unoriginal seducer
who stole favours in the dark by pretending to be the lady's chosen
lover, or induced guileless maids to trust him under promise of
marriage, then rode away as fast as his horse could carry him. The
monotony of his methods and their success are an outrage to the
intelligence of the sex. But for all his scoffing he remained a true
Catholic, devoutly believing that the day would come when he must
account for his acts; and he proposed, when too old to commit more sins,
to repent and make his peace with the Almighty.

It is significant that the Andalusians have thus chosen Don Juan
Tenorio, for he is an abstract, with the lines somewhat subdued by the
advance of civilisation, of the national character. For them his vices,
his treachery, his heartlessness, have nothing repellent; nor does his
inconstancy rob him of feminine sympathy. He is, indeed, a far greater
favourite with the ladies than John Bull. The Englishman they respect,
they know he will make a good husband and a model father; but he is too
monogamous to arouse enthusiasm.




XVI

[Sidenote: Women of Andalusia]


It is meet and just that the traveller who desires a closer acquaintance
with the country wherein he sojourns than is obtained by the Cockney
tripper, should fall in love. The advantages of this proceeding are
manifold and obvious. He will acquire the language with a more rapid
facility; he will look upon the land with greater sympathy and hence
with sharper insight; and little particularities of life will become
known to him, which to the dreary creature who surveys a strange world
from the portico of an expensive hotel, must necessarily lie hid. If I
personally did not arrive at that delectable condition the fault is with
the immortal gods rather than with myself; for in my eagerness to learn
the gorgeous tongue of Calderon and of Cervantes, I placed myself
purposely in circumstances where I thought the darts of young Cupid
could never fail to miss me. But finally I was reduced to Ollendorf's
Grammar. However, these are biographical details of interest to none but
myself; they are merely to serve as preface for certain observations
upon the women whom the traveller in the evening sees hurrying through
the Sierpes on their way home.

Human beauty is the most arbitrary of things, and the Englishman,
accustomed to the classic type of his own countrywomen, will at first
perhaps be somewhat disappointed with the excellence of Spain. It
consists but seldom in any regularity of feature, for their appeal is to
the amorist rather than to the sculptor in marble. Their red lips carry
suggestions of burning kisses, so that his heart must be hard indeed who
does not feel some flutterings at their aspect. The teeth are small,
very white, regular. Face and body, indeed, are but the expression of a
passionate nature.

But when I write of Spanish women I think of you, Rosarito; I find
suddenly that it is no impersonal creature that fills my mind, but
you--you! When I state solemnly that their greatest beauty lies in their
hair and eyes, it is of you I think; it is your dark eyes that were
lustrous, soft as velvet, caressing sometimes, and sometimes sparkling
with fiery glances. (Alas! that I can find but hackneyed phrases to
describe those heart-disturbers!) And when I say that the eyebrows of a
Spanish woman are not often so delicately pencilled as with many an
English girl, I remember that yours were thick; and the luxuriance gave
you a certain tropical and savage charm. And your hair was plentiful and
curling, intensely black; I believe it was your greatest care in life.
Don't you remember how often you explained to me that nothing was so
harmful as to brush it, and how proud you were that it hung in glorious
locks to your very knees?

Hardly any girl in Seville is too poor to have a _peinadora_ to do her
hair; and these women go from house to house, combing and arranging the
coiffure for such infinitesimal sums as half a _real_, which is little
more than a penny.

Again I try to be impersonal. The complexion ranges through every
quality from dark olive to pearly white; but yours, Rosarito, was like
the very finest ivory, a perfect miracle of delicacy and brilliance; and
the blood in the cheeks shone through with a rich, soft red. I used to
think it was a colour by itself, not to be found on palettes, the
carnation of your cheeks, Rosarito. And none could walk with such
graceful dignity as you; it was a pleasure to watch your perfect ease,
your self-command. Your feet, I think, were somewhat long; but your
hands were wonderful, very small, admirably modelled, with little
tapering fingers, and the most adorable filbert nails. Don't you
remember how I used to look at them, and turn them over and discuss them
point by point? And if ever I kissed their soft, warm palms, (I think it
possible, though I have no vivid recollections,) remember that I was
twenty-three; and it was certainly an appropriate gesture in the little
comedy which to our mutual entertainment we played so gravely.

Now, as I write, my heart goes pit-a-pat, thinking of you, Rosarito; and
I'm sure that if we had over again that charming time, I should fall
head over ears in love. Oh, you know we were both fibbing when we vowed
we adored one another; I am a romancer by profession, and you by nature.
We parted joyously, and you had the grace not to force a tear, and
neither of our hearts was broken. Where are you now, I wonder; and do
you ever think of me?

* * *

The whole chapter of Andalusian beauty is unfolded in the tobacco
factory at Seville. Six thousand women work there, at little tables
placed by the columns which uphold the roof; they are of all ages, of
all types; plain, pretty, commonplace, beautiful; and ten, perhaps, are
lovely. The gipsies are disappointing, not so comely as the pure
Spaniards; and they attract only by the sphinx-like mystery of their
copper-coloured skin, by their hard, unfathomable eyes.

The Sevillans are perhaps inclined to stoutness, but that is a charm in
their lover's sight, and often have a little down on the upper lip, than
which, when it amounts to no more than a shadow, nothing can be more
enchanting. They look with malicious eyes as you saunter through room
after room in the factory; it is quite an experience to run the gauntlet
of their numerous tongues, making uncomplimentary remarks about your
person, sometimes to your embarrassment offering you the carnation from
their hair, or other things. Their clothes are suspended to the pillars,
and their costume in summer is more adapted for coolness than for the
inspection of decorous foreigners. They may bring with them babies, and
many a girl will have a cradle by her side, which she rocks with one
foot as her fingers work nimbly at the cigarettes.

They are very oriental, these women with voluptuous forms; they have no
education, and with all their charm are unutterably stupid; they do not
read, and find even newspapers tiresome! Those whose circumstances do
not force them to work for their living, love nothing better than to lie
for long hours on a sofa, neither talking nor thinking, in easy gowns,
untrammelled by tight-fitting things. In the morning they put on a
_mantilla_ and go to mass, and besides, except to pay a polite visit on
a friend or to drive in the Paseo, hardly leave the house. They are
content with the simplest life. They adore their children, and willingly
devote themselves entirely to them; they seem never to be bored.

For them the days must come and go without distinction. Their fleeting
beauty leaves them imperceptibly; they grow fat, they grow thin,
wrinkled, and gaunt; the years pass and their life proceeds without
change. They do not think, they do not live: they merely exist, and they
die, and that is the end of it. I suppose they are as happy as any one
else. After all, taking it from one point of view, it matters very
little what sort of life one leads, there are so many people in the
world, such millions have come and gone, such millions will come and go.
If an individual makes no use of his hour what does it signify? He is
only one among countless hordes. In the existence of these handsome
creatures, so passionate and yet so apathetic, there are no particular
pleasures beside the simple joys of sense, but on the other hand, beyond
the inevitable separations of death, there are no outstanding griefs.
They propagate their species, and that, perhaps, is the only quite
certain duty that human beings have.




XVII

[Sidenote: The Dance]


Cervantes said that there was never born a Spanish woman but she was
made to dance; and he might have added that in the South, at all events,
most men share the enviable faculty. The dance is one of the most
characteristic features of Andalusia, and as an amusement rivals in
popularity even the bull-fight. The Sevillans dance on every possible
occasion, and nothing pleases them more than the dexterity of
professionals. Before a company has been assembled half an hour some one
is bound to suggest that a couple should show their skill; room is
quickly made, the table pushed against the wall, the chairs drawn back,
and they begin. Even when men are alone in a tavern, drinking wine, two
of them will often enough stand up to tread a _seguidilla_. On a rainy
day it is the entertainment that naturally recommends itself.

Riding through the villages round Seville on Sundays it delighted me to
see little groups making a circle about the house doors, in the middle
of which were dancing two girls in bright-coloured clothes, with roses
in their hair. A man seated on a broken chair was twanging a guitar, the
surrounders beat their hands in time and the dancers made music with
their castanets. Sometimes on a feast-day I came across a little band,
arrayed in all its best, that had come into the country for an
afternoon's diversion, and sat on the grass in the shade of summer or in
the wintry sun. Whenever Andalusians mean to make merry some one will
certainly bring a guitar, or if not the girls have their castanets; and
though even these are wanting and no one can be induced to sing, a
rhythmical clapping of hands will be sufficient accompaniment, and the
performers will snap their fingers in lieu of castanets.

It is charming then to see the girls urge one another to dance; each
vows with much dramatic gesture that she cannot, calling the Blessed
Virgin to witness that she has strained her ankle and has a shocking
cold. But some youth springs up and volunteers, inviting a particular
damsel to join him. She is pushed forward, and the couple take their
places. The man carefully puts down his cigarette, jams his
broad-brimmed hat on his head, buttons his short coat and arches his
back! The spectators cry: '_Ole!_' The girl passes an arranging hand
over her hair. The measure begins. The pair stand opposite one another,
a yard or so distant, and foot it in accordance with one another's
motions. It is not a thing of complicated steps, but, as one might
expect from its Moorish origin, of movements of the body. With much
graceful swaying from side to side the executants approach and retire,
and at the middle of the dance change positions. It finishes with a
great clapping of hands, the maiden sinks down among her friends and
begins violently to fan herself, while her partner, with a great
affectation of nonchalance, takes a seat and relights his cigarette.

And in the music-halls the national dances are, with the national songs,
the principal attraction. Seville possesses but one of these
establishments; it is a queer place, merely the _patio_ of a private
house, with a stage at one end, in which chairs and tables have been
placed. On holiday nights it is crammed with students, with countrymen
and artisans, with the general riff-raff of the town, and with women of
no particular reputation. Now and then appears a gang of soldiers,
giving a peculiar note with the uniformity of their brown holland suits;
and occasionally a couple of British sailors come sauntering in with
fine self-assurance, their fair hair and red cheeks contrasting with the
general swartness. You pay no entrance money, but your refreshment costs
a _real_--which is twopence ha'penny; and for that you may enjoy not
only a cup of coffee or a glass of manzanilla, but an evening's
entertainment. As the night wears on the heat is oven-like, and the air
is thick and grey with the smoke of countless cigarettes.

The performance consists of three 'turns' only, and these are repeated
every hour. The company boasts generally of a male singer, a female
singer, and of the _corps de ballet_, which is made up of six persons.
Spain is the stronghold of the out-of-date, and I suppose it alone
preserves the stiff muslin ballet-skirts which delighted our fathers. To
see half-a-dozen dancers thus attired in a remote Andalusian music-hall
is so entirely unexpected that it quite takes the breath away. But by
the time the traveller reaches Seville he must be used to disillusion,
and he must be ingenuous indeed if he expects the Spaniards to have
preserved their national costume for the most national of their
pastimes. Yet the dances are still Spanish; and even if the pianoforte
has ousted the guitar, the castanets give, notwithstanding, a
characteristic note which the aggressive muslin and the pink,
ill-fitting tights cannot entirely destroy.

* * *

But I remember one dancer who was really a great artist. She was
ill-favoured, of middle age, thin; but every part of her was imbued with
grace, expressive, from the tips of her toes to the tips of her fingers.
The demands of the public sometimes forced upon her odious
ballet-skirts, sometimes she wasted her talent on the futilities of
skirt-dancing; but chiefly she loved the national measures, and her
phenomenal leanness made her only comfortable in the national dress. She
travelled from place to place in Spain with another woman whom she had
taught to dance, and whose beauty she used cleverly as a foil to her own
uncomeliness; and so wasted herself in these low resorts, earning hardly
sufficient to keep body and soul together. I wish I could remember her
name.

When she began to dance you forgot her ugliness; her gaunt arms gained
shape, her face was transfigured, her dark eyes flashed, and her mouth
and smile said a thousand eloquent things. Even the nape of her neck,
which in most women has no significance, with her was expressive. A
consummate actress, she exhibited all her skill in the _bolero_, which
represents a courtship; she threw aside the castanets and wrapped
herself in a _mantilla_, while her companion, dressed as a man, was
hidden in a _capa_. The two passed one another, he trying to see the
lady's face, which she averted, but not too strenuously; he pursued, she
fled, but not too rapidly. Dropping his cloak, the lover attacked with
greater warmth, while alternately she repelled and lured him on. At last
she too cast away the _mantilla_. They seized the castanets and danced
round one another with all manner of graceful and complicated
evolutions, making love, quarrelling, pouting, exhibiting every variety
of emotion. The dance grew more passionate, the steps flew faster, till
at last, with the music, both stopped suddenly dead still. This abrupt
cessation is one of the points most appreciated by a Spanish audience.
'_Ole!_' they cry,'_bien parado!_'

But when, unhampered by a partner, this nameless, exquisite dancer gave
full play to her imagination, there was no end to the wildness of her
fancy, to the intricacy and elaboration of her measures, to the gay
audacity of her movements. She performed a hundred feats, each more
difficult than the other--and all impossible to describe.

* * *

Then, between Christmas and Lent, at midnight on Saturdays and Sundays,
the tables and the chairs are cleared away for the masked ball; and you
will see the latest mode of Spanish dance. The women are of the lowest
possible class; some, with a kind of savage irony, disguised as nuns,
others in grotesque dominos of their own devising; but most wear
every-day clothes with great shawls draped about them. The men are of a
corresponding station, and through the evening wear their broad-brimmed
hats. On the stage is a brass band, which plays one single tune till
day-break, and to that one single measure is danced--the _habanera_.

In this alone may people take part as in any round dance. The couples
hold one another in the very tightest embrace, the lady clasping her
arms round her partner's neck, while he places both his about her waist.
They go round the room very slowly, immediately behind one another; it
is a kind of straight polka, with a peculiar, rhythmic swaying of the
body; the feet are not lifted off the floor, and you do not turn at all.
The highest gravity is preserved throughout, and the whole performance
is--well, very oriental.




XVIII

[Sidenote: A Feast Day]


I arrived in Seville on the Eve of the Immaculate Conception. All day
people had been preparing to celebrate the feast, decorating their
houses with great banners of blue and white; and at night the silent,
narrow streets had a strange appearance, for in every window were
lighted candles, throwing around them a white, unusual glare; they
looked a little like the souls of infants dead. All day the bells of a
hundred churches had been ringing, half drowned by the rolling peals of
the Giralda.

It had been announced that the archbishop would himself officiate at the
High Mass in the Blessed Virgin's honour; and early in the morning the
cathedral steps were crowded with black-robed women, making their way to
the great sacristy where was to be held the service. I joined the
throng, and entering through the darkness of the porch, was almost
blinded by the brilliant altar, upon which stood a life-sized image of
the Virgin, surrounded by a huge aureole, with great bishops, all of
silver, on either side. It was ablaze with the light of many candles, so
that the nave was thrown into deep shadow, and the kneeling women were
scarcely visible.

The canons in the choir listlessly droned their prayers. At last the
organ burst forth, and a long procession slowly came into the chapel,
priests in white and blue, the colours of the Virgin, four bishops in
mitres, the archbishop with his golden crozier; and preceding them all,
in odd contrast, the beadle in black, with a dark periwig, bearing a
silver staff. From the choir in due order they returned to the altar,
headed this time by three pairs of acolytes, bearing great silver
candlesticks, and by incense-burners, that filled the church with rich
perfume.

When the Mass was finished, a young dark man in copious robes of violet
ascended the pulpit and muttered a text. He waited an instant to collect
himself, looking at the congregation; then turning to the altar began a
passionate song of praise to the Blessed Virgin, unsoiled by original
sin. He described her as in a hundred pictures the great painter of the
Immaculate Conception has portrayed her--a young and graceful maid,
clothed in a snowy gown of ample folds, with an azure cloak, a maid
mysteriously pure; her hair, floating on the shoulders in luxurious
ringlets, was an aureole more glorious than the silver rays which
surrounded the great image; her dark eyes, with their languid lashes,
her mouth, with the red lips, expressed a beautiful and immaculate
virtue. It might have been some earthly woman of whom the priest spoke,
one of those Andalusians that knelt below him, flashing quick glances at
the gallant who negligently leaned against a pillar.

The archbishop sat on his golden throne--a thin, small man with a
wrinkled face, with dead and listless eyes; in his gorgeous vestments
he looked hardly human, he seemed a puppet, sitting stilly. At the end
of the sermon he went back to the altar, and in his low, broken voice
read the prayers. And then turning towards the great congregation he
gave the plenary absolution, for which the Pope's Bull had been read
from the pulpit steps.

* * *

In the afternoon, when the sun was going down behind the Guadalquivir,
over the plain, I went again to the cathedral. The canons in the choir
still droned their chant in praise of the Blessed Virgin, and in the
greater darkness the altar shone more magnificently. The same procession
filed through the nave, some priests were in black, some in violet, some
in the Virgin's colours; but this time the archbishop wore gorgeous
robes of scarlet, and as he knelt at the altar his train spread to the
chancel steps. From the side appeared ten boys and knelt before the
altar, and stood in two lines facing one another. They were dressed like
pages of the seventeenth century, with white stockings and breeches, and
a doublet of blue and silver, holding in their hands hats with long
feathers. The archbishop, kneeling in front of the throne, buried his
face in his hands.

A soft melody, played by violins and 'cellos, broke the silence, and
presently the ten pages began to sing:

    _Los cielos y la tierra alaben al Señor_
    _Con imnos de alabanza que inflamen al Señor._

It was a curious, old-fashioned music, reminding one a little of the
quiet harmonies of Gluck. Then, putting on their hats, the pages danced,
continuing their song; they wound in and out of one another, gravely
footing it, swaying to and fro with the music very slowly. The measure
was performed with the utmost reverence. Now and then the chorus came,
and the fresh boys' voices, singing in unison, filled the church with
delightful melody. And still the old archbishop prayed, his face buried
in his hands.

The boys ceased to sing, but continued the dance, marking the time now
with castanets, and the mundane instrument contrasted strangely with the
glittering altar and with the kneeling priests. I wondered of what the
archbishop thought, kneeling so humbly--of the boys dancing before the
altar, fresh and young? Was he thinking of their white souls darkening
with the sins of the world, or of the troubles, the disillusionments of
life, and the decrepitude? Or was it of himself--did he think of his own
youth, so long past, so hopelessly gone, or did he think that he was old
and worn, and of the dark journey before him, and of the light that
seemed so distant? Did he regret his beautiful Seville with the blue
sky, and the orange-trees bowed down with their golden fruit? He seemed
so small and weak, overwhelmed in his gorgeous robes.

Again the ten boys repeated their song and dance and their castanets,
and with a rapid genuflection disappeared.

The archbishop rose painfully from his knees and ascended to the altar.
A priest held open a book before him, and another lighted the printed
page with a candle; he read out a prayer. Then, kneeling down, he bent
very low, as though he felt himself unworthy to behold the magnificence
of the Queen of Heaven. The people fell to their knees, and a man's
voice burst forth--_Ave Maria, gratia plena_; waves of passionate sound
floated over the worshippers, upwards, towards heaven. And from the
Giralda, the Moorish tower, the Christian bells rang joyfully. The
archbishop turned towards the people; and when in his thin, broken voice
he gave the benediction, one thought that no man in his heart felt such
humility as the magnificent prince of the Church, Don Marcelo Spinola y
Maestre, Archbishop of Seville.

The people flocked out quickly, and soon only a few devout penitents
remained. A priest came, waving censers before the altar, and thick
volumes of perfume ascended to the Blessed Virgin. He disappeared, and
one by one the candles were extinguished. The night crept silently along
the church, and the silver image sank into the darkness; at last two
candles only were left on the altar, high up, shining dimly.

Outside the sky was still blue, bespattered with countless stars.

     NOTE.--I believe there is no definite explanation of this ceremony,
     and the legend told me by an ancient priest that it was invented
     during the Moorish dominion so that Christian services might be
     held under cover of a social gathering--intruding Muslims would be
     told merely that people were there assembled to see boys dance and
     to listen to their singing--is more picturesque than probable.
     Rather does it seem analogous with the leaping of David the King
     before the Ark of Jehovah, when he danced before the Lord with all
     his might, girt with a linen Ephod; and this, if I may hazard an
     opinion, was with a view to amuse a deity apt to be bored or
     languid, just as Nautch girls dance to this day before the idols of
     the Hindus, and tops are spun before Krishna to divert him.




XIX

[Sidenote: The Giralda]


The Christian bells rang joyfully from the Moorish tower, the great old
bells christened with holy oil, _el Cantor_ the Singer, _la Gorda_ the
Great, _San Miguel_. I climbed the winding passage till I came to the
terrace where stood the ringers, and as they pulled their ropes the
bells swung round on their axles, completing a circle, with deafening
clamour. The din was terrific, so that the solid masonry appeared to
shake, and I felt the vibrations of the surrounding air. It was a
strange sensation to shout as loud as possible and hear no sound issue
from my mouth.

The Giralda, with its Moorish base and its Christian belfry, is a symbol
of Andalusia. There is in the Ayuntamiento an old picture of the Minaret
built by Djâbir the Moor, nearly one hundred feet shorter than the
completed tower, but surmounted by a battlemented platform on which are
huge brazen balls and an iron standard. These were overthrown by an
earthquake, and later, when the discoveries of Christopher Columbus had
poured unmeasured riches into Seville, the Chapter commissioned Hernan
Ruiz to add a belfry to the Moorish base. Hernan Ruiz nearly ruined the
mosque at Cordova, but here he was entirely successful. Indeed it is
extraordinary that the two parts should be joined in such admirable
harmony. It is impossible to give in words an idea of the slender grace
of the Giralda, it does not look a thing of bricks and mortar, it is so
straight and light that it reminds one vaguely of some beautiful human
thing. The great height is astonishing, there is no buttress or
projection to break the very long straight line as it rises, with a kind
of breathless speed, to the belfry platform. And then the renaissance
building begins, ascending still more, a sort of filigree work,
excessively rich, and elegant beyond all praise. It is surmounted by a
female figure of bronze, representing Faith and veering with every
breeze, and the artist has surrounded his work with the motto: _Nomen
Domini Fortissima Turris_.

But the older portion gains another charm from the Moorish windows that
pierce it, one above the other, with horseshoe arches; and from the
arabesque network with which the upper part is diapered, a brick
trellis-work against the brick walls, of the most graceful and delicate
intricacy. The Giralda is almost toylike in the daintiness of its
decoration. Notwithstanding its great size it is a masterpiece of
exquisite proportion. At night it stands out with strong lines against
the bespangled sky, and the lights of the watchers give it a magic
appearance of some lacelike tower of imagination; but on high festivals
it is lit with countless lamps, and then, as Richard Ford puts it, hangs
from the dark vault of heaven like a brilliant chandelier.

I looked down at Seville from above. A Spanish town wears always its
most picturesque appearance thus seen, but it is never different; the
_patios_ glaring with whitewash, the roofs of brown and yellow tiles,
and the narrow streets, winding in unexpected directions, narrower than
ever from such a height and dark with shade, so that they seem black
rivulets gliding stealthily through the whiteness. Looking at a northern
city from a tall church tower all things are confused with one another,
the slate roofs join together till it is like a huge uneven sea of grey;
but in Seville the atmosphere is so limpid, the colour so brilliant,
that every house is clearly separated from its neighbour, and sometimes
there appears to be between them a preternatural distinctness. Each
stands independently of any other; you might suppose yourself in a
strange city of the _Arabian Nights_ where a great population lived in
houses crowded together, but invisibly, so that each person fancied
himself in isolation.

Immediately below was the Cathedral and to remind you of Cordova, the
Court of Oranges; but here was no sunny restfulness, nor old-world
quiet. The Court is gloomy and dark, and the trim rows of orange-trees
contrast oddly with the grey stone of the Cathedral, its huge porches,
and the flamboyant exuberance of its decoration. The sun never shines in
it and no fruit splash the dark foliage with gold. You do not think of
the generations of priests who have wandered in it on the summer
evenings, basking away their peaceful lives in the sunshine; but rather
of the busy merchants who met there in the old days when it was still
the exchange of Seville, before the Lonja was built, to discuss the war
with England, or the fate of ships bringing gold from America. At one
end of the court is an old stone pulpit from which preached St. Francis
of Borga and St. Vincent Ferrer and many an unknown monk besides. Then
it was thronged with multi-coloured crowds, with townsmen, soldiers and
great noblemen, when the faith was living and strong; and the preacher,
with all the gesture and the impassioned rhetoric of a Spaniard, poured
out burning words of hate for Jew and Moor and Heretic, so that the
listeners panted and a veil of blood passed before their eyes; or else
uttered so eloquent a song in praise of the Blessed Virgin, immaculately
conceived, that strong men burst into tears at the recital of her
perfect beauty.




XX

[Sidenote: The Cathedral of Seville]


Your first impression when you walk round the cathedral of Seville,
noting with dismay the crushed cupolas and unsightly excrescences, the
dinginess of colour, is not enthusiastic. It was built by German
architects without a thought for the surrounding houses, brilliantly
whitewashed, and the blue sky, and it proves the incongruity of northern
art in a southern country; but even lowering clouds and mist could lend
no charm to the late Gothic of _Santa Maria de la Sede_.

The interior fortunately is very different. Notwithstanding the Gothic
groining, as you enter from the splendid heat of noonday, (in the Plaza
del Triunfo the sun beats down and the houses are more dazzling than
snow,) the effect is thoroughly and delightfully Spanish. Light is very
fatal to devotion and the Spaniards have been so wise as to make their
churches extremely dark. At first you can see nothing. Incense floats
heavily about you, filling the air, and the coolness is like a draught
of fresh, perfumed water. But gradually the church detaches itself from
the obscurity and you see great columns, immensely lofty. The spaces are
large and simple, giving an impression of vast room; and the choir,
walled up on three sides, in the middle of the nave as in all Spanish
cathedrals, by obstructing the view gives an appearance of almost
unlimited extent. To me it seems that in such a place it is easier to
comprehend the majesty wherewith man has equipped himself. Science
offers only thoughts of human insignificance; the vastness of the sea,
the terror of the mountains, emphasise the fact that man is of no
account, ephemeral as the leaves of summer. But in those bold aisles, by
the pillars rising with such a confident pride towards heaven, it is
almost impossible not to feel that man indeed is god-like, lord of the
earth; and that the great array of nature is builded for his purpose.

Typically Spanish also is the decoration, and very rich. The
choir-stalls are of carved wood, florid and exuberant like the Spanish
imagination; the altars gleam with gold; pictures of saints are framed
by golden pillars carved with huge bunches of grapes and fruit and
fantastic leaves. I was astounded at the opulence of the treasure; there
were gorgeous altars of precious metal, great saints of silver, caskets
of gold, monstrances studded with rare stones, crosses and crucifixes.
The vestments were of unimaginable splendour: there were two hundred
copes of all ages and of every variety, fifty of each colour, white for
Christmas and Easter, red for Corpus Christi, blue for the Immaculate
Conception, violet for Holy Week; there were the special copes of the
Primate, copes for officiating bishops, copes for dignitaries from other
countries and dioceses. They were of the richest velvet and satin,
heavily embroidered with gold, many with saints worked in silk, so
heavy that it seemed hardly possible for a man to bear them.

In the Baptistery, filling it with warm light, is the _San Antonio_ of
Murillo, than which no picture gives more intensely the religious
emotion. The saint, tall and meagre, beautiful of face, looks at the
Divine Child hovering in a golden mist with an ecstasy that is no longer
human.

It is interesting to consider whether an artist need feel the sentiment
he desires to convey. Certainly many pictures have been painted under
the influence of profound feeling which leave the spectator entirely
cold, and it is probable enough that the early Italians felt few of the
emotions which their pictures call forth. We know that the masterpieces
of Perugino, so moving, so instinct with religious tenderness, were very
much a matter of pounds, shillings and pence. But Luis de Vargas, on the
other hand, daily humbled himself by scourging and by wearing a hair
shirt, and Vicente Joanes prepared himself for a new picture by
communion and confession; so that it is impossible to wonder at the rude
and savage ardour of their work. And the impression that may be gathered
of Murillo from his pictures is borne out by the study of his grave and
simple life. He had not the turbulent piety of the other two, but a calm
and sweet devotion, which led him to spend long hours in church,
meditating. He, at any rate, felt all that he expressed.

I do not know a church that gives the religious sentiment more
completely than Seville Cathedral. The worship of the Spaniards is
sombre, full-blooded, a thing of dark rich colours; it requires the
heaviness of incense and that overloading of rococo decoration. It is
curious that notwithstanding their extreme similarity to the
Neapolitans, the Andalusians should in their faith differ so entirely.
Of course, in Southern Italy religion is as full of superstition--an
adoration of images in which all symbolism is lost and only the gross
idol remains; but it is a gayer and a lighter thing than in Spain. Most
characteristic of this is the difference between the churches; and with
_Santa Maria de la Sede_ may well be contrasted the Neapolitan _Santa
Chiara_, with its great windows, so airy and spacious, sparkling with
white and gold. The paintings are almost frolicsome. It is like a
ballroom, a typical place of worship for a generation that had no desire
to pray, but strutted in gaudy silks and ogled over pretty fans,
pretending to discuss the latest audacity of Monsieur Arouet de
Voltaire.




XXI

[Sidenote: The Hospital of Charity]


The Spaniards possess to the fullest degree the art of evoking devout
emotions, and in their various churches may be experienced every phase
of religious feeling. After the majestic size and the solemn mystery of
the Cathedral, nothing can come as a greater contrast than the Church of
the Hermandad de la Caredad. It was built by don Miguel de Mañara, who
rests in the chancel, with the inscription over him: '_Aqui jacen los
huesos y ceñizas del peor hombre que ha habido en el mundo; ruegan por
el_'--'Here lie the bones and ashes of the worst man that has ever been
in the world; pray for him.' But like all Andalusians he was a braggart;
for a love of chocolate, which appears to have been his besetting sin,
is insufficient foundation for such a vaunt: a vice of that order is
adequately punished by the corpulence it must occasion. However, legend,
representing don Miguel as the most dissolute of libertines, is more
friendly. The grave sister who escorts the visitor relates that one day
in church don Miguel saw a beautiful nun, and undaunted by her habit,
made amorous proposals. She did not speak, but turned to look at him,
whereupon he saw the side of her face which had been hidden from his
gaze, and it was eaten away by a foul and loathsome disease, so that it
seemed more horrible than the face of death. The gallant was so
terrified that he fainted, and afterwards the face haunted him, the face
of matchless beauty and of revolting decay, so that he turned from the
world. He devoted his fortune to rebuilding the hospital and church of
the Brotherhood of Charity, whose chief office it was to administer the
sacraments to those condemned to death and provide for their burial, and
was eventually received into their Order.

It was in the seventeenth century that Mañara built his church, and
consequently rococo holds sway with all its fantasies. It is small,
without aisles or chapels, and the morbid opulence of the decoration
gives it a peculiar character. The walls are lined with red damask, and
the floor carpeted with a heavy crimson carpet; it gives the sensation
of a hothouse, or, with its close odours, of a bedchamber transformed
into a chapel for the administration of the last sacrament. The
atmosphere is unhealthy: one pants for breath.

At one end, taking up the entire wall, is a reredos by Pedro Roldan, of
which the centrepiece is an elaborate 'Deposition in the Tomb,' with
numerous figures coloured to the life. It is very fine in its mingling
of soft, rich hues and flamboyant realism. The artist has revelled in
the opportunity for anguish of expression that his subject afforded, but
has treated it with such a passionate seriousness that, in his grim,
fierce way, he does not fail to be impressive. The frame is of twisted
golden pillars, supported by little naked angels, and decorated with
grapes and vine-leaves. Above and at the sides are great saints in
carved wood, and angels with floating drapery.

Murillo was on terms of intimacy with don Miguel de Mañara, and like him
a member of the Hermandad. For his friend he painted some of his most
famous pictures, which by the subdued ardour of their colour, by their
opulent tones, harmonise most exquisitely with the church. Marshal
Soult, with a fine love of art that was profitable, carried off several
of them, and their empty frames stare at one still. But before that,
when they were all in place, the effect must have been of unique
magnificence.

It must be an extraordinary religion that flourishes in such a place, an
artificial faith that needs heat like tropical plants, that desires
unnatural vows. It breathes of neurotic emotions with its damask-covered
walls, with its carpet that deadens the footfall, its sombre, gorgeous
pictures. The sweet breeze of heaven never enters there, nor the
sunlight; the air is languid with incense; one is oppressed by a
strange, heavy silence. In such a church sins must be fostered for the
morbid pleasure of confession. One can imagine that the worshippers in
that overloaded atmosphere would see strange visions, voluptuous and
mystical; the Blessed Mary and the Saints might gain visible and
palpable flesh, and the devil would not be far off. There the gruesome
imaginings of Valdes Leal are a fitting decoration. Every one knows that
grim picture of a bishop in episcopal robes, eaten by worms, his flesh
putrefying, which led Murillo to say: 'Leal, you make me hold my nose,'
and the other answered: 'You have taken all the flesh and left me
nought but the bones.' Elsewhere, by the same master, there is a
painting that suggests, with greater poignancy to my mind because less
brutally, the thoughts evoked by the more celebrated work, and since it
seems to complete the ideas awakened by this curious chapel, I mention
it here.

It represents a priest at the altar, saying his mass, and the altar
after the Spanish fashion is sumptuous with gilt and florid carving. He
wears a magnificent cope and a surplice of exquisite lace, but he wears
them as though their weight were more than he could bear; and in the
meagre, trembling hands, and in the white, ashen face, in the dark
hollowness of the eyes and in the sunken cheeks, there is a bodily
corruption that is terrifying. The priest seems to hold together with
difficulty the bonds of the flesh, but with no eager yearning of the
soul to burst its prison, only with despair; it is as if the Lord
Almighty had forsaken him, and the high heavens were empty of their
solace. All the beauty of life appears forgotten, and there is nothing
in the world but decay. A ghastly putrefaction has attacked already the
living man; the worms of the grave, the piteous horror of mortality, and
the darkness before him offer nought but fear, and what soul is there to
rise again! Beyond, dark night is seen and a turbulent sea, the dark
night of the soul of which the mystics write, and the troublous sea of
life whereon there is no refuge for the weary and the sick at heart.

* * *

Then, if you would study yet another phase of the religious sentiment,
go to the Museo, where are the fine pictures that Murillo painted for
the Capuchin Monastery. You will see all the sombreness of Spanish
piety, the savage faith, dissolved into ineffable love. Religion has
become a wonderful tenderness, in which passionate human affection is
inextricably mingled with god-like adoration. Murillo, these sensual
forms quivering with life, brought the Eternal down to earth, and gave
terrestrial ardour to the apathy of an impersonal devotion; that,
perhaps, is why to women he has always been the most fascinating of
painters. In the _Madonna de la Servilleta_--painted on a napkin for the
cook of the monastery--the child is a simple, earthly infant, fresh and
rosy, with wide-open, wondering eyes and not a trace of immortality. I
myself saw a common woman of the streets stand before this picture with
tears running down her cheeks.

'_Corazon de mi alma!_' she said, 'Heart of my soul! I could cover his
little body with kisses.'

She smiled, but could hardly restrain her sobs. The engrossing love of a
mother for her child seemed joined in miraculous union with the worship
of a mortal for his God.

Murillo had neither the power nor the desire to idealise his models. The
saints of these great pictures, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Felix of
Cantalicio, St. Thomas of Villanueva, are monks and beggars such as may
to this day be seen in the streets of Seville. St. Felix is merely an
old man with hollow cheeks and a grey, ragged beard; but yet as he
clasps the child in his arms with eager tenderness, he is transfigured
by a divine ecstasy: his face is radiant with the most touching
emotion. And St. Antony of Padua, in another picture, worships the
infant God with a mystic adoration, which, notwithstanding the realism
of the presentment, lifts him far, far above the earth.




XXII

[Sidenote: Gaol]


I was curious to see the prison in Seville. Gruesome tales had been told
me of its filth and horror, and the wretched condition of the prisoners;
I had even heard that from the street you might see them pressing
against the barred windows with arms thrust through, begging the
passer-by for money or bread. Mediæval stories recurred to my mind and
the clank of chains trailed through my imagination.

I arranged to be conducted by the prison doctor, and one morning soon
after five set out to meet him. My guide informed me by a significant
gesture that his tendencies were--bibulous, and our meeting-place was a
tavern; but when we arrived they told us that don Felipe--such was his
name--had been taken his morning dram and gone; however, if we went to
another inn we should doubtless find him. But there we heard he had not
yet arrived, he was not due till half-past five. To pass the time we
drank a mouthful of _aguardiente_ and smoked a cigarette, and eventually
the medico was espied in the distance. We went towards him--a round, fat
person with a red face and a redder nose, somewhat shabbily dressed.

He looked at me pointedly and said:

'I'm dry. _Vengo seco._'

It was a hint not to be neglected, and we returned to the tavern where
don Felipe had his nip.

'It's very good for the stomach,' he assured me.

We sallied forth together, and as we walked he told me the number of
prisoners, the sort of crimes for which they were detained--ranging from
man-slaughter to petty larceny--and finally, details of his own career.
He was an intelligent man, and when we came to the prison door insisted
on drinking my health.

The prison is an old convent, and it is a little startling to see the
church façade, with a statue of the Madonna over the central porch. At
the steps a number of women stood waiting with pots and jars and
handkerchiefs full of food for their relatives within; and when the
doctor appeared several rushed up to ask about a father or a son that
lay sick. We went in and there was a melodramatic tinkling of keys and
an unlocking of heavy doors.

The male prisoners, the adults, were in the _patio_ of the convent,
where in olden days the nuns had wandered on summer evenings, watering
their roses. The iron door was opened and shut behind us; there was a
movement of curiosity at the sight of a stranger, and many turned to
look at me. Such as had illnesses came to the doctor, and he looked at
their tongues and felt their pulse, giving directions to an assistant
who stood beside him with a note-book. Don Felipe was on excellent terms
with his patients, laughing and joking; a malingerer asked if he could
not have a little wine because his throat was sore; the doctor jeered
and the man began to laugh; they bandied repartees with one another.

There were about two hundred in the _patio_, and really they did not
seem to have so bad a time. There was one large group gathered round a
man who read a newspaper aloud; it was Monday morning, and all listened
intently to the account of a bull-fight on the previous day, bursting
into a little cry of surprise and admiration on hearing that the
_matador_ had been caught and tossed. Others lay by a pillar playing
draughts for matches, while half a dozen more eagerly watched, giving
unsolicited advice with much gesticulation. The draught-board consisted
of little squares drawn on the pavement with chalk, and the pieces were
scraps of white and yellow paper. One man sat cross-legged by a column
busily rolling cigarettes; he had piles of them by his side arranged in
packets, which he sold at one penny each; it was certainly an illegal
offence, because the sale of tobacco is a government monopoly, but if
you cannot break the laws in prison where can you break them? Others
occupied themselves by making baskets or nets. But the majority did
nothing at all, standing about, sitting when they could, with the
eternal cigarette between their lips; and the more energetic watched the
blue smoke curl into the air. Altogether a very happy family!

Nor did they seem really very criminal, more especially as they wore no
prison uniform, but their own clothes. I saw no difference between them
and the people I met casually in the street. They were just very
ordinary citizens, countrymen smelling of the soil, labouring men,
artisans. Their misfortune had been only to make too free a use of their
long curved knives or to be discovered taking something over which
another had prior claims. But in Andalusia every one is potentially as
criminal, which is the same as saying that these jail-birds were
estimable persons whom an unkind fate and a mistaken idea of justice had
separated for a little while from their wives and families.

I saw two only whose aspect was distinctly vicious. One was a tall
fellow with shifty eyes, a hard thin mouth, a cruel smile, and his face
was really horrible. I asked the doctor why he was there. Don Felipe,
without speaking, made the peculiar motion of the fingers which
signifies robbery, and the man seeing him repeated it with a leer. I
have seldom seen a face that was so utterly repellent, so depraved and
wicked: I could not get it out of my head, and for a long time saw
before me the crafty eyes and the grinning mouth. Obviously the man was
a criminal born who would start thieving as soon as he was out of
prison, hopelessly and utterly corrupt. But it was curious that his
character should be marked so plainly on his face; it was a
danger-signal to his fellows, and one would have thought the suspicion
it aroused must necessarily keep him virtuous. It was a countenance that
would make a man instinctively clap his hand to his pocket.

The other was a Turk, a huge creature, with dark scowling face and
prominent brows; he made a singular figure in his bright fez and baggy
breeches, looking at his fellow prisoners with a frown of hate.

But the doctor had finished seeing his patients and the iron door was
opened for us to go out. We went upstairs to the hospital, a long bare
ward, terribly cheerless. Six men, perhaps, lay in bed, guarded by two
warders; one old fellow with rheumatism groaning in agony, two others
dazed and very still, with high fever. We walked round quickly, don
Felipe as before mechanically looking at their tongues and feeling their
pulse, speaking a word to the assistant and moving on. The windows were
shut and there was a horrid stench of illness and drugs and antiseptics.

We went through long corridors to the female side, and meanwhile the
assistant told the doctor that during the night a woman had been
confined. Don Felipe sat down in an office to write a certificate.

'What a nuisance these women are!' he said. 'Why can't they wait till
they get out of prison? How is it?'

'It was still-born.'

'_Pero, hombre_,' said the doctor crossly. 'Why didn't you tell me that
before? Now I shall have to write another certificate. This one's no
good.'

He tore it up and painfully made out a second with the slow laborious
writing of a man unused to holding a pen.

Then we marched on and came to another smaller _patio_ where the females
were. They were comparatively few, not more than twenty or thirty; and
when we entered a dark inner-room to see the woman who was ill they all
trooped in after us--all but one. They stood round eagerly telling us of
the occurrence.

'Don't make such a noise, _por Dios_! I can't hear myself speak,' said
the doctor.

The woman was lying on her back with flushed cheeks, her eyes staring
glassily. The doctor asked a question, but she did not answer. She began
to cry, sobbing from utter weakness in a silent, unrestrained way. On a
table near her, hidden by a cloth, lay the dead child.

We went out again into the _patio_. The sun was higher now and it was
very warm, the blue sky shone above us without a cloud. The prisoners
returned to their occupations. One old hag was doing a younger woman's
hair; I noticed that even for Spain it was beautiful, very thick,
curling, and black as night. The girl held a carnation in her hand to
put in front of the comb when the operation was completed. Another woman
suckled a baby, and several tiny children were playing about happily,
while their mothers chatted to one another, knitting.

But there was one, markedly different from the others, who sat alone
taking no notice of the scene. It was she who remained in the _patio_
when the rest followed us into the sick room, a gipsy, tall and gaunt,
with a skin of the darkest yellow. Her hair was not elaborately arranged
as that of her companions, but plainly done, drawn back stiffly from the
forehead. She sat there, erect and motionless, looking at the ground
with an unnatural stare, silent. They told me she never spoke a word
nor paid attention to the women in the court. She might have been
entirely alone. She never altered her position, but sat there,
sphinx-like, in that attitude of stony grief. She was a stranger among
the rest, and her bronzed face, her silence gave a weird impression; she
seemed to recall the burning deserts of the East and an endless past.

At last we came out, and the heavy iron door was closed behind us. What
a relief it was to be in the street again, to see the sun and the trees,
and to breathe the free air! A cart went by with a great racket, drawn
by three mules, and the cries of the driver as he cracked his whip were
almost musical; a train of donkeys passed; a man trotted by on a brown
shaggy cob, his huge panniers filled with glowing vegetables, green and
red, and in a corner was a great bunch of roses. I took long breaths of
the free air, I shook myself to get rid of those prison odours.

I offered don Felipe refreshment and we repaired to a dram-shop
immediately opposite. Two women were standing there.

'_Ole!_' said the doctor to an old toothless hag with a vicious leer.
'What are you doing here? You've not been in for some time.'

She laughed and explained that she was come to fetch her friend, a young
woman, who had been released that morning. The doctor nodded to her,
asking how long she had been in gaol.

'Two years and nine months,' she said.

And she began to laugh hysterically with tears streaming down her
cheeks.

'I don't know what I'm doing,' she cried. 'I can't understand it.'

She looked into the street with wild, yearning eyes; everything seemed
to her strange and new.

'I haven't seen a tree for nearly three years,' she sobbed.

But the hag was pressing the doctor to drink with her; he accepted
without much hesitation, and gallantly proposed her health.

'What are you going to do?' he said to the younger woman, she was hardly
more than a girl. 'You'd better not hang about in Seville or you'll get
into trouble again.'

'Oh no,' she said, 'I'm going to my village--_mi pueblo_--this
afternoon. I want to see my husband and my child.'

Don Felipe turned to me and asked what I thought of the Seville prison.
I made some complimentary reply.

'Are English prisons like that?' he asked.

I said I did not think so.

'Are they better?'

I shrugged my shoulders.

'I'm told,' he said, 'that two years' hard labour in an English prison
kills a man.'

'The English are a great nation,' I replied.

'And a humane one,' he added, with a bow and a smile.

I bade him good-morning.




XXIII

[Sidenote: Before the Bull-fight]


If all Andalusians are potential gaol-birds they are also potential
bull-fighters. It is impossible for foreigners to realise how firmly the
love of that pastime is engrained in all classes. In other countries the
gift that children love best is a box of soldiers, but in Spain it is a
miniature ring with tin bulls, _picadors_ on horseback and _toreros_.
From their earliest youth boys play at bull-fighting, one of them taking
the bull's part and charging with the movements peculiar to that animal,
while the rest make passes with their coats or handkerchiefs. Often, to
increase the excitement of the game, they have two horns fixed on a
piece of wood. You will see them playing it at every street corner all
day long, and no amusement can rival it; with the result that by the
time a boy is fifteen he has acquired considerable skill in the
exercise, and a favourite entertainment then is to hire a bull-calf for
an afternoon and practise with it. Every urchin in Andalusia knows the
names of the most prominent champions and can tell you their merits.

The bull-fight is the national spectacle; it excites Spaniards as
nothing else can, and the death of a famous _torero_ is more tragic than
the loss of a colony. Seville looks upon itself as the very home and
centre of the art. The good king Ferdinand VII.--as precious a rascal as
ever graced a throne--founded in Seville the first academy for the
cultivation of tauromachy, and bull-fighters swagger through the Sierpes
in great numbers and the most faultless costume.

There are only five great bull-fights in a year at Seville, namely, on
Easter day, on the three days of the fair, and on Corpus Christi. But
during the summer _novilladas_ are held every Sunday, with bulls of
three years old and young fighters. Long before an important _corrida_
there is quite an excitement in the town. Gaudy bills are posted on the
walls with the names of the performers and the proprietor of the bulls;
crowds stand round reading them breathlessly, discussing with one
another the chances of the fray; the papers give details and forecasts
as in England they do for the better cause of horse-racing! And the
journeyings of the _matador_ are announced as exactly as with us the
doings of the nobility and gentry.

The great _matador_, Mazzantini or Guerrita, arrives the day before the
fight, and perhaps takes a walk in the Sierpes. People turn to look at
him and acquaintances shake his hand, pleased that all the world may
know how friendly they are with so great a man. The hero himself is calm
and gracious. He feels himself a person of merit, and cannot be
unconscious that he has a fortune of several million _pesetas_ bringing
in a reasonable interest. He talks with ease and assurance, often
condescends to joke, and elegantly waves his hand, sparkling with
diamonds of great value.

* * *

Many persons have described a bull-fight, but generally their emotions
have overwhelmed them so that they have seen only part of one
performance, and consequently have been obliged to use an indignant
imagination to help out a very faulty recollection. This is my excuse
for giving one more account of an entertainment which can in no way be
defended. It is doubtless vicious and degrading; but with the constant
danger, the skill displayed, the courage, the hair-breadth escapes, the
catastrophes, it is foolish to deny that any pastime can be more
exciting.

The English humanity to animals is one of the best traits of a great
people, and they justly thank God they are not as others are. Can
anything more horrid be imagined than to kill a horse in the bull-ring,
and can any decent hack ask for a better end when he is broken down,
than to be driven to death in London streets or to stand for hours on
cab ranks in the rain and snow of an English winter? The Spaniards are
certainly cruel to animals; on the other hand, they never beat their
wives nor kick their children. From the dog's point of view I would ten
times sooner be English, but from the woman's--I have my doubts. Some
while ago certain papers, anxious perhaps to taste the comfortable joys
of self-righteousness, turned their attention to the brutality of
Spaniards, and a score of journalists wrote indignantly of bull-fights.
At the same time, by a singular chance, a prize-fighter was killed in
London, and the Spanish papers printed long tirades against the gross,
barbaric English. The two sets of writers were equally vehement,
inaccurate and flowery; but what seemed most remarkable was that each
side evidently felt quite unaffected horror and disgust for the
proceedings of the other. Like persons of doubtful character inveighing
against the vices of the age, both were so carried away by moral
enthusiasm as to forget that there was anything in their own histories
which made this virtuous fury a little absurd. There is really a good
deal in the point of view.




XXIV

[Sidenote: Corrida de Toros--I]


On the day before a bull-fight all the world goes down to Tablada to see
the bulls. Youth and beauty drive, for every one in Seville of the least
pretension to gentility keeps a carriage; the Sevillans,
characteristically, may live in houses void of every necessity and
comfort, eating bread and water, but they will have a carriage to drive
in the _paseo_. You see vehicles of all kinds, from the new landau with
a pair of magnificent Andalusian horses, or the strange omnibus drawn by
mules, typical of Southern Spain, to the shabby victoria, with a
broken-down hack and a decrepit coachman.

Tablada is a vast common without the town, running along the river side,
and here all manner of cattle are kept throughout the year. But the
fighting bulls are brought from their respective farms the morning
before the day of battle, and each is put in an enclosure with its
attendant oxen. The crowd looks eagerly, admiring the length of horn,
forecasting the fight.

The handsome brutes remain there till midnight, when they are brought to
the ring and shut in little separate boxes till the morrow. The
_encierro_, as it is called, is an interesting sight. The road has been
palisaded and the bulls are driven along by oxen. It is very curious to
wait in the darkness, in the silence, under the myriad stars of the
southern night. Your ear is astrung to hear the distant tramp; the
waiting seems endless. A sound is heard and every one runs to the side;
but nothing follows, and the waiting continues. Suddenly the stillness
is broken by tinkling bells, the oxen; and immediately there is a tramp
of rushing hoofs. Three men on horseback gallop through the entrance,
and on their heels the cattle; the riders turn sharply round, a door is
swung to behind them, and the oxen, with the bulls in their midst, pound
through the ring.

* * *

The doors are opened two hours before the performance. Through the
morning the multitude has trooped to the Plaza San Fernando to buy
tickets, and in the afternoon all Seville wends its way towards the
ring. The road is thronged with people, they walk in dense crowds,
pushing one another to get out of the way of broken-down shays that roll
along filled with enthusiasts. The drivers crack their whips, shouting:
'_Un real, un real a los Toros!_'{a} The sun beats down and the sky is
intensely blue. It is very hot, already people are blowing and panting,
boys sell fans at a halfpenny each. '_Abanicos a perra chica!_'{b}

When you come near the ring the din is tremendous; the many vendors
shout their wares, middlemen offer tickets at double the usual price,
friends call to one another. Now and then is a quarrel, a quick exchange
of abuse as one pushes or treads upon his neighbour; but as a rule all
are astonishingly good-natured. A man, after a narrow escape from being
run over, will shout a joke to the driver, who is always ready with a
repartee. And they surge on towards the entrance. Every one is expectant
and thrilled, the very air seems to give a sense of exhilaration. The
people crowd in like ants. All things are gay and full of colour and
life.

A _picador_ passes on horseback in his uncouth clothes, and all turn to
look at him.

And in the ring itself the scene is marvellous. On one side the sun
beats down with burning rays, and there, the seats being cheaper,
notwithstanding the terrific heat people are closely packed. There is a
perpetual irregular movement of thousands of women's fans fluttering to
and fro. Opposite, in the shade, are nearly as many persons, but of
better class. Above, in the boxes sit ladies in _mantillas_, and when a
beautiful woman appears she is often greeted with a burst of applause,
which she takes most unconcernedly. When at last the ring is full, tier
above tier crammed so that not a place is vacant, it gives quite an
extraordinary emotion. The serried masses cease then to be a collection
of individuals, but gain somehow a corporate unity; you realise, with a
kind of indeterminate fear, the many-headed beast of savage instincts
and of ruthless might. No crowd is more picturesque than the Spanish,
and the dark masculine costume vividly contrasts with the bright
colours of the women, with flowers in their hair and _mantillas_ of
white lace.

But also the tremendous vitality of it all strikes you. Late arrivals
walk along looking for room, gesticulating, laughing, bandying jokes;
vendors of all sorts cry out their goods: the men who sell prawns,
shrimps, and crabs' claws from Cadiz pass with large baskets: '_Bocas,
bocas!_'

The water sellers with huge jars: '_Agua, quien quiere agua? Agua!_'{c}
The word sings along the interminable rows. A man demands a glass and
hands down a halfpenny; a mug of sparkling water is sent up to him. It
is deliciously cool.

The sellers of lottery tickets, offering as usual the first prize:
'_Premio gordo, quien quiere el premio gordo_';{d} or yelling the number
of the ticket: 'Who wants number seventeen hundred and eighty-five for
three _pesetas_?'

And the newsboys add to the din: '_Noticiero! Porvenir!_' Later on
arrives the Madrid paper: '_Heraldo! Heraldo!_'

Lastly the men with stacks of old journals to use as seats: '_A perra
chica, dos periodicos a perra chica!_'{e}

Suddenly there is a great clapping of hands, and looking up you find the
president has come; he is supported by two friends, and all three, with
comic solemnity, wear tall hats and frock coats. They bow to the public.
Bull-fighting is the only punctual thing in Spain, and the president
arrives precisely as the clock strikes half-past four. He waves a
handkerchief, the band strikes up, a door is opened, and the fighters
enter. First come the three _matadors_, the eldest in the middle, the
next on his right, and the youngest on the left; they are followed by
their respective _cuadrillas_, the _banderilleros_, the _capeadors_, the
_picadors_ on horseback, and finally the _chulos_, whose duty it is to
unsaddle dead horses, attach the slaughtered bull to the team of mules,
and perform other minor offices. They advance, gorgeous in their
coloured satin and gold embroidery, bearing a cloak peculiarly folded
over the arm; they walk with a kind of swinging motion, as ordained by
the convention of a century. They bow to the president, very solemnly.
The applause is renewed. They retire to the side, three _picadors_ take
up their places at some distance from one another on the right of the
door from which issues the bull. The _alguaciles_, in black velvet, with
peaked and feathered hats, on horseback, come forward, and the key of
the bull's den is thrown to them. They disappear. The fighters meanwhile
exchange their satin cloaks for others of less value. There is another
flourish of trumpets, the gates are opened for the bull.

Then comes a moment of expectation, every one is trembling with
excitement. There is perfect silence. All eyes are fixed on the open
gate.

Notes:

{a} 'Twopence-halfpenny to the Bulls.'

{b} "Fans, one halfpenny each!"

{c} 'Water, who wants water? Water!'

{d} 'The first prize, who wants the first prize?'

{e} 'One halfpenny, two papers for one halfpenny.'




XXV

[Sidenote: Corrida de Toros--II]


One or two shouts are heard, a murmur passes through the people, and the
bull emerges--shining, black, with massive shoulders and fine horns. It
advances a little, a splendid beast conscious of its strength, and
suddenly stops dead, looking round. The _toreros_ wave their capes and
the _picadors_ flourish their lances, long wooden spikes with an iron
point. The bull catches sight of a horse, and lowering his head, bears
down swiftly upon it. The _picador_ takes firmer hold of his lance, and
when the brute reaches him plants the pointed end between its shoulders;
at the same moment the senior _matador_ dashes forward and with his
cloak distracts the bull's attention. It wheels round and charges; he
makes a pass; it goes by almost under his arm, but quickly turns and
again attacks. This time the skilful fighter receives it backwards,
looking over his shoulder, and again it passes. There are shouts of
enthusiasm from the public. The bull's glossy coat is stained with red.

A second _picador_ comes forward, and the bull charges again, but
furiously now, exerting its full might. The horse is thrown to the
ground and the rider, by an evil chance, falls at the bull's very feet.

It cannot help seeing him and lowers its head; the people catch their
breath; many spring instinctively to their feet; here and there is a
woman's frightened cry; but immediately a _matador_ draws the cape over
its eyes and passionately the bull turns on him. Others spring forward
and lift the _picador_: his trappings are so heavy that he cannot rise
alone; he is dragged to safety and the steed brought back for him. One
more horseman advances, and the bull with an angry snort bounds at him;
the _picador_ does his best, but is no match for the giant strength. The
bull digs its horns deep into the horse's side and lifts man and beast
right off the ground; they fall with a heavy thud, and as the raging
brute is drawn off, blood spurts from the horse's flank. The _chulos_
try to get it up; they drag on the reins with shouts and curses, and
beat it with sticks. But the wretched creature, wounded to the death,
helplessly lifts its head. They see it is useless and quickly remove
saddle and bridle, a man comes with a short dagger called the
_puntilla_, which he drives into its head, the horse falls on its side,
a quiver passes through its body, and it is dead. The people are
shouting with pleasure; the bull is a good one. The first _picador_
comes up again and the bull attacks for the fourth time, but it has lost
much strength, and the man drives it off. It has made a horrible gash in
the horse's belly, and the entrails protrude, dragging along the ground.
The horse is taken out.

The president waves his handkerchief, the trumpets sound, and the first
act of the drama is over.

The _picadors_ leave the ring and the _banderilleros_ take their darts,
about three feet long, gay with decorations of coloured paper. While
they make ready, others play with the bull, gradually tiring it: one
throws aside his cape and awaits the charge with folded arms; the bull
rushes at him, and the man without moving his feet twists his body away
and the savage brute passes on. There is a great burst of applause for a
daring feat well done.

Each _matador_ has two _banderilleros_, and it is proper that three
pairs of these darts should be placed. One of them steps to within
speaking distance of the animal, and holding a _banderilla_ in each hand
lifted above his head, stamps his foot and shouts insulting words. The
bull does not know what this new thing is, but charges blindly; at the
same moment the man runs forward, and passing, plants the two darts
between the shoulders. If they are well placed there is plentiful
hand-clapping; no audience is so liberal of applause for skill or
courage, none so intolerant of cowardice or stupidity; and with equal
readiness it will yell with delight or hiss and hoot and whistle. The
second _banderillero_ comes forward to plant his pair; a third is
inserted and the trumpets sound for the final scene.

This is the great duel between the single man and the bull. The
_matador_ advances, sword in hand, with the _muleta_, the red cloth for
the passes, over his arm. Under the president's box he takes off his
hat, and with fine gesture makes a grandiloquent speech, wherein he vows
either to conquer or to die: the harangue is finished with a wheel round
and a dramatic flinging of his hat to attendants on the other side of
the barrier. He pensively walks forward. All eyes are upon him--and he
knows it. He motions his companions to stand back and goes close to the
bull. He is quite alone, with his life in his hands--a slender figure,
very handsome in the gorgeous costume glittering with fine gold. He
arranges the _muleta_ over a little stick, so that it hangs down like a
flag and conceals his sword. Then quite solemnly he walks up to the
bull, holding the red rag in his left hand. The bull watches
suspiciously, suddenly charges, and the _muleta_ is passed over its
head; the _matador_ does not move a muscle, the bull turns and stands
quite motionless. Another charge, another pass. And so he continues,
making seven or eight of various sorts, to the growing approbation of
the public. At last it is time to kill. With great caution he withdraws
the sword; the bull looks warily. He makes two or three passes more and
walks round till he gets the animal into proper position: the forefeet
must be set squarely on the ground. '_Ora! Ora!_' cry the people. 'Now!
Now!' The bull is well placed. The _matador_ draws the sword back a
little and takes careful aim. The bull rushes, and at the same moment
the man makes one bound forward and buries the sword to the hilt between
the brute's shoulders. It falls to its knees and rolls over.

Then is a perfect storm of applause; and it is worth while to see
fourteen thousand people wild with delight. The band bursts into joyous
strains, and the mules come galloping in, gaily caparisoned; a rope is
passed round the dead beast, and they drag it away. The _matador_
advances to the president's box and bows, while the shouting grows more
frantic. He walks round, bowing and smiling, and the public in its
enthusiasm throws down hats and cigars and sticks.

But there are no intervals to a bull-fight, and the _picadors_
immediately reappear and take their places; the doors are flung open,
and a second bull rushes forth. The _matador_ still goes round bowing to
the applause, elaborately unmindful of the angry beast.

Six animals are killed in an afternoon within two hours, and then the
mighty audience troop out with flushed cheeks, the smell of blood strong
in their nostrils.




XXVI

[Sidenote: On Horseback]


I had a desire to see something of the very heart of Andalusia, of that
part of the country which had preserved its antique character, where
railway trains were not, and the horse, the mule, the donkey were still
the only means of transit. After much scrutiny of local maps and
conversation with horse-dealers and others, I determined from Seville to
go circuitously to Ecija, and thence return by another route as best I
could. The district I meant to traverse in olden times was notorious for
its brigands; even thirty years ago the prosperous tradesman, voyaging
on his mule from town to town, was liable to be seized by unromantic
outlaws and detained till his friends forwarded ransom, while ears and
fingers were playfully sent to prove identity. In Southern Spain
brigandage necessarily flourished, for not only were the country-folk in
collusion with the bandits, but the very magistrates united with them to
share the profits of lawless undertakings. Drastic measures were needful
to put down the evil, and in a truly Spanish way drastic measures were
employed. The Civil Guard, whose duty it was to see to the safety of the
country side, had no confidence in the justice of Madrid, whither
captured highwaymen were sent for trial; once there, for a few hundred
dollars, the most murderous ruffian could prove his babe-like innocence,
forthwith return to the scene of his former exploits and begin again. So
they hit upon an expedient. The Civil Guards set out for the capital
with their prisoner handcuffed between them; but, curiously enough, in
every single case the brigand had scarcely marched a couple of miles
before he incautiously tried to escape, whereupon he was, of course,
promptly shot through the back. People noticed two things: first, that
the clothes of the dead man were often singed, as if he had not escaped
very far before he was shot down; that only proved his guardians' zeal.
But the other was stranger: the two Civil Guards, when after a couple of
hours they returned to the town, as though by a mysterious premonition
they had known the bandit would make some rash attempt, invariably had
waiting for them an excellent hot dinner.

The only robber of importance who avoided such violent death was the
chief of a celebrated band who, when captured, signed a declaration that
he had not the remotest idea of escaping, and insisted on taking with
him to Madrid his solicitor and a witness. He reached the capital alive,
and having settled his little affairs with benevolent judges, turned to
a different means of livelihood, and eventually, it is said, occupied a
responsible post in the Government. It is satisfactory to think that his
felonious talents were not in after-life entirely wasted.

* * *

It was the beginning of March when I started. According to the old
proverb, the dog was already seeking the shade: _En Marzo busca la
sombra el perro_; the chilly Spaniard, loosening the folds of his
_capa_, acknowledged that at mid-day in the sun it was almost warm. The
winter rains appeared to have ceased; the sky over Seville was
cloudless, not with the intense azure of midsummer, but with a blue that
seemed mixed with silver. And in the sun the brown water of the
Guadalquivir glittered like the scales on a fish's back, or like the
burnished gold of old Moorish pottery.

I set out in the morning early, with saddle-bags fixed on either side
and poncho strapped to my pommel. A loaded revolver, though of course I
never had a chance to use it, made me feel pleasantly adventurous. I
walked cautiously over the slippery cobbles of the streets, disturbing
the silence with the clatter of my horse's shoes. Now and then a mule or
a donkey trotted by, with panniers full of vegetables, of charcoal or of
bread, between which on the beast's neck sat perched a man in a short
blouse. I came to the old rampart of the town, now a promenade; and at
the gate groups of idlers, with cigarettes between their lips, stood
talking.

An hospitable friend had offered lodging for the night and food; after
which, my ideas of the probable accommodation being vague, I expected to
sleep upon straw, for victuals depending on the wayside inns. I arrived
at the _Campo de la Cruz_, a tiny chapel which marks the same distance
from the Cathedral as Jesus Christ walked to the Cross; it is the final
boundary of Seville.

Immediately afterwards I left the high-road, striking across country to
Carmona. The land was already wild; on either side of the bridle-path
were great wastes of sand covered only by palmetto. The air was cool and
fresh, like the air of English country in June when it has rained
through the night; and Aguador, snorting with pleasure, cantered over
the uneven ground, nimbly avoiding holes and deep ruts with the
sure-footedness of his Arab blood. An Andalusian horse cares nothing for
the ground on which he goes, though it be hard and unyielding as iron;
and he clambers up and down steep, rocky precipices as happily as he
trots along a cinder-path.

I passed a shepherd in a ragged cloak and a broad-brimmed hat, holding a
crook. He stared at me, his flock of brown sheep clustered about him as
I scampered by, and his dog rushed after, barking.

'_Vaya Usted con Dios!_'

I came to little woods of pine-trees, with long, thin trunks, and the
foliage spreading umbrella-wise; round them circled innumerable hawks,
whose nests I saw among the branches. Two ravens crossed my path, their
wings heavily flapping.

The great charm of the Andalusian country is that you seize romance, as
it were, in the act. In northern lands it is only by a mental effort
that you can realise the picturesque value of the life that surrounds
you; and, for my part, I can perceive it only by putting it mentally in
black and white, and reading it as though between the covers of a book.
Once, I remember, in Brittany, in a distant corner of that rock-bound
coast, I sat at midnight in a fisherman's cottage playing cards by the
light of two tallow candles. Next door, with only a wall between us, a
very old sailor lay dying in the great cupboard-bed which had belonged
to his fathers before him; and he fought for life with the remains of
that strenuous vigour with which in other years he had battled against
the storms of the Atlantic. In the stillness of the night, the waves,
with the murmur of a lullaby, washed gently upon the shingle, and the
stars shone down from a clear sky. I looked at the yellow light on the
faces of the players, gathered in that desolate spot from the four
corners of the earth, and cried out: 'By Jove, this is romance!' I had
never before caught that impression in the very making, and I was
delighted with my good fortune.

The answer came quickly from the American: 'Don't talk bosh! It's your
deal.'

But for all that it was romance, seized fugitively, and life at that
moment threw itself into a decorative pattern fit to be remembered. It
is the same effect which you get more constantly in Spain, so that the
commonest things are transfigured into beauty. For in the cactus and the
aloe and the broad fields of grain, in the mules with their wide
panniers and the peasants, in the shepherds' huts and the straggling
farm-houses, the romantic is there, needing no subtlety to be
discovered; and the least imaginative may feel a certain thrill when he
understands that the life he leads is not without its æsthetic meaning.

* * *

I rode for a long way in complete solitude, through many miles of this
sandy desert. Then the country changed, and olive-groves in endless
succession followed one another, the trees with curiously decorative
effect were planted in long, even lines. The earth was a vivid red,
contrasting with the blue sky and the sombre olives, gnarled and
fantastically twisted, like evil spirits metamorphosed: in places they
had sown corn, and the young green enhanced the shrill diversity of
colour. With its clear, brilliant outlines and its lack of shadow, the
scene reminded one of a prim pattern, such as in Jane Austen's day young
gentlewomen worked in worsted. Sometimes I saw women among the trees,
perched like monkeys on the branches, or standing below with large
baskets; they were extraordinarily quaint in the trousers which modesty
bade them wear for the concealment of their limbs when olive-picking.
The costume was so masculine, their faces so red and weather-beaten,
that the yellow handkerchief on their heads was really the only means of
distinguishing their sex.

But the path became more precipitous, hewn from the sandstone, and so
polished by the numberless shoes of donkeys and of mules that I hardly
dared walk upon it; and suddenly I saw Carmona in front of me--quite
close.




XXVII

[Sidenote: By the Road--I]


The approach to Carmona is a very broad, white street, much too wide for
the cottages which line it, deserted; and the young trees planted on
either side are too small to give shade. The sun beat down with a fierce
glare and the dust rose in clouds as I passed. Presently I came to a
great Moorish gateway, a dark mass of stone, battlemented, with a lofty
horseshoe arch. People were gathered about it in many-coloured groups, I
found it was a holiday in Carmona, and the animation was unwonted; in a
corner stood the hut of the _Consumo_, and the men advanced to examine
my saddle-bags. I passed through, into the town, looking right and left
for a _parador_, an hostelry whereat to leave my horse. I bargained for
the price of food and saw Aguador comfortably stalled; then made my way
to the Nekropolis where lived my host. There are many churches in
Carmona, and into one of these I entered; it had nothing of great
interest, but to a certain degree it was rich, rich in its gilded
woodwork and in the brocade that adorned the pillars; and I felt that
these Spanish churches lent a certain dignity to life: for all the
careless flippancy of Andalusia they still remained to strike a nobler
note. I forgot willingly that the land was priest-ridden and
superstitious, so that a Spaniard could tell me bitterly that there were
but two professions open to his countrymen, the priesthood and the
bull-ring. It was pleasant to rest in that cool and fragrant darkness.

My host was an archæologist, and we ate surrounded by broken
earthenware, fragmentary mosaics, and grinning skulls. It was curious
afterwards to wander in the graveyard which, with indefatigable zeal, he
had excavated, among the tombs of forgotten races, letting oneself down
to explore the subterranean cells. The paths he had made in the giant
cemetery were lined with a vast number of square sandstone boxes which
had contained human ashes; and now, when the lid was lifted, a green
lizard or a scorpion darted out. From the hill I saw stretched before me
the great valley of the Guadalquivir: with the squares of olive and of
ploughed field, and the various greens of the corn, it was like a vast,
multi-coloured carpet. But later, with the sunset, black clouds arose,
splendidly piled upon one another; and the twilight air was chill and
grey. A certain sternness came over the olive-groves, and they might
well have served as a reproach to the facile Andaluz; for their cold
passionless green seemed to offer a warning to his folly.

At night my host left me to sleep in the village, and I lay in bed alone
in the little house among the tombs; it was very silent. The wind sprang
up and blew about me, whistling through the windows, whistling weirdly;
and I felt as though the multitudes that had been buried in that old
cemetery filled the air with their serried numbers, a vast, silent
congregation waiting motionless for they knew not what. I recalled a
gruesome fact that my friend had told me: not far from there, in tombs
that he had disinterred the skeletons lay huddled spasmodically, with
broken skulls and a great stone by the side; for when a man, he said,
lay sick unto death, his people took him, and placed him in his grave,
and with the stone killed him.

* * *

In the morning I set out again. It was five-and-thirty miles to Ecija,
but a new high road stretched from place to place and I expected easy
riding. Carmona stands on the top of a precipitous hill, round which
winds the beginning of the road; below, after many zigzags, I saw its
continuation, a straight white line reaching as far as I could see. In
Andalusia, till a few years ago, there were practically no high roads,
and even now they are few and bad. The chief communication from town to
town is usually an uneven track, which none attempts to keep up, with
deep ruts, and palmetto growing on either side, and occasional pools of
water. A day's rain makes it a quagmire, impassable for anything beside
the sure-footed mule.

I went on, meeting now and then a string of asses, their panniers filled
with stones or with wood for Carmona; the drivers sat on the rump of the
hindmost animal, for that is the only comfortable way to ride a donkey.
A peasant trotted briskly by on his mule, his wife behind him with her
arms about his waist. I saw a row of ploughs in a field; to each were
attached two oxen, and they went along heavily, one behind the other in
regular line. By the side of every pair a man walked bearing a long
goad, and one of them sang a _Malagueña_, its monotonous notes rising
and falling slowly. From time to time I passed a white farm, a little
way from the road, invitingly cool in the heat; the sun began to beat
down fiercely. The inevitable storks were perched on a chimney, by their
big nest; and when they flew in front of me, with their broad white
wings and their red legs against the blue sky, they gave a quaint
impression of a Japanese screen.

A farmhouse such as this seems to me always a type of the Spanish
impenetrability. I have been over many of them, and know the manner of
their rooms and the furniture, the round of duties there performed and
how the day is portioned out; but the real life of the inhabitants
escapes me. My knowledge is merely external. I am conscious that it is
the same of the Andalusians generally, and am dismayed because I know
practically nothing more after a good many years than I learnt in the
first months of my acquaintance with them. Below the superficial
similarity with the rest of Europe which of late they have acquired,
there is a difference which makes it impossible to get at the bottom of
their hearts. They have no openness as have the French and the Italians,
with whom a good deal of intimacy is possible even to an Englishman, but
on the contrary an Eastern reserve which continually baffles me. I
cannot realise their thoughts nor their outlook. I feel always below the
grace of their behaviour the instinctive, primeval hatred of the
stranger.

Gradually the cultivation ceased, and I saw no further sign of human
beings. I returned to the desert of the previous day, but the land was
more dreary. The little groves of pine-trees had disappeared, there were
no olives, no cornfields, not even the aloe nor the wilder cactus; but
on either side as far as the horizon, desert wastes, littered with
stones and with rough boulders, grown over only by palmetto. For many
miles I went, dismounting now and then to stretch my legs and sauntering
a while with the reins over my shoulder. Towards mid-day I rested by the
wayside and let Aguador eat what grass he could.

Presently, continuing my journey, I caught sight of a little hovel where
the fir-branch over the door told me wine was to be obtained. I fastened
my horse to a ring in the wall, and, going in, found an aged crone who
gave me a glass of that thin white wine, produce of the last year's
vintage, which is called _Vino de la Hoja_, wine of the leaf; she looked
at me incuriously as though she saw so many people and they were so much
alike that none repaid particular scrutiny. I tried to talk with her,
for it seemed a curious life that she must lead, alone in that hut many
miles from the nearest hamlet, with never a house in sight; but she was
taciturn and eyed me now with something like suspicion. I asked for
food, but with a sullen frown she answered that she had none to spare. I
inquired the distance to Luisiana, a village on the way to Ecija where
I had proposed to lunch, and shrugging her shoulders, she replied: 'How
should I know!' I was about to go when I heard a great clattering, and a
horseman galloped up. He dismounted and walked in, a fine example of the
Andalusian countryman, handsome and tall, well-shaved, with
close-cropped hair. He wore elaborately decorated gaiters, the usual
short, close-fitting jacket, and a broad-brimmed hat; in his belt were a
knife and a revolver, and slung across his back a long gun. He would
have made an admirable brigand of comic-opera; but was in point of fact
a farmer riding, as he told me, to see his _novia_, or lady-love, at a
neighbouring farm.

I found him more communicative and in the politest fashion we discussed
the weather and the crops. He had been to Seville.

'_Che maravilla!_' he cried, waving his fine, strong hands. 'What a
marvel! But I cannot bear the town-folk. What thieves and liars!'

'Town-folk should stick to the towns,' muttered the old woman, looking
at me somewhat pointedly.

The remark drew the farmer's attention more closely to me.

'And what are you doing here?' he asked.

'Riding to Ecija.'

'Ah, you're a commercial traveller,' he cried, with fine scorn. 'You
foreigners bleed the country of all its money. You and the government!'

'Rogues and vagabonds!' muttered the old woman.

Notwithstanding, the farmer with much condescension accepted one of my
cigars, and made me drink with him a glass of _aguardiente_.

We went off together. The mare he rode was really magnificent, rather
large, holding her head beautifully, with a tail that almost swept the
ground. She carried as if it were nothing the heavy Spanish saddle,
covered with a white sheep-skin, its high triangular pommel of polished
wood. Our ways, however, quickly diverged. I inquired again how far it
was to the nearest village.

'Eh!' said the farmer, with a vague gesture. 'Two leagues. Three
leagues. _Quien sabe?_ Who knows? _Adios!_'

He put the spurs to his mare and galloped down a bridle-track. I, whom
no fair maiden awaited, trotted on soberly.




XXVIII

[Sidenote: By the Road--II]


The endless desert grew rocky and less sandy, the colours duller. Even
the palmetto found scanty sustenance, and huge boulders, strewn as
though some vast torrent had passed through the plain, alone broke the
desolate flatness. The dusty road pursued its way, invariably straight,
neither turning to one side nor to the other, but continually in front
of me, a long white line.

Finally in the distance I saw a group of white buildings and a cluster
of trees. I thought it was Luisiana, but Luisiana, they had said, was a
populous hamlet, and here were only two or three houses and not a soul.
I rode up and found among the trees a tall white church, and a pool of
murky water, further back a low, new edifice, which was evidently a
monastery, and a _posada_. Presently a Franciscan monk in his brown cowl
came out of the church, and he told me that Luisiana was a full league
off, but that food could be obtained at the neighbouring inn.

The _posada_ was merely a long barn, with an open roof of wood, on one
side of which were half a dozen mangers and in a corner two mules.
Against another wall were rough benches for travellers to sleep on. I
dismounted and walked to the huge fireplace at one end, where I saw
three very old women seated like witches round a _brasero_, the great
brass dish of burning cinders. With true Spanish stolidity they did not
rise as I approached, but waited for me to speak, looking at me
indifferently. I asked whether I could have anything to eat.

'Fried eggs.'

'Anything else?'

The hostess, a tall creature, haggard and grim, shrugged her shoulders.
Her jaws were toothless, and when she spoke it was difficult to
understand. I tied Aguador to a manger and took off his saddle. The old
women stirred themselves at last, and one brought a portion of chopped
straw and a little barley. Another with the bellows blew on the cinders,
and the third, taking eggs from a basket, fried them on the _brasero_.
Besides, they gave me coarse brown bread and red wine, which was coarser
still; for dessert the hostess went to the door and from a neighbouring
tree plucked oranges.

When I had finished--it was not a very substantial meal--I drew my chair
to the _brasero_ and handed round my cigarette-case. The old women
helped themselves, and a smile of thanks made the face of my gaunt
hostess somewhat less repellent. We smoked a while in silence.

'Are you all alone here?' I asked, at length.

The hostess made a movement of her head towards the country. 'My son is
out shooting,' she said, 'and two others are in Cuba, fighting the
rebels.'

'God protect them!' muttered another.

'All our sons go to Cuba now,' said the first. 'Oh, I don't blame the
Cubans, but the government.'

An angry light filled her eyes, and she lifted her clenched hand,
cursing the rulers at Madrid who took her children. 'They're robbers and
fools. Why can't they let Cuba go? It isn't worth the money we pay in
taxes.'

She spoke so vehemently, mumbling the words between her toothless gums,
that I could scarcely make them out.

'In Madrid they don't care if the country goes to rack and ruin so long
as they fill their purses. Listen.' She put one hand on my arm. 'My boy
came back with fever and dysentery. He was ill for months--at death's
door--and I nursed him day and night. And almost before he could walk
they sent him out again to that accursed country.'

The tears rolled heavily down her wrinkled cheeks.

* * *

Luisiana is a curious place. It was a colony formed by Charles III. of
Spain with Germans whom he brought to people the desolate land; and I
fancied the Teuton ancestry was apparent in the smaller civility of the
inhabitants. They looked sullenly as I passed, and none gave the
friendly Andalusian greeting. I saw a woman hanging clothes on the line
outside her house; she had blue eyes and flaxen hair, a healthy red
face, and a solidity of build which proved the purity of her northern
blood. The houses, too, had a certain exotic quaintness; notwithstanding
the universal whitewash of the South, there was about them still a
northern character. They were prim and regularly built, with little
plots of garden; the fences and the shutters were bright green. I almost
expected to see German words on the post-office and on the tobacco-shop,
and the grandiloquent Spanish seemed out of place; I thought the Spanish
clothes of the men sat upon them uneasily.

The day was drawing to a close and I pushed on to reach Ecija before
night, but Aguador was tired and I was obliged mostly to walk. Now the
highway turned and twisted among little hills and it was a strange
relief to leave the dead level of the plains: on each side the land was
barren and desolate, and in the distance were dark mountains. The sky
had clouded over, and the evening was grey and very cold; the solitude
was awful. At last I overtook a pedlar plodding along by his donkey, the
panniers filled to overflowing with china and glass, which he was taking
to sell in Ecija. He wished to talk, but he was going too slowly, and I
left him. I had hills to climb now, and at the top of each expected to
see the town, but every time was disappointed. The traces of man
surrounded me at last; again I rode among olive-groves and cornfields;
the highway now was bordered with straggling aloes and with hedges of
cactus.

At last! I reached the brink of another hill, and then, absolutely at my
feet, so that I could have thrown a stone on its roofs, lay Ecija with
its numberless steeples.




XXIX

[Sidenote: Ecija]


The central square, where are the government offices, the taverns, and a
little inn, is a charming place, quiet and lackadaisical, its pale
browns and greys very restful in the twilight, and harmonious. The
houses with their queer windows and their balconies of wrought iron are
built upon arcades which give a pleasant feeling of intimacy: in summer,
cool and dark, they must be the promenade of all the gossips and the
loungers. One can imagine the uneventful life, the monotonous round of
existence; and yet the Andalusian blood runs in the people's veins. To
my writer's fantasy Ecija seemed a fit background for some tragic story
of passion or of crime.

I dined, unromantically enough, with a pair of commercial travellers, a
post-office clerk, and two stout, elderly men who appeared to be retired
officers. Spanish victuals are terrible and strange; food is even more
an affair of birth than religion, since a man may change his faith, but
hardly his manner of eating: the stomach used to roast meat and
Yorkshire pudding rebels against Eastern cookery, and a Christian may
sooner become a Buddhist than a beef-eater a guzzler of _olla podrida_.
The Spaniards without weariness eat the same dinner day after day, year
in, year out: it is always the same white, thin, oily soup; a dish of
haricot beans and maize swimming in a revolting sauce; a nameless
_entrée_ fried in oil--Andalusians have a passion for other animals'
insides; a thin steak, tough as leather and grilled to utter dryness;
raisins and oranges. You rise from table feeling that you have been
soaked in rancid oil.

My table-companions were disposed to be sociable. The travellers desired
to know whether I was there to sell anything, and one drew from his
pocket, for my inspection, a case of watch-chains. The officers surmised
that I had come from Gibraltar to spy the land, and to terrify me, spoke
of the invincible strength of the Spanish forces.

'Are you aware,' said the elder, whose adiposity prevented his outward
appearance from corresponding with his warlike heart, 'Are you aware
that in the course of history our army has never once been defeated, and
our fleet but twice?'

He mentioned the catastrophes, but I had never heard of them; and
Trafalgar was certainly not included. I hazarded a discreet inquiry,
whereupon, with much emphasis, both explained how on that occasion the
Spanish had soundly thrashed old Nelson, although he had discomfited the
French.

'It is odd,' I observed, 'that British historians should be so
inaccurate.'

'It is discreditable,' retorted my acquaintance, with a certain
severity.

'How long did the English take to conquer the Soudan?' remarked the
other, somewhat aggressively picking his teeth. 'Twenty years? We
conquered Morocco in three months.'

'And the Moors are devils,' said the commercial traveller. 'I know,
because I once went to Tangiers for my firm.'

After dinner I wandered about the streets, past the great old houses of
the nobles in the _Calle de los Caballeros_, empty now and dilapidated,
for every gentleman that can put a penny in his pocket goes to Madrid to
spend it; down to the river which flowed swiftly between high banks.
Below the bridge two Moorish mills, irregular masses of blackness, stood
finely against the night. Near at hand they were still working at a
forge, and I watched the flying sparks as the smith hammered a
horseshoe; the workers were like silhouettes in front of the leaping
flames.

At many windows, to my envy, couples were philandering; the night was
cold and Corydon stood huddled in his cape. But the murmuring as I
passed was like the flow of a rapid brook, and I imagined, I am sure,
far more passionate and romantic speeches than ever the lovers made. I
might have uttered them to the moon, but I should have felt ridiculous,
and it was more practical to jot them down afterwards in a note-book. In
some of the surrounding villages they have so far preserved the Moorish
style as to have no windows within reach of the ground, and lovers then
must take advantage of the aperture at the bottom of the door made for
the domestic cat's particular convenience. Stretched full length on the
ground, on opposite sides of the impenetrable barrier, they can still
whisper amorous commonplaces to one another. But imagine the confusion
of a polite Spaniard, on a dark night, stumbling over a recumbent swain:

'My dear sir, I beg your pardon. I had no idea....'

In old days the disturbance would have been sufficient cause for a duel,
but now manners are more peaceful: the gallant, turning a little,
removes his hat and politely answers:

'It is of no consequence. _Vaya Usted con Dios!_'

'Good-night!'

The intruder passes and the beau endeavours passionately to catch sight
of his mistress' black eyes.

* * *

Next day was Sunday, and I walked by the river till I found a plot of
grass sheltered from the wind by a bristly hedge of cactus. I lay down
in the sun, lazily watching two oxen that ploughed a neighbouring field.

I felt it my duty in the morning to buy a chap-book relating the
adventures of the famous brigands who were called the Seven Children of
Ecija; and this, somewhat sleepily, I began to read. It required a
byronic stomach, for the very first chapter led me to a monastery where
mass proceeded in memory of some victim of undiscovered crime. Seven
handsome men appeared, most splendidly arrayed, but armed to the teeth;
each one was every inch a brigand, pitiless yet great of heart,
saturnine yet gentlemanly; and their peculiarity was that though six
were killed one day seven would invariably be seen the next. The most
gorgeously apparelled of them all, entering the sacristy, flung a purse
of gold to the Superior, while a scalding tear coursed down his sunburnt
cheek; and this he dried with a noble gesture and a richly embroidered
handkerchief! In a whirlwind of romantic properties I read of a wicked
miser who refused to support his brother's widow, of the widow herself,
(brought at birth to a gardener in the dead of night by a mysterious
mulatto,) and of this lady's lovely offspring. My own feelings can never
be harrowed on behalf of a widow with a marriageable daughter, but I am
aware that habitual readers of romance, like ostriches, will swallow
anything. I was hurried to a subterranean chamber where the Seven
Children, in still more elaborate garments, performed various dark
deeds, smoked expensive Havanas, and seated on silken cushions, partook
(like Freemasons) of a succulent cold collation.

The sun shone down with comfortable warmth, and I stretched my legs. My
pipe was out and I refilled it. A meditative snail crawled up and
observed me with flattering interest.

I grew somewhat confused. A stolen will was of course inevitable, and so
were prison dungeons; but the characters had an irritating trick of
revealing at critical moments that they were long-lost relatives. It
must have been a tedious age when poor relations were never safely
buried. However, youth and beauty were at last triumphant and villainy
confounded, virtue was crowned with orange blossom and vice died a
miserable death. Rejoicing in duty performed I went to sleep.




XXX

[Sidenote: Wind and Storm]


But next morning the sky was dark with clouds; people looked up
dubiously when I asked the way and distance to Marchena, prophesying
rain. Fetching my horse, the owner of the stable robbed me with peculiar
callousness, for he had bound my hands the day before, when I went to
see how Aguador was treated, by giving me with most courteous ceremony a
glass of _aguardiente_; and his urbanity was then so captivating that
now I lacked assurance to protest. I paid the scandalous overcharge with
a good grace, finding some solace in the reflection that he was at least
a picturesque blackguard, tall and spare, grey-headed, with fine
features sharpened by age to the strongest lines; for I am always
grateful to the dishonest when they add a certain æsthetic charm to
their crooked ways. There is a proverb which says that in Ecija every
man is a thief and every woman--no better than she should be: I was not
disinclined to believe it.

I set out, guided by a sign-post, and the good road seemed to promise an
easy day. They had told me that the distance was only six leagues, and I
expected to arrive before luncheon. Aguador, fresh after his day's rest,
broke into a canter when I put him on the green plot, which the old
Spanish law orders to be left for cattle by the side of the highway. But
after three miles, without warning, the road suddenly stopped. I found
myself in an olive-grove, with only a narrow path in front of me. It
looked doubtful, but there was no one in sight and I wandered on,
trusting to luck.

Presently, in a clearing, I caught sight of three men on donkeys,
walking slowly one after the other, and I galloped after to ask my way.
The beasts were laden with undressed skins which they were taking to
Fuentes, and each man squatted cross-legged on the top of his load. The
hindermost turned right round when I asked my question and sat
unconcernedly with his back to the donkey's head. He looked about him
vaguely as though expecting the information I sought to be written on
the trunk of an olive-tree, and scratched his head.

'Well,' he said, 'I should think it was a matter of seven leagues, but
it will rain before you get there.'

'This is the right way, isn't it?'

'It may be. If it doesn't lead to Marchena it must lead somewhere else.'

There was a philosophic ring about the answer which made up for the
uncertainty. The skinner was a fat, good-humoured creature, like all
Spaniards intensely curious; and to prepare the way for inquiries,
offered a cigarette.

'But why do you come to Ecija by so roundabout a way as Carmona, and why
should you return to Seville by such a route as Marchena?'

His opinion was evidently that the shortest way between two places was
also the best. He received my explanation with incredulity and asked,
more insistently, why I went to Ecija on horseback when I might go by
train to Madrid.

'For pleasure,' said I.

'My good sir, you must have come on some errand.'

'Oh yes,' I answered, hoping to satisfy him, 'on the search for
emotion.'

At this he bellowed with laughter and turned round to tell his fellows.

'_Usted es muy guason_,' he said at length, which may be translated:
'You're a mighty funny fellow.'

I expressed my pleasure at having provided the skinners with amusement
and bidding them farewell, trotted on.

I went for a long time among the interminable olives, grey and sad
beneath the sullen clouds, and at last the rain began to fall. I saw a
farm not very far away and cantered up to ask for shelter. An old woman
and a labourer came to the door and looked at me very doubtfully; they
said it was not a _posada_, but my soft words turned their hearts and
they allowed me to come in. The rain poured down in heavy, oblique
lines.

The labourer took Aguador to the stable and I went into the parlour, a
long, low, airy chamber like the refectory of a monastery, with windows
reaching to the ground. Two girls were sitting round the _brasero_,
sewing; they offered me a chair by their side, and as the rain fell
steadily we began to talk. The old woman discreetly remained away. They
asked about my journey, and as is the Spanish mode, about my country,
myself, and my belongings. It was a regular volley of questions I had to
answer, but they sounded pleasanter in the mouth of a pretty girl than
in that of an obese old skinner; and the rippling laughter which greeted
my replies made me feel quite witty. When they smiled they showed the
whitest teeth. Then came my turn for questioning. The girl on my right,
prettier than her sister, was very Spanish, with black, expressive eyes,
an olive skin, and a bunch of violets in her abundant hair. I asked
whether she had a _novio_, or lover; and the question set her laughing
immoderately. What was her name? 'Soledad--Solitude.'

I looked somewhat anxiously at the weather, I feared the shower would
cease, and in a minute, alas! the rain passed away; and I was forced to
notice it, for the sun-rays came dancing through the window,
importunately, making patterns of light upon the floor. I had no further
excuse to stay, and said good-bye; but I begged for the bunch of violets
in Soledad's dark hair and she gave it with a pretty smile. I plunged
again into the endless olive-groves.

It was a little strange, the momentary irruption into other people's
lives, the friendly gossip with persons of a different tongue and
country, whom I had never seen before, whom I should never see again;
and were I not strictly truthful I might here lighten my narrative by
the invention of a charming and romantic adventure. But if chance brings
us often for a moment into other existences, it takes us out with equal
suddenness so that we scarcely know whether they were real or mere
imaginings of an idle hour: the Fates have a passion for the unfinished
sketch and seldom trouble to unravel the threads which they have so
laboriously entangled. The little scene brought another to my mind. When
I was 'on accident duty' at St. Thomas's Hospital a man brought his son
with a broken leg; it was hard luck on the little chap, for he was
seated peacefully on the ground when another boy, climbing a wall, fell
on him and did the damage. When I returned him, duly bandaged, to his
father's arms, the child bent forward and put out his lips for a kiss,
saying good-night with babyish pronunciation. The father and the
attendant nurse laughed, and I, being young, was confused and blushed
profusely. They went away and somehow or other I never saw them again. I
wonder if the pretty child, (he must be eight or ten now,) remembers
kissing a very weary medical student, who had not slept much for several
days, and was dead tired. Probably he has quite forgotten that he ever
broke his leg. And I suppose no recollection remains with the pretty
girl in the farm of a foreigner riding mysteriously through the
olive-groves, to whom she gave shelter and a bunch of violets.

* * *

I came at last to the end of the trees and found then that a mighty wind
had risen, which blew straight in my teeth. It was hard work to ride
against it, but I saw a white town in the distance, on a hill; and made
for it, rejoicing in the prospect. Presently I met some men shooting,
and to make sure, asked whether the houses I saw really were Marchena.

'Oh no,' said one. 'You've come quite out of the way. That is Fuentes.
Marchena is over there, beyond the hill.'

My heart sank, for I was growing very hungry, and I asked whether I
could not get shelter at Fuentes. They shrugged their shoulders and
advised me to go to Marchena, which had a small inn. I went on for
several hours, battling against the wind, bent down in order to expose
myself as little as possible, over a huge expanse of pasture land, a
desert of green. I reached the crest of the hill, but there was no sign
of Marchena, unless that was a tower which I saw very far away, its
summit just rising above the horizon.

I was ravenous. My saddle-bags contained spaces for a bottle and for
food; and I cursed my folly in stuffing them with such useless
refinements of civilisation as hair-brushes and soap. It is possible
that one could allay the pangs of hunger with soap; but under no
imaginable circumstances with hair-brushes.

It was a tower in the distance, but it seemed to grow neither nearer nor
larger; the wind blew without pity, and miserably Aguador tramped on. I
no longer felt very hungry, but dreadfully bored. In that waste of
greenery the only living things beside myself were a troop of swallows
that had accompanied me for miles. They flew close to the ground, in
front of me, circling round; and the wind was so high that they could
scarcely advance against it.

I remembered the skinner's question, why I rode through the country when
I could go by train. I thought of the _Cheshire Cheese_ in Fleet Street,
where persons more fortunate than I had that day eaten hearty luncheons.
I imagined to myself a well-grilled steak with boiled potatoes, and a
pint of old ale, Stilton! The smoke rose to my nostrils.

But at last, the Saints be praised! I found a real bridle-path, signs of
civilisation, ploughed fields; and I came in sight of Marchena perched
on a hill-top, surrounded by its walls. When I arrived the sun was
setting finely behind the town.




XXXI

[Sidenote: Two Villages]


Marchena was all white, and on the cold windy evening I spent there,
deserted of inhabitants. Quite rarely a man sidled past wrapped to the
eyes in his cloak, or a woman with a black shawl over her head. I saw in
the town nothing characteristic but the wicker-work frame in front of
each window, so that people within could not possibly be seen; it was
evidently a Moorish survival. At night men came into the eating-room of
the inn, ate their dinner silently, and muffling themselves, quickly
went out; the cold seemed to have killed all life in them. I slept in a
little windowless cellar, on a straw bed which was somewhat verminous.

But next morning, as I looked back, the view of Marchena was charming.
It stood on the crest of a green hill, surrounded by old battlements,
and the sun shone down upon it. The wind had fallen, and in the early
hour the air was pleasant and balmy. There was no road whatever, not
even a bridle-track this time, and I made straight for Seville. I
proposed to rest my horse and lunch at Mairena. On one side was a great
plain of young corn stretching to the horizon, and on the other, with
the same mantle of green, little hills, round which I slowly wound. The
sun gave all manner of varied tints to the verdure--sometimes it was
all emerald and gold, and at others it was like dark green velvet.

But the clouds in the direction of Seville were very black, and coming
nearer I saw that it rained upon the hills. The water fell on the earth
like a transparent sheet of grey. Soon I felt an occasional drop, and I
put on my _poncho_.

The rain began in earnest, no northern drizzle, but a streaming downpour
that soaked me to the skin. The path became marsh-like, and Aguador
splashed along at a walk; it was impossible to go faster. The rain
pelted down, blinding me. Then, oddly enough, for the occasion hardly
warranted such high-flown thoughts, I felt suddenly the utter
helplessness of man: I had never before realised with such completeness
his insignificance beside the might of Nature; alone, with not a soul in
sight, I felt strangely powerless. The plain flaunted itself insolently
in face of my distress, and the hills raised their heads with a scornful
pride; they met the rain as equals, but me it crushed; I felt as though
it would beat me down into the mire. I fell into a passion with the
elements, and was seized with a desire to strike out. But the white
sheet of water was senseless and impalpable, and I relieved myself by
raging inwardly at the fools who complain of civilisation and of
railway-trains; they have never walked for hours foot-deep in mud,
terrified lest their horse should slip, with the rain falling as though
it would never cease.

The path led me to a river; there was a ford, but the water was very
high, and rushed and foamed like a torrent. Ignorant of the depth and
mistrustful, I trotted up-stream a little, seeking shallower parts; but
none could be seen, and it was no use to look for a bridge. I was bound
to cross, and I had to risk it; my only consolation was that even if
Aguador could not stand, I was already so wet that I could hardly get
wetter. The good horse required some persuasion before he would enter;
the water rushed and bubbled and rapidly became deeper; he stopped and
tried to turn back, but I urged him on. My feet went under water, and
soon it was up to my knees; then, absurdly, it struck me as rather
funny, and I began to laugh; I could not help thinking how foolish I
should look and feel on arriving at the other side, if I had to swim for
it. But immediately it grew shallower; all my adventures tailed off thus
unheroically just when they began to grow exciting, and in a minute I
was on comparatively dry land.

I went on, still with no view of Mairena; but I was coming nearer. I met
a group of women walking with their petticoats over their heads. I
passed a labourer sheltered behind a hedge, while his oxen stood in a
field, looking miserably at the rain. Still it fell, still it fell!

And when I reached Mairena it was the most cheerless place I had come
across on my journey, merely a poverty-stricken hamlet that did not even
boast a bad inn. I was directed from place to place before I could find
a stable; I was soaked to the skin, and there seemed no shelter. At last
I discovered a wretched wine-shop; but the woman who kept it said there
was no fire and no food. Then I grew very cross. I explained with heat
that I had money; it is true I was bedraggled and disreputable, but when
I showed some coins, to prove that I could pay for what I bought, she
asked unwillingly what I required. I ordered a _brasero_, and dried my
clothes as best I could by the burning cinders. I ate a scanty meal of
eggs, and comforted myself with the thin wine of the leaf, sufficiently
alcoholic to be exhilarating, and finally, with _aguardiente_ regained
my equilibrium.

But the elements were against me. The rain had ceased while I lunched,
but no sooner had I left Mairena than it began again, and Seville was
sixteen miles away. It poured steadily. I tramped up the hills, covered
with nut-trees; I wound down into valleys; the way seemed interminable.
I tramped on. At last from the brow of a hill I saw in the distance the
Giralda and the clustering houses of Seville, but all grey in the wet;
above it heavy clouds were lowering. On and on!

The day was declining, and Seville now was almost hidden in the mist,
but I reached a road. I came to the first tavern of the environs; after
a while to the first houses, then the road gave way to slippery cobbles,
and I was in Seville. The Saints be praised!




XXXII

[Sidenote: Granada]


To go from Seville to Granada is like coming out of the sunshine into
deep shadow. I arrived, my mind full of Moorish pictures, expecting to
find a vivid, tumultuous life; and I was ready with a prodigal hand to
dash on the colours of my admiration. But Granada is a sad town, grey
and empty; its people meander, melancholy, through the streets,
unoccupied. It is a tradeless place living on the monuments which
attract strangers, and like many a city famous for stirring history,
seems utterly exhausted. Granada gave me an impression that it wished
merely to be left alone to drag out its remaining days in peace, away
from the advance of civilisation and the fervid hurrying of progress: it
seemed like a great adventuress retired from the world after a life of
vicissitude, anxious only to be forgotten, and after so much storm and
stress to be nothing more than pious. There must be many descendants of
the Moors, but the present population is wan and lifeless. They are
taciturn, sombre folk, with nothing in them of the chattering and
vivacious creatures of Arab history. Indeed, as I wandered through the
streets, it was not the Moors that engaged my mind, but rather Ferdinand
of Arragon and Isabella of Castille. Their grim strength over-powered
the more graceful shadows of Moordom; and it was only by an effort that
I recalled Gazul and Musa, most gallant and amorous of Paynim knights,
tilting in the square, displaying incredible valour in the slaughter of
savage bulls. I thought of the Catholic Kings, in full armour, riding
with clank of steel through the captured streets. And the snowy summits
of the Sierra Nevada, dazzling sometimes under the sun and the blue sky,
but more often veiled with mist and capped by heavy clouds, grim and
terrifying, lent a sort of tragic interest to the scene; so that I felt
those grey masses, with their cloak of white, (they seemed near enough
to overwhelm one,) made it impossible for the town built at their very
feet, to give itself over altogether to flippancy.

And for a while I found little of interest in Granada but the Alhambra.
The gipsy quarter, with neither beauty, colour, nor even a touch of
barbarism, is a squalid, brutal place, consisting of little dens built
in the rock of the mountain which stands opposite the Alhambra. Worse
than hovels, they are the lairs of wild beasts, foetid and oppressive,
inhabited by debased creatures, with the low forehead, the copper skin,
and the shifty cruel look of the Spanish gipsy. They surround the
visitor in their rags and tatters, clamouring for alms, and for
exorbitant sums proposing to dance. Even in the slums of great cities I
have not seen a life more bestial. I tried to imagine what sort of
existence these people led. In the old days the rock-dwellings among the
cactus served the gipsies for winter quarters only, and when the spring
came they set off, scouring the country for something to earn or steal;
but that is long ago. For two generations they have remained in these
hovels--year in, year out--employed in shoeing horses, shearing, and the
like menial occupations which the Spaniard thinks beneath his dignity.
The women tell fortunes, or dance for the foreigner, or worse. It is a
mere struggle for daily bread. I wondered whether in the spring-time the
young men loved the maidens, or if they only coupled like the beasts. I
saw one pair who seemed quite newly wed; for their scanty furniture was
new and they were young. The man, short and squat, sat scowling,
cross-legged on a chair, a cigarette between his lips. The woman was
taller and not ill-made, a slattern; her hair fell dishevelled on her
back and over her forehead; her dress was open, displaying the bosom;
her apron was filthy. But when she smiled, asking for money, her teeth
were white and regular, and her eyes flashed darkly. She was attractive
in a heavy sensual fashion, attractive and at the same time horribly
repellant: she was the sort of woman who might fetter a man to herself
by some degrading, insuperable passion, the true Carmen of the famous
story whom a man might at once love and hate; so that though she dragged
him to hell in shame and in despair, he would never find the strength to
free himself. But where among that bastard race was the splendid desire
for freedom of their fathers, the love of the fresh air of heaven and
the untrammeled life of the fields?

At first glance also the cathedral seemed devoid of charm. I suppose
travellers seek emotions in the things they see, and often the more
beautiful objects do not give the most vivid sensations. Painters
complain that men of letters have written chiefly of second-rate
pictures, but the literary sentiment is different from the artistic; and
a masterpiece of Perugino may excite it less than a mediocre work of
Guido Reni.

The cathedral of Granada is said by the excellent Fergusson to be the
most noteworthy example in Europe of early Renaissance architecture; its
proportions are evidently admirable, and it is designed and carried out
according to all the canons of the art. 'Looking at its plan only,' he
says, 'this is certainly one of the finest churches in Europe. It would
be difficult to point out any other, in which the central aisle leads up
to the dome, so well proportioned to its dimensions, and to the dignity
of the high altar which stands under it.' But though I vaguely
recognised these perfections, though the spacing appeared fine and
simple, and the columns had a certain majesty, I was left more than a
little cold. The whitewash with which the interior is coated gives an
unsympathetic impression, and the abundant light destroys that mystery
which the poorest, gaudiest Spanish church almost invariably possesses.
In the _Capilla de los Reyes_ are the elaborate monuments of the
Catholic Kings, of their daughter Joan the Mad, and of Philip her
husband; below, in the crypt, are four simple coffins, in which after so
much grandeur, so much joy and sorrow, they rest. Indeed, for the two
poor women who loved without requite, it was a life of pain almost
unrelieved: it is a pitiful story, for all its magnificence, of Joan
with her fiery passion for the handsome, faithless, worthless husband,
and her mad jealousy; and of Isabella, with patient strength bearing
every cross, always devoted to the man who tired of her quickly, and
repaid her deep affection with naught but coldness and distrust.

Queen Isabella's sword and sceptre are shown in the sacristry, and in
contrast with the implement of war a beautiful cope, worked with her
royal hands. And her crown also may be seen, one of the few I have come
across which might really become the wearer, of silver, a masterpiece of
delicate craftsmanship.

But presently, returning to the cathedral and sitting in front of the
high altar, I became at last conscious of its airy, restful grace. The
chancel is very lofty. The base is a huge arcade which gives an effect
of great lightness; and above are two rows of pictures, and still higher
two rows of painted windows. The coloured glass throws the softest
lights upon the altar and on the marble floor, rendering even quieter
the low tints of the pictures. These are a series of illustrations of
the life of the Blessed Virgin, painted by Alonzo Cano, a native of
Valladolid, who killed his wife and came to Granada, whereupon those in
power made him a prebendary. In the obscurity I could not see the
paintings, but divined soft and pleasant things after the style of
Murillo, and doubtless that was better than actually to see them. The
pulpits are gorgeously carved in wood, and from the walls fly great
angels with fine turbulence of golden drapery. And in the contrast of
the soft white stone with the gold, which not even the most critical
taste could complain was too richly spread, there is a delicate,
fascinating lightness: the chancel has almost an Italian gaiety, which
comes upon one oddly in the gloomy town. Here the decoration, the gilded
virgins, the elaborate carving, do not oppress as elsewhere; the effect
is too debonair and too refreshing. It is one colour more, one more
distinction, in the complexity of the religious sentiment.

* * *

But if what I have said of Granada seems cold, it is because I did not
easily catch the spirit of the place. For when you merely observe and
admire some view, and if industrious make a note of your impression, and
then go home to luncheon, you are but a vulgar tripper, scum of the
earth, deserving the ridicule with which the natives treat you. The
romantic spirit is your only justification; when by the comeliness of
your life or the beauty of your emotion you have attained that, (Shelley
when he visited Paestum had it, but Théophile Gautier, flaunting his red
waistcoat _tras los montes_, was perhaps no better than a Cook's
tourist,) then you are no longer unworthy of the loveliness which it is
your privilege to see. When the old red brick and the green trees say to
you hidden things, and the _vega_ and the mountains are stretched before
you with a new significance, when at last the white houses with their
brown tiles, and the labouring donkey, and the peasant at his plough,
appeal to you so as to make, as it were, an exquisite pattern on your
soul, then you may begin to find excuses for yourself. But you may see
places long and often before they are thus magically revealed to you,
and for myself I caught the real emotion of Granada but once, when from
the Generalife I looked over the valley, the Generalife in which are
mingled perhaps more admirably than anywhere else in Andalusia all the
charm of Arabic architecture, of running water, and of cypress trees, of
purple flags and dark red roses. It is a spot, indeed, fit for the
plaintive creatures of poets to sing their loves, for Paolo and
Francesca, for Juliet and Romeo; and I am glad that there I enjoyed such
an exquisite moment.




XXXIII

[Sidenote: The Alhambra]


From the church of _San Nicolas_, on the other side of the valley, the
Alhambra, like all Moorish buildings externally very plain, with its red
walls and low, tiled roofs, looks like some old charter-house. Encircled
by the fresh green of the spring-time, it lies along the summit of the
hill with an infinite, most simple grace, dun and brown and deep red;
and from the sultry wall on which I sat the elm-trees and the poplars
seemed very cool. Thirstily, after the long drought, the Darro, the Arab
stream which ran scarlet with the blood of Moorish strife, wound its way
over its stony bed among the hills; and beyond, in strange contrast with
all the fertility, was the grey and silent grandeur of the Sierra
Nevada. Few places can be more charming than the green wood in which
stands the stronghold of the Moorish kings; the wind sighs among the
topmost branches and all about is the sweet sound of running water; in
spring the ground is carpeted with violets, and the heavy foliage gives
an enchanting coldness. A massive gateway, flanked by watch-towers,
forms the approach; but the actual entrance, offering no hint of the
incredible magnificence within, is an insignificant door.

But then, then you are immediately transported to a magic palace,
existing in some uncertain age of fancy, which does not seem the work of
human hands, but rather of Jin, an enchanted dwelling of seven lovely
damsels. It is barely conceivable that historical persons inhabited such
a place. At the same time it explains the wonderful civilisation of the
Moors in Spain, with their fantastic battles, their songs and strange
histories; and it brings the _Arabian Nights_ into the bounds of sober
reality: after he has seen the Alhambra none can doubt the literal truth
of the stories of Sinbad the Sailor and of Hasan of Bassorah.

* * *

From the terrace that overlooks the city you enter the Court of
Myrtles--a long pool of water with goldfish swimming to and fro,
enclosed by myrtle hedges. At the ends are arcades, borne by marble
columns with capitals of surpassing beauty. It is very quiet and very
restful; the placid water gives an indescribable sensation of delight,
and at the end mirrors the slender columns and the decorated arches so
that in reflection you see the entrance to a second palace, which is
filled with mysterious, beautiful things. But in the Alhambra the
imagination finds itself at last out of its depth, it cannot conjure up
chambers more beautiful than the reality presents. It serves only to
recall the old inhabitants to the deserted halls.

The Moors continually used inscriptions with great effect, and there is
one in this court which surpasses all others in its oriental imagery, in
praise of Mohammed V.: _Thou givest safety from the breeze to the
blades of grass, and inspirest terror in the very stars of heaven. When
the shining stars quiver, it is through dread of thee, and when the
grass of the field bends down it is to give thee thanks._

But it is the Hall of the Ambassadors which shows most fully the
unparalleled splendour of Moorish decoration. It is a square room, very
lofty, with alcoves on three sides, at the bottom of which are windows;
and the walls are covered, from the dado of tiles to the roof, with the
richest and most varied ornamentation. The Moorish workmen did not spare
themselves nor economise their exuberant invention. One pattern follows
another with infinite diversity. Even the alcoves, and there are nine,
are covered each with different designs, so that the mind is bewildered
by their graceful ingenuity. All kinds of geometrical figures are used,
enlacing with graceful intricacy, intersecting, combining and
dissolving; conventional foliage and fruit, Arabic inscriptions. An
industrious person has counted more than one hundred and fifty patterns
in the Hall of the Ambassadors, impressed with iron moulds on the moist
plaster of the walls. The roof is a low dome of larch wood, intricately
carved and inlaid with ivory and with mother-of-pearl; it has been
likened to the faceted surface of an elaborately cut gem. The effect is
so gorgeous that you are oppressed; you long for some perfectly plain
space whereon to rest the eye; but every inch is covered.

Now the walls have preserved only delicate tints of red and blue, pale
Wedgwood blues and faded terracottas, that make with the ivory of the
plaster most exquisite harmonies; but to accord with the tiles, their
brilliancy still undiminished, the colours must have been very bright.
The complicated patterns and the gay hues reproduce the oriental carpets
of the nomad's tent; for from the tent, it is said, (I know not with
what justification,) all oriental architecture is derived. The fragile
columns upon which rest masses of masonry are, therefore, direct
imitations of tent-poles, and the stalactite borders of the arches
represent the fringe of the woven hangings. The Moorish architect paid
no attention to the rules of architecture, and it has been well said
that if they existed for him at all it was only that he might
elaborately disregard them. His columns generally support nothing; his
arcades, so delicately worked that they seem like carved ivory, are of
the lightest wood and plaster.

And it is curious that there should be such durability in those dainty
materials: they express well the fatalism of the luxurious Moor, to whom
the past and future were as nothing, and the transient hour all in all;
yet they have outlasted him and his conqueror. The Spaniard, inglorious
and decayed, is now but the showman to this magnificence; time has seen
his greatness come and go, as came and went the greatness of the Moor,
but still, for all its fragility, the Alhambra stands hardly less
beautiful. Travellers have always been astonished at the small size of
the Alhambra, especially of the Court of Lions; for here, though the
proportion is admirable the scale is tiny; and many have supposed that
the Moors were of less imposing physique than modern Europeans. The
Court is surrounded by exquisite little columns, singly, in twos, in
threes, supporting horseshoe arches; and in the centre is that beautiful
fountain, borne by twelve lions with bristly manes, standing very
stiffly, whereon is the inscription: _O thou who beholdest these lions
crouching, fear not. Life is wanting to enable them to show their fury._

Indeed, their surroundings have such a delicate and playful grace that
it is hard to believe the Moors had any of our strenuous, latter-day
passions. Life must have been to them a masque rather than a
tragi-comedy; and whether they belong to sober history or no, those
contests of which the curious may read in the lively pages of Gines
Perez de Hita accord excellently with the fanciful environment. In the
Alhambra nothing seems more reasonable than those never-ending duels in
which, for a lady's favour, gallant knights gave one another such blows
that the air rang with them, such wounds that the ground was red with
blood; but at sunset they separated and bound up their wounds and
returned to the palace. And the king, at the relation of the adventure,
was filled with amazement and with great content.

* * *

Yet, notwithstanding, I find in the Alhambra something unsatisfying; for
many an inferior piece of architecture has set my mind a-working so that
I have dreamed charming dreams, or seen vividly the life of other times.
But here, I know not why, my imagination helps me scarcely at all. The
existence led within these gorgeous walls is too remote; there is but
little to indicate the thoughts, the feelings, of these people, and one
can take the Alhambra only as a thing of beauty, and despair to
understand.

I know that it is useless to attempt with words to give an idea of these
numerous chambers and courts. A string of superlatives can do no more
than tire the reader, an exact description can only confuse; nor is the
painter able to give more than a suggestion of the bewildering charm.
The effect is too emotional to be conveyed from man to man, and each
must feel it for himself. Charles V. called him unhappy who had lost
such treasure--_desgraciado el que tal perdio_--and showed his own
appreciation by demolishing a part to build a Renaissance palace for
himself! It appears that kings have not received from heaven with their
right divine to govern wrong the inestimable gift of good taste; and for
them possibly it is fortunate, since when, perchance, a sovereign has
the artistic temperament, a discerning people--cuts off his head.




XXXIV

[Sidenote: Boabdil the Unlucky]


He was indeed unhappy who lost such treasure. The plain of Granada
smiles with luxuriant crops, a beautiful country, gay with a hundred
colours, and in summer when the corn is ripe it burns with vivid gold.
The sun shines with fiery rays from the blue sky, and from the
snow-capped mountains cool breezes temper the heat.

But from his cradle Boabdil was unfortunate; soothsayers prophesied that
his reign would see the downfall of the Moorish power, and his every
step tended to that end. Never in human existence was more evident the
mysterious power of the three sisters, the daughters of Night; the Fates
had spun his destiny, they placed the pitfalls before his feet and
closed his eyes that he might not see; they hid from him the way of
escape. _Allah Achbar!_ It was destiny. In no other way can be explained
the madness which sped the victims of that tragedy to their ruin; for
with the enemy at their very gates, the Muslims set up and displaced
kings, plotted and counterplotted. Boabdil was twice deposed and twice
regained the throne. Even when the Christian kingdoms had united to
consume the remnant of Moorish sovereignty the Moors could not cease
their quarrelling. Boabdil looked on with satisfaction while the
territory of the rival claimant to his crown was wrested from him, and
did not understand that his turn must inevitably follow. Verily, the
gods, wishing to destroy him, had deranged his mind. It is a pitiful
history of treachery and folly that was enacted while the Catholic
Sovereigns devoured the pomegranate, seed by seed.

To me history, with its hopes bound to be frustrated and its useless
efforts, sometimes is so terrible that I can hardly read. I feel myself
like one who lives, knowing the inevitable future, and yet is powerless
to help. I see the acts of the poor human puppets, and know the disaster
that must follow. I wonder if the Calvinists ever realised the agony of
that dark God of theirs, omniscient and yet so strangely weak, to whom
the eternal majesty of heaven was insufficient to save the predestined
from everlasting death.

* * *

On March 22, 1491, began the last siege of Granada.

Ferdinand marched his army into the plain and began to destroy the
crops, taking one by one the surrounding towns. He made no attempt upon
the city itself, and hostilities were confined to skirmishes beneath the
walls and single combats between Christian knights and Muslim cavaliers,
wherein on either side prodigies of valour were performed. Through the
summer the Moors were able to get provisions from the Sierra Nevada, but
when, with winter, the produce of the earth grew less and its conveyance
more difficult, famine began to make itself felt. The Moors consoled
themselves with the hope that the besieging army would retire with the
cold weather, for such in those days was the rule of warfare; but
Ferdinand was in earnest. When an accidental fire burned his camp, he
built him a town of solid stone and mortar, which he named Santa Fè. It
stands still, the only town in Spain wherein a Moorish foot has never
trod. Then the Muslims understood at last that the Spaniard would never
again leave that fruitful land.

And presently they began to talk of surrender; Spanish gold worked its
way with Boabdil's councillors, and before winter was out the
capitulation was signed.

On the second day of the new year the final scene of the tragedy was
acted. Early in the morning, before break of day, Boabdil had sent his
mother and his wife with the treasure to precede him to the Alpuxarras,
in which district, by the conditions of the treaty, Ferdinand had
assigned him a little kingdom. Himself had one more duty to perform, and
at the prearranged hour he sallied forth with a wretched escort of fifty
knights. On the Spanish side the night had been spent in joy and
feasting; but how must Boabdil have spent his, thinking of the
inevitable morrow? To him the hours must have sped like minutes. What
must have been the agony of his last look at the Alhambra, that jewel of
incalculable price? Mendoza, the cardinal, had been sent forward to
occupy the palace, and Boabdil passed him on the hill.

Soon he reached Ferdinand, who was stationed near a mosque surrounded by
all the glory of his Court, pennons flying, and knights in their
magnificent array. Boabdil would have thrown himself from his horse in
sign of homage to kiss the hand of the king of Arragon, but Ferdinand
prevented him. Then Boabdil delivered the keys of the Alhambra to the
victor, saying: 'They are thine, O king, since Allah so decrees it; use
thy success with clemency and moderation.' Moving on sadly he saluted
Isabella, and passed to rejoin his family; the Christians processioned
to the city with psalm-singing.

But when Boabdil was crossing the mountains he turned to look at the
city he had lost, and burst into tears.

'You do well,' said his mother, 'to weep like a woman for what you could
not defend like a man.'

'Alas!' he cried, 'when were woes ever equal to mine?'

It was not to be expected that the pious Kings of Castille and Arragon
would keep their word, and means were soon invented to hound the
wretched Boabdil from the principality they had granted. He crossed to
Africa, and settled in Fez, of which the Sultan was his kinsman. It is
pathetic to learn that there he built himself a palace in imitation of
the Alhambra. At last, after many years, he was killed in an obscure
battle fighting against the Sultan's rebels, and the Arab historian
finishes the account of him with these words: 'Wretched man! who could
lose his life in another's cause, though he dared not die in his own!
Such was the immutable decree of destiny. Blessed be Allah, who exalteth
and abaseth the kings of the earth according to His divine will, in the
fulfilment of which consists that eternal justice which regulates all
human affairs.'

In the day of El Makkary, the historian of the Moorish Empire, Boabdil's
descendants had so fallen that they were nothing but common beggars,
subsisting upon the charitable allowances made to the poor from the
funds of the mosques.

_One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but the
earth abideth for ever._




XXXV

[Sidenote: Los Pobres]


People say that in Granada the beggars are more importunate than in any
other Spanish town, but throughout Andalusia their pertinacity and
number are amazing. They are licensed by the State, and the brass badge
they wear makes them demand alms almost as a right. It is curious to
find that the Spaniard, who is by no means a charitable being, gives
very often to beggars--perhaps from superstitious motives, thinking
their prayers will be of service, or fearing the evil eye, which may
punish a refusal. Begging is quite an honourable profession in Spain;
mendicants are charitably termed the poor, and not besmirched, as in
England, with an opprobrious name.

I have never seen so many beggars as in Andalusia; at every church door
there will be a dozen, and they stand or sit at each street corner,
halt, lame and blind. Every possible deformity is paraded to arouse
charity. Some look as though their eyes had been torn out, and they
glare at you with horrible bleeding sockets; most indeed are blind, and
you seldom fail to hear their monotonous cry, sometimes naming the
saint's day to attract particular persons: 'Alms for the love of God,
for a poor blind man on this the day of St. John!' They stand from
morning till night, motionless, with hand extended, repeating the words
as the sound of footsteps tells them some one is approaching; and then,
as a coin is put in their hands, say gracefully: '_Dios se lo pagara!_
God will repay you.'

In Spain you do not pass silently when a beggar demands alms, but pray
his mercy for God's love to excuse you: '_Perdone Usted por el amor de
Dios!_' Or else you beseech God to protect him: '_Dios le ampare!_' And
the mendicant, coming to your gate, sometimes invokes the Immaculate
Virgin.

'_Ave Maria purissima!_' he calls.

And you, tired of giving, reply: '_Y por siempre!_ And for ever.'

He passes on, satisfied with your answer, and rings at the next door.

It is not only in Burgos that Théophile Gautier might have admired the
beggar's divine rags; everywhere they wrap their cloaks about them in
the same magnificent fashion. The _capa_, I suppose, is the most
graceful of all the garments of civilised man, and never more so than
when it barely holds together, a mass of rags and patches, stained by
the rain and bleached by the sun and wind. It hangs straight from the
neck in big simple lines, or else is flung over one shoulder with a
pompous wealth of folds.

There is a strange immobility about Andalusian beggars which recalls
their Moorish ancestry. They remain for hours in the same attitude,
without moving a muscle; and one I knew in Seville stood day after day,
from early morning till midnight, with hand outstretched in the same
rather crooked position, never saying a word, but merely trusting to the
passer-by to notice. The variety is amazing, men and women and children;
and Seville at fair-time, or when the foreigners are coming for Holy
Week, is like an enormous hospital. Mendicants assail you on all sides,
the legless dragging themselves on their hands, the halt running towards
you with a crutch, the blind led by wife or child, the deaf and dumb,
the idiotic. I remember a woman with dead eyes and a huge hydrocephalic
head, who sat in a bath-chair by one of the cathedral doors, and
whenever people passed, cried shrilly for money in a high, unnatural
voice. Sometimes they protrude maimed limbs, feetless legs or arms
without hands; they display loathsome wounds, horribly inflamed; every
variety of disease is shown to extort a copper. And so much is it a
recognised trade that they have their properties, as it were: one old
man whose legs had been shot away, trotted through the narrow streets of
Seville on a diminutive ass, driving it into the shop-doors to demand
his mite. Then there are the children, the little boys and girls that
Murillo painted, barely covered by filthy rags, cherubs with black hair
and shining eyes, the most importunate of all the tribe. The refusal of
a halfpenny is followed impudently by demands for a cigarette, and as a
last resort for a match; they wander about with keen eyes for
cigar-ends, and no shred of a smoked leaf is too diminutive for them to
get no further use from it.

And beside all these are the blind fiddlers, scraping out old-fashioned
tunes that were popular thirty years ago; the guitarists, singing the
_flamenco_ songs which have been sung in Spain ever since the Moorish
days; the buffoons, who extract tunes from a broomstick; the owners of
performing dogs.

They are a picturesque lot, neither vicious nor ill-humoured. Begging is
a fairly profitable trade, and not a very hard one; in winter _el pobre_
can always find a little sunshine, and in summer a little shade. It is
no hardship for him to sit still all day; he would probably do little
else if he were a millionaire. He looks upon life without bitterness;
Fate has not been very kind, but it is certainly better to be a live
beggar than a dead king, and things might have been ten thousand times
worse. For instance, he might not have been born a Spaniard, and every
man in his senses knows that Spain is the greatest nation on earth,
while to be born a citizen of some other country is the most dreadful
misfortune that can befall him. He has his licence from the State, and a
charitable public sees that he does not absolutely starve; he has
cigarettes to smoke--to say that a blind man cannot enjoy tobacco is
evidently absurd--and therefore, all these things being so, why should
he think life such a woeful matter? While it lasts the sun is there to
shine equally on rich and poor, and afterwards will not a paternal
government find a grave in the public cemetery? It is true that the
beggar shares it with quite a number of worthy persons, doubtless most
estimable corpses, and his coffin even is but a temporary
convenience--but still, what does it matter?




XXXVI

[Sidenote: The Song]


But the Moorish influence is nowhere more apparent than in the Spanish
singing. There is nothing European in that quavering lament, in those
long-drawn and monotonous notes, in those weird trills. The sounds are
strange to the ear accustomed to less barbarous harmonies, and at first
no melody is perceived; it is custom alone which teaches the sad and
passionate charm of these things. A _malagueña_ is the particular
complaint of the maid sorrowing for an absent lover, of the peasant who
ploughs his field in the declining day. The long notes of such a song,
floating across the silence of the night, are like a new melody on the
great harpsichord of human sorrow. No emotion is more poignant than that
given by the faint sad sounds of a Spanish song as one wanders through
the deserted streets in the dead of night; or far in the country, with
the sun setting red in the cloudless sky, when the stillness is broken
only by the melancholy chanting of a shepherd among the olive-trees.

An heritage of Moordom is the Spanish love for the improvisation of
well-turned couplets; in olden days a skilful verse might procure the
poet a dress of cloth-of-gold, and it did on one occasion actually
raise a beggar-maid to a royal throne: even now it has power to secure
the lover his lady's most tender smiles, or at the worst a glass of
Manzanilla. The richness of the language helps him with his rhymes, and
his southern imagination gives him manifold subjects. But, being the
result of improvisation--no lady fair would consider the suit of a
gallant who could not address her in couplets of his own devising--the
Spanish song has a peculiar character. The various stanzas have no
bearing upon one another; they consist of four or seven lines, but in
either case each contains its definite sentiment; so that one verse may
be a complete song, or the singer may continue as long as the muse
prompts and his subject's charms occasion. The Spanish song is like a
barbaric necklace in which all manner of different stones are strung
upon a single cord, without thought for their mutual congruity.

Naturally the vast majority of the innumerable couplets thus invented
are forgotten as soon as sung, but now and then the fortuitous
excellence of one impresses it on the maker's recollection, and it may
be preserved. Here is an example which has been agreeably translated by
Mr. J. W. Crombie; but neither original nor English rendering can give
an adequate idea of the charm which depends on the oriental melancholy
of the music:

    Dos besos tengo en el alma
    Que no se apartan de mí:
    El ultimo de mi madre,
    Y el primero que te di.

    _Deep in my soul two kisses rest,_
    _Forgot they ne'er shall be:_
    _The last my mother's lips impressed,_
    _The first I stole from thee._

Here is another, the survival of which testifies to the Spanish extreme
love of a compliment; and the somewhat hackneyed sentiment can only have
made it more pleasant to the feminine ear:

    Salga el sol, si ha de salir,
    Y si no, que nunca salga;
    Que para alumbrarme á mí
    La luz de tus ojos basta.

    _If the sun care to rise, let him rise,_
    _But if not, let him ever lie hid;_
    _For the light from my lady-love's eyes_
    _Shines forth as the sun never did._

It is a diverting spectacle to watch a professional improviser in the
throes of inspiration. This is one of the stock 'turns' of the Spanish
music-hall, and one of the most popular. I saw a woman in Granada, who
was quite a celebrity; and the barbaric wildness of her performance,
with its accompaniment of hand-clapping, discordant cries, and twanging
of guitar, harmonised well with my impression of the sombre and mediæval
city.

She threaded her way to the stage among the crowded tables, through the
auditorium, a sallow-faced creature, obese and large-boned, with coarse
features and singularly ropy hair. She was accompanied by a fat small
man with a guitar and a woman of mature age and ample proportions: it
appeared that the cultivation of the muse, evidently more profitable
than in England, conduced to adiposity. They stepped on the stage,
taking chairs with them, for in Spain you do not stand to sing, and were
greeted with plentiful applause. The little fat man began to play the
long prelude to the couplet; the old woman clapped her hands and
occasionally uttered a raucous cry. The poetess gazed into the air for
inspiration. The guitarist twanged on, and in the audience there were
scattered cries of _Ole!_ Her companions began to look at the singer
anxiously, for the muse was somewhat slow; and she patted her knee and
groaned; at last she gave a little start and smiled. _Ole! Ole!_ The
inspiration had come. She gave a moan, which lengthened into the
characteristic trill, and then began the couplet, beating time with her
hands. Such an one as this:

Suspires que de mí salgan,
Y otros que de tí saldran,
Si en el camino se encuentran
Que de cosas se diran!

_If all the sighs thy lips now shape_
_Could meet upon the way_
_With those that from mine own escape_
_What things they'd have to say!_

She finished, and all three rose from their chairs and withdrew them,
but it was only a false exit; immediately the applause grew clamorous
they sat down again, and the little fat man repeated his introduction.

But this time there was no waiting. The singer had noticed a well-known
bull-fighter and quickly rolled off a couplet in his praise. The
subject beamed with delight, and the general enthusiasm knew no bounds.
The people excitedly threw their hats on the stage, and these were
followed by a shower of coppers, which the performers, more heedful to
the compensation of Art than to its dignity, grovelled to picked up.

* * *

Here is a lover's praise of the whiteness of his lady's skin:

    La neve por tu cara
      Paso diciendo:
    En donde no hago falta
      No me detengo.

    _Before thy brow the snow-flakes_
      _Hurry past and say:_
    _'Where we are not needed,_
      _Wherefore should we stay?'_

And this last, like the preceding translated by Mr. Crombie, shows once
more how characteristic are Murillo's Holy Families of the popular
sentiment:

    La Virgen lava la ropa,
    San José la esta tendiendo,
    Santa Ana entretiene el niño,
    Y el agua se va riendo.

    _The Virgin is washing the clothes at the brook._
    _And Saint Joseph hangs them to dry._
    _Saint Anna plays with the Holy Babe,_
    _And the water flows smiling by._




XXXVII

[Sidenote: Jerez]


Jerez is the Andalusian sunshine again after the dark clouds of Granada.
It is a little town in the middle of a fertile plain, clean and
comfortable and spacious. It is one of the richest places in Spain; the
houses have an opulent look, and without the help of Baedeker you may
guess that they contain respectable persons with incomes, and carriages
and horses, with frock-coats and gold watch-chains. I like the people of
Jerez; their habitual expression suggests a consciousness that the
Almighty is pleased with them, and they without doubt are well content
with the Almighty. The main street, with its trim shops and its _cafés_,
has the air of a French provincial town--an appearance of agreeable ease
and dulness.

Every building in Jerez is washed with lime, and in the sunlight the
brilliancy is dazzling. You realise then that in Seville the houses are
not white--although the general impression is of a white town--but, on
the contrary, tinted with various colours from faintest pink to pale
blue, pale green; they remind you of the summer dresses of women. The
soft tones are all mingled with the sunlight and very restful. But Jerez
is like a white banner floating under the cloudless sky, the pure white
banner of Bacchus raised defiantly against the gaudy dyes of teetotalism
and its shrieking trumpets.

Jerez the White is, of course, the home of sherry, and the whole town is
given over to the preparation of the grateful juice. The air is
impregnated with a rich smell. The sun shines down on Jerez; and its
cleanliness, its prosperity, are a rebuke to harsh-voiced contemners of
the grape.

You pass _bodega_ after _bodega_, cask-factories, bottle-factories. A
bottle-factory is a curious, interesting place, an immense barn, sombre,
so that the eye loses itself in the shadows of the roof; and the scanty
light is red and lurid from the furnaces, which roar hoarsely and long.
Against the glow the figures of men, half-naked, move silently,
performing the actions of their craft with a monotonous regularity which
is strange and solemn. They move to and fro, carrying an iron instrument
on which is the molten mass of red-hot glass, and it gleams with an
extraordinary warm brilliancy. It twists hither and thither in obedience
to the artisan's deft movements; it coils and writhes into odd shapes,
like a fire-snake curling in the torture of its own unearthly ardour.
The men pass so regularly, with such a silent and exact precision, that
it seems a weird and mystic measure they perform--a rhythmic dance of
unimaginable intricacy, whose meaning you cannot gather and whose
harmony escapes you. The flames leap and soar in a thousand savage
forms, and their dull thunder fills your ears with a confusion of sound.
Your eyes become accustomed to the dimness, and you discern more
clearly the features of those swarthy men, bearded and gnome-like. But
the molten mass has been put into the mould; you watch it withdrawn, the
bottom indented, the mouth cut and shaped. And now it is complete, but
still red-hot, and glowing with an infernal transparency, gem-like and
wonderful; it is a bottle fit now for the juice of satanic vineyards,
and the miraculous potions of eternal youth, for which men in the old
days bartered their immortal souls.

And the effect of a _bodega_ is picturesque, too, though in a different
way. It is a bright and cheerful spot, a huge shed with whitewashed
walls and an open roof supported by dark beams; great casks are piled
up, impressing you in their vast rotundity with a sort of aldermanic
stateliness. The whole place is fragrant with clean, vinous perfumes.
Your guide carries a glass and a long filler. You taste wine after wine,
in different shades of brown; light wines to drink with your dinner,
older wines to drink before your coffee; wines more than a century old,
of which the odour is more delicate than violets; new wines of the
preceding year, strong and rough; Amontillados, with the softest flavour
in the world; Manzanillas for the gouty; Marsalas, heavy and sweet;
wines that smell of wild-flowers; cheap wines and expensive wines. Then
the brandies--the distiller tells you proudly that Spanish brandy is
made from wine, and contemptuously that French brandy is not--old
brandies for which a toper would sell his soul; new brandies like
fusel-oil; brandies mellow and mild and rich. It is a drunkard's
paradise.

And why should not the drinker have his paradise? The teetotallers have
slapped their bosoms and vowed that liquor was the devil's own
invention. (Note, by the way, that liquor is a noble word that should
not be applied to those weak-kneed abominations that insolently flaunt
their lack of alcohol. Let them be called liquids or fluids or
beverages, or what you will. Liquor is a word for heroes, for the
British tar who has built up British glory--Imperialism is quite the
fashion now.) And for a hundred years none has dared lift his voice in
refutation of these dyspeptic slanders. The toper did not care, he
nursed his bottle and let the world say what it would; but the moderate
drinker was abashed. Who will venture to say that a glass of beer gives
savour to the humblest crust, and comforts Corydon, lamenting the
inconstancy of Phyllis? Who will come forward and strike an attitude and
prove the benefits of the grape? (The attitude is essential, for without
it you cannot hope to impress your fellow men.) Rise up in your might,
ye lovers of hop and grape and rye--rise up and slay the Egyptians. Be
honest and thank your stars for the cup that cheers. Bacchus was not a
pot-bellied old sot, but a beautiful youth with vine-leaves in his hair,
Bacchus the lover of flowers; and Ariadne was charming.

* * *

The country about Jerez undulates in just such an easy comfortable
fashion as you would expect. It is scenery of the gentlest and
pleasantest type, sinuous; little hills rising with rounded lines and
fertile valleys. The vines cover the whole land, creeping over the brown
soil fantastically, black stumps, shrivelled and gnarled, tortured into
uncouth shapes; they remind you of the creeping things in a naturalist's
museum, of giant spiders and great dried centipedes and scorpions. But
imagine the vineyards later, when the spring has stirred the earth with
fecundity! The green shoots tenderly forth; at first it is all too
delicate for a colour, it is but a mist of indescribable tenuity; and
gradually the leaves burst out and trail along the ground with
ever-increasing luxuriance; and then it is a rippling sea of passionate
verdure.

But I liked Jerez best towards evening, when the sun had set and the
twilight glided through the tortuous alleys like a woman dressed in
white. Then, as I walked in the silent streets, narrow and steep, with
their cobble-paving, the white houses gained a new aspect. There seemed
not a soul in the world, and the loneliness was more intoxicating than
all their wines; the shining sun was gone, and the sky lost its blue
richness, it became so pale that you felt it like a face of death--and
the houses looked like long rows of tombs. We walked through the
deserted streets, I and the woman dressed in white, side by side
silently; our footsteps made no sound upon the stones. And Jerez was
wrapped in a ghostly shroud. Ah, the beautiful things I have seen which
other men have not!




XXXVIII

[Sidenote: Cadiz]


I admire the strenuous tourist who sets out in the morning with his
well-thumbed Baedeker to examine the curiosities of a foreign town, but
I do not follow in his steps; his eagerness after knowledge, his
devotion to duty, compel my respect, but excite me to no imitation. I
prefer to wander in old streets at random without a guide-book, trusting
that fortune will bring me across things worth seeing; and if
occasionally I miss some monument that is world-famous, more often I
discover some little dainty piece of architecture, some scrap of
decoration, that repays me for all else I lose. And in this fashion the
less pretentious beauties of a town delight me, which, if I sought under
the guidance of the industrious German, would seem perhaps scarcely
worth the trouble. Nor do I know that there is in Cadiz much to attract
the traveller beyond the grace with which it lies along the blue sea and
the unstudied charm of its gardens, streets, and market-place; the echo
in the cathedral to which the gaping tripper listens with astonishment
leaves me unmoved; and in the church of _Santa Catalina_, which contains
the last work of Murillo, upon which he was engaged at his death, I am
more interested in the tall stout priest, unctuous and astute, who
shows me his treasure, than in the picture itself. I am relieved now and
again to visit a place that has no obvious claims on my admiration; it
throws me back on the peculiarities of the people, on the stray
incidents of the street, on the contents of the shops.

Cadiz is said to be the gayest town in Andalusia. Spaniards have always
a certain gravity; they are not very talkative, and like the English,
take their pleasures a little sadly. But here lightness of heart is
thought to reign supreme, and the inhabitants have not even the apparent
seriousness with which the Sevillan cloaks a somewhat vacant mind. They
are great theatre-goers, and as dancers, of course, have been famous
since the world began. But I doubt whether Cadiz deserves its
reputation, for it always seems to me a little prim. The streets are
well-kept and spacious, the houses, taller than is usual in Andalusia,
have almost as cared-for an appearance as those in a prosperous suburb
of London; and it is only quite occasionally, when you catch a glimpse
of tawny rock and of white breakwater against the blue sea, that by a
reminiscence of Naples you can persuade yourself it is as immoral as
they say. For, not unlike the Syren City, Cadiz lies white and cool
along the bay, with gardens at the water's edge; but it has not the
magic colour of its rival, it is quieter, smaller, more restful; and on
the whole lacks that agreeable air of wickedness which the Italian town
possesses to perfection. It is impossible to be a day in Naples without
discovering that it is the most depraved city in Europe; there is
something in the atmosphere which relaxes the moral fibre, and the
churchwarden who keeps guard in the bosom of every Englishman falls
asleep, so that you feel capable of committing far more than the seven
deadly sins. Of course, you don't, but still it is comfortable to have
them within reach.

* * *

I came across, while examining the wares of a vendor of antiquities, a
contemporary narrative from the Spanish side of the attack made on Cadiz
by Sir Francis Drake when he set out to singe the beard of Philip II.;
and this induced me afterwards to look into the English story. It is far
from me to wish to inform the reader, but the account is not
undiverting, and shows, besides, a frame of mind which the Anglo-Saxon
has not ceased to cultivate. 'But the Almighty God,' says the historian,
'knowing and seeing his (the Spanish king's) wicked intent to punish,
molest, and trouble His little flock, the children of Israel, hath
raised up a faithful Moses for the defence of His chosen, and will not
suffer His people utterly to fall into the hands of their enemies.'
Drake set sail from Plymouth with four of her Majesty's ships, two
pinnaces, and some twenty merchantmen. A vessel was sent after, charging
him not to show hostilities, but the messenger, owing to contrary winds,
could never come near the admiral, and vastly to the annoyance of the
Virgin Queen, as she solemnly assured the ambassadors of foreign powers,
had to sail home. Under the circumstances it was, perhaps, hardly
discreet of her to take so large a share of the booty.

Faithful Moses arrived in Cadiz, spreading horrid consternation, and the
Spanish pamphlet shows very vividly the confusion of the enemy. It
appears that, had he boldly landed, he might have sacked the town, but
he imagined the preparations much greater than they were. However, he
was not idle. 'The same night our general, having, by God's good favour
and sufferance, opportunity to punish the enemy of God's true gospel and
our daily adversary, and further willing to discharge his expected duty
towards God, his peace and country, began to sink and fire divers of
their ships.'

The English fleet burned thirty sail of great burden, and captured vast
quantities of the bread, wheat, wine and oil which had been prepared for
the descent upon England. Sir Francis Drake himself remarks that 'the
sight of the terrible fires were to us very pleasant, and mitigated the
burden of our continual travail, wherein we were busied for two nights
and one day, in discharging, firing, and lading of provisions.'

* * *

It is a curious thing to see entirely deserted a place of entertainment,
where great numbers of people are in the habit of assembling. A theatre
by day, without a soul in it, gives me always a sensation of the
ridiculous futility of things; and a public garden towards evening
offers the same emotion. On the morrow I was starting for Africa; I
watched the sunset from the quays of Cadiz, the vapours of the twilight
rise and envelop the ships in greyness, and I walked by the _alamadas_
that stretch along the bay till I came to the park. The light was
rapidly failing and I found myself alone. It had quaint avenues of
short palms, evidently not long planted, and between them rows of yellow
iron chairs arranged with great neatness and precision. It was there
that on Sunday I had seen the populace disport itself, and it was full
of life then, gay and insouciant. The fair ladies drove in their
carriages, and the fine gentlemen, proud of their English clothes,
lounged idly. The chairs were taken by all the lesser fry, by stout
mothers, dragons attendant on dark-eyed girls, and their lovers in broad
hats, in all the gala array of the _flamenco_. There was a joyous
clamour of speech and laughter; the voices of Spanish women are harsh
and unrestrained; the park sparkled with colour, and the sun caught the
fluttering of countless fans.

For those blithe people it seemed that there was no morrow: the present
was there to be enjoyed, divine and various, and the world was full of
beauty and of sunshine; merely to live was happiness enough; if there
was pain or sorrow it served but to enhance the gladness. The hurrying
hours for a while had ceased their journey. Life was a cup of red wine,
and they were willing to drink its very dregs, a brimming cup in which
there was no bitterness, but a joy more thrilling than the gods could
give in all their paradise.

But now I walked alone between the even rows of chairs. The little palms
were so precise, with their careful foliage, that they did not look like
real trees; the flower-beds were very stiff and neat, and now and then a
pine stood out, erect and formal as if it were a cardboard tree from a
Noah's Ark. The scene was so artificial that it brought to my mind the
setting of a pantomime. I stopped, almost expecting a thousand
ballet-girls to appear from the wings, scantily clad, and go through a
measure to the playing of some sudden band, and retire and come forward
till the stage was filled and a great tableau formed.

But the day grew quite dim, and the vast stage remained empty. The
painted scene became still more unreal, and presently the park was
filled with the ghostly shapes of all the light-hearted people who had
lived their hour and exhibited their youth in the empty garden. I heard
the whispered compliments, and the soft laughter of the ladies; there
was a peculiar little snap as gaily they closed their fans.




XXXIX

[Sidenote: El Genero Chico]


In the evening I wandered again along the quay, my thoughts part
occupied with the novel things I expected from Morocco, part sorrowful
because I must leave the scented land of Spain. I seemed never before to
have enjoyed so intensely the exquisite softness of the air, and there
was all about me a sense of spaciousness which gave a curious feeling of
power. In the harbour, on the ships, the lights of the masts twinkled
like the stars above; and looking over the stony parapet, I heard the
waves lap against the granite like a long murmur of regret; I tried to
pierce the darkness, straining my eyes to see some deeper obscurity
which I might imagine to be the massive coasts of Africa. But at last I
could bear the solitude no longer, and I dived into the labyrinth of
streets.

At first, in unfrequented ways, I passed people only one by one, some
woman walking rapidly with averted face, or a pair of chattering
students; but as I came near the centre of the town the passers-by grew
more frequent, and suddenly I found myself in the midst of a thronging,
noisy crowd. I looked up and saw that I was opposite a theatre; the
people had just come from the second _funcion_. I had heard that the
natives of Cadiz were eager theatre-goers, and was curious to see how
they took this pleasure. I saw also that the next piece was _Las
Borrachos_, a play of Seville life that I had often seen; and I felt
that I could not spend my last evening better than in living again some
of those scenes which pattered across my heart now like little sorrowful
feet.

* * *

The theatre in Spain is the only thing that has developed further than
in the rest of Europe--in fact, it has nearly developed clean away. The
Spaniards were the first to confess that dramatic art bored them to
death; and their habits rendered impossible the long play which took an
evening to produce. Eating late, they did not wish to go to the theatre
till past nine; being somewhat frivolous, they could not sit for more
than an hour without going outside and talking to their friends; and
they were poor. To satisfy their needs the _genero chico_, or little
style, sprang into existence; and quickly every theatre in Spain was
given over to the system of four houses a night. Each function is
different, and the stall costs little more than sixpence.

We English are idealists; and on the stage especially reality stinks in
our nostrils. The poor are vulgar, and in our franker moments we confess
our wish to have nothing to do with them. The middle classes are sordid;
we have enough of them in real life, and no desire to observe their
doings at the theatre, particularly when we wear our evening clothes.
But when a dramatist presents duchesses to our admiring eyes, we feel
at last in our element; we watch the acts of persons whom we would
willingly meet at dinner, and our craving for the ideal is satisfied.

But in Spain nobles are common and excite no overwhelming awe. The
Spaniard, most democratic of Europeans, clamours for realism, and
nothing pleases him more than a literal transcript of the life about
him. The manners and customs of good society do not entertain him, and
the _genero chico_ concerns itself almost exclusively with the lower
classes. The bull-fighter is, of course, one of the most usual figures;
and round him are gathered the lovers of the ring, inn-keepers, cobblers
and carpenters, policemen, workmen, flower-sellers, street-singers,
cigarette girls, country maidens. The little pieces are innumerable, and
together form a compend of low life in Spain; the best are full of
gaiety and high spirits, with a delicate feeling for character, and
often enough are touched by a breath of poetry. Songs and dances are
introduced, and these come in the more naturally since the action
generally takes place on a holiday. The result is a musical comedy in
one act; but with nothing in it of the entertainment which is a joy to
the British public: an Andalusian audience would never stand that
representation of an impossible and vulgar world in which the women are
all trollops and the men, rips, nincompoops and bounders; they would
never suffer the coarse humour and the shoddy patriotism.

Unfortunately, these one-act plays have destroyed the legitimate drama.
Whereas Maria Guerrero, that charming actress, will have a run of twenty
nights in a new play by Echegaray, a popular _zarzuela_ will be acted
hundreds of times in every town in Spain. But none can regret that the
Spaniards have evolved these very national little pieces, and little has
been lost in the non-existence of an indefinite number of imitations
from the French. The _zarzuela_, I should add, lasts about an hour, and
for the most part is divided into three scenes.

Such a play as _Los Borrachos_ is nothing less than a _genre_ picture of
Seville life. It reminds one of a painting by Teniers; and I should like
to give some idea of it, since it is really one of the best examples of
the class, witty, varied, and vivacious. But an obstacle presents itself
in the fact that I can find no vestige of a plot. The authors set out to
characterise the various lovers of the vine, (nowhere in Andalusia are
the devotees of the yellow Manzanilla more numerous than in Seville,)
and with telling strokes have drawn the good-natured tippler, the surly
tippler, the religious tippler. To these they have added other types,
which every Andalusian can recognise as old friends--the sharp-tongued
harridan, the improviser of couplets with his ridiculous vanity, the
flower-seller, and the 'prentice-boy of fifteen, who, notwithstanding
his tender years, is afflicted with love for the dark-eyed heroine. The
action takes place first in a street, then in a court-yard, lastly in a
carpenter's shop. There are dainty love-scenes between Soledad, the
distressed maiden, and Juanillo, the flower-seller; and one, very
Spanish, where the witty and precocious apprentice offers her his
diminutive hand and heart. Numerous people come and go, the drunkards
drink and quarrel and make peace; the whole thing, if somewhat confused,
is very life-like, and runs with admirable lightness and ease. It is
true that the play has neither beginning nor end, but perhaps that only
makes it seem the truer; and if the scenes have no obvious connection
they are all amusing and characteristic. It is acted with extraordinary
spirit. The players, indeed, are not acting, but living their ordinary
lives, and it is pleasant to see the zest with which they throw
themselves into the performance. When the hero presses the heroine in
his arms, smiles and passionate glances pass between them, which suggest
that even the love-making is not entirely make-believe.

I wish I could translate the song which Juanillo sings when he passes
his lady's window, bearing his basket of flowers:

    Carnations for pretty girls that are true,
    Musk-roses for pretty girls that are coy,
    Rosebuds as small as thy mouth, my dearest,
    And roses as fair as thy cheeks.

I cannot, indeed, resist the temptation of giving one verse in that
Andalusian dialect, from which all harsh consonants and unmusical sounds
have been worn away--the most complete and perfect language in the world
for lovers and the passion of love:

      _Sal, morena, á tu ventana,_
    _Mira las flores que traigo;_
    _Sal y di si son bastantes_
    _Pa arfombrita de tu cuarto._
      _Que yo te quiero_
      _Y a ti te doy_
    _Tos los tesoros der mundo entero,_
    _To le que vargo, to lo que soy._




XL

[Sidenote: Adios]


And then the morrow was come. Getting up at five to catch my boat, I
went down to the harbour; a grey mist hung over the sea, and the sun had
barely risen, a pallid, yellow circle; the fishing-boats lolled on the
smooth, dim water, and fishermen in little groups blew on their fingers.

And from Cadiz I saw the shores of Spain sink into the sea; I saw my
last of Andalusia. Who, when he leaves a place that he has loved, can
help wondering when he will see it again? I asked the wind, and it
sighed back the Spanish answer: '_Quien sabe?_ Who knows?' The traveller
makes up his mind to return quickly, but all manner of things happen,
and one accident or another prevents him; time passes till the desire is
lost, and when at last he comes back, himself has altered or changes
have occurred in the old places and all seems different. He looks quite
coldly at what had given an intense emotion, and though he may see new
things, the others hardly move him; it is not thus he imagined them in
the years of waiting. And how can he tell what the future may have in
store; perhaps, notwithstanding all his passionate desires, he will
indeed never return.

Of course the intention of this book is not to induce people to go to
Spain: railway journeys are long and tedious, the trains crawl, and the
hotels are bad. Experienced globe-trotters have told me that all
mountains are very much alike, and that pictures, when you have seen a
great many, offer no vast difference. It is much better to read books of
travel than to travel oneself; he really enjoys foreign lands who never
goes abroad; and the man who stays at home, preserving his illusions,
has certainly the best of it. How delightful is the anticipation as he
looks over time-tables and books of photographs, forming delightful
images of future pleasure! But the reality is full of disappointment,
and the more famous the monument the bitterer the disillusion. Has any
one seen St. Peter's without asking himself: Is that all? And the truest
enjoyment arises from things that come unexpectedly, that one had never
heard of. Then, living in a strange land, one loses all impression of
its strangeness; it is only afterwards, in England, that one realises
the charm and longs to return; and a hundred pictures rise to fill the
mind with delight. Why can one not be strong enough to leave it at that
and never tempt the fates again?

The wisest thing is to leave unvisited in every country some place that
one wants very much to see. In Italy I have never been to Siena, and in
Andalusia I have taken pains to avoid Malaga. The guide-books tell me
there is nothing whatever to see there; and according to them it is
merely a prosperous sea-port with a good climate. But to me, who have
never seen it, Malaga is something very different; it is the very cream
of Andalusia, where every trait and characteristic is refined to perfect
expression.

I imagine Malaga to be the most smiling town on the seaboard, and it
lies along the shore ten times more charmingly than Cadiz. The houses
are white, whiter than in Jerez; the patios are beautiful with oranges
and palm-trees, and the dark green of the luxuriant foliage contrasts
with the snowy walls. In Malaga the sky is always blue and the sun
shines, but the narrow Arab streets are cool and shady. The passionate
odours of Andalusia float in the air, the perfume of a myriad cigarettes
and the fresh scent of fruit and flower. The blue sea lazily kisses the
beach and fishing-boats bask on its bosom.

In Malaga, for me, there are dark churches, with massive, tall pillars;
the light falls softly through the painted glass, regilding the golden
woodwork, the angels and the saints and the bishops in their mitres. The
air is heavy with incense, and women in _mantillas_ kneel in the
half-light, praying silently. Now and then I come across an old house
with a fragment of Moorish work, reminding me that here again the Moors
have left their mark.

And in Malaga, for me, the women are more lovely than in Seville; for
their dark eyes glitter marvellously, and their lips, so red and soft,
are ever trembling with a half-formed smile. They are more graceful than
the daffodils, their hands are lovers' sighs, and their voice is a
caressing song. (What was your voice like, Rosarito? Alas! it is so long
ago that I forget.) The men are tall and slender, with strong, clear
features and shining eyes, deep sunken in their sockets.

In Malaga, for me, life is a holiday in which there are no dullards and
no bores; all the world is strong and young and full of health, and
there is nothing to remind one of horrible things. Malaga, I know, is
the most delightful place in Andalusia. Oh, how refreshing it is to get
away from sober fact, but what a fool I should be ever to go there!

* * *

The steamer plods on against the wind slowly, and as the land sinks
away, unsatisfied to leave the impressions hovering vaguely through my
mind, I try to find the moral. The Englishman, ever somewhat
sententiously inclined, asks what a place can teach him. The
churchwarden in his bosom gives no constant, enduring peace; and after
all, though he may be often ridiculous, it is the churchwarden who has
made good part of England's greatness.

And most obviously Andalusia suggests that it might not be ill to take
things a little more easily: we English look upon life so very
seriously, so much without humour. Is it worth while to be quite so
strenuous? At the stations on the line between Jerez and Cadiz, I
noticed again how calmly they took things; people lounged idly talking
to one another; the officials of the railway smoked their cigarettes; no
one was in a hurry, time was long, and whether the train arrived late or
punctual could really matter much to no one. A beggar came to the
window, a cigarette-end between his lips.

'_Caballero!_ Alms for the love of God for a poor old man. God will
repay you!'

He passed slowly down the train. It waited for no reason; the passengers
stared idly at the loungers on the platform, and they stared idly back.
No one moved except to roll himself a cigarette. The sky was blue and
the air warm and comforting. Life seemed good enough, and above all
things easy. There was no particular cause to trouble. What is the use
of hurrying to pile up money when one can live on so little? What is the
use of reading these endless books? Why not let things slide a little,
and just take what comes our way? It is only for a little while, and
then the great antique mother receives us once more in her bosom. And
there are so many people in the world. Think again of all the countless
hordes who have come and gone, and who will come and go; the immense sea
of Time covers them, and what matters the life they led? What odds is it
that they ever existed at all? Let us do our best to be happy; the earth
is good and sweet-smelling, there is sunshine and colour and youth and
loveliness; and afterwards--well, let us shrug our shoulders and not
think of it.

And then in bitter irony, contradicting my moral, a train came in with a
number of Cuban soldiers. There were above fifty of them, and they had
to change at the junction. They reached out to open the carriage doors
and crawled down to the platform. Some of them seemed at death's door;
they could not walk, and chairs were brought that they might be carried;
others leaned heavily on their companions. And they were dishevelled,
with stubbly beards. But what struck me most was the deathly colour; for
their faces were almost green, while round their sunken eyes were great
white rings, and the white was ghastly, corpse-like. They trooped along
in a dazed and listless fashion, wasted with fever, and now and then
one stopped, shaken with a racking cough; he leaned against the wall,
and put his hand to his heart as if the pain were unendurable. It was a
pitiful sight. They were stunted and under-sized; they ceased to develop
when they went to the cruel island, and they were puny creatures with
hollow chests and thin powerless limbs; often, strangely enough, their
faces had remained quite boyish. They were twenty or twenty-two, and
they looked sixteen. And then, by the sight of those boys who had never
known youth with its joyful flowers, doomed to a hopeless life, I was
forced against my will to another moral. Perhaps some would recover, but
the majority must drag on with ruined health, fever-stricken, dying one
by one, falling like the unripe fruit of a rotten tree. They had no
chance, poor wretches! They would return to their miserable homes; they
could not work, and their people were too poor to keep them--so they
must starve. Their lives were even shorter than those of the rest, and
what pleasure had they had?

And that is the result of the Spanish insouciance--death and corruption,
loss of power and land and honour, the ruin of countless lives, and
absolute decay. It is rather a bitter irony, isn't it? And now all they
have left is their sunshine and the equanimity which nothing can
disturb.

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. London & Edinburgh

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CASTILIAN DAYS. By Hon. J. HAY. Illustrated by JOSEPH PENNELL. In one
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