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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Castilian Days, by John Hay
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Castilian Days
+
+Author: John Hay
+
+Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7470]
+Last Updated: August 24, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CASTILIAN DAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CASTILIAN DAYS
+
+By John Hay
+
+
+Published November 1903
+
+
+
+
+PUBLISHERS' NOTE
+
+
+In this Holiday Edition of _Castilian Days_ it has been thought
+advisable to omit a few chapters that appeared in the original edition.
+These chapters were less descriptive than the rest of the book, and not
+so rich in the picturesque material which the art of the illustrator
+demands. Otherwise, the text is reprinted without change. The
+illustrations are the fruit of a special visit which Mr. Pennell has
+recently made to Castile for this purpose.
+
+BOSTON, AUTUMN, 1903
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF CONTENTS
+
+
+MADRID AL FRESCO
+
+SPANISH LIVING AND DYING
+
+INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE
+
+TAUROMACHY
+
+RED-LETTER DAYS
+
+AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS
+
+A CASTLE IN THE AIR
+
+THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS
+
+THE ESCORIAL
+
+A MIRACLE PLAY
+
+THE CRADLE AND THE GRAVE OF CERVANTES
+
+
+
+
+MADRID AL FRESCO
+
+
+Madrid is a capital with malice aforethought. Usually the seat of
+government is established in some important town from the force of
+circumstances. Some cities have an attraction too powerful for the court
+to resist. There is no capital of England possible but London. Paris is
+the heart of France. Rome is the predestined capital of Italy in spite
+of the wandering flirtations its varying governments in different
+centuries have carried on with Ravenna, or Naples, or Florence. You can
+imagine no Residenz for Austria but the Kaiserstadt,--the gemuthlich
+Wien. But there are other capitals where men have arranged things and
+consequently bungled them. The great Czar Peter slapped his imperial
+court down on the marshy shore of the Neva, where he could look westward
+into civilization and watch with the jealous eye of an intelligent
+barbarian the doings of his betters. Washington is another specimen of
+the cold-blooded handiwork of the capital builders. We shall think
+nothing less of the _clarum et venerabile nomen_ of its founder if we
+admit he was human, and his wishing the seat of government nearer to
+Mount Vernon than Mount Washington sufficiently proves this. But Madrid
+more plainly than any other capital shows the traces of having been set
+down and properly brought up by the strong hand of a paternal
+government; and like children with whom the same regimen has been
+followed, it presents in its maturity a curious mixture of lawlessness
+and insipidity.
+
+Its greatness was thrust upon it by Philip II. Some premonitory symptoms
+of the dangerous honor that awaited it had been seen in preceding
+reigns. Ferdinand and Isabella occasionally set up their pilgrim
+tabernacle on the declivity that overhangs the Manzanares. Charles V.
+found the thin, fine air comforting to his gouty articulations. But
+Philip II. made it his court. It seems hard to conceive how a king who
+had his choice of Lisbon, with its glorious harbor and unequalled
+communications; Seville, with its delicious climate and natural beauty;
+and Salamanca and Toledo, with their wealth of tradition, splendor of
+architecture, and renown of learning, should have chosen this barren
+mountain for his home, and the seat of his empire. But when we know this
+monkish king we wonder no longer. He chose Madrid simply because it was
+cheerless and bare and of ophthalmic ugliness. The royal kill-joy
+delighted in having the dreariest capital on earth. After a while there
+seemed to him too much life and humanity about Madrid, and he built the
+Escorial, the grandest ideal of majesty and ennui that the world has
+ever seen. This vast mass of granite has somehow acted as an anchor that
+has held the capital fast moored at Madrid through all succeeding years.
+
+It was a dreary and somewhat shabby court for many reigns. The great
+kings who started the Austrian dynasty were too busy in their world
+conquest to pay much attention to beautifying Madrid, and their weak
+successors, sunk in ignoble pleasures, had not energy enough to indulge
+the royal folly of building. When the Bourbons came down from France
+there was a little flurry of construction under Philip V., but he never
+finished his palace in the Plaza del Oriente, and was soon absorbed in
+constructing his castle in cloud-land on the heights of La Granja. The
+only real ruler the Bourbons ever gave to Spain was Charles III., and to
+him Madrid owes all that it has of architecture and civic improvement.
+Seconded by his able and liberal minister, Count Aranda, who was
+educated abroad, and so free from the trammels of Spanish ignorance and
+superstition, he rapidly changed the ignoble town into something like a
+city. The greater portion of the public buildings date from this active
+and beneficent reign. It was he who laid out the walks and promenades
+which give to Madrid almost its only outward attraction. The Picture
+Gallery, which is the shrine of all pilgrims of taste, was built by him
+for a Museum of Natural Science. In nearly all that a stranger cares to
+see, Madrid is not an older city than Boston.
+
+There is consequently no glory of tradition here. There are no
+cathedrals. There are no ruins. There is none of that mysterious and
+haunting memory that peoples the air with spectres in quiet towns like
+Ravenna and Nuremberg. And there is little of that vast movement of
+humanity that possesses and bewilders you in San Francisco and New York.
+Madrid is larger than Chicago; but Chicago is a great city and Madrid a
+great village. The pulsations of life in the two places resemble each
+other no more than the beating of Dexter's heart on the home-stretch is
+like the rising and falling of an oozy tide in a marshy inlet.
+
+There is nothing indigenous in Madrid. There is no marked local color.
+It is a city of Castile, but not a Castilian city, like Toledo, which
+girds its graceful waist with the golden Tagus, or like Segovia,
+fastened to its rock in hopeless shipwreck.
+
+But it is not for this reason destitute of an interest of its own. By
+reason of its exceptional history and character it is the best point in
+Spain to study Spanish life. It has no distinctive traits itself, but it
+is a patchwork of all Spain. Every province of the Peninsula sends a
+contingent to its population. The Gallicians hew its wood and draw its
+water; the Asturian women nurse its babies at their deep bosoms, and
+fill the promenades with their brilliant costumes; the Valentians carpet
+its halls and quench its thirst with orgeat of chufas; in every street
+you shall see the red bonnet and sandalled feet of the Catalan; in every
+cafe, the shaven face and rat-tail chignon of the Majo of Andalusia. If
+it have no character of its own, it is a mirror where all the faces of
+the Peninsula may sometimes be seen. It is like the mockingbird of the
+West, that has no song of its own, and yet makes the woods ring with
+every note it has ever heard.
+
+Though Madrid gives a picture in little of all Spain, it is not all
+Spanish. It has a large foreign population. Not only its immediate
+neighbors, the French, are here in great numbers,--conquering so far
+their repugnance to emigration, and living as gayly as possible in the
+midst of traditional hatred,--but there are also many Germans and
+English in business here, and a few stray Yankees have pitched their
+tents, to reinforce the teeth of the Dons, and to sell them ploughs and
+sewing-machines. Its railroads have waked it up to a new life, and the
+Revolution has set free the thought of its people to an extent which
+would have been hardly credible a few years ago. Its streets swarm with
+newsboys and strangers,--the agencies that are to bring its people into
+the movement of the age.
+
+It has a superb opera-house, which might as well be in Naples, for all
+the national character it has; the court theatre, where not a word of
+Cas-tilian is ever heard, nor a strain of Spanish music. Even
+cosmopolite Paris has her grand opera sung in French, and easy-going
+Vienna insists that Don Juan shall make love in German. The champagny
+strains of Offenbach are heard in every town of Spain oftener than the
+ballads of the country. In Madrid there are more _pilluelos_ who whistle
+_Bu qui s'avance_ than the Hymn of Riego. The Cancan has taken its place
+on the boards of every stage in the city, apparently to stay; and the
+exquisite jota and cachucha are giving way to the bestialities of the
+casino cadet. It is useless perhaps to fight against that hideous orgie
+of vulgar Menads which in these late years has swept over all nations,
+and stung the loose world into a tarantula dance from the Golden Horn to
+the Golden Gate. It must have its day and go out; and when it has
+passed, perhaps we may see that it was not so utterly causeless and
+irrational as it seemed; but that, as a young American poet has
+impressively said, "Paris was proclaiming to the world in it somewhat of
+the pent-up fire and fury of her nature, the bitterness of her heart,
+the fierceness of her protest against spiritual and political
+repression. It is an execration in rhythm,--a dance of fiends, which
+Paris has invented to express in license what she lacks in liberty."
+
+This diluted European, rather than Spanish, spirit may be seen in most
+of the amusements of the politer world of Madrid. They have classical
+concerts in the circuses and popular music in the open air. The theatres
+play translations of French plays, which are pretty good when they are
+in prose, and pretty dismal when they are turned into verse, as is more
+frequent, for the Spanish mind delights in the jingle of rhyme. The fine
+old Spanish drama is vanishing day by day. The masterpieces of Lope and
+Calderon, which inspired all subsequent playwriting in Europe, have sunk
+almost utterly into oblivion. The stage is flooded with the washings of
+the Boulevards. Bad as the translations are, the imitations are worse.
+The original plays produced by the geniuses of the Spanish Academy, for
+which they are crowned and sonneted and pensioned, are of the kind upon
+which we are told that gods and men and columns look austerely.
+
+This infection of foreign manners has completely gained and now controls
+what is called the best society of Madrid. A soiree in this circle is
+like an evening in the corresponding grade of position in Paris or
+Petersburg or New York in all external characteristics. The toilets are
+by Worth; the beauties are coiffed by the deft fingers of Parisian
+tiring-women; the men wear the penitential garb of Poole; the music is
+by Gounod and Verdi; Strauss inspires the rushing waltzes, and the
+married people walk through the quadrilles to the measures of Blue Beard
+and Fair Helen, so suggestive of conjugal rights and duties. As for the
+suppers, the trail of the Neapolitan serpent is over them all. Honest
+eating is a lost art among the effete denizens of the Old World.
+Tantalizing ices, crisped shapes of baked nothing, arid sandwiches, and
+the feeblest of sugary punch, are the only supports exhausted nature
+receives for the shock of the cotillon. I remember the stern reply of a
+friend of mine when I asked him to go with me to a brilliant
+reception,--"No! Man liveth not by biscuit-glace alone!" His heart was
+heavy for the steamed cherry-stones of Harvey and the stewed terrapin of
+Augustin.
+
+The speech of the gay world has almost ceased to be national. Every one
+speaks French sufficiently for all social requirements. It is sometimes
+to be doubted whether this constant use of a foreign language in
+official and diplomatic circles is a cause or effect of paucity of
+ideas. It is impossible for any one to use another tongue with the ease
+and grace with which he could use his own. You know how tiresome the
+most charming foreigners are when they speak English. A fetter-dance is
+always more curious than graceful. Yet one who has nothing to say can
+say it better in a foreign language. If you must speak nothing but
+phrases, Ollendorff's are as good as any one's. Where there are a dozen
+people all speaking French equally badly, each one imagines there is a
+certain elegance in the hackneyed forms. I know of no other way of
+accounting for the fact that clever people seem stupid and stupid people
+clever when they speak French. This facile language thus becomes the
+missionary of mental equality,--the principles of '89 applied to
+conversation. All men are equal before the phrase-book.
+
+But this is hypercritical and ungrateful. We do not go to balls to hear
+sermons nor discuss the origin of matter. If the young grandees of Spain
+are rather weaker in the parapet than is allowed in the nineteenth
+century, if the old boys are more frivolous than is becoming to age, and
+both more ignorant of the day's doings than is consistent with even
+their social responsibilities, in compensation the women of this circle
+are as pretty and amiable as it is possible to be in a fallen world. The
+foreigner never forgets those piquant, _mutines_ faces of Andalusia and
+those dreamy eyes of Malaga,--the black masses of Moorish hair and the
+blond glory of those graceful heads that trace their descent from Gothic
+demigods. They were not very learned nor very witty, but they were
+knowing enough to trouble the soundest sleep. Their voices could
+interpret the sublimest ideas of Mendelssohn. They knew sufficiently of
+lines and colors to dress themselves charmingly at small cost, and their
+little feet were well enough educated to bear them over the polished
+floor of a ball-room as lightly as swallows' wings. The flirting of
+their intelligent fans, the flashing of those quick smiles where eyes,
+teeth, and lips all did their dazzling duty, and the satin twinkling of
+those neat boots in the waltz, are harder to forget than things better
+worth remembering.
+
+Since the beginning of the Revolutionary regime there have been serious
+schisms and heart-burnings in the gay world. The people of the old
+situation assumed that the people of the new were rebels and traitors,
+and stopped breaking bread with them. But in spite of this the palace
+and the ministry of war were gay enough,--for Madrid is a city of
+office-holders, and the White House is always easy to fill, even if two
+thirds of the Senate is uncongenial. The principal fortress of the post
+was the palace of the spirituelle and hospitable lady whose society name
+is Duchess of Penaranda, but who is better known as the mother of the
+Empress of the French. Her salon was the weekly rendezvous of the
+irreconcilable adherents of the House of Bourbon, and the aristocratic
+beauty that gathered there was too powerful a seduction even for the
+young and hopeful partisans of the powers that be. There was nothing
+exclusive about this elegant hospitality. Beauty and good manners have
+always been a passport there. I have seen a proconsul of Prim talking
+with a Carlist leader, and a fiery young democrat dancing with a
+countess of Castile.
+
+But there is another phase of society in Madrid which is altogether
+pleasing,--far from the domain of politics or public affairs, where
+there is no pretension or luxury or conspiracy,--the old-fashioned
+Tertulias of Spain. There is nowhere a kindlier and more unaffected
+sociableness. The leading families of each little circle have one
+evening a week on which they remain at home. Nearly all their friends
+come in on that evening. There is conversation and music and dancing.
+The young girls gather together in little groups,--not confined under
+the jealous guard of their mothers or chaperons,--and chatter of the
+momentous events of the week--their dresses, their beaux, and their
+books. Around these compact formations of loveliness skirmish light
+bodies of the male enemy, but rarely effect a lodgment. A word or a
+smile is momently thrown out to meet the advance; but the long,
+desperate battle of flirtation, which so often takes place in America in
+discreet corners and outlying boudoirs, is never seen in this
+well-organized society. The mothers in Israel are ranged for the evening
+around the walls in comfortable chairs, which they never leave; and the
+colonels and generals and chiefs of administration, who form the bulk of
+all Madrid gatherings, are gravely smoking in the library or playing
+interminable games of tresillon, seasoned with temperate denunciations
+of the follies of the time.
+
+Nothing can be more engaging than the tone of perfect ease and cordial
+courtesy which pervades these family festivals. It is here that the
+Spanish character is seen in its most attractive light. Nearly everybody
+knows French, but it is never spoken. The exquisite Castilian, softened
+by its graceful diminutives into a rival of the Italian in tender
+melody, is the only medium of conversation; it is rare that a stranger'
+is seen, but if he is, he must learn Spanish or be a wet blanket
+forever.
+
+You will often meet, in persons of wealth and distinction, an easy
+degenerate accent in Spanish, strangely at variance with their elegance
+and culture. These are Creoles of the Antilles, and they form one of the
+most valued and popular elements of society in the capital. There is a
+gallantry and dash about the men, and an intelligence and independence
+about the women, that distinguish them from their cousins of the
+Peninsula. The American element has recently grown very prominent in the
+political and social world. Admiral Topete is a Mexican. His wife is one
+of the distinguished Cuban family of Arrieta. General Prim married a
+Mexican heiress. The magnificent Duchess de la Torre, wife of the Regent
+Serrano, is a Cuban born and bred.
+
+In one particular Madrid is unique among capitals,--it has no suburbs.
+It lies in a desolate table-land in the windy waste of New Castile; on
+the north the snowy Guadarrama chills its breezes, and on every other
+side the tawny landscape stretches away in dwarfish hills and shallow
+ravines barren of shrub or tree, until distance fuses the vast steppes
+into one drab plain, which melts in the hazy verge of the warm horizon.
+There are no villages sprinkled in the environs to lure the Madrilenos
+out of their walls for a holiday. Those delicious picnics that break
+with such enchanting freshness and variety the steady course of life in
+other capitals cannot here exist. No Parisian loves _la bonne ville_ so
+much that he does not call those the happiest of days on which he
+deserts her for a row at Asnieres, a donkey-ride at Enghien, or a
+bird-like dinner in the vast chestnuts of Sceaux. "There is only one
+Kaiserstadt," sings the loyal Kerl of Vienna, but he shakes the dust of
+the Graben from his feet on holiday mornings, and makes his merry
+pilgrimage to the lordly Schoen-brunn or the heartsome Dornbach, or the
+wooded eyry of the Kahlenberg. What would white-bait be if not eaten at
+Greenwich? What would life be in the great cities without the knowledge
+that just outside, an hour away from the toil and dust and struggle of
+this money-getting world, there are green fields, and whispering
+forests, and verdurous nooks of breezy shadow by the side of brooks
+where the white pebbles shine through the mottled stream,--where you
+find great pied pan-sies under your hands, and catch the black beady
+eyes of orioles watching you from the thickets, and through the lush
+leafage over you see patches of sky flecked with thin clouds that sail
+so lazily you cannot be sure if the blue or the white is moving?
+Existence without these luxuries would be very much like life in Madrid.
+
+Yet it is not so dismal as it might seem. The Grande Duchesse of
+Gerolstein, the cheeriest moralist who ever occupied a throne, announces
+just before the curtain falls, "Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime, il faut
+aimer ce qu'on a." But how much easier it is to love what you have when
+you never imagined anything better! The bulk of the good people of
+Madrid have never left their natal city. If they have been, for their
+sins, some day to Val-lecas or Carabanchel or any other of the dusty
+villages that bake and shiver on the arid plains around them, they give
+fervid thanks on returning alive, and never wish to go again. They
+shudder when they hear of the summer excursions of other populations,
+and commiserate them profoundly for living in a place they are so
+anxious to leave. A lovely girl of Madrid once said to me she never
+wished to travel,--some people who had been to France preferred Paris to
+Madrid; as if that were an inexplicable insanity by which their
+wanderings had been punished. The indolent incuriousness of the Spaniard
+accepts the utter isolation of his city as rather an advantage. It saves
+him the trouble of making up his mind where to go. _Vamonos al Prado!_
+or, as Browning says,--
+
+  "Let's to the Prado and make the most of time."
+
+The people of Madrid take more solid comfort in their promenade than any
+I know. This is one of the inestimable benefits conferred upon them by
+those wise and liberal free-thinkers Charles III. and Aranda. They knew
+how important to the moral and physical health of the people a place of
+recreation was. They reduced the hideous waste land on the east side of
+the city to a breathing-space for future generations, turning the meadow
+into a promenade and the hill into the Buen Retiro. The people growled
+terribly at the time, as they did at nearly everything this prematurely
+liberal government did for them. The wise king once wittily said: "My
+people are like bad children that kick the shins of their nurse whenever
+their faces are washed."
+
+But they soon became reconciled to their Prado,--a name, by the way,
+which runs through several idioms,--in Paris they had a Pre-aux-clercs,
+the Clerks' Meadow, and the great park of Vienna is called the Prater.
+It was originally the favorite scene of duels, and the cherished
+trysting-place of lovers. But in modern times it is too popular for any
+such selfish use.
+
+The polite world takes its stately promenade in the winter afternoons in
+the northern prolongation of the real Prado, called in the official
+courtier style _Las delicias de Isabel Segunda,_ but in common speech
+the Castilian Fountain, or _Castellana,_ to save time. So perfect is the
+social discipline in these old countries that people who are not in
+society never walk in this long promenade, which is open to all the
+world. You shall see there, any pleasant day before the Carnival, the
+aristocracy of the kingdom, the fast young hopes of the nobility, the
+diplomatic body resident, and the flexible figures and graceful bearing
+of the high-born ladies of Castile. Here they take the air as free from
+snobbish competition as the good society of Olympus, while a hundred
+paces farther south, just beyond the Mint, the world at large takes its
+plebeian constitutional. How long, with a democratic system of
+government, this purely conventional respect will be paid to blue-ness
+of blood cannot be conjectured. Its existence a year after the
+Revolution was to me one of the most singular of phenomena.
+
+After Easter Monday the Castellana is left to its own devices for the
+summer. With the warm long days of May and June, the evening walk in the
+Salon begins. Europe affords no scene more original and characteristic.
+The whole city meets in this starlit drawing-room. It is a vast evening
+party al fresco, stretching from the Alcala to the Course of San
+Geronimo. In the wide street beside it every one in town who owns a
+carriage may be seen moving lazily up and down, and apparently envying
+the gossiping strollers on foot. On three nights in the week there is
+music in the Retiro Garden,--not as in our feverish way beginning so
+early that you must sacrifice your dinner to get there, and then turning
+you out disconsolate in that seductive hour which John Phoenix used to
+call the "shank of the evening," but opening sensibly at half past nine
+and going leisurely forward until after midnight. The music is very
+good. Sometimes Arban comes down from Paris to recover from his winter
+fatigues and bewitch the Spains with his wizard _baton._
+
+In all this vast crowd nobody is in a hurry. They have all night before
+them. They stayed quietly at home in the stress of the noontide when the
+sunbeams were falling in the glowing streets like javelins,--they
+utilized some of the waste hours of the broiling afternoon in sleep, and
+are fresh as daisies now. The women are not haunted by the thought of
+lords and babies growling and wailing at home. Their lords are beside
+them, the babies are sprawling in the clean gravel by their chairs. Late
+in the small hours I have seen these family parties in the promenade,
+the husband tranquilly smoking his hundredth cigarette, his _placens
+uxor_ dozing in her chair, one baby asleep on the ground, and another
+slumbering in her lap.
+
+This Madrid climate is a gallant one, and kindlier to the women than the
+men. The ladies are built on the old-fashioned generous plan. Like a
+Southern table in the old times, the only fault is too abundant plenty.
+They move along with a superb dignity of carriage that Banting would
+like to banish from the world, their round white shoulders shining in
+the starlight, their fine heads elegantly draped in the coquettish and
+always graceful mantilla. But you would look in vain among the men of
+Madrid for such fulness and liberality of structure. They are thin,
+eager, sinewy in appearance,--though it is the spareness of the Turk,
+not of the American. It comes from tobacco and the Guadarrama winds.
+This still, fine, subtle air that blows from the craggy peaks over the
+treeless plateau seems to take all superfluous moisture out of the men
+of Madrid. But it is, like Benedick's wit, "a most manly air, it will
+not hurt a woman." This tropic summer-time brings the halcyon days of
+the vagabonds of Madrid. They are a temperate, reasonable people, after
+all, when they are let alone. They do not require the savage stimulants
+of our colder-blooded race. The fresh air is a feast. As Walt Whitman
+says, they loaf and invite their souls. They provide for the banquet
+only the most spiritual provender. Their dissipation is confined
+principally to starlight and zephyrs; the coarser and wealthier spirits
+indulge in ice, agraz, and meringues dissolved in water. The climax of
+their luxury is a cool bed. Walking about the city at midnight, I have
+seen the fountains all surrounded by luxurious vagabonds asleep or in
+revery, dozens of them stretched along the rim of the basins, in the
+spray of the splashing water, where the least start would plunge them
+in. But the dreams of these Latin beggars are too peaceful to trouble
+their slumber. They lie motionless, amid the roar of wheels and the
+tramp of a thousand feet, their bed the sculptured marble, their
+covering the deep, amethystine vault, warm and cherishing with its
+breath of summer winds, bright with its trooping stars. The Providence
+of the worthless watches and guards them!
+
+The chief commerce of the streets of Madrid seems to be fire and water,
+bane and antidote. It would be impossible for so many match-venders to
+live anywhere else, in a city ten times the size of Madrid. On every
+block you will find a wandering merchant dolefully announcing paper and
+phosphorus,--the one to construct cigarettes and the other to light
+them. The matches are little waxen tapers very neatly made and enclosed
+in pasteboard boxes, which are sold for a cent and contain about a
+hundred _fosforos._ These boxes are ornamented with portraits of the
+popular favorites of the day, and afford a very fair test of the
+progress and decline of parties. The queen has disappeared from them
+except in caricature, and the chivalrous face of Castelar and the heavy
+Bourbon mouth of Don Carlos are oftener seen than any others. A Madrid
+smoker of average industry will use a box a day. They smoke more
+cigarettes than cigars, and in the ardor of conversation allow their
+fire to go out every minute. A young Austrian, who was watching a
+_senorito_ light his wisp of paper for the fifth time, and mentally
+comparing it with the volcano volume and _kern-deutsch_ integrity of
+purpose of the meerschaums of his native land, said to me: "What can you
+expect of a people who trifle in that way with the only work of their
+lives?"
+
+It is this habit of constant smoking that makes the Madrilenos the
+thirstiest people in the world; so that, alternating with the cry of
+"Fire, lord-lings! Matches, chevaliers!" you hear continually the drone
+so tempting to parched throats, "Water! who wants water? freezing water!
+colder than snow!" This is the daily song of the Gallician who marches
+along in his irrigating mission, with his brown blouse, his short
+breeches, and pointed hat, like that Aladdin wears in the cheap
+editions; a little varied by the Valentian in his party-colored mantle
+and his tow trousers, showing the bronzed leg from the knee to the
+blue-bordered sandals. Numerous as they are, they all seem to have
+enough to do. They carry their scriptural-looking water-jars on their
+backs, and a smart tray of tin and burnished brass, with meringues and
+glasses, in front. The glasses are of enormous but not extravagant
+proportions. These dropsical Iberians will drink water as if it were no
+stronger than beer. In the winter-time, while the cheerful invitation
+rings out to the same effect,--that the beverage is cold as the
+snow,--the merchant prudently carries a little pot of hot water over a
+spirit-lamp to take the chill off for shivery customers.
+
+Madrid is one of those cities where strangers fear the climate less than
+residents. Nothing is too bad for the Castilian to say of his native
+air. Before you have been a day in the city some kind soul will warn you
+against everything you have been in the habit of doing as leading to
+sudden and severe death in this subtle air. You will hear in a dozen
+different tones the favorite proverb, which may be translated,--
+
+  The air of Madrid is as sharp as a knife,--
+  It will spare a candle and blow out your life:--
+
+and another where the truth, as in many Spanish proverbs, is sacrificed
+to the rhyme, saying that the climate is _tres meses invierno y nueve
+infierno,--_three months winter and nine months Tophet. At the first
+coming of the winter frosts the genuine son of Madrid gets out his capa,
+the national full round cloak, and never leaves it off till late in the
+hot spring days. They have a way of throwing one corner over the left
+shoulder, so that a bright strip of gay lining falls outward and
+pleasantly relieves the sombre monotony of the streets. In this way the
+face is completely covered by the heavy woollen folds, only the eyes
+being visible under the sombrero. The true Spaniard breathes no
+out-of-doors air all winter except through his cloak, and they stare at
+strangers who go about with uncovered faces enjoying the brisk air as if
+they were lunatics. But what makes the custom absurdly incongruous is
+that the women have no such terror of fresh air. While the hidalgo goes
+smothered in his wrappings his wife and daughter wear nothing on their
+necks and faces but their pretty complexions, and the gallant breeze,
+grateful for this generous confidence, repays them in roses. I have
+sometimes fancied that in this land of traditions this difference might
+have arisen in those days of adventure when the cavaliers had good
+reasons for keeping their faces concealed, while the senoras, we are
+bound to believe, have never done anything for which their own beauty
+was not the best excuse.
+
+Nearly all there is of interest in Madrid consists in the faces and the
+life of its people. There is but one portion of the city which appeals
+to the tourist's ordinary set of emotions. This is the old Moors'
+quarter,--the intricate jumble of streets and places on the western edge
+of the town, overlooking the bankrupt river. Here is St. Andrew's, the
+parish church where Isabella the Catholic and her pious husband used to
+offer their stiff and dutiful prayers. Behind it a market-place of the
+most primitive kind runs precipitately down to the Street of. Segovia,
+at such an angle that you wonder the turnips and carrots can ever be
+brought to keep their places on the rocky slope. If you will wander
+through the dark alleys and hilly streets of this quarter when twilight
+is softening the tall tenement-houses to a softer purpose, and the
+doorways are all full of gossiping groups, and here and there in the
+little courts you can hear the tinkling of a guitar and the drone of
+ballads, and see the idlers lounging by the fountains, and everywhere
+against the purple sky the crosses of old convents, while the evening
+air is musical with slow chimes from the full-arched belfries, it will
+not be hard to imagine you are in the Spain you have read and dreamed
+of. And, climbing out of this labyrinth of slums, you pass under the
+gloomy gates that lead to the Plaza Mayor. This once magnificent square
+is now as squalid and forsaken as the Place Royale of Paris, though it
+dates from a period comparatively recent. The mind so instinctively
+revolts at the contemplation of those orgies of priestly brutality which
+have made the very name of this place redolent with a fragrance of
+scorched Christians, that we naturally assign it an immemorial
+antiquity. But a glance at the booby face of Philip III. on his
+round-bellied charger in the centre of the square will remind us that
+this place was built at the same time the Mayflower's passengers were
+laying the massive foundations of the great Republic. The Autos-da-Fe,
+the plays of Lope de Vega, and the bull-fights went on for many years
+with impartial frequency under the approving eyes of royalty, which
+occupied a convenient balcony in the Panaderia, that overdressed
+building with the two extinguisher towers. Down to a period
+disgracefully near us, those balconies were occupied by the dull-eyed,
+pendulous-lipped tyrants who have sat on the throne of St. Ferdinand,
+while there in the spacious court below the varied sports went
+on,--to-day a comedy of Master Lope, to-morrow the gentle and joyous
+slaying of bulls, and the next day, with greater pomp and ceremony, with
+banners hung from the windows, and my lord the king surrounded by his
+women and his courtiers in their bravest gear, and the august presence
+of the chief priests and their idol in the form of wine and wafers,--the
+judgment and fiery sentence of the thinking men of Spain.
+
+Let us remember as we leave this accursed spot that the old palace of
+the Inquisition is now the Ministry of Justice, where a liberal
+statesman has just drawn up the bill of civil marriage; and that in the
+convent of the Trinitarians a Spanish Rationalist, the Minister of
+Fomento, is laboring to secularize education in the Peninsula. There is
+much coiling and hissing, but the fangs of the ser-pent are much less
+prompt and effective than of old.
+
+The wide Calle Mayor brings you in a moment out of these mouldy shadows
+and into the broad light of nowadays which shines in the Puerta del Sol.
+Here, under the walls of the Ministry of the Interior, the quick,
+restless heart of Madrid beats with the new life it has lately earned.
+The flags of the pavement have been often stained with blood, but of
+blood shed in combat, in the assertion of individual freedom. Although
+the government holds that fortress-palace with a grasp of iron, it can
+exercise no control over the free speech that asserts itself on the very
+sidewalk of the Principal. At every step you see news-stands filled with
+the sharp critical journalism of Spain,--often ignorant and unjust, but
+generally courteous in expression and independent in thought. Every day
+at noon the northern mails bring hither the word of all Europe to the
+awaking Spanish mind, and within that massive building the converging
+lines of the telegraph are whispering every hour their persuasive
+lessons of the world's essential unity.
+
+The movement of life and growth is bearing the population gradually away
+from that dark mediaeval Madrid of the Catholic kings through the Puerta
+del Sol to the airy heights beyond, and the new, fresh quarter built by
+the philosopher Bourbon Charles III. is becoming the most important part
+of the city. I think we may be permitted to hope that the long reign of
+savage faith and repression is broken at last, and that this abused and
+suffering people is about to enter into its rightful inheritance of
+modern freedom and progress.
+
+
+
+
+SPANISH LIVING AND DYING
+
+
+Nowhere is the sentiment of home stronger than in Spain. Strangers,
+whose ideas of the Spanish character have been gained from romance and
+comedy, are apt to note with some surprise the strength and prevalence
+of the domestic affections. But a moment's reflection shows us that
+nothing is more natural. It is the result of all their history. The old
+Celtic population had scarcely any religion but that of the family. The
+Goths brought in the pure Teutonic regard for woman and marriage. The
+Moors were distinguished by the patriarchal structure of their society.
+The Spaniards have thus learned the lesson of home in the school of
+history and tradition. The intense feeling of individuality, which so
+strongly marks the Spanish character, and which in the political world
+is so fatal an element of strife and obstruction, favors this peculiar
+domesticity. The Castilian is submissive to his king and his priest,
+haughty and inflexible with his equals. But his own house is a refuge
+from the contests of out of doors. The reflex of absolute authority is
+here observed, it is true. The Spanish father is absolute king and lord
+by his own hearthstone, but his sway is so mild and so readily
+acquiesced in that it is hardly felt. The evils of tyranny are rarely
+seen but by him who resists it, and the Spanish family seldom calls for
+the harsh exercise of parental authority.
+
+This is the rule. I do not mean to say there are no exceptions. The
+pride and jealousy inherent in the race make family quarrels, when they
+do arise, the bitterest and the fiercest in the world. In every grade of
+life these vindictive feuds among kindred are seen from time to time.
+Twice at least the steps of the throne have been splashed with royal
+blood shed by a princely hand. Duels between noble cousins and stabbing
+affrays between peasant brothers alike attest the unbending sense of
+personal dignity that still infects this people.
+
+A light word between husbands and wives sometimes goes unexplained, and
+the rift between them widens through life. I know some houses where the
+wife enters at one door and the husband at another; where if they meet
+on the stairs, they do not salute each other. Under the same roof they
+have lived for years and have not spoken. One word would heal all
+discord, and that word will never be spoken by either. They cannot be
+divorced,--the Church is inexorable. They will not incur the scandal of
+a public separation. So they pass lives of lonely isolation in adjoining
+apartments, both thinking rather better of each other and of themselves
+for this devilish persistence.
+
+An infraction of parental discipline is never forgiven. I knew a general
+whose daughter fell in love with his adjutant, a clever and amiable
+young officer. He had positively no objection to the suitor, but was
+surprised that there should be any love-making in his house without his
+previous suggestion. He refused his consent, and the young people were
+married without it. The father and son-in-law went off on a campaign,
+fought, and were wounded in the same battle. The general was asked to
+recommend his son-in-law for promotion. "I have no son-in-law!" "I mean
+your daughter's husband." "I have no daughter." "I refer to Lieutenant
+Don Fulano de Tal. He is a good officer. He distinguished himself
+greatly in the recent affair." "Ah! otra cosa!" said the grim
+father-in-law. His hate could not overcome his sense of justice. The
+youth got his promotion, but his general will not recognize him at the
+club. It is in the middle and lower classes that the most perfect
+pictures of the true Spanish family are to be found. The aristocracy is
+more or less infected with the contagion of Continental manners and
+morals. You will find there the usual proportion of wives who despise
+their husbands, and men who neglect their wives, and children who do not
+honor their parents. The smartness of American "pickles" has even made
+its appearance among the little countesses of Madrid. A lady was eating
+an ice one day, hungrily watched by the wide eyes of the infant heiress
+of the house. As the latter saw the last hope vanishing before the
+destroying spoon, she cried out, "Thou eatest all and givest me
+none,--maldita sea tu alma!" (accursed be thy soul). This dreadful
+imprecation was greeted with roars of laughter from admiring friends,
+and the profane little innocent was smothered in kisses and cream.
+
+Passing at noon by any of the squares or shady places of Madrid, you
+will see dozens of laboring-people at their meals. They sit on the
+ground, around the steaming and savory _cocido_ that forms the peasant
+Spaniard's unvaried dinner. The foundation is of _garbanzos,_ the large
+chick-pea of the country, brought originally to Europe by the
+Carthaginians,--the Roman _cicer,_ which gave its name to the greatest
+of the Latin orators. All other available vegetables are thrown in; on
+days of high gala a piece of meat is added, and some forehanded
+housewives attain the climax of luxury by flavoring the compound with a
+link of sausage. The mother brings the dinner and her tawny brood of
+nestlings. A shady spot is selected for the feast. The father dips his
+wooden spoon first into the vapory bowl, and mother and babes follow
+with grave decorum. Idle loungers passing these patriarchal groups, on
+their way to a vapid French breakfast at a restaurant, catch the
+fragrance of the _olla_ and the chatter of the family, and envy the
+dinner of herbs with love.
+
+There is no people so frugal. We often wonder how a Washington clerk can
+live on twelve hundred dollars, but this would be luxury in expensive
+Madrid. It is one of the dearest capitals in Europe. Foreigners are
+never weary decrying its high prices for poor fare; but Castilians live
+in good houses, dress well, receive their intimate friends, and hold
+their own with the best in the promenade, upon incomes that would seem
+penury to any country parson in America. There are few of the nobility
+who retain the great fortunes of former days. You can almost tell on
+your fingers the tale of the grandees in Madrid who can live without
+counting the cost. The army and navy are crowded with general officers
+whose political services have obliged their promotion. The state is too
+much impoverished to pay liberal salaries, and yet the rank of these
+officers requires the maintenance of a certain social position. Few of
+them are men of fortune. The result is that necessity has taught them to
+live well upon little, I knew widows who went everywhere in society,
+whose daughters were always charmingly dressed, who lived in a decent
+quarter of the town, and who had no resources whatever but a husband's
+pension.
+
+The best proof of the capacity of Spaniards to spread a little gold over
+as much space as a goldbeater could is the enormous competition for
+public employment. Half the young men in Spain are candidates for
+places under government ranging from $250 to $1000. Places of $1500 to
+$2000 are considered objects of legitimate ambition even to deputies and
+leading politicians. Expressed in reals these sums have a large and
+satisfying sound. Fifty dollars seems little enough for a month's work,
+but a thousand reals has the look of a most respectable salary. In
+Portugal, however, you can have all the delightful sensations of
+prodigality at a contemptible cost. You can pay, without serious damage
+to your purse, five thousand reis for your breakfast.
+
+It is the smallness of incomes and the necessity of looking sharply to
+the means of life that makes the young people of Madrid so prudent in
+their love affairs. I know of no place where ugly heir-esses are such
+belles, and where young men with handsome incomes are so universally
+esteemed by all who know them. The stars on the sleeves of young
+officers are more regarded than their dancing, and the red belt of a
+field officer is as winning in the eyes of beauty as a cestus of Venus.
+A. subaltern offered his hand and heart to a black-eyed girl of Castile.
+She said kindly but firmly that the night was too cloudy. "What," said
+the stupefied lover, "the sky is full of stars." "I see but one," said
+the prudent beauty, her fine eyes resting pensively upon his cuff, where
+one lone luminary indicated his rank.
+
+This spirit is really one of forethought, and not avarice. People who
+have enough for two almost always marry from inclination, and frequently
+take partners for life without a penny.
+
+If men were never henpecked except by learned wives, Spain would be the
+place of all others for timid men to marry in. The girls are bright,
+vivacious, and naturally very clever, but they have scarcely any
+education whatever. They never know the difference between _b_ and _v._
+They throw themselves in orthography entirely upon your benevolence.
+They know a little music and a little French, but they have never
+crossed, even in a school-day excursion, the border line of the ologies.
+They do not even read novels. They are regarded as injurious, and
+cannot be trusted to the daughters until mamma has read them. Mamma
+never has time to read them, and so they are condemned by default.
+Fernan Caballero, in one of her sleepy little romances, refers to this
+illiterate character of the Spanish ladies, and says it is their chief
+charm,--that a Christian woman, in good society, ought not to know
+anything beyond her cookery-book and her missal. There is-an old proverb
+which coarsely conveys this idea: A mule that whinnies and a woman that
+talks Latin never come to any good.
+
+There is a contented acquiescence in this moral servitude among the fair
+Spaniards which would madden our agitatresses. (See what will become of
+the language when male words are crowded out of the dictionary!)
+
+It must be the innocence which springs from ignorance that induces an
+occasional coarseness of expression which surprises you in the
+conversation of those lovely young girls. They will speak with perfect
+freedom of the _etat-civil_ of a young unmarried mother. A maiden of
+fifteen said to me: "I must go to a party this evening _decolletee,_ and
+I hate it. Benigno is getting old enough to marry, and he wants to see
+all the girls in low neck before he makes up his mind." They all swear
+like troopers, without a thought of profanity. Their mildest expression
+of surprise is Jesus Maria! They change their oaths with the season. At
+the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the favorite oath is Maria
+Purissima. This is a time of especial interest to young girls. It is a
+period of compulsory confession,--conscience-cleaning, as they call it.
+They are all very pious in their way. They attend to their religious
+duties with the same interest which they displayed a few years before in
+dressing and undressing their dolls, and will display a few years later
+in putting the lessons they learned with their dolls to a more practical
+use.
+
+The visible concrete symbols and observances of religion have great
+influence with them. They are fond of making vows in tight places and
+faithfully observing them afterwards. In an hour's walk in the streets
+of Madrid you will see a dozen ladies with a leather strap buckled about
+their slender waists and hanging nearly to the ground. Others wear a
+knotted cord and tassels. These are worn as the fulfilment of vows, or
+penances.
+
+I am afraid they give rise to much worldly conjecture on the part of
+idle youth as to what amiable sins these pretty penitents can have been
+guilty of. It is not prudent to ask an explanation of the peculiar
+mercy, or remorse, which this purgatorial strap commemorates. You will
+probably not enlarge your stock of knowledge further than to learn that
+the lady in question considers you a great nuisance.
+
+The graceful lady who, in ascending the throne of France, has not ceased
+to be a thorough Spaniard, still preserves these pretty weaknesses of
+her youth. She vowed a chapel to her patron saint if her firstborn was a
+man-child, and paid it. She has hung a vestal lamp in the Church of
+Notre Dame des Victoires, in pursuance of a vow she keeps rigidly
+secret. She is a firm believer in relics also, and keeps a choice
+assortment on hand in the Tuileries for sudden emergencies. When old
+Baciocchi lay near his death, worn out by a horrible nervous disorder
+which would not let him sleep, the empress told the doctors, with great
+mystery, that she would cure him. After a few preliminary masses, she
+came into his room and hung on his bedpost a little gold-embroidered
+sachet containing (if the evidence of holy men is to be believed) a few
+threads of the swaddling-clothes of John the Baptist. Her simple
+childlike faith wrung the last grim smile from the tortured lips of the
+dying courtier.
+
+The very names of the Spanish women are a constant reminder of their
+worship. They are all named out of the calendar of saints and virgin
+martyrs. A large majority are christened Mary; but as this sacred name
+by much use has lost all distinctive meaning, some attribute, some
+especial invocation of the Virgin, is always coupled with it. The names
+of Dolores, Mercedes, Milagros, recall Our Lady of the Sorrows, of the
+Gifts, of the Miracles. I knew a hoydenish little gypsy who bore the
+tearful name of Lagrimas. The most appropriate name I heard for these
+large-eyed, soft-voiced beauties was Peligros, Our Lady of Dangers. Who
+could resist the comforting assurance of "Consuelo"? "Blessed," says my
+Lord Lytton, "is woman who consoles." What an image of maiden purity
+goes with the name of Nieves, the Virgin of the Snows! From a single
+cotillon of Castilian girls you can construct the whole history of Our
+Lady; Conception, Annunciation, Sorrows, Solitude, Assumption. As young
+ladies are never called by their family names, but always by their
+baptismal appellations, you cannot pass an evening in a Spanish
+_tertulia_ without being reminded of every stage in the life of the
+Immaculate Mother, from Bethlehem to Calvary and beyond.
+
+The common use of sacred words is universal in Catholic countries, but
+nowhere so striking as in Spain. There is a little solemnity in the
+French adieu. But the Spaniard says adios instead of "good-morning." No
+letter closes without the prayer, "God guard your Grace many years!"
+They say a judge announces to a murderer his sentence of death with the
+sacramental wish of length of days. There is something a little shocking
+to a Yankee mind in the label of Lachryma Christi; but in La Mancha they
+call fritters the Grace of God.
+
+The piety of the Spanish women does not prevent them from seeing some
+things clearly enough with their bright eyes. One of the most bigoted
+women in Spain recently said: "I hesitate to let my child go to
+confession. The priests ask young girls such infamous questions, that my
+cheeks burn when I think of them, after all these years." I stood one
+Christmas Eve in the cold midnight wind, waiting for the church doors to
+open for the night mass, the famous _misa del gallo._ On the steps
+beside me sat a decent old woman with her two daughters. At last she
+rose and said, "Girls, it is no use waiting any longer. The priests
+won't leave their housekeepers this cold night to save anybody's soul."
+In these two cases, taken from the two extremes of the Catholic society,
+there was no disrespect for the Church or for religion. Both these women
+believed with a blind faith. But they could not help seeing how unclean
+were the hands that dispensed the bread of life.
+
+The respect shown to the priesthood as a body is marvellous, in view of
+the profligate lives of many. The general progress of the age has forced
+most of the dissolute priests into hypocrisy. But their cynical
+immorality is still the bane of many families. And it needs but a glance
+at the vile manual of confession, called the Golden Key, the author of
+which is the too well known Padre Claret, confessor to the queen, to see
+the systematic moral poisoning the minds of Spanish women must undergo
+who pay due attention to what is called their religious duties. If a
+confessor obeys the injunctions of this high ecclesiastical authority,
+his fair penitents will have nothing to learn from a diligent perusal of
+Faublas or Casanova. It would, however, be unjust to the priesthood to
+consider them all as corrupt as royal chaplains. It requires a
+combination of convent and palace life to produce these finished
+specimens of mitred infamy.
+
+It is to be regretted that the Spanish women are kept in such systematic
+ignorance. They have a quicker and more active intelligence than the
+men. With a fair degree of education, much might be hoped from them in
+the intellectual development of the country. In society, you will at
+once be struck with the superiority of the women to their husbands and
+brothers in cleverness and appreciation. Among small tradesmen, the wife
+always comes to the rescue of her slow spouse when she sees him befogged
+in a bargain. In the fields, you ask a peasant some question about your
+journey. He will hesitate, and stammer, and end with, "_Quien sabe?"_
+but his wife will answer with glib completeness all you want to know. I
+can imagine no cause for this, unless it be that the men cloud their
+brains all day with the fumes of tobacco, and the women do not.
+
+The personality of the woman is not so entirely merged in that of the
+husband as among us. She retains her own baptismal and family name
+through life. If Miss Matilda Smith marries Mr. Jonathan Jones, all
+vestige of the former gentle being vanishes at once from the earth, and
+Mrs. Jonathan Jones alone remains. But in Spain she would become Mrs.
+Matilda Smith de Jones, and her eldest-born would be called Don Juan
+Jones y Smith. You ask the name of a married lady in society, and you
+hear as often her own name as that of her husband.
+
+Even among titled people, the family name seems more highly valued than
+the titular designation. Everybody knows Narvaez, but how few have heard
+of the Duke of Valencia! The Regent Serrano has a name known and honored
+over the world, but most people must think twice before they remember
+the Duke de la Torre. Juan Prim is better known than the Marques de los
+Castillejos ever will be. It is perhaps due to the prodigality with
+which titles have been scattered in late years that the older titles are
+more regarded than the new, although of inferior grade. Thus Prim calls
+himself almost invariably the Conde de Reus, though his grandeeship came
+with his investiture as marquis.
+
+There is something quite noticeable about this easy way of treating
+one's name. We are accustomed to think a man can have but one name, and
+can sign it but in one way. Lord Derby can no more call himself Mr.
+Stanley than President Grant can sign a bill as U. Simpson. Yet both
+these signatures would be perfectly valid according to Spanish analogy.
+The Marquis of Santa Marta signs himself Guzman; the Marquis of Albaida
+uses no signature but Orense; both of these gentlemen being Republican
+deputies. I have seen General Prim's name signed officially, Conde de
+Reus, Marques de los Castillejos, Prim, J. Prim, Juan Prim, and Jean
+Prim, changing the style as often as the humor strikes him.
+
+Their forms of courtesy are, however, invariable. You can never visit a
+Spaniard without his informing you that you are in your own house. If,
+walking with him, you pass his residence, he asks you to enter your
+house and unfatigue yourself a moment. If you happen upon any Spaniard,
+of whatever class, at the hour of repast, he always offers you his
+dinner; if you decline, it must be with polite wishes for his digestion.
+With the Spaniards, no news is good news; it is therefore civil to ask a
+Spaniard if his lady-wife goes on without novelty, and to express your
+profound gratification on being assured that she does. Their forms of
+hospitality are evidently Moorish, derived from the genuine open hand
+and open tent of the children of the desert; now nothing is left of them
+but grave and decorous words. In the old times, one who would have
+refused such offers would have been held a churl; now one who would
+accept them would be regarded as a boor.
+
+There is still something primitive about the Spanish servants. A flavor
+of the old romances and the old comedy still hangs about them. They are
+chatty and confidential to a degree that appalls a stiff and formal
+Englishman of the upper middle class. The British servant is a chilly
+and statuesque image of propriety. The French is an intelligent and
+sympathizing friend. You can make of him what you like. But the Italian,
+and still more the Spaniard, is as gay as a child, and as incapable of
+intentional disrespect. The Castilian grandee does not regard his
+dignity as in danger from a moment's chat with a waiter. He has no
+conception of that ferocious decorum we Anglo-Saxons require from our
+manservants and our maidservants. The Spanish servant seems to regard it
+as part of his duty to keep your spirits gently excited while you dine
+by the gossip of the day. He joins also in your discussions, whether
+they touch lightly on the politics of the hour or plunge profoundly into
+the depths of philosophic research. He laughs at your wit, and swings
+his napkin with convulsions of mirth at your good stories. He tells you
+the history of his life while you are breaking your egg, and lays the
+story of his loves before you with your coffee. Yet he is not intrusive.
+He will chatter on without waiting for a reply, and when you are tired
+of him you can shut him off with a word. There are few Spanish servants
+so uninteresting but that you can find in them from time to time some
+sparks of that ineffable light which shines forever in Sancho and
+Figaro.
+
+The traditions of subordination, which are the result of long centuries
+of tyranny, have prevented the development of that feeling of
+independence among the lower orders, which in a freer race finds its
+expression in ill manners and discourtesy to superiors. I knew a
+gentleman in the West whose circumstances had forced him to become a
+waiter in a backwoods restaurant. He bore a deadly grudge at the
+profession that kept him from starving, and asserted his unconquered
+nobility of soul by scowling at his customers and swearing at the viands
+he dispensed. I remember the deep sense of wrong with which he would
+growl, "Two buckwheats, begawd!" You see nothing of this defiant spirit
+in Spanish servants. They are heartily glad to find employment, and ask
+no higher good-fortune than to serve acceptably. As to drawing
+comparisons between themselves and their masters, they never seem to
+think they belong to the same race. I saw a pretty grisette once stop to
+look at a show-window where there was a lay-figure completely covered
+with all manner of trusses. She gazed at it long and earnestly,
+evidently thinking it was some new fashion just introduced into the gay
+world. At last she tripped away with all the grace of her unfettered
+limbs, saying, "If the fine ladies have to wear all those machines, I am
+glad I am not made like them."
+
+Whether it be from their more regular and active lives, or from their
+being unable to pay for medical attendance, the poorer classes suffer
+less from sickness than their betters. An ordinary Spaniard is sick but
+once in his life, and that once is enough,--'twill serve. The traditions
+of the old satires which represented the doctor and death as always
+hunting in couples still survive in Spain. It is taken as so entirely a
+matter of course that a patient must die that the law of the land
+imposed a heavy fine upon physicians who did not bring a priest on their
+second visit. His labor of exhortation and confession was rarely wasted.
+There were few sufferers who recovered from the shock of that solemn
+ceremony in their chambers. Medical science still labors in Spain under
+the ban of ostracism, imposed in the days when all research was impiety.
+The Inquisition clamored for the blood of Vesalius, who had committed
+the crime of a demonstration in anatomy. He was forced into a pilgrimage
+of expiation, and died on the way to Palestine. The Church has always
+looked with a jealous eye upon the inquirers, the innovators. Why these
+probes, these lancets, these multifarious drugs, when the object in view
+could be so much more easily obtained by the judicious application of
+masses and prayers?
+
+So it has come about that the doctor is a Pariah, and miracles flourish
+in the Peninsula. At every considerable shrine you will see the walls
+covered with waxen models of feet, legs, hands, and arms secured by the
+miraculous interposition of the _genius loci,_ and scores of little
+crutches attesting the marvellous hour when they became useless. Each
+shrine, like a mineral spring, has its own especial virtue. A Santiago
+medal was better than quinine for ague. St. Veronica's handkerchief is
+sovereign for sore eyes. A bone of St. Magin supersedes the use of
+mercury. A finger-nail of San Frutos cured at Segovia a case of
+congenital idiocy. The Virgin of Ona acted as a vermifuge on royal
+infantas, and her girdle at Tortosa smooths their passage into this
+world. In this age of unfaith relics have lost much of their power. They
+turn out their score or so of miracles every feast-day, it is true, but
+are no longer capable of the _tours de force_ of earlier days. Cardinal
+de Retz saw with his eyes a man whose wooden legs were turned to
+capering flesh and blood by the image of the Pillar of Saragossa. But
+this was in the good old times before newspapers and telegraphs had come
+to dispel the twilight of belief.
+
+Now, it is excessively probable that neither doctor nor priest can do
+much if the patient is hit in earnest. He soon succumbs, and is laid out
+in his best clothes in an improvised chapel and duly sped on his way.
+The custom of burying the dead in the gown and cowl of monks has greatly
+passed into disuse. The mortal relics are treated with growing contempt,
+as the superstitions of the people gradually lose their concrete
+character. The soul is the important matter which the Church now looks
+to. So the cold clay is carted off to the cemetery with small ceremony.
+Even the coffins of the rich are jammed away into receptacles too small
+for them, and hastily plastered out of sight. The poor are carried off
+on trestles and huddled into their nameless graves, without following or
+blessing. Children are buried with some regard to the old Oriental
+customs. The coffin is of some gay and cheerful color, pink or blue, and
+is carried open to the grave by four of the dead child's young
+companions, a fifth walking behind with the ribboned coffin-lid. I have
+often seen these touching little parties moving through the bustling
+streets, the peaceful small face asleep under the open sky, decked with
+the fading roses and withering lilies. In all well-to-do families the
+house of death is deserted immediately after the funeral. The stricken
+ones retire to some other habitation, and there pass eight days in
+strict and inviolable seclusion. On the ninth day the great masses for
+the repose of the soul of the departed are said in the parish church,
+and all the friends of the family are expected to be present. These
+masses are the most important and expensive incident of the funeral.
+They cost from two hundred to one thousand dollars, according to the
+strength and fervor of the orisons employed. They are repeated several
+years on the anniversary of the decease, and afford a most sure and
+nourishing revenue to the Church. They are founded upon those feelings
+inseparable from every human heart, vanity and affection. Our dead
+friends must be as well prayed for as those of others, and who knows but
+that they may be in deadly need of prayers! To shorten their fiery
+penance by one hour, who would not fast for a week? On these
+anniversaries a black-bordered advertisement appears in the newspapers,
+headed by the sign of the cross and the Requiescat in Pace, announcing
+that on this day twelve months Don Fulano de Tal passed from earth
+garnished with the holy sacraments, that all the masses this day
+celebrated in such and such churches will be applied to the benefit of
+his spirit's repose, and that all Christian friends are hereby requested
+to commend his soul this day unto God. These efforts, if they do the
+dead no good, at least do the living no harm.
+
+A luxury of grief, in those who can afford it, consists in shutting up
+the house where a death has taken place and never suffering it to be
+opened again. I once saw a beautiful house and wide garden thus
+abandoned in one of the most fashionable streets of Madrid. I inquired
+about it, and found it was formerly the residence of the Duke of------.
+His wife had died there many years before, and since that day not a door
+nor a window had been opened. The garden gates were red and rough with
+rust. Grass grew tall and rank in the gravelled walks. A thick lush
+undergrowth had overrun the flower-beds and the lawns. The blinds were
+rotting over the darkened windows. Luxuriant vines clambered over all
+the mossy doors. The stucco was peeling from the walls in unwholesome
+blotches. Wild birds sang all day in the safe solitude. There was
+something impressive in this spot of mould and silence, lying there so
+green and implacable in the very heart of a great and noisy city. The
+duke lived in Paris, leading the rattling life of a man of the world. He
+never would sell or let that Madrid house. Perhaps in his heart also,
+that battered thoroughfare worn by the pattering boots of Ma-bine and
+the Bois, and the Quartier Breda, there was a green spot sacred to
+memory and silence, where no footfall should ever light, where no living
+voice should ever be heard, shut out from the world and its cares and
+its pleasures, where through the gloom of dead days he could catch a
+glimpse of a white hand, a flash of a dark eye, the rustle of a trailing
+robe, and feel sweeping over him the old magic of love's young dream,
+softening his fancy to tender regret and his eyes to a happy mist--
+
+  "Like that which kept the heart of Eden green
+  Before the useful trouble of the rain."
+
+
+
+
+INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE
+
+
+Intelligent Spaniards with whom I have conversed on political matters
+have often exclaimed, "Ah, you Americans are happy! you have no
+traditions." The phrase was at first a puzzling one. We Americans are
+apt to think we have traditions,--a rather clearly marked line of
+precedents. And it is hard to see how a people should be happier without
+them. It is not anywhere considered a misfortune to have had a
+grandfather, I believe, and some very good folks take an innocent pride
+in that very natural fact. It was not easy to conceive why the
+possession of a glorious history of many centuries should be regarded as
+a drawback. But a closer observation of Spanish life and thought reveals
+the curious and hurtful effect of tradition upon every phase of
+existence.
+
+In the commonest events of every day you will find the flavor of past
+ages lingering in petty annoyances. The insecurity of the middle ages
+has left as a legacy to our times a complicated system of obstacles to a
+man getting into his own house at night. I lived in a pleasant house on
+the Prado, with a minute garden in front, and an iron gate and railing.
+This gate was shut and locked by the night watchman of the quarter at
+midnight,--so conscientiously that he usually had everything snug by
+half past eleven. As the same man had charge of a dozen or more houses,
+it was scarcely reasonable to expect him to be always at your own gate
+when you arrived. But by a singular fatality I think no man ever found
+him in sight at any hour. He is always opening some other gate or
+shutting some other door, or settling the affairs of the nation with a
+friend in the next block, or carrying on a chronic courtship at the
+lattice of some olive-cheeked soubrette around the corner. Be that as it
+may, no one ever found him on hand; and there is nothing to do but to
+sit down on the curbstone and lift up your voice and shriek for him
+until he comes. At two o'clock of a morning in January the exercise is
+not improving to the larynx or the temper. There is a tradition in the
+very name of this worthy. He is called the Sereno, because a century or
+so ago he used to call the hour and the state of the weather, and as the
+sky is almost always cloudless here, he got the name of the Sereno, as
+the quail is called Bob White, from much iteration. The Sereno opens
+your gate and the door of your house. When you come to your own floor
+you must ring, and your servant takes a careful survey of you through a
+latticed peep-hole before he will let you in. You may positively forbid
+this every day in the year, but the force of habit is too strong in the
+Spanish mind to suffer amendment.
+
+This absurd custom comes evidently down from a time of great lawlessness
+and license, when no houses were secure without these precautions, when
+people rarely stirred from their doors after nightfall, and when a door
+was never opened to a stranger. Now, when no such dangers exist, the
+annoying and senseless habit still remains, because no one dreams of
+changing anything which their fathers thought proper. Three hundred
+thousand people in Madrid submit year after year to this nightly cross,
+and I have never heard a voice raised in protest, nor even in defence of
+the custom.
+
+There is often a bitterness of opposition to evident improvement which
+is hard to explain. In the last century, when the eminent naturalist
+Bowles went down to the Almaden silver-mines, by appointment of the
+government, to see what was the cause of their exhaustion, he found that
+they had been worked entirely in perpendicular shafts instead of
+following the direction of the veins. He perfected a plan for working
+them in this simple and reasonable way, and no earthly power could make
+the Spanish miners obey his orders. There was no precedent for this new
+process, and they would not touch it. They preferred starvation rather
+than offend the memory of their fathers by a change. At last they had to
+be dismissed and a full force imported from Germany, under whose hands
+the mines became instantly enormously productive.
+
+I once asked a very intelligent English contractor why he used no
+wheelbarrows in his work. He had some hundreds of stalwart navvies
+employed carrying dirt in small wicker baskets to an embankment. He said
+the men would not use them. Some said it broke their backs. Others
+discovered a capital way of amusing themselves by putting the barrow on
+their heads and whirling the wheel as rapidly as possible with their
+hands. This was a game which never grew stale. The contractor gave up in
+despair, and went back to the baskets. But it is in the official regions
+that tradition is most powerful. In the budget of 1870 there was a
+curious chapter called "Charges of Justice." This consisted of a
+collection of articles appropriating large sums of money for the payment
+of feudal taxes to the great aristocracy of the kingdom as a
+compensation for long extinct seigniories. The Duke of Rivas got
+thirteen hundred dollars for carrying the mail to Victoria. The Duke of
+San Carlos draws ten thousand dollars for carrying the royal
+correspondence to the Indies. Of course this service ceased to belong to
+these families some centuries ago, but the salary is still paid. The
+Duke of Almodovar is well paid for supplying the _baton_ of office to
+the Alguazil of Cordova. The Duke of Osuna--one of the greatest grandees
+of the kingdom, a gentleman who has the right to wear seventeen hats in
+the presence of the Queen--receives fifty thousand dollars a year for
+imaginary feudal services. The Count of Altamira, who, as his name
+indicates, is a gentleman of high views, receives as a salve for the
+suppression of his fief thirty thousand dollars a year. In consideration
+of this sum he surrenders, while it is punctually paid, the privilege of
+hanging his neighbors.
+
+When the budget was discussed, a Republican member gently criticised
+this chapter; but his amendment for an investigation of these charges
+was indignantly rejected. He was accused of a shocking want of
+Espanolismo. He was thought to have no feeling in his heart for the
+glories of Spain. The respectability of the Chamber could find but one
+word injurious enough to express their contempt for so shameless a
+proposition; they said it was little better than socialism. The
+"charges" were all voted. Spain, tottering on the perilous verge of
+bankruptcy, her schoolmasters not paid for months, her sinking fund
+plundered, her credit gone out of sight, borrowing every cent she spends
+at thirty per cent., is proud of the privilege of paying into the hands
+of her richest and most useless class this gratuity of twelve million
+reals simply because they are descended from the robber chiefs of the
+darker ages. There is a curious little comedy played by the family of
+Medina Celi at every new coronation of a king of Spain. The duke claims
+to be the rightful heir to the throne. He is descended from Prince
+Ferdinand, who, dying before his father, Don Alonso X., left his babies
+exposed to the cruel kindness of their uncle Sancho, who, to save them
+the troubles of the throne, assumed it himself and transmitted it to his
+children,--all this some half dozen centuries ago. At every coronation
+the duke formally protests; an athletic and sinister-looking court
+headsman comes down to his palace in the Carrera San Geronimo, and by
+threats of immediate decapitation induces the duke to sign a paper
+abdicating his rights to the throne of all the Spains. The duke eats the
+Bourbon leek with inward profanity, and feels that he has done a most
+clever and proper thing. This performance is apparently his only object
+and mission in life. This one sacrifice to tradition is what he is born
+for.
+
+The most important part of a Spaniard's signature is the _rubrica_ or
+flourish with which it closes. The monarch's hand is set to public acts
+exclusively by this _parafe._ This evidently dates from the time when
+none but priests could write. In Madrid the mule-teams are driven tandem
+through the wide streets, because this was necessary in the ages when
+the streets were narrow.
+
+There is even a show of argument sometimes to justify an adherence to
+things as they are. About a century ago there was an effort made by
+people who had lived abroad, and so become conscious of the possession
+of noses, to have the streets of Madrid cleaned. The proposition was at
+first received with apathetic contempt, but when the innovators
+persevered they met the earnest and successful opposition of all
+classes. The Cas-tilian _savans_ gravely reported that the air of
+Madrid, which blew down from the snowy Guadarra-mas, was so thin and
+piercing that it absolutely needed the gentle corrective of the
+ordure-heaps to make it fit for human lungs.
+
+There is no nation in Europe in which so little washing is done. I do
+not think it is because the Spaniards do not want to be neat. They are,
+on the whole, the best-dressed people on the Continent. The hate of
+ablutions descends from those centuries of warfare with the Moors. The
+heathens washed themselves daily; therefore a Christian should not. The
+monks, who were too lazy to bathe, taught their followers to be filthy
+by precept and example. Water was never to be applied externally except
+in baptism. It was a treacherous element, and dallying with it had
+gotten Bathsheba and Susanna into no end of trouble. So when the cleanly
+infidels were driven out of Granada, the pious and hydrophobic Cardinal
+Ximenez persuaded the Catholic sovereigns to destroy the abomination of
+baths they left behind. Until very recently the Spanish mind has been
+unable to separate a certain idea of immorality from bathing. When
+Madame Daunoy, one of the sprightliest of observers, visited the court
+of Philip IV., she found it was considered shocking among the ladies of
+the best society to wash the face and hands. Once or twice a week they
+would glaze their pretty visages with the white of an egg. Of late years
+this prejudice has given way somewhat; but it has lasted longer than any
+monument in Spain.
+
+These, however, are but trivial manifestations of that power of
+tradition which holds the Spanish intellect imprisoned as in a vice of
+iron. The whole life of the nation is fatally influenced by this blind
+reverence for things that have been. It may be said that by force of
+tradition Christian morality has been driven from individual life by
+religion, and honesty has been supplanted as a rule of public conduct by
+honor,--a wretched substitute in either case, and irreconcilably at war
+with the spirit of the age.
+
+The growth of this double fanaticism is easily explained; it is the
+result of centuries of religious wars. From the hour when Pelayo, the
+first of the Asturian kings, successfully met and repulsed the hitherto
+victorious Moors in his rocky fortress of Covadonga, to the day when
+Boabdil the Unlucky saw for the last time through streaming tears the
+vermilion towers of Alhambra crowned with the banner of the cross, there
+was not a year of peace in Spain. No other nation has had such an
+experience. Seven centuries of constant warfare, with three thousand
+battles; this is the startling epitome of Spanish history from the
+Mahometan conquest to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. In this vast
+war there was laid the foundation of the national character of to-day.
+
+Even before the conquering Moslem crossed from Africa, Spain was the
+most deeply religious country in Europe; and by this I mean the country
+in which the Church was most powerful in its relations with the State.
+When the Council of Toledo, in 633, received the king of Castile, he
+fell on his face at the feet of the bishops before venturing to address
+them. When the hosts of Islam had overspread the Peninsula, and the last
+remnant of Christianity had taken refuge in the inaccessible hills of
+the northwest, the richest possession they carried into these inviolate
+fastnesses was a chest of relics,--knuckle-bones of apostles and
+splinters of true crosses, in which they trusted more than in mortal
+arms. The Church had thus a favorable material to work upon in the years
+of struggle that followed. The circumstances all lent themselves to the
+scheme of spiritual domination. The fight was for the cross against the
+crescent; the symbol of the quarrel was visible and tangible. The
+Spaniards were poor and ignorant and credulous. The priests were enough
+superior to lead and guide them, and not so far above them as to be out
+of the reach of their sympathies and their love. They marched with them.
+They shared their toils and dangers. They stimulated their hate of the
+enemy. They taught them that their cruel anger was the holy wrath of
+God. They held the keys of eternal weal or woe, and rewarded
+subservience to the priestly power with promises of everlasting
+felicity; while the least symptom of rebellion in thought or action was
+punished with swift death and the doom of endless flames. There was
+nothing in the Church which the fighting Spaniard could recognize as a
+reproach to himself. It was as bitter, as brave, as fierce, and
+revengeful as he. His credulity regarded it as divine, and worthy of
+blind adoration, and his heart went out to it with the sympathy of
+perfect love.
+
+In these centuries of war there was no commerce, no manufactures, no
+settled industry of importance among the Spaniards. There was
+consequently no wealth, none of that comfort and ease which is the
+natural element of doubt and discussion. Science did not exist. The
+little learning of the time was exclusively in the hands of the
+priesthood. If from time to time an intelligent spirit struggled against
+the chain of unquestioning bigotry that bound him, he was rigorously
+silenced by prompt and bloody punishment. There seemed to be no need of
+discussion, no need of inculcation of doctrine. The serious work of the
+time was the war with the infidel. The clergy managed everything. The
+question, "What shall I do to be saved?" never entered into those simple
+and ignorant minds. The Church would take care of those who did her
+bidding.
+
+Thus it was that in the hammering of those struggling ages the nation
+became welded together in one compact mass of unquestioning, unreasoning
+faith, which the Church could manage at its own good pleasure.
+
+It was also in these times that Spanish honor took its rise. This
+sentiment is so nearly connected with that of personal loyalty that they
+may be regarded as phases of the same monarchical spirit. The rule of
+honor as distinguished from honesty and virtue is the most prominent
+characteristic of monarchy, and for that reason the political theorists
+from the time of Montesquieu have pronounced in favor of the monarchy as
+a more practicable form of government than the republic, as requiring a
+less perfect and delicate machinery, men of honor being far more common
+than men of virtue. As in Spain, owing to special conditions, monarchy
+attained the most perfect growth and development which the world has
+seen, the sentiment of honor, as a rule of personal and political
+action, has there reached its most exaggerated form. I use this word, of
+course, in its restricted meaning of an intense sense of personal
+dignity, and readiness to sacrifice for this all considerations of
+interest and morality.
+
+This phase of the Spanish character is probably derived in its germ from
+the Gothic blood of their ancestors. Their intense self-assertion has
+been, in the Northern races, modified by the progress of intelligence
+and the restraints of municipal law into a spirit of sturdy self-respect
+and a disinclination to submit to wrong. The Goths of Spain have
+unfortunately never gone through this civilizing process. Their endless
+wars never gave an opportunity for the development of the purely civic
+virtues of respect and obedience to law. The people at large were too
+wretched, too harried by constant coming and going of the waves of war,
+to do more than live, in a shiftless, hand-to-mouth way, from the
+proceeds of their flocks and herds. There were no cities of importance
+within the Spanish lines. There was no opportunity for the growth of the
+true burgher spirit.
+
+There was no law to speak of in all these years except the twin
+despotism of the Church and the king. If there had been dissidence
+between them it might have been better for the people. But up to late
+years there has never been a quarrel between the clergy and the crown.
+Their interests were so identified that the dual tyranny was stronger
+than even a single one could have been. The crown always lending to the
+Church when necessary the arm of flesh, and the Church giving to the
+despotism of the sceptre the sanction of spiritual authority, an
+absolute power was established over body and soul.
+
+The spirit of individual independence inseparable from Gothic blood
+being thus forced out of its natural channels of freedom of thought and
+municipal liberty, it remained in the cavaliers of the army of Spain in
+the same barbarous form which it had held in the Northern forests,--a
+physical self-esteem and a readiness to fight on the slightest
+provocation. This did not interfere with the designs of the Church and
+was rather a useful engine against its enemies. The absolute power of
+the crown kept the spirit of feudal arrogance in check while the
+pressure of a common danger existed. The close cohesion which was so
+necessary in camp and Church prevented the tendency to disintegration,
+while the right of life and death was freely exercised by the great
+lords on their distant estates without interference. The predominating
+power of the crown was too great and too absolute to result in the
+establishment of any fixed principle of obedience to law. The union of
+crozier and sceptre had been, if anything, too successful. The king was
+so far above the nobility that there was no virtue in obeying him. His
+commission was divine, and he was no more confined by human laws than
+the stars and the comets. The obedience they owed and paid him was not
+respect to law. It partook of the character of religious worship, and
+left untouched and untamed in their savage hearts the instinct of
+resistance to all earthly claims of authority.
+
+Such was the condition of the public spirit of Spain at the beginning of
+that wonderful series of reigns from Ferdinand and Isabella to their
+great-grandson Philip II., which in less than a century raised Spain to
+the summit of greatness and built up a realm on which the sun never set.
+All the events of these prodigious reigns contributed to increase and
+intensify the national traits to which we have referred. The discovery
+of America flooded Europe with gold, and making the better class of
+Spaniards the richest people in the world naturally heightened their
+pride and arrogance. The long and eventful religious wars of Charles V.
+and Philip II. gave employment and distinction to thousands of families
+whose vanity was nursed by the royal favor, and whose ferocious
+self-will was fed and pampered by the blood of heretics and the spoil of
+rebels.
+
+The national qualities of superstition and pride made the whole cavalier
+class a wieldy and effective weapon in the hands of the monarch, and the
+use he made of them reacted upon these very traits, intensifying and
+affirming them.
+
+So terrible was this absolute command of the spiritual and physical
+forces of the kingdom possessed by the monarchs of that day, that when
+the Reformation flashed out, a beacon in the northern sky of political
+and religious freedom to the world, its light could not penetrate into
+Spain. There was a momentary struggle there, it is true. But so
+apathetic was the popular mind that the effort to bring it into sympathy
+with the vast movement of the age was hopeless from the beginning. The
+axe and the fagot made rapid work of the heresy. After only ten years of
+burnings and beheadings Philip II. could boast that not a heretic lived
+in his borders.
+
+Crazed by his success and his unquestioned omnipotence at home, and
+drunken with the delirious dream that God's wrath was breathing through
+him upon a revolted world, he essayed to crush heresy throughout Europe;
+and in this mad and awful crime his people undoubtingly seconded him. In
+this he failed, the stars in their courses fighting against him, the God
+that his worship slandered taking sides against him. But history records
+what rivers of blood he shed in the long and desperate fight, and how
+lovingly and adoringly his people sustained him. He killed, in cold
+blood, some forty thousand harmless people for their faith, besides the
+vastly greater number whose lives he took in battle.
+
+Yet this horrible monster, who is blackened with every crime at which
+humanity shudders, who had no grace of manhood, no touch of humanity, no
+gleam of sympathy which could redeem the gloomy picture of his ravening
+life, was beloved and worshipped as few men have been since the world
+has stood. The common people mourned him at his death with genuine
+unpaid sobs and tears. They will weep even yet at the story of his
+edifying death,--this monkish vampire breathing his last with his eyes
+fixed on the cross of the mild Nazarene, and tormented with impish
+doubts as to whether he had drunk blood enough to fit him for the
+company of the just!
+
+His successors rapidly fooled away the stupendous empire that had filled
+the sixteenth century with its glory. Spain sank from the position of
+ruler of the world and queen of the seas to the place of a second-rate
+power, by reason of the weakening power of superstition and bad
+government, and because the people and the chieftains had never learned
+the lesson of law.
+
+The clergy lost no tittle of their power. They went on, gayly roasting
+their heretics and devouring the substance of the people, more
+prosperous than ever in those days of national decadence. Philip III.
+gave up the government entirely to the Duke of Lerma, who formed an
+alliance with the Church, and they led together a joyous life. In the
+succeeding reign the Church had become such a gnawing cancer upon the
+state that the servile Cortes had the pluck to protest against its
+inroads. There were in 1626 nine thousand monasteries for men, besides
+nunneries. There were thirty-two thousand Dominican and Franciscan
+friars. In the diocese of Seville alone there were fourteen thousand
+chaplains. There was a panic in the land. Every one was rushing to get
+into holy orders. The Church had all the bread. Men must be monks or
+starve. _Zelus domus tuae come-dit me,_ writes the British ambassador,
+detailing these facts.
+
+We must remember that this was the age when the vast modern movement of
+inquiry and investigation was beginning. Bacon was laying in England the
+foundations of philosophy, casting with his prophetic intelligence the
+horoscope of unborn sciences. Descartes was opening new vistas of
+thought to the world. But in Spain, while the greatest names of her
+literature occur at this time, they aimed at no higher object than to
+amuse their betters. Cervantes wrote Quixote, but he died in a monk's
+hood; and Lope de Vega was a familiar of the Inquisition. The sad story
+of the mind of Spain in this momentous period may be written in one
+word,--everybody believed and nobody inquired.
+
+The country sank fast into famine and anarchy. The madness of the monks
+and the folly of the king expelled the Moors in 1609, and the loss of a
+million of the best mechanics and farmers of Spain struck the nation
+with a torpor like that of death. In 1650 Sir Edward Hyde wrote that
+"affairs were in huge disorder." People murdered each other for a loaf
+of bread. The marine perished for want of sailors. In the stricken land
+nothing flourished but the rabble of monks and the royal authority.
+
+This is the curious fact. The Church and the Crown had brought them to
+this misery, yet better than their lives the Spaniards loved the Church
+and the Crown. A word against either would have cost any man his life in
+those days. The old alliance still hung together firmly. The Church
+bullied and dragooned the king in private, but it valued his despotic
+power too highly ever to slight it in public. There was something
+superhuman about the faith and veneration with which the people, and the
+aristocracy as well, regarded the person of the king. There was somewhat
+of gloomy and ferocious dignity about Philip II. which might easily
+bring a courtier to his knees; but how can we account for the equal
+reverence that was paid to the ninny Philip III., the debauched trifler
+Philip IV., and the drivelling idiot Charles II.?
+
+Yet all of these were invested with the same attributes of the divine.
+Their hands, like those of Midas, had the gift of making anything they
+touched too precious for mortal use. A horse they had mounted could
+never be ridden again. A woman they had loved must enter a nunnery when
+they were tired of her.
+
+When Buckingham came down to Spain with Charles of England, the
+Conde-Duque of Olivares was shocked and scandalized at the relation of
+confidential friendship that existed between the prince and the duke.
+The world never saw a prouder man than Olivares. His picture by
+Velazquez hangs side by side with that of his royal master in Madrid.
+You see at a glance that the count-duke is the better man physically,
+mentally, morally. But he never dreamed it. He thought in his inmost
+heart that the best thing about him was the favor of the worthless
+fribble whom he governed.
+
+Through all the vicissitudes of Spanish history the force of these
+married superstitions--reverence for the Church as distinguished from
+the fear of God, and reverence for the king as distinguished from
+respect for law--have been the ruling characteristics of the Spanish
+mind. Among the fatal effects of this has been the extinction of
+rational piety and rational patriotism. If a man was not a good Catholic
+he was pretty sure to be an atheist. If he did not honor the king he was
+an outlaw. The wretched story of Spanish dissensions beyond seas, and
+the loss of the vast American empire, is distinctly traceable to the
+exaggerated sentiment of personal honor, unrestrained by the absolute
+authority of the crown. It seems impossible for the Spaniard of history
+and tradition to obey anything out of his sight. The American provinces
+have been lost one by one through petty quarrels and colonial rivalries.
+At the first word of dispute their notion of honor obliges them to fly
+to arms, and when blood has been shed reconciliation is impossible. So
+weak is the principle of territorial loyalty, that whenever the
+Peninsula government finds it necessary to overrule some violence of its
+own soldiers, these find no difficulty in marching over to the
+insurrection, or raising a fresh rebellion of their own. So little
+progress has there been in Spain from the middle ages to to-day in true
+political science, that we see such butchers as Caballero and Valmaseda
+repeating to-day the crimes and follies of Cortes and Pamfilo Narvaez,
+of Pizarro and Almagro, and the revolt of the bloodthirsty volunteers of
+the Havana is only a question of time.
+
+It is true that in later years there has been the beginning of a better
+system of thought and discussion in Spain. But the old tradition still
+holds its own gallantly in Church and state. Nowhere in the world are
+the forms of religion so rigidly observed, and the precepts of Christian
+morality less regarded. The most facile beauties in Madrid are severe as
+Minervas on Holy Thursday. I have seen a dozen fast men at the door of a
+gambling-house fall on their knees in the dust as the Host passed by in
+the street. Yet the fair were no less frail and the senoritos were no
+less profligate for this unfeigned reverence for the outside of the cup
+and platter.
+
+In the domain of politics there is still the lamentable disproportion
+between honor and honesty. A high functionary cares nothing if the whole
+Salon del Prado talks of his pilferings, but he will risk his life in an
+instant if you call him no gentleman. The word "honor" is still used in
+all legislative assemblies, even in England and America. But the idea
+has gone by the board in all democracies, and the word means no more
+than the chamberlain's sword or the speaker's mace. The only criterion
+which the statesman of the nineteenth century applies to public acts is
+that of expediency and legality. The first question is, "Is it lawful?"
+the second, "Does it pay?" Both of these are questions of fact, and as
+such susceptible of discussion and proof. The question of honor and
+religion carries us at once into the realm of sentiment where no
+demonstration is possible. But this is where every question is planted
+from the beginning in Spanish politics. Every public matter presents
+itself under this form: "Is it consistent with Spanish honor?" and "Will
+it be to the advantage of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church?" Now,
+nothing is consistent with Spanish honor which does not recognize the
+Spain of to-day as identical with the Spain of the sixteenth century,
+and the bankrupt government of Madrid as equal in authority to the
+world-wide autocracy of Charles V. And nothing is thought to be to the
+advantage of the Church which does not tend to the concubinage of the
+spiritual and temporal power, and to the muzzling of speech and the
+drugging of the mind to sleep.
+
+Let any proposition be made which touches this traditional
+susceptibility of race, no matter how sensible or profitable it may be,
+and you hear in the Cortes and the press, and, louder than all, among
+the idle cavaliers of the _cafes,_ the wildest denunciations of the
+treason that would consent to look at things as they are. The men who
+have ventured to support the common-sense view are speedily stormed into
+silence or timid self-defence. The sword of Guzman is brandished in the
+Chambers, the name of Pelayo is invoked, the memory of the Cid is
+awakened, and the proposition goes out in a blaze of patriotic
+pyrotechnics, to the intense satisfaction of the unthinking and the
+grief of the judicious. The senoritos go back to the serious business of
+their lives--coffee and cigarettes--with a genuine glow of pride in a
+country which is capable of the noble self-sacrifice of cutting off its
+nose to spite somebody else's face.
+
+But I repeat, the most favorable sign of the times is that this tyranny
+of tradition is losing its power. A great deal was done by the single
+act of driving out the queen. This was a blow at superstition which gave
+to the whole body politic a most salutary shock. Never before in Spain
+had a revolution been directed at the throne. Before it was always an
+obnoxious ministry that was to be driven out. The monarch remained; and
+the exiled outlaw of to-day might be premier to-morrow. But the fall of
+Novaliches at the Bridge of Alcolea decided the fate not only of the
+ministry but of the dynasty; and while General Concha was waiting for
+the train to leave Madrid, Isabel of Bourbon and Divine Right were
+passing the Pyrenees.
+
+Although the moral power of the Church is still so great, the
+incorporation of freedom of worship in the constitution of 1869 has been
+followed by a really remarkable development of freedom of thought. The
+proposition was regarded by some with horror and by others with
+contempt. One of the most enlightened statesmen in Spain once said to
+me, "The provision for freedom of worship in the constitution is a mere
+abstract proposition,--it can never have any practical value except for
+foreigners. I cannot conceive of a Spaniard being anything but a
+Catholic." And so powerful was this impression in the minds of the
+deputies that the article only accords freedom of worship to foreigners
+in Spain, and adds, hypothetically, that if any Spaniards should profess
+any other religion than the Catholic, they are entitled to the same
+liberty as foreigners. The Inquisition has been dead half a century,
+but you can see how its ghost still haunts the official mind of Spain.
+It is touching to see how the broken links of the chain of superstition
+still hang about even those who imagine they are defying it. As in their
+Christian burials, following unwittingly the example of the hated Moors,
+they bear the corpse with uncovered face to the grave, and follow it
+with the funeral torch of the Romans, so the formula of the Church
+clings even to the mummery of the atheists. Not long ago in Madrid a man
+and woman who belonged to some fantastic order which rejected religion
+and law had a child born to them in the course of things, and determined
+that it should begin life free from the taint of superstition. It should
+not be christened, it should be named, in the Name of Reason. But they
+could not break loose from the idea of baptism. They poured a bottle of
+water on the shivering nape of the poor little neophyte, and its frail
+life went out in its first wheezing week.
+
+But in spite of all this a spirit of religious inquiry is growing up in
+Spain, and the Church sees it and cannot prevent it. It watches the
+liberal newspapers and the Protestant prayer-meetings much as the old
+giant in Bunyan's dream glared at the passing pilgrims, mumbling and
+muttering toothless curses. It looks as if the dead sleep of uniformity
+of thought were to be broken at last, and Spain were to enter the
+healthful and vivifying atmosphere of controversy.
+
+Symptoms of a similar change may be seen in the world of politics. The
+Republican party is only a year or two old, but what a vigorous and
+noisy infant it is! With all its faults and errors, it seems to have the
+promise of a sturdy and wholesome future. It refuses to be bound by the
+memories of the past, but keeps its eyes fixed on the brighter
+possibilities to come. Its journals, undeterred by the sword of Guzman
+or the honor of all the Caballeros,--the men on horseback,--are
+advocating such sensible measures as justice to the Antilles, and the
+sale of outlying property, which costs more than it produces. Emilio
+Castelar, casting behind him all the restraints of tradition, announces
+as his idea of liberty "the right of all citizens to obey nothing but
+the law." There is no sounder doctrine than this preached in Manchester
+or Boston. If the Spanish people can be brought to see that God is
+greater than the Church, and that the law is above the king, the day of
+final deliverance is at hand.
+
+
+
+
+TAUROMACHY
+
+
+The bull-fight is the national festival of Spain. The rigid Britons have
+had their fling at it for many years. The effeminate _badaud_ of Paris
+has declaimed against its barbarity. Even the aristocracy of Spain has
+begun to suspect it of vulgarity and to withdraw from the arena the
+light of its noble countenance. But the Spanish people still hold it to
+their hearts and refuse to be weaned from it.
+
+"As Panem et Circenses was the cry Among the Roman populace of old, So
+Pan y Toros is the cry in Spain."
+
+It is a tradition which has passed into their national existence. They
+received it from nowhere. They have transmitted it nowhither except to
+their own colonies. In late years an effort has been made to transplant
+it, but with small success. There were a few bull-fights four years ago
+at Havre. There was a sensation of curiosity which soon died away. This
+year in London the experiment was tried, but was hooted out of
+existence, to the great displeasure of the Spanish journals, who said
+the ferocious Islanders would doubtless greatly prefer baiting to death
+a half dozen Irish serfs from the estate of Lord Fritters,--a gentle
+diversion in which we are led to believe the British peers pass their
+leisure hours.
+
+It is this monopoly of the bull-fight which so endears it to the Spanish
+heart. It is to them conclusive proof of the vast superiority of both
+the human and taurine species in Spain. The eminent torero, Pepe Illo,
+said: "The love of bulls is inherent in man, especially in the Spaniard,
+among which glorious people there have been bull-fights ever since bulls
+were, because," adds Pepe, with that modesty which forms so charming a
+trait of the Iberian character, "the Spanish men are as much more brave
+than all other men, as the Spanish bull is more savage and valiant than
+all other bulls."
+
+The sport permeates the national life. I have seen it woven into the
+tapestry of palaces, and rudely stamped on the handkerchief of the
+peasant. It is the favorite game of children in the street. Loyal Spain
+was thrilled with joy recently on reading in its Paris correspondence
+that when the exiled Prince of Asturias went for a half-holiday to visit
+his imperial comrade at the Tuileries, the urchins had a game of "toro"
+on the terrace, admirably conducted by the little Bourbon and followed
+up with great spirit by the little Montijo-Bonaparte.
+
+The bull-fight has not always enjoyed the royal favor. Isabel the
+Catholic would fain have abolished bathing and bull-fighting together.
+The Spaniards, who willingly gave up their ablutions, stood stoutly by
+their bulls, and the energetic queen was baffled. Again when the
+Bourbons came in with Philip V., the courtiers turned up their thin
+noses at the coarse diversion, and induced the king to abolish it. It
+would not stay abolished, however, and Philip's successor built the
+present coliseum in expiation. The spectacle has, nevertheless, lost
+much of its early splendor by the hammering of time. Formerly the gayest
+and bravest gentlemen of the court, mounted on the best horses in the
+kingdom, went into the arena and defied the bull in the names of their
+lady-loves. Now the bull is baited and slain by hired artists, and the
+horses they mount are the sorriest hacks that ever went to the knacker.
+
+One of the most brilliant shows of the kind that was ever put upon the
+scene was the Festival of Bulls given by Philip IV. in honor of Charles
+I.,
+
+  "When the Stuart came from far,
+  Led by his love's sweet pain,
+  To Mary, the guiding star
+  That shone in the heaven of Spain."
+
+And the memory of that dazzling occasion was renewed by Ferdinand VII.
+in the year of his death, when he called upon his subjects to swear
+allegiance to his baby Isabel. This festival took place in the Plaza
+Mayor. The king and court occupied the same balconies which Charles and
+his royal friend and model had filled two centuries before. The
+champions were poor nobles, of good blood but scanty substance, who
+fought for glory and pensions, and had quadrilles of well-trained
+bull-fighters at their stirrups to prevent the farce from becoming
+tragedy. The royal life of Isabel of Bourbon was inaugurated by the
+spilled blood of one hundred bulls save one. The gory prophecy of that
+day has been well sustained. Not one year has passed since then free
+from blood shed in her cause.
+
+But these extraordinary attractions are not necessary to make a festival
+of bulls the most seductive of all pleasures to a Spaniard. On any
+pleasant Sunday afternoon, from Easter to All Souls, you have only to go
+into the street to see that there is some great excitement fusing the
+populace into one living mass of sympathy. All faces are turned one way,
+all minds are filled with one purpose. From the Puerta del Sol down the
+wide Alcala a vast crowd winds, solid as a glacier and bright as a
+kaleidoscope. From the grandee in his blazoned carriage to the manola in
+her calico gown, there is no class unrepresented. Many a red hand grasps
+the magic ticket which is to open the realm of enchantment to-day, and
+which represents short commons for a week before. The pawnbrokers' shops
+have been very animated for the few preceding days. There is nothing too
+precious to be parted with for the sake of the bulls. Many of these
+smart girls have made the ultimate sacrifice for that coveted scrap of
+paper. They would leave one their mother's cross with the children of
+Israel rather than not go. It is no cheap entertainment. The worst
+places in the broiling sun cost twenty cents, four reals; and the boxes
+are sold usually at fifteen dollars. These prices are necessary to cover
+the heavy expenses of bulls, horses, and gladiators.
+
+The way to the bull-ring is one of indescribable animation. The cabmen
+drive furiously this day their broken-kneed nags, who will soon be found
+on the horns of the bulls, for this is the natural death of the Madrid
+cab-horse; the omnibus teams dash gayly along with their shrill chime of
+bells; there are the rude jests of clowns and the high voices of excited
+girls; the water-venders droning their tempting cry, "Cool as the snow!"
+the sellers of fans and the merchants of gingerbread picking up their
+harvests in the hot and hungry crowd.
+
+The Plaza de Toros stands just outside the monumental gate of the
+Alcala. It is a low, squat, prison-like circus of stone, stuccoed and
+whitewashed, with no pretence of ornament or architectural effect. There
+is no nonsense whatever about it. It is built for the killing of bulls
+and for no other purpose. Around it, on a day of battle, you will find
+encamped great armies of the lower class of Madrilenos, who, being at
+financial ebb-tide, cannot pay to go in. But they come all the same, to
+be in the enchanted neighborhood, to hear the shouts and roars of the
+favored ones within, and to seize any possible occasion for getting in.
+Who knows? A caballero may come out and give them his check. An English
+lady may become disgusted and go home, taking away numerous lords whose
+places will be vacant. The sky may fall, and they may catch four reals'
+worth of larks. It is worth taking the chances.
+
+One does not soon forget the first sight of the full coliseum. In the
+centre is the sanded arena, surrounded by a high barrier. Around this
+rises the graded succession of stone benches for the people; then
+numbered seats for the connoisseurs; and above a row of boxes extending
+around the circle. The building holds, when full, some fourteen thousand
+persons; and there is rarely any vacant space. For myself I can say that
+what I vainly strove to imagine in the coliseum at Rome, and in the more
+solemn solitude of the amphitheatres of Capua and Pompeii, came up
+before me with the vividness of life on entering the bull-ring of
+Madrid. This, and none other, was the classic arena. This was the crowd
+that sat expectant, under the blue sky, in the hot glare of the South,
+while the doomed captives of Dacia or the sectaries of Judea commended
+their souls to the gods of the Danube, or the Crucified of Galilee. Half
+the sand lay in the blinding sun. Half the seats were illuminated by the
+fierce light. The other half was in shadow, and the dark crescent crept
+slowly all the afternoon across the arena as the sun declined in the
+west.
+
+It is hard to conceive a more brilliant scene. The women put on their
+gayest finery for this occasion. In the warm light, every bit of color
+flashes out, every combination falls naturally into its place. I am
+afraid the luxuriance of hues in the dress of the fair Iberians would be
+considered shocking in Broadway, but in the vast frame and broad light
+of the Plaza the effect was very brilliant. Thousands of party-colored
+paper fans are sold at the ring. The favorite colors are the national
+red and yellow, and the fluttering of these broad, bright disks of color
+is dazzlingly attractive. There is a gayety of conversation, a quick
+fire of repartee, shouts of recognition and salutation, which altogether
+make up a bewildering confusion.
+
+The weary young water-men scream their snow-cold refreshment. The
+orange-men walk with their gold-freighted baskets along the barrier, and
+throw their oranges with the most marvellous skill and certainty to
+people in distant boxes or benches. They never miss their mark. They
+will throw over the heads of a thousand people a dozen oranges into the
+outstretched hands of customers, so swiftly that it seems like one line
+of gold from the dealer to the buyer.
+
+At length the blast of a trumpet announces the clearing of the ring. The
+idlers who have been lounging in the arena are swept out by the
+alguaciles, and the hum of conversation gives way to an expectant
+silence. When the last loafer has reluctantly retired, the great gate is
+thrown open, and the procession of the toreros enters. They advance in a
+glittering line: first the marshals of the day, then the picadors on
+horseback, then the matadors on foot surrounded each by his quadrille of
+chulos. They walk towards the box which holds the city fathers, under
+whose patronage the show is given, and formally salute the authority.
+This is all very classic, also, recalling the _Ave Caesar, morituri,_
+etc., of the gladiators. It lacks, however, the solemnity of the Roman
+salute, from those splendid fellows who would never all leave the arena
+alive. A bullfighter is sometimes killed, it is true, but the percentage
+of deadly danger is scarcely enough to make a spectator's heart beat as
+the bedizened procession comes flashing by in the sun.
+
+The municipal authority throws the bowing alguacil a key, which he
+catches in his hat, or is hissed if he misses it. With this he unlocks
+the door through which the bull is to enter, and then scampers off with
+undignified haste through the opposite entrance. There is a bugle
+flourish, the door flies open, and the bull rushes out, blind with the
+staring light, furious with rage, trembling in every limb. This is the
+most intense moment of the day. The glorious brute is the target of
+twelve thousand pairs of eyes. There is a silence as of death, while
+every one waits to see his first movement. He is doomed from the
+beginning; the curtain has risen on a three-act tragedy, which will
+surely end with his death, but the incidents which are to fill the
+interval are all unknown. The minds and eyes of all that vast assembly
+know nothing for the time but the movements of that brute. He stands for
+an instant recovering his senses. He has been shot suddenly out of the
+darkness into that dazzling light. He sees around him a sight such as he
+never confronted before,--a wall of living faces lit up by thousands of
+staring eyes. He does not dwell long upon this, however; in his pride
+and anger he sees a nearer enemy. The horsemen have taken position near
+the gate, where they sit motionless as burlesque statues, their long
+ashen spears, iron-tipped, in rest, their wretched nags standing
+blindfolded, with trembling knees, and necks like dromedaries, not
+dreaming of their near fate. The bull rushes, with a snort, at the
+nearest one. The picador holds firmly, planting his spear-point in the
+shoulder of the brute. Sometimes the bull flinches at this sharp and
+sudden punishment, and the picador, by a sudden turn to the left, gets
+away unhurt. Then there is applause for the torero and hisses for the
+bull. Some indignant amateurs go so far as to call him cow, and to
+inform him that he is the son of his mother. But oftener he rushes in,
+not caring for the spear, and with one toss of his sharp horns tumbles
+horse and rider in one heap against the barrier and upon the sand. The
+capeadores, the cloak-bearers, come fluttering around and divert the
+bull from his prostrate victims. The picador is lifted to his feet,--his
+iron armor not permitting him to rise without help,--and the horse is
+rapidly scanned to see if his wounds are immediately mortal. If not, the
+picador mounts again, and provokes the bull to another rush. A horse
+will usually endure two or three attacks before dying. Sometimes a
+single blow from in front pierces the heart, and the blood spouts forth
+in a cataract. In this case the picador hastily dismounts, and the
+bridle and saddle are stripped in an instant from the dying brute. If a
+bull is energetic and rapid in execution, he will clear the arena in a
+few moments. He rushes at one horse after another, tears them open with
+his terrible "spears" ("horns" is a word never used in the ring), and
+sends them madly galloping over the arena, trampling out their gushing
+bowels as they fly. The assistants watch their opportunity, from time to
+time, to take the wounded horses out of the ring, plug up their gaping
+rents with tow, and sew them roughly up for another sally. It is
+incredible to see what these poor creatures will endure,--carrying their
+riders at a lumbering gallop over the ring, when their thin sides seem
+empty of entrails.
+
+Sometimes the bull comes upon the dead body of a horse he has killed.
+The smell of blood and the unmoving helplessness of the victim excite
+him to the highest pitch. He gores and tramples the carcass, and tosses
+it in the air with evident enjoyment, until diverted by some living
+tormentor. You will occasionally see a picador nervous and anxious about
+his personal safety. They are ignorant and superstitious, and subject to
+presentiments; they often go into the ring with the impression that
+their last hour has come. If one takes counsel of his fears and avoids
+the shock of combat, the hard-hearted crowd immediately discover it and
+rain maledictions on his head. I saw a picador once enter the ring as
+pale as death. He kept carefully out of the way of the bull for a few
+minutes. The sharp-eyed Spaniards noticed it, and commenced shouting,
+"Craven! He wants to live forever!" They threw orange-skins at him, and
+at last, their rage vanquishing their economy, they pelted him with
+oranges. His pallor gave way to a flush of shame and anger. He attacked
+the bull so awkwardly that the animal, killing his horse, threw him also
+with great violence. His hat flew off, his bald head struck the hard
+soil. He lay there as one dead, and was borne away lifeless. This
+mollified the indignant people, and they desisted from their abuse.
+
+A cowardly bull is much more dangerous than a courageous one, who lowers
+his head, shuts his eyes, and goes blindly at everything he sees. The
+last refuge of a bull in trouble is to leap the barrier, where he
+produces a lively moment among the water-carriers and orange-boys and
+stage-carpenters. I once saw a bull, who had done very little execution
+in the arena, leap the barrier suddenly and toss an unfortunate
+carpenter from the gangway sheer into the ring. He picked himself up,
+laughed, saluted his friends, ran a little distance and fell, and was
+carried out dying. Fatal accidents are rarely mentioned in the
+newspapers, and it is considered not quite good form to talk about them.
+
+When the bull has killed enough horses, the first act of the play
+terminates. But this is an exceedingly delicate matter for the
+authorities to decide. The audience will not endure any economy in this
+respect. If the bull is enterprising and "voluntary," he must have as
+many horses as he can dispose of. One day in Madrid the bulls operated
+with such activity that the supply of horses was exhausted before the
+close of the show, and the contractors rushed out in a panic and bought
+a half dozen screws from the nearest cab-stand. If the president orders
+out the horses before their time, he will hear remarks by no means
+complimentary from the austere groundlings.
+
+The second act is the play of the banderilleros, the flag-men. They are
+beautifully dressed and superbly built fellows, principally from
+Andalusia, got up precisely like Figaro in the opera. Theirs is the most
+delicate and graceful operation of the bull-fight. They take a pair of
+barbed darts, with little banners fluttering at their ends, and provoke
+the bull to rush at them. At the instant he reaches them, when it seems
+nothing can save them, they step aside and plant the banderillas in the
+neck of the bull. If the bull has been cowardly and sluggish, and the
+spectators have called for "fire," darts are used filled with detonating
+powder at the base, which explode in the flesh of the bull. He dances
+and skips like a kid or a colt in his agony, which is very diverting to
+the Spanish mind. A prettier conceit is that of confining small birds in
+paper cages, which come apart when the banderilla is planted, and set
+the little fluttering captives free.
+
+Decking the bull with these torturing ornaments is the last stage in the
+apprenticeship of the chulo, before he rises to the dignity of matador,
+or killer. The matadors themselves on special occasions think it no
+derogation from their dignity to act as banderilleros. But they usually
+accompany the act with some exaggeration of difficulty that reaps for
+them a harvest of applause. Frascuelo sits in a chair and plants the
+irritating bannerets. Lagartijo lays his handkerchief on the ground and
+stands upon it while he coifs the bull. A performance which never fails
+to bring down the house is for the torero to await the rush of the bull,
+and when the bellowing monster comes at him with winking eyes and
+lowered head, to put his slippered foot between the horns, and vault
+lightly over his back.
+
+These chulos exhibit the most wonderful skill and address in evading the
+assault of the bull. They can almost always trick him by waving their
+cloaks a little out of the line of their flight. Sometimes, however, the
+bull runs straight at the man, disregarding the flag, and if the
+distance is great to the barrier the danger is imminent; for swift as
+these men are, the bulls are swifter. Once I saw the bull strike the
+torero at the instant he vaulted over the barrier. He fell sprawling
+some distance the other side, safe, but terribly bruised and stunned. As
+soon as he could collect himself he sprang into the arena again, looking
+very seedy; and the crowd roared, "Saved by miracle." I could but think
+of Basilio, who, when the many cried, "A miracle," answered, "Industria!
+Industria!" But these bullfighters are all very pious, and glad to curry
+favor with the saints by attributing every success to their
+intervention. The famous matador, Paco Montes, fervently believed in an
+amulet he carried, and in the invocation of Our Lord of the True Cross.
+He called upon this special name in every tight place, and while other
+people talked of his luck he stoutly affirmed it was his faith that
+saved him; often he said he saw the veritable picture of the Passion
+coming down between him and the bull, in answer to his prayers. At every
+bull-ring there is a little chapel in the refreshment-room where these
+devout ruffians can toss off a prayer or two in the intervals of work. A
+priest is always at hand with a consecrated wafer, to visa the torero's
+passport who has to start suddenly for Paradise. It is not exactly
+regular, but the ring has built many churches and endowed many chapels,
+and must not be too rigidly regarded. In many places the chief boxes are
+reserved for the clergy, and prayers are hurried through an hour earlier
+on the day of combat.
+
+The final act is the death of the bull. It must come at last. His
+exploits in the early part of his career afford to the amateur some
+indication of the manner in which he will meet his end. If he is a
+generous, courageous brute, with more heart than brains, he will die
+gallantly and be easily killed. But if he has shown reflection,
+forethought, and that saving quality of the oppressed, suspicion, the
+matador has a serious work before him. The bull is always regarded from
+this objective standpoint. The more power of reason the brute has, the
+worse opinion the Spaniard has of him. A stupid creature who rushes
+blindly on the sword of the matador is an animal after his own heart.
+But if there be one into whose brute brain some glimmer of the awful
+truth has come,--and this sometimes happens,--if he feels the solemn
+question at issue between him and his enemy, if he eyes the man and not
+the flag, if he refuses to be fooled by the waving lure, but keeps all
+his strength and all his faculties for his own defence, the soul of the
+Spaniard rises up in hate and loathing. He calls on the matador to kill
+him any way. If he will not rush at the flag, the crowd shouts for the
+demi-lune; and the noble brute is houghed from behind, and your soul
+grows sick with shame of human nature, at the hellish glee with which
+they watch him hobbling on his severed legs.
+
+This seldom happens. The final act is usually an admirable study of
+coolness and skill against brute force. When the banderillas are all
+planted, and the bugles sound for the third time, the matador, the
+espada, the sword, steps forward with a modest consciousness of
+distinguished merit, and makes a brief speech to the corregidor,
+offering in honor of the good city of Madrid to kill the bull. He turns
+on his heel, throws his hat by a dexterous back-handed movement over the
+barrier, and advances, sword and cape in hand, to where his noble enemy
+awaits him. The bull appears to recognize a more serious foe than any he
+has encountered. He stops short and eyes the newcomer curiously. It is
+always an impressive picture: the tortured, maddened animal, whose thin
+flanks are palpitating with his hot breath, his coat one shining mass of
+blood from the darts and the spear-thrusts, his massive neck still
+decked as in mockery with the fluttering flags, his fine head and muzzle
+seeming sharpened by the hour's terrible experience, his formidable
+horns crimsoned with onset; in front of this fiery bulk of force and
+courage, the slight, sinewy frame of the killer, whose only reliance is
+on his coolness and his intellect. I never saw a matador come carelessly
+to his work. He is usually pale and alert. He studies the bull for a
+moment with all his eyes. He waves the blood-red engano, or lure, before
+his face. If the bull rushes at it with his eyes shut, the work is easy.
+He has only to select his own stroke and make it. But if the bull is
+jealous and sly, it requires the most careful management to kill him.
+The disposition of the bull is developed by a few rapid passes of the
+red flag. This must not be continued too long: the tension of the nerves
+of the auditory will not bear trifling. I remember one day the crowd was
+aroused to fury by a bugler from the adjoining barracks playing retreat
+at the moment of decision. All at once the matador seizes the favorable
+instant. He poises his sword as the bull rushes upon him. The point
+enters just between the left shoulder and the spine; the long blade
+glides in up to the hilt. The bull reels and staggers and dies.
+Sometimes the matador severs the vertebrae. The effect is like magic. He
+lays the point of his sword between the bull's horns, as lightly as a
+lady who touches her cavalier with her fan, and he falls dead as a
+stone.
+
+If the blow is a clean, well-delivered one, the enthusiasm of the people
+is unbounded. Their approval comes up in a thunderous shout of "Well
+done! Valiente! Viva!" A brown shower of cigars rains on the sand. The
+victor gathers them up: they fill his hands, his pockets, his hat. He
+gives them to his friends, and the aromatic shower continues. Hundreds
+of hats are flung into the ring. He picks them up and shies them back to
+their shouting owners. Sometimes a dollar is mingled with the flying
+compliments; but the enthusiasm of the Spaniard rarely carries him so
+far as that. For ten minutes after a good estocada, the matador is the
+most popular man in Spain.
+
+But the trumpets sound again, the door of the Toril flies open, another
+bull comes rushing out, and the present interest quenches the past. The
+play begins again, with its sameness of purpose and its infinite variety
+of incident.
+
+It is not quite accurate to say, as is often said, that the bull-fighter
+runs no risk. El Tato, the first sword of Spain, lost his leg in 1869,
+and his life was saved by the coolness and courage of Lagartijo, who
+succeeded him in the championship, and who was terribly wounded in the
+foot the next summer. Arjona killed a bull in the same year, which
+tossed and ruptured him after receiving his death-blow. Pepe Illo died
+in harness, on the sand. Every year picadors, chulos, and such small
+deer are killed, without gossip. I must copy the inscription on the
+sword which Tato presented to Lagartijo, as a specimen of tauromachian
+literature:--
+
+"If, as philosophers say, gratitude is the tribute of noble souls,
+accept, dear Lagartijo, this present; preserve it as a sacred relic, for
+it symbolizes the memory of my glories, and is at the same time the mute
+witness of my misfortune. With it I killed my last bull named
+_Peregrino,_ bred by D. Vicente Martinez, fourth of the fight of the 7th
+June, 1869, in which act I received the wound which has caused the
+amputation of my right leg. The will of man can do nothing against the
+designs of Providence. Nothing but resignation is left to thy
+affectionate friend, Antonio Sanchez [Tato]."
+
+It is in consideration of the mingled skill and danger of the trade,
+that such enormous fees are paid the principal performers. The leading
+swordsmen receive about three hundred dollars for each performance, and
+they are eagerly disputed by the direction of all the arenas of Spain.
+In spite of these large wages, they are rarely rich. They are as
+wasteful and improvident as gamblers. Tato, when he lost his leg, lost
+his means of subsistence, and his comrades organized one or two benefits
+to keep him from want. Cuchares died in the Havana, and left no
+provision for his family.
+
+There is a curious naivete in the play-bill of a bull-fight, the only
+conscientious public document I have seen in Spain. You know how we of
+Northern blood exaggerate the attractions of all sorts of shows,
+trusting to the magnanimity of the audience. "He warn't nothing like so
+little as that," confesses Mr. Magsman, "but where's your dwarf what
+is?" There are few who have the moral courage to demand their money back
+because they counted but thirty-nine thieves when the bills promised
+forty. But the management of the Madrid bull-ring knows its public too
+well to promise more than it is sure of performing. It announces six
+bulls, and positively no more. It says there will be no use of
+bloodhounds. It promises two picadors, with three others in reserve, and
+warns the public that if all five become inutilized in the combat, no
+more will be issued. With so fair a preliminary statement, what crowd,
+however inflammable, could mob the management?
+
+Some industrious and ascetic statistician has visited Spain and
+interested himself in the bullring. Here are some of the results of his
+researches. In 1864 the number of places in all the taurine
+establishments of Spain was 509,283, of which 246,813 belonged to the
+cities, and 262,470 to the country.
+
+In the year 1864, there were 427 bull-fights, of which 294 took place in
+the cities, and 13 3 in the country towns. The receipts of ninety-eight
+bullrings in 1864 reached the enormous sum of two hundred and seventeen
+and a half millions of reals (nearly $11,000,000). The 427 bull-fights
+which took place in Spain during the year 1864 caused the death of 2989
+of these fine animals, and about 7473 horses,--something more than half
+the number of the cavalry of Spain. These wasted victims could have
+ploughed three hundred thousand hectares of land, which would have
+produced a million and a half hectolitres of grain, worth eighty
+millions of reals; all this without counting the cost of the slaughtered
+cattle, worth say seven or eight millions, at a moderate calculation.
+
+Thus far the Arithmetic Man; to whom responds the tauromachian
+aficionado: That the bulk of this income goes to purposes of charity;
+that were there no bull-fights, bulls of good race would cease to be
+bred; that nobody ever saw a horse in a bull-ring that could plough a
+furrow of a hundred yards without giving up the ghost; that the nerve,
+dexterity, and knowledge of brute nature gained in the arena is a good
+thing to have in the country; that, in short, it is our way of amusing
+ourselves, and if you don't like it you can go home and cultivate
+prize-fighters, or kill two-year-old colts on the racecourse, or murder
+jockeys in hurdle-races, or break your own necks in steeple-chases, or
+in search of wilder excitement thicken your blood with beer or burn your
+souls out with whiskey.
+
+And this is all we get by our well-meant effort to convince Spaniards of
+the brutality of bullfights. Must Chicago be virtuous before I can
+object to Madrid ale, and say that its cakes are unduly gingered?
+
+Yet even those who most stoutly defend the bull-fight feel that its
+glory has departed and that it has entered into the era of full
+decadence. I was talking one evening with a Castilian gentleman, one of
+those who cling with most persistence to the national traditions, and he
+confessed that the noble art was wounded to death. "I do not refer, as
+many do, to the change from the old times, when gentlemen fought on
+their own horses in the ring. That was nonsense, and could not survive
+the time of Cervantes. Life is too short to learn bull-fighting. A
+grandee of Spain, if he knows anything else, would make a sorry torero.
+The good times of the art are more modern. I saw the short day of the
+glory of the ring when I was a boy. There was a race of gladiators then,
+such as the world will never see again,--mighty fighters before the
+king. Pepe Illo and Costillares, Romero and Paco Montes,--the world does
+not contain the stuff to make their counterparts. They were serious,
+earnest men. They would have let their right arms wither before they
+would have courted the applause of the mob by killing a bull outside of
+the severe traditions. Compare them with the men of to-day, with your
+Rafael Molina, who allows himself to be gored, playing with a heifer;
+with your frivolous boys like Frascuelo. I have seen the ring convulsed
+with laughter as that buffoon strutted across the arena, flirting his
+muleta as a manola does her skirts, the bewildered bull not knowing what
+to make of it. It was enough to make Illo turn in his bloody grave.
+
+"Why, my young friend, I remember when bulls were a dignified and
+serious matter; when we kept account of their progress from their
+pasture to the capital. We had accounts of their condition by couriers
+and carrier-pigeons. On the day when they appeared it was a high
+festival in the court. All the sombreros in Spain were there, the ladies
+in national dress with white mantillas. The young queen always in her
+palco (may God guard her). The fighters of that day were high priests of
+art; there was something of veneration in the regard that was paid them.
+Duchesses threw them bouquets with billets-doux. Gossip and newspapers
+have destroyed the romance of common life.
+
+"The only pleasure I take in the Plaza de Toros now is at night. The
+custodians know me and let me moon about in the dark. When all that is
+ignoble and mean has faded away with the daylight, it seems to me the
+ghosts of the old time come back upon the sands. I can fancy the patter
+of light hoofs, the glancing of spectral horns. I can imagine the agile
+tread of Romero, the deadly thrust of Montes, the whisper of
+long-vanished applause, and the clapping of ghostly hands. I am growing
+too old for such skylarking, and I sometimes come away with a cold in my
+head. But you will never see a bull-fight you can enjoy as I do these
+visionary festivals, where memory is the corregidor, and where the only
+spectators are the stars and I."
+
+
+
+
+RED-LETTER DAYS
+
+
+No people embrace more readily than the Spaniards the opportunity of
+spending a day without work. Their frequent holidays are a relic of the
+days when the Church stood between the people and their taskmasters, and
+fastened more firmly its hold upon the hearts of the ignorant and
+overworked masses, by becoming at once the fountain of salvation in the
+next world, and of rest in this. The government rather encouraged this
+growth of play-days, as the Italian Bourbons used to foster mendicancy,
+by way of keeping the people as unthrifty as possible. Lazzaroni are so
+much more easily managed than burghers!
+
+It is only the holy days that are successfully celebrated in Spain. The
+state has tried of late years to consecrate to idle parade a few
+revolutionary dates, but they have no vigorous national life. They grow
+feebler and more colorless year by year, because they have no depth of
+earth.
+
+The most considerable of these national festivals is the 2d of May,
+which commemorates the slaughter of patriots in the streets of Madrid by
+Murat. This is a political holiday which appeals more strongly to the
+national character of the Spaniards than any other. The mingled pride of
+race and ignorant hate of everything foreign which constitutes that
+singular passion called Spanish patriotism, or Espanolismo, is fully
+called into play by the recollections of the terrible scenes of their
+war of independence, which drove out a foreign king, and brought back
+into Spain a native despot infinitely meaner and more injurious. It is
+an impressive study in national character and thought, this
+self-satisfaction of even liberal Spaniards at the reflection that, by a
+vast and supreme effort of the nation, after countless sacrifices and
+with the aid of coalesced Europe, they exchanged Joseph Bonaparte for
+Ferdinand VII. and the Inquisition. But the victims of the Dos de Mayo
+fell fighting. Daoiz, Velarde, and Ruiz were bayoneted at their guns,
+scorning surrender. The alcalde of Mostoles, a petty village of Castile,
+called on Spain to rise against the tyrant. And Spain obeyed the summons
+of this cross-roads justice. The contempt of probabilities, the
+Quixotism of these successive demonstrations, endear them to the Spanish
+heart.
+
+Every 2d of May the city of Madrid gives up the day to funeral honors to
+the dead of 1808. The city government, attended by its Maceros, in their
+gorgeous robes of gold and scarlet, with silver maces and long white
+plumes; the public institutions of all grades, with invalids and
+veterans and charity children; a large detachment of the army and
+navy,--form a vast procession at the Town Hall, and, headed by the
+Supreme Government, march to slow music through the Puerta del Sol and
+the spacious Alcala street to the granite obelisk in the Prado which
+marks the resting-place of the patriot dead. I saw the regent of the
+kingdom, surrounded by his cabinet, sauntering all a summer's afternoon
+under a blazing sun over the dusty mile that separates the monument from
+the Ayuntamiento. The Spaniards are hopelessly inefficient in these
+matters. The people always fill the line of march, and a rivulet of
+procession meanders feebly through a wilderness of mob. It is fortunate
+that the crowd is more entertaining than the show.
+
+The Church has a very indifferent part in this ceremonial. It does
+nothing more than celebrate a mass in the shade of the dark cypresses in
+the Place of Loyalty, and then leaves the field clear to the secular
+power. But this is the only purely civic ceremony I ever saw in Spain.
+The Church is lord of the holidays for the rest of the year.
+
+In the middle of May comes the feast of the ploughboy patron of
+Madrid,--San Isidro. He was a true Madrileno in tastes, and spent his
+time lying in the summer shade or basking in the winter sunshine, seeing
+visions, while angels came down from heaven and did his farm chores for
+him. The angels are less amiable nowadays, but every true child of
+Madrid reveres the example and envies the success of the San Isidro
+method of doing business. In the process of years this lazy lout has
+become a great saint, and his bones have done more extensive and
+remarkable miracle-work than any equal amount of phosphate in existence.
+In desperate cases of sufficient rank the doctors throw up the sponge
+and send for Isidro's urn, and the drugging having ceased, the noble
+patient frequently recovers, and much honor and profit comes thereby to
+the shrine of the saint. There is something of the toady in Isidro's
+composition. You never hear of his curing any one of less than princely
+rank. I read in an old chronicle of Madrid, that once when Queen Isabel
+the Catholic was hunting in the hills that overlook the Manzanares, near
+what is now the oldest and quaintest quarter of the capital, she killed
+a bear of great size and ferocity; and doubtless thinking it might not
+be considered lady-like to have done it unassisted, she gave San Isidro
+the credit of the lucky blow and built him a nice new chapel for it near
+the Church of San Andres. If there are any doubters, let them go and see
+the chapel, as I did. When the allied armies of the Christian kings of
+Spain were seeking for a passage through the hills to the Plains of
+Tolosa, a shepherd appeared and led them straight to victory and endless
+fame. After the battle, which broke the Moorish power forever in Central
+Spain, instead of looking for the shepherd and paying him handsomely for
+his timely scout-service, they found it more pious and economical to say
+it was San Isidro in person who had kindly made himself flesh for this
+occasion. By the great altar in the Cathedral of Toledo stand side by
+side the statues of Alonso VIII., the Christian commander, and San Isidro
+brazenly swelling in the shepherd garb of that unknown guide who led
+Alonso and his chivalry through the tangled defiles of the Sierra
+Morena.
+
+His fete is the Derby Day of Madrid. The whole town goes out to his
+Hermitage on the further banks of the Manzanares, and spends a day or
+two of the soft spring weather in noisy frolic. The little church stands
+on a bare brown hill, and all about it is an improvised village
+consisting half of restaurants and the other half of toyshops. The
+principal traffic is in a pretty sort of glass whistle which forms the
+stem of an artificial rose, worn in the button-hole in the intervals of
+tooting, and little earthen pig-bells, whose ringing scares away the
+lightning. There is but one duty of the day to flavor all its pleasures.
+The faithful must go into the oratory, pay a penny, and kiss a
+glass-covered relic of the saint which the attendant ecclesiastic holds
+in his hand. The bells are rung violently until the church is full; then
+the doors are shut and the kissing begins. They are very expeditious
+about it. The worshippers drop on their knees by platoons before the
+railing. The long-robed relic-keeper puts the precious trinket rapidly
+to their lips; an acolyte follows with a saucer for the cash. The glass
+grows humid with many breaths. The priest wipes it with a dirty napkin
+from time to time. The multitude advances, kisses, pays, and retires,
+till all have their blessing; then the doors are opened and they all
+pass out,--the bells ringing furiously for another detachment. The
+pleasures of the day are like those of all fairs and public merrymaking.
+Working-people come to be idle, and idle people come to have something
+to do. There is much eating and little drinking. The milk-stalls are
+busier than the wine-shops. The people are gay and jolly, but very
+decent and clean and orderly. To the east of the Hermitage, over and
+beyond the green cool valley, the city rises on its rocky hills, its
+spires shining in the cloudless blue. Below on the emerald meadows there
+are the tents and wagons of those who have come from a distance to the
+Romeria. The sound of guitars and the drone of peasant songs come up the
+hill, and groups of men are leaping in the wild barbaric dances of
+Iberia. The scene is of another day and time. The Celt is here, lord of
+the land. You can see these same faces at Donnybrook Fair. These
+large-mouthed, short-nosed, rosy-cheeked peasant-girls are called
+Dolores and Catalina, but they might be called Bridget and Kathleen.
+These strapping fellows, with long simian upper lips, with brown
+leggings and patched, mud-colored overcoats, who are leaping and
+swinging their cudgels in that Pyrrhic round are as good Tipperary boys
+as ever mobbed an agent or pounded, twenty to one, a landlord to death.
+The same unquestioning, fervent faith, the same superficial good-nature,
+the same facility to be amused, and at bottom the same cowardly and
+cruel blood-thirst. What is this mysterious law of race which is
+stronger than time, or varying climates, or changing institutions? Which
+is cause, and which is effect, race or religion?
+
+The great Church holiday of the year is Corpus Christi. On this day the
+Host is carried in solemn procession through the principal streets,
+attended by the high officers of state, several battalions of each arm
+of the service in fresh bright uniforms, and a vast array of
+ecclesiastics in the most gorgeous stoles and chasubles their vestiary
+contains. The windows along the line of march are gayly decked with
+flags and tapestry. Work is absolutely suspended, and the entire
+population dons its holiday garb. The Puerta del Sol--at this season
+blazing with relentless light--is crowded with patient Madrilenos in
+their best clothes, the brown-cheeked maidens with flowing silks as in a
+ball-room, and with no protection against the ardent sky but the
+fluttering fan they hold in their ungloved hands. As everything is
+behind time in this easy-going land, there are two or three hours of
+broiling gossip on the glowing pavement before the Sacred Presence is
+announced by the ringing of silver bells. As the superb structure of
+filigree gold goes by, a movement of reverent worship vibrates through
+the crowd. Forgetful of silks and broadcloth and gossip, they fall on
+their knees in one party-colored mass, and, bowing their heads and
+beating their breasts, they mutter their mechanical prayers. There are
+thinking men who say these shows are necessary; that the Latin mind must
+see with bodily eyes the thing it worships, or the worship will fade
+away from its heart. If there were no cathedrals and masses, they say,
+there would be no religion; if there were no king, there would be no
+law. But we should not accept too hurriedly this ethnological theory of
+necessity, which would reject all principles of progress and positive
+good, and condemn half the human race to perpetual childhood. There was
+a time when we Anglo-Saxons built cathedrals and worshipped the king.
+Look at Salisbury and Lincoln and Ely; read the history of the growth of
+parliaments. There is nothing more beautifully sensuous than the
+religious spirit that presided over those master works of English
+Gothic; there is nothing in life more abject than the relics of the
+English love and fear of princes. But the steady growth of centuries has
+left nothing but the outworn shell of the old religion and the old
+loyalty. The churches and the castles still exist. The name of the king
+still is extant in the constitution. They remain as objects of taste and
+tradition, hallowed by a thousand memories of earlier days, but, thanks
+be to God who has given us the victory, the English race is now
+incapable of making a new cathedral or a new king.
+
+Let us not in our safe egotism deny to others the possibility of a like
+improvement.
+
+This summery month of June is rich in saints. The great apostles, John,
+Peter, and Paul, have their anniversaries on its closing days, and the
+shortest nights of the year are given up to the riotous eating of
+fritters in their honor. I am afraid that the progress of luxury and
+love of ease has wrought a change in the observance of these festivals.
+The feast of midsummer night is called the Verbena of St. John, which
+indicates that it was formerly a morning solemnity, as the vervain could
+not be hunted by the youths and maidens of Spain with any success or
+decorum at midnight. But of late years it may be that this useful and
+fragrant herb has disappeared from the tawny hills of Castile. It is
+sure that midsummer has grown too warm for any field work. So that the
+Madrilenos may be pardoned for spending the day napping, and swarming
+into the breezy Prado in the light of moon and stars and gas. The Prado
+is ordinarily the promenade of the better classes, but every Spanish
+family has its John, Paul, and Peter, and the crowded barrios of Toledo
+and the Penue-las pour out their ragged hordes to the popular festival.
+The scene has a strange gypsy wildness. From the round point of Atocha
+to where Cybele, throned among spouting waters, drives southward her
+spanking team of marble lions, the park is filled with the merry
+roysterers. At short intervals are the busy groups of fritter merchants;
+over the crackling fire a great caldron of boiling oil; beside it a
+mighty bowl of dough. The bunolero, with the swift precision of
+machinery, dips his hand into the bowl and makes a delicate ring of the
+tough dough, which he throws into the bubbling caldron. It remains but a
+few seconds, and his grimy acolyte picks it out with a long wire and
+throws it on the tray for sale. They are eaten warm, the droning cry
+continually sounding, "Bunuelos! Calientitos!" There must be millions of
+these oily dainties consumed on every night of the Verbena. For the more
+genteel revellers, the Don Juans, Pedros, and Pablos of the better sort,
+there are improvised restaurants built of pine planks after sunset and
+gone before sunrise. But the greater number are bought and eaten by the
+loitering crowd from the tray of the fritterman. It is like a vast
+gitano-camp. The hurrying crowd which is going nowhere, the blazing
+fires, the cries of the venders, the songs of the majos under the great
+trees of the Paseo, the purposeless hurly-burly, and above, the steam of
+the boiling oil and the dust raised by the myriad feet, form together a
+striking and vivid picture. The city is more than usually quiet. The
+stir of life is localized in the Prado. The only busy men in town are
+those who stand by the seething oil-pots and manufacture the brittle
+forage of the browsing herds. It is a jealous business, and requires the
+undivided attention of its professors. The _ne sutor ultra crepidam_ of
+Spanish proverb is "Bunolero haz tus bunuelos,"--Fritterman, mind thy
+fritters. With the long days and cooler airs of the autumn begin the
+different fairs. These are relics of the times of tyranny and exclusive
+privilege, when for a few days each year, by the intervention of the
+Church, or as a reward for civic service, full liberty of barter and
+sale was allowed to all citizens. This custom, more or less modified,
+may be found in most cities of Europe. The boulevards of Paris swarm
+with little booths at Christmas-time, which begin and end their lawless
+commercial life within the week. In Vienna, in Leipsic, and other
+cities, the same waste-weir of irregular trade is periodically opened.
+These fairs begin in Madrid with the autumnal equinox, and continue for
+some weeks in October. They disappear from the Alcala to break out with
+renewed virulence in the avenue of Atocha, and girdle the city at last
+with a belt of booths. While they last they give great animation and
+spirit to the street life of the town. You can scarcely make your way
+among the heaps of gaudy shawls and handkerchiefs, cheap laces and
+illegitimate jewels, that cumber the pavement. When the Jews were driven
+out of Spain, they left behind the true genius of bargaining.
+
+A nut-brown maid is attracted by a brilliant red and yellow scarf. She
+asks the sleepy merchant nodding before his wares, "What is this rag
+worth?"
+
+He answers with profound indifference, "Ten reals."
+
+"Hombre! Are you dreaming or crazy?" She drops the coveted neck-gear,
+and moves on, apparently horror-stricken.
+
+The chapman calls her back peremptorily. "Don't be rash! The scarf is
+worth twenty reals, but for the sake of Santisima Maria I offered it to
+you for half price. Very well! You are not suited. What will you give?"
+
+"Caramba! Am I buyer and seller as well? The thing is worth three reals;
+more is a robbery."
+
+"Jesus! Maria! Jose! and all the family! Go thou with God! We cannot
+trade. Sooner than sell for less than eight reals I will raise the cover
+of my brains! Go thou! It is eight of the morning, and still thou
+dreamest."
+
+She lays down the scarf reluctantly, saying, "Five?"
+
+But the outraged mercer snorts scornfully, "Eight is my last word! Go
+to!"
+
+She moves away, thinking how well that scarf would look in the Apollo
+Gardens, and casts over her shoulder a Parthian glance and bid, "Six!"
+
+"Take it! It is madness, but I cannot waste my time in bargaining."
+
+Both congratulate themselves on the operation. He would have taken five,
+and she would have given seven. How trade would suffer if we had windows
+in our breasts!
+
+The first days of November are consecrated to all the saints, and to the
+souls of all the blessed dead. They are observed in Spain with great
+solemnity; but as the cemeteries are generally of the dreariest
+character, bare, bleak, and most forbidding under the ashy sky of the
+late autumn, the days are deprived of that exquisite sentiment that
+pervades them in countries where the graves of the dead are beautiful.
+There is nothing more touching than these offerings of memory you see
+every year in Mont Parnasse and Pere-la-Chaise. Apart from all beliefs,
+there is a mysterious influence for good exerted upon the living by the
+memory of the beloved dead. On all hearts not utterly corrupt, the
+thoughts that come by the graves of the departed fall like dew from
+heaven, and quicken into life purer and higher resolves.
+
+In Spain, where there is nothing but desolation in graveyards, the
+churches are crowded instead, and the bereaved survivors commend to God
+their departed friends and their own stricken hearts in the dim and
+perfumed aisles of temples made with hands. A taint of gloom thus rests
+upon the recollection and the prayer, far different from the consolation
+that comes with the free air and the sunshine, and the infinite blue
+vault, where Nature conspires with revelation to comfort and cherish and
+console.
+
+Christmas apparently comes in Spain on no other mission than that
+referred to in the old English couplet, "bringing good cheer." The
+Spaniards are the most frugal of people, but during the days that
+precede their Noche Buena, their Good Night, they seem to be given up as
+completely to cares of the commissariat as the most eupeptic of Germans.
+Swarms of turkeys are driven in from the surrounding country, and taken
+about the streets by their rustic herdsmen, making the roads gay with
+their scarlet wattles, and waking rural memories by their vociferous
+gobbling. The great market-place of the season is the Plaza Mayor. The
+ever-fruitful provinces of the South are laid under contribution, and
+the result is a wasteful show of tropical luxuriance that seems most
+incongruous under the wintry sky. There are mountains of oranges and
+dates, brown hillocks of nuts of every kind, store of every product of
+this versatile soil. The air is filled with nutty and fruity fragrance.
+Under the ancient arcades are the stalls of the butchers, rich with the
+mutton of Castile, the hams of Estremadura, and the hero-nourishing
+bull-beef of Andalusian pastures.
+
+At night the town is given up to harmless racket. Nowhere has the
+tradition of the Latin Saturnalia been fitted with less change into the
+Christian calendar. Men, women, and children of the proletariat--the
+unemancipated slaves of necessity--go out this night to cheat their
+misery with noisy frolic. The owner of a tambourine is the equal of a
+peer; the proprietor of a guitar is the captain of his hundred. They
+troop through the dim city with discordant revel and song. They have
+little idea of music. Every one sings and sings ill. Every one dances,
+without grace or measure. Their music is a modulated howl of the East.
+Their dancing is the savage leaping of barbarians. There is no lack of
+couplets, religious, political, or amatory. I heard one ragged woman
+with a brown baby at her breast go shrieking through the Street of the
+Magdalen,--
+
+  "This is the eve of Christmas,
+  No sleep from now till morn,
+  The Virgin is in travail,
+  At twelve will the child be born!"
+
+Behind her stumped a crippled beggar, who croaked in a voice rough with
+frost and aguardiente his deep disillusion and distrust of the great:--
+
+  "This is the eve of Christmas,
+  But what is that to me?
+  We are ruled by thieves and robbers,
+  As it was and will always be."
+
+Next comes a shouting band of the youth of Spain, strapping boys with
+bushy locks, crisp and black almost to blueness, and gay young girls
+with flexible forms and dark Arab eyes that shine with a phosphorescent
+light in the shadows. They troop on with clacking castinets. The
+challenge of the mozos rings out on the frosty air,--
+
+  "This is the eve of Christmas,
+  Let us drink and love our fill!"
+
+And the saucy antiphon of girlish voices responds,--
+
+  "A man may be bearded and gray,
+  But a woman can fool him still!"
+
+The Christmas and New-Year's holidays continue for a fortnight, ending
+with the Epiphany. On the eve of the Day of the Kings a curious farce is
+performed by bands of the lowest orders of the people, which
+demonstrates the apparently endless naivete of their class. In every
+coterie of water-carriers, or mozos de cordel, there will be one found
+innocent enough to believe that the Magi are coming to Madrid that
+night, and that a proper respect to their rank requires that they must
+be met at the city gate. To perceive the coming of their feet, beautiful
+upon the mountains, a ladder is necessary, and the poor victim of the
+comedy is loaded with this indispensable "property." He is dragged by
+his gay companions, who never tire of the exquisite wit of their jest,
+from one gate to another, until suspicion supplants faith in the mind of
+the neophyte, and the farce is over.
+
+In the burgher society of Castile this night is devoted to a very
+different ceremony. Each little social circle comes together in a house
+agreed upon. They take mottoes of gilded paper and write on each the
+name of some one of the company. The names of the ladies are thrown into
+one urn, and those of the cavaliers into another, and they are drawn out
+by pairs. These couples are thus condemned by fortune to intimacy during
+the year. The gentleman is always to be at the orders of the dame and to
+serve her faithfully in every knightly fashion. He has all the duties
+and none of the privileges of a lover, unless it be the joy of those
+"who stand and wait." The relation is very like that which so astonished
+M. de Gramont in his visit to Piedmont, where the cavalier of service
+never left his mistress in public and never approached her in private.
+
+The true Carnival survives in its naive purity only in Spain. It has
+faded in Rome into a romping day of clown's play. In Paris it is little
+more than a busier season for dreary and professional vice. Elsewhere
+all over the world the Carnival gayeties are confined to the salon. But
+in Madrid the whole city, from grandee to cordwainer, goes with
+childlike earnestness into the enjoyment of the hour. The Corso begins
+in the Prado on the last Sunday before Lent, and lasts four days. From
+noon to night the great drive is filled with a double line of carriages
+two miles long, and between them are the landaus of the favored hundreds
+who have the privilege of driving up and down free from the law of the
+road. This right is acquired by the payment of ten dollars a day to city
+charities, and produces some fifteen thousand dollars every Carnival. In
+these carriages all the society of Madrid may be seen; and on foot,
+darting in and out among the hoofs of the horses, are the young men of
+Castile in every conceivable variety of absurd and fantastic disguise.
+There are of course pirates and Indians and Turks, monks, prophets, and
+kings, but the favorite costumes seem to be the Devil and the
+Englishman. Sometimes the Yankee is attempted, with indifferent success.
+He wears a ribbon-wreathed Italian bandit's hat, an embroidered jacket,
+slashed buckskin trousers, and a wide crimson belt,--a dress you would
+at once recognize as universal in Boston.
+
+Most of the maskers know by name at least the occupants of the
+carriages. There is always room for a mask in a coach. They leap in,
+swarming over the back or the sides, and in their shrill monotonous
+scream they make the most startling revelations of the inmost secrets of
+your soul. There is always something impressive in the talk of an
+unknown voice, but especially is this so in Madrid, where every one
+scorns his own business, and devotes himself rigorously to his
+neighbor's. These shrieking young monks and devilkins often surprise a
+half-formed thought in the heart of a fair Castilian and drag it out
+into day and derision. No one has the right to be offended. Duchesses
+are called Tu! Isabel! by chin-dimpled school-boys, and the proudest
+beauties in Spain accept bonbons from plebeian hands. It is true, most
+of the maskers are of the better class. Some of the costumes are very
+rich and expensive, of satin and velvet heavy with gold. I have seen a
+distinguished diplomatist in the guise of a gigantic canary-bird,
+hopping briskly about in the mud with bedraggled tail-feathers,
+shrieking well-bred sarcasms with his yellow beak.
+
+The charm of the Madrid Carnival is this, that it is respected and
+believed in. The best and fairest pass the day in the Corso, and gallant
+young gentlemen think it worth while to dress elaborately for a few
+hours of harmless and spirituelle intrigue. A society that enjoys a
+holiday so thoroughly has something in it better than the blase cynicism
+of more civilized capitals. These young fellows talk like the lovers of
+the old romances. I have never heard prettier periods of devotion than
+from some gentle savage, stretched out on the front seat of a landau
+under the peering eyes of his lady, safe in his disguise, if not
+self-betrayed, pouring out his young soul in passionate praise and
+prayer; around them the laughter and the cries, the cracking of whips,
+the roll of wheels, the presence of countless thousands, and yet these
+two young hearts alone under the pale winter sky. The rest of the
+Continent has outgrown the true Carnival. It is pleasant to see this gay
+relic of simpler times, when youth was young. No one here is too "swell"
+for it. You may find a duke in the disguise of a chimney-sweep, or a
+butcher-boy in the dress of a Crusader. There are none so great that
+their dignity would suffer by a day's reckless foolery, and there are
+none so poor that they cannot take the price of a dinner to buy a mask
+and cheat their misery by mingling for a time with their betters in the
+wild license of the Carnival.
+
+The winter's gayety dies hard. Ash Wednesday is a day of loud merriment
+and is devoted to a popular ceremony called the Burial of the Sardine. A
+vast throng of workingmen carry with great pomp a link of sausage to the
+bank of the Manzanares and inter it there with great solemnity. On the
+following Saturday, after three days of death, the Carnival has a
+resurrection, and the maddest, wildest ball of the year takes place at
+the opera. Then the sackcloth and ashes of Lent come down in good
+earnest and the town mourns over its scarlet sins. It used to be very
+fashionable for the genteel Christians to repair during this season of
+mortification to the Church of San Gines, and scourge themselves lustily
+in its subterranean chambers. A still more striking demonstration was
+for gentlemen in love to lash themselves on the sidewalks where passed
+the ladies of their thoughts. If the blood from the scourges sprinkled
+them as they sailed by, it was thought an attention no female heart
+could withstand. But these wholesome customs have decayed of late
+unbelieving years.
+
+The Lenten piety increases with the lengthening days. It reaches its
+climax on Holy Thursday. On this day all Spain goes to church: it is one
+of the obligatory days. The more you go, the better for you; so the good
+people spend the whole day from dawn to dusk roaming from one church to
+another, and investing an Ave and a Pater-Noster in each. This fills
+every street of the city with the pious crowd. No carriages are
+permitted. A silence like that of Venice falls on the rattling capital.
+With three hundred thousand people in the street, the town seems still.
+In 1870, a free-thinking cabman dared to drive up the Calle Alcala. He
+was dragged from his box and beaten half to death by the chastened
+mourners, who yelled as they kicked and cuffed him, "Que bruto! He will
+wake our Jesus."
+
+On Good Friday the gloom deepens. No colors are worn that day by the
+orthodox. The senoras appear on the street in funeral garb. I saw a
+group of fast youths come out of the jockey club, black from hat to
+boots, with jet studs and sleeve-buttons. The gayest and prettiest
+ladies sit within the church doors and beg in the holy name of charity,
+and earn large sums for the poor. There are hourly services in the
+churches, passionate sermons from all the pulpits. The streets are free
+from the painted haunters of the pavement. The whole people taste the
+luxury of a sentimental sorrow.
+
+Yet in these heavy days it is not the Redeemer whose sufferings and
+death most nearly touch the hearts of the faithful. It is Santisima
+Maria who is worshipped most. It is the Dolorous Mother who moves them
+to tears of tenderness. The presiding deity of these final days of
+meditation is Our Lady of Solitude.
+
+But at last the days of mourning are accomplished. The expiation for sin
+is finished. The grave is vanquished, death is swallowed up in victory.
+Man can turn from the grief that is natural to the joy that is eternal.
+From every steeple the bells fling out their happy clangor in glad
+tidings of great joy. The streets are flooded once more with eager
+multitudes, gay as in wedding garments. Christ has arisen! The heathen
+myth of the awakening of nature blends the old tradition with the new
+gospel. The vernal breezes sweep the skies clean and blue. Birds are
+pairing in the budding trees. The streams leap down from the melting
+snow of the hills. The brown turf takes a tint of verdure. Through the
+vast frame of things runs a quick shudder of teeming power. In the heart
+of man love and will mingle into hope. Hail to the new life and the
+ever-new religion! Hail to the resurrection morning!
+
+
+
+
+AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS
+
+
+As a general thing it is well to distrust a Spaniard's superlatives. He
+will tell you that his people are the most amiable in the world, but you
+will do well to carry your revolver into the interior. He will say there
+are no wines worth drinking but the Spanish, but you will scarcely
+forswear Clicquot and Yquem on the mere faith of his assertion. A
+distinguished general once gravely assured me that there was no
+literature in the world at all to be compared with the productions of
+the Castilian mind. All others, he said, were but pale imitations of
+Spanish master-work.
+
+Now, though you may be shocked at learning such unfavorable facts of
+'Shakespeare and Goethe and Hugo, you will hardly condemn them to an
+Auto da fe, on the testimony even of a grandee of Spain.
+
+But when a Spaniard assures you that the picture-gallery of Madrid is
+the finest in the world, you may believe him without reserve. He
+probably does not know what he is talking about. He may never have
+crossed the Pyrenees. He has no dream of the glories of Dresden, or
+Florence, or the Louvre. It is even possible that he has not seen the
+matchless collection he is boasting of. He crowns it with a sweeping
+superlative simply because it is Spanish. But the statement is
+nevertheless true.
+
+The reason of this is found in that gigantic and overshadowing fact
+which seems to be an explanation of everything in Spain,--the power and
+the tyranny of the House of Austria. The period of the vast increase of
+Spanish dominion coincided with that of the meridian glory of Italian
+art. The conquest of Granada was finished as the divine child Raphael
+began to meddle with his father's brushes and pallets, and before his
+short life ended Charles, Burgess of Ghent, was emperor and king.
+
+The dominions he governed and transmitted to his son embraced Spain, the
+Netherlands, Franche-Comte, the Milanese, Naples, and Sicily; that is to
+say, those regions where art in that age and the next attained its
+supreme development. He was also lord of the New World, whose
+inexhaustible mines poured into the lap of Europe a constant stream of
+gold. Hence came the riches and the leisure necessary to art.
+
+Charles V., as well as his great contemporary and rival, Francis I., was
+a munificent protector of art. He brought from Italy and Antwerp some of
+the most perfect products of their immortal masters. He was the friend
+and patron of Titian, and when, weary of the world and its vanities, he
+retired to the lonely monastery of Yuste to spend in devout
+contemplation the evening of his days, the most precious solace of his
+solitude was that noble canvas of the great Venetian, where Charles and
+Philip are borne, in penitential guise and garb, on luminous clouds into
+the visible glory of the Most High.
+
+These two great kings made a good use of their unbounded opportunities.
+Spain became illuminated with the glowing canvases of the incomparable
+Italians. The opening up of the New World beyond seas, the meteoric
+career of European and African conquest in which the emperor had won so
+much land and glory, had given an awakening shock to the intelligent
+youth of Spain, and sent them forth in every avenue of enterprise. This
+jealously patriotic race, which had remained locked up by the mountains
+and the seas for centuries, started suddenly out, seeking adventures
+over the earth. The mind of Spain seemed suddenly to have brightened and
+developed like that of her great king, who, in his first tourney at
+Valladolid, wrote with proud sluggishness _Nondum_--not yet--on his
+maiden shield, and a few years later in his young maturity adopted the
+legend of arrogant hope and promise,--_Plus Ultra._ There were seen two
+emigrations of the young men of Spain, eastward and westward. The latter
+went for gold and material conquest into the American wilds; and the
+former, led by the sacred love of art, to that land of beauty and
+wonder, then, now, and always the spiritual shrine of all
+peoples,--Italy.
+
+A brilliant young army went out from Spain on this new crusade of the
+beautiful. From the plains of Castile and the hills of Navarre went,
+among others, Berruguete, Becerra, and the marvellous deaf-mute
+Navarrete. The luxurious city of Valentia sent Juan de Juanes and
+Ribalta. Luis de Vargas went out from Seville, and from Cordova the
+scholar, artist, and thinker, Paul of Cespedes. The schools of Rome and
+Venice and Florence were thronged with eager pilgrims, speaking an alien
+Latin and filled with a childlike wonder and appreciation.
+
+In that stirring age the emigration was not all in one direction. Many
+distinguished foreigners came down to Spain, to profit by the new love
+of art in the Peninsula. It was Philip of Burgundy who carved, with
+Berruguete, those miracles of skill and patience we admire to-day in the
+choir of Toledo. Peter of Champagne painted at Seville the grand
+altar-piece that so comforted the eyes and the soul of Murillo. The wild
+Greek bedouin, George Theotocopouli, built the Mozarabic chapel and
+filled the walls of convents with his weird ghost-faces. Moor, or Moro,
+came from the Low Countries, and the Carducci brothers from Italy, to
+seek their fortunes in Madrid. Torrigiani, after breaking Michael
+Angelo's nose in Florence, fled to Granada, and died in a prison of the
+Inquisition for smashing the face of a Virgin which a grandee of Spain
+wanted to steal from him.
+
+These immigrations, and the refluent tide of Spanish students from
+Italy, founded the various schools of Valentia, Toledo, Seville, and
+Madrid. Madrid soon absorbed the school of Toledo, and the attraction of
+Seville was too powerful for Valentia. The Andalusian school counts
+among its early illustrations Vargas, Roelas, the Castillos, Herrera,
+Pacheco, and Moya, and among its later glories Velazquez, Alonzo Cano,
+Zurbaran, and Murillo, last and greatest of the mighty line. The school
+of Madrid begins with Berruguete and Na-varrete, the Italians Caxes,
+Rizi, and others, who are followed by Sanchez Coello, Pantoja,
+Collantes. Then comes the great invader Velazquez, followed by his
+retainers Pareja and Carreno, and absorbs the whole life of the school.
+Claudio Coello makes a good fight against the rapid decadence. Luca
+Giordano comes rattling in from Naples with his whitewash-brush,
+painting a mile a minute, and classic art is ended in Spain with the
+brief and conscientious work of Raphael Mengs.
+
+There is therefore little distinction of schools in Spain. Murillo, the
+glory of Seville, studied in Madrid, and the mighty Andalusian,
+Velazquez, performed his enormous life's work in the capital of Castile.
+
+It now needs but one word to show how the Museum of Madrid became so
+rich in masterpieces. During the long and brilliant reigns of Charles V.
+and Philip II., when art had arrived at its apogee in Italy, and was
+just beginning its splendid career in Spain, these powerful monarchs had
+the lion's share of all the best work that was done in the world. There
+was no artist so great but he was honored by the commands of these lords
+of the two worlds. They thus formed in their various palaces,
+pleasure-houses, and cloisters a priceless collection of pictures
+produced in the dawn of the Spanish and the triumphant hey-day of
+Italian genius. Their frivolous successors lost provinces and kingdoms,
+honor and prestige, but they never lost their royal prerogative nor
+their taste for the arts. They consoled themselves for the slings and
+arrows of outrageous fortune by the delights of sensual life, and
+imagined they preserved some distant likeness to their great forerunners
+by encouraging and protecting Velazquez and Lope de Vega and other
+intellectual giants of that decaying age. So while, as the result of a
+vicious system of kingly and spiritual thraldom, the intellect of Spain
+was forced away from its legitimate channels of thought and action,
+under the shadow of the royal prerogative, which survived the genuine
+power of the older kings, art flourished and bloomed, unsuspected and
+unpersecuted by the coward jealousy of courtier and monk.
+
+The palace and the convent divided the product of those marvellous days.
+Amid all the poverty of the failing state, it was still the king and
+clergy who were best able to appropriate the works of genius. This may
+have contributed to the decay of art. The immortal canvases passed into
+oblivion in the salons of palaces and the cells of monasteries. Had they
+been scattered over the land and seen by the people, they might have
+kept alive the spark that kindled their creators. But exclusiveness is
+inevitably followed by barrenness. When the great race of Spanish
+artists ended, these matchless works were kept in the safe obscurity of
+palaces and religious establishments. History was working in the
+interests of this Museum. The pictures were held by the clenched dead
+hand of the Church and the throne. They could not be sold or
+distributed. They made the dark places luminous, patiently biding their
+time.
+
+It was long enough coming, and it was a despicable hand that brought
+them into the light. Ferdinand VII. thought his palace would look
+fresher if the walls were covered with French paper, and so packed all
+the pictures off to the empty building on the Prado, which his
+grandfather had built for a museum. As soon as the glorious collection
+was exposed to the gaze of the world, its incontestable merit was at
+once recognized. Especially were the works of Velazquez, hitherto almost
+an unknown name in Europe, admired and appreciated. Ferdinand, finding
+he had done a clever thing unawares, began to put on airs and poser for
+a patron of art. The gallery was still further immensely enriched on the
+exclaustration of the monasteries, by the hidden treasures of the
+Escorial, and other spoils of mortmain. And now, as a collection of
+masterpieces, it has no equal in the world.
+
+A few figures will prove this. It contains more than two thousand
+pictures already catalogued,--all of them worth a place on the walls.
+Among these there are ten by Raphael, forty-three by Titian, thirty-four
+by Tintoret, twenty-five by Paul Veronese. Rubens has the enormous
+contingent of sixty-four. Of Teniers, whose works are sold for fabulous
+sums for the square inch, this extraordinary museum possesses no less
+than sixty finished pictures,--the Louvre considers itself rich with
+fourteen. So much for a few of the foreigners. Among the Spaniards the
+three greatest names could alone fill a gallery. There are sixty-five
+Velazquez, forty-six Murillos, and fifty-eight Riberas. Compare these
+figures with those of any other gallery in existence, and you will at
+once recognize the hopeless superiority of this collection. It is not
+only the greatest collection in the world, but the greatest that can
+ever be made until this is broken up.
+
+But with all this mass of wealth it is not a complete, nor, properly
+speaking, a representative museum. You cannot trace upon its walls the
+slow, groping progress of art towards perfection. It contains few of
+what the book-lovers call _incunabula._ Spanish art sprang out
+full-armed from the mature brain of Rome. Juan de Juanes came back from
+Italy a great artist. The schools of Spain were budded on a full-bearing
+tree. Charles and Philip bought masterpieces, and cared little for the
+crude efforts of the awkward pencils of the necessary men who came
+before Raphael. There is not a Perugino in Madrid. There is nothing
+Byzantine, no trace of Renaissance; nothing of the patient work of the
+early Flemings,--the art of Flanders comes blazing in with the full
+splendor of Rubens and Van Dyck. And even among the masters, the
+representation is most unequal. Among the wilderness of Titians and
+Tintorets you find but two Domenichinos and two Correggios. Even in
+Spanish art the gallery is far from complete. There is almost nothing
+of such genuine painters as Zurbaran and Herrera.
+
+But recognizing all this, there is, in this glorious temple, enough to
+fill the least enthusiastic lover of art with delight and adoration for
+weeks and months together. If one knew he was to be blind in a year,
+like the young musician in Auerbach's exquisite romance, I know of no
+place in the world where he could garner up so precious a store of
+memories for the days of darkness, memories that would haunt the soul
+with so divine a light of consolation, as in that graceful Palace of the
+Prado.
+
+It would be a hopeless task to attempt to review with any detail the
+gems of this collection. My memory is filled with the countless canvases
+that adorn the ten great halls. If I refer to my notebook I am equally
+discouraged by the number I have marked for special notice. The
+masterpieces are simply innumerable. I will say a word of each room, and
+so give up the unequal contest.
+
+As you enter the Museum from the north, you are in a wide
+sturdy-columned vestibule, hung with splashy pictures of Luca Giordano.
+To your right is the room devoted to the Spanish school; to the left,
+the Italian. In front is the grand gallery where the greatest works of
+both schools are collected. In the Spanish saloon there is an
+indefinable air of severity and gloom. It is less perfectly lighted than
+some others, and there is something forbidding in the general tone of
+the room. There are prim portraits of queens and princes, monks in
+contemplation, and holy people in antres vast and deserts idle. Most
+visitors come in from a sense of duty, look hurriedly about, and go out
+with a conscience at ease; in fact, there is a dim suggestion of the
+fagot and the rack about many of the Spanish masters. At one end of this
+gallery the Prometheus of Ribera agonizes chained to his rock. His
+gigantic limbs are flung about in the fury of immortal pain. A vulture,
+almost lost in the blackness of the shadows, is tugging at his vitals.
+His brow is convulsed with the pride and anguish of a demigod. It is a
+picture of horrible power. Opposite hangs one of the few Zurbarans of
+the gallery,--also a gloomy and terrible work. A monk kneels in shadows
+which, by the masterly chiaroscuro of this ascetic artist, are made to
+look darker than blackness. Before him in a luminous nimbus that burns
+its way through the dark, is the image of the crucified Saviour, head
+downwards. So remarkable is the vigor of the drawing and the power of
+light in this picture that you can imagine you see the resplendent
+crucifix suddenly thrust into the shadow by the strong hands of
+invisible spirits, and swayed for a moment only before the dazzled eyes
+of the ecstatic solitary.
+
+But after you have made friends with this room it will put off its
+forbidding aspect, and you will find it hath a stern look but a gentle
+heart. It has two lovely little landscapes by Murillo, showing how
+universal was that wholesome genius. Also one of the largest landscapes
+of Velazquez, which, when you stand near it, seems a confused mass of
+brown daubs, but stepping back a few yards becomes a most perfect view
+of the entrance to a royal park. The wide gate swings on its pivot
+before your eyes. A court cortege moves in,--the long, dark alley
+stretches off for miles directly in front, without any trick of lines or
+curves; the artist has painted the shaded air. To the left a patch of
+still water reflects the dark wood, and above there is a distant and
+tranquil sky. Had Velazquez not done such vastly greater things, his few
+landscapes would alone have won him fame enough. He has in this room a
+large number of royal portraits,--one especially worth attention, of
+Philip III. The scene is by the shore,--a cool foreground of sandy
+beach,--a blue-gray stretch of rippled water, and beyond, a low
+promontory between the curling waves and the cirrus clouds. The king
+mounts a magnificent gray horse, with a mane and tail like the broken
+rush of a cascade. The keeping is wonderful; a fresh sea breeze blows
+out of the canvas. A brilliant bit of color is thrown into the red,
+gold-fringed scarf of the horseman, fluttering backward over his
+shoulder. Yet the face of the king is, as it should be, the principal
+point of the picture,--the small-eyed, heavy-mouthed, red-lipped, fair,
+self-satisfied face of these Austrian despots. It is a handsomer face
+than most of Velazquez, as it was probably painted from memory and
+lenient tradition. For Philip III. was gathered to his fathers in the
+Escorial before Velazquez came up from Andalusia to seek his fortune at
+the court. The first work he did in Madrid was to paint the portrait of
+the king, which so pleased his majesty that he had it repeated _ad
+nauseam._ You see him served up in every form in this gallery,--on foot,
+on horseback, in full armor, in a shooting-jacket, at picnics, and
+actually on his knees at his prayers! We wonder if Velazquez ever grew
+tired of that vacant face with its contented smirk, or if in that loyal
+age the smile of royalty was not always the sunshine of the court?
+
+There is a most instructive study of faces in the portraits of the
+Austrian line. First comes Charles V., the First of Spain, painted by
+Titian at Augsburg, on horseback, in the armor he wore at Muhl-berg, his
+long lance in rest, his visor up over the eager, powerful face,--the eye
+and beak of an eagle, the jaw of a bull-dog, the face of a born ruler, a
+man of prey. And yet in the converging lines about the eyes, in the
+premature gray hair, in the nervous, irritable lips, you can see the
+promise of early decay, of an age that will be the spoil of superstition
+and bigotry. It is the face of a man who could make himself emperor and
+hermit. In his son, Philip II., the soldier dies out and the bigot is
+intensified. In the fine portrait by Pantoja, of Philip in his age,
+there is scarcely any trace of the fresh, fair youth that Titian painted
+as Adonis. It is the face of a living corpse; of a ghastly pallor,
+heightened by the dull black of his mourning suit, where all passion and
+feeling have died out of the livid lips and the icy eyes. Beside him
+hangs the portrait of his rickety, feebly passionate son, the
+unfortunate Don Carlos. The forehead of the young prince is narrow and
+ill-formed; the Austrian chin is exaggerated one degree more; he looks a
+picture of fitful impulse. His brother, Philip III., we have just seen,
+fair and inane,--a monster of cruelty, who burned Jews and banished
+Moors, not from malice, but purely from vacuity of spirit; his head
+broadens like a pine-apple from the blond crest to the plump jowls.
+Every one knows the head of Philip IV.,--he was fortunate in being the
+friend of Velazquez,--the high, narrow brow, the long, weak face, the
+yellow, curled mustache, the thick, red lips, and the ever lengthening
+Hapsburg chin. But the line of Austria ends with the utmost limit of
+caricature in the face of Charles the Bewitched! Carreno has given us an
+admirable portrait of this unfortunate,--the forehead caved in like the
+hat of a drunkard, the red-lidded eyes staring vacantly, a long, thin
+nose absurd as a Carnival disguise, an enormous mouth which he could not
+shut, the under-jaw projected so prodigiously,--a face incapable of any
+emotion but fear. And yet in gazing at this idiotic mask you are
+reminded of another face you have somewhere seen, and are startled to
+remember it is the resolute face of the warrior and statesman, the king
+of men, the Kaiser Karl. Yes, this pitiable being was the descendant of
+the great emperor, and for that sufficient reason, although he was an
+impotent and shivering idiot, although he could not sleep without a
+friar in his bed to keep the devils away, for thirty-five years this
+scarecrow ruled over Spain, and dying made a will whose accomplishment
+bathed the Peninsula in blood. It must be confessed this institution of
+monarchy is a luxury that must be paid for.
+
+We did not intend to talk of politics in this room, but that line of
+royal effigies was too tempting. Before we go, let us look at a
+beautiful Magdalen in penitence, by an unknown artist of the school of
+Murillo. She stands near the entrance of her cave, in a listening
+attitude. The bright out-of-door light falls on her bare shoulder and
+gives the faintest touch of gold to her dishevelled brown hair. She
+casts her eyes upward, the large melting eyes of Andalusia; a chastened
+sorrow, through which a trembling hope is shining, softens the somewhat
+worldly beauty of her exquisite and sensitive face. Through the mouth of
+the cave we catch a glimpse of sunny mountain solitude, and in the rosy
+air that always travels with Spanish angels a band of celestial
+serenaders is playing. It is a charming composition, without any depth
+of sentiment or especial mastery of treatment, but evidently painted by
+a clever artist in his youth, and this Magdalen is the portrait of the
+lady of his dreams. None of Murillo's pupils but Tobar could have
+painted it, and the manner is precisely the same as that of his Divina
+Pastora.
+
+Across the hall is the gallery consecrated to Italian artists. There are
+not many pictures of the first rank here. They have been reserved for
+the great central gallery, where we are going. But while here, we must
+notice especially two glorious works of Tintoret,--the same subject
+differently treated,--the Death of Holofernes. Both are placed higher
+than they should be, considering their incontestable merit. A full light
+is needed to do justice to that magnificence of color which is the pride
+of Venice. There are two remarkable pictures of Giordano,--one in the
+Roman style, which would not be unworthy of the great Sanzio himself, a
+Holy Family, drawn and colored with that scrupulous correctness which
+seems so impossible in the ordinary products of this Protean genius; and
+just opposite, an apotheosis of Rubens, surrounded by his usual
+"properties" of fat angels and genii, which could be readily sold
+anywhere as a specimen of the estimate which the unabashed Fleming
+placed upon himself. It is marvellous that any man should so master the
+habit and the thought of two artists so widely apart as Raphael and
+Rubens, as to produce just such pictures as they would have painted upon
+the same themes. The halls and dark corridors of the Museum are filled
+with Giordano's canvases. In less than ten years' residence in Spain he
+covered the walls of dozens of churches and palaces with his fatally
+facile work. There are more than three hundred pictures recorded as
+executed by him in that time. They are far from being without merit.
+There is a singular slap-dash vigor about his drawing. His coloring,
+except when he is imitating some earlier master, is usually thin and
+poor. It is difficult to repress an emotion of regret in looking at his
+laborious yet useless life. With great talents, with indefatigable
+industry, he deluged Europe with paintings that no one cares for, and
+passed into history simply as Luca Fa Presto,--Luke Work-Fast.
+
+It is not by mere activity that great things are done in art. In the
+great gallery we now enter we see the deathless work of the men who
+wrought in faith. This is the grandest room in Christendom. It is about
+three hundred and fifty feet long and thirty-five broad and high. It is
+beautifully lighted from above. Its great length is broken here and
+there by vases and statues, so placed between doors as nowhere to
+embarrass the view. The northern half of the gallery is Spanish, and the
+southern half Italian. Halfway down, a door to the left opens into an
+oval chamber, devoted to an eclectic set of masterpieces of every school
+and age. The gallery ends in a circular room of French and German
+pictures, on either side of which there are two great halls of Dutch and
+Flemish. On the ground floor there are some hundreds more Flemish and a
+hall of sculpture.
+
+The first pictures you see to your left are by the early masters of
+Spain,--Morales, called in Spain the Divine, whose works are now
+extremely rare, the Museum possessing only three or four, long,
+fleshless faces and stiff figures of Christs and Marys,--and Juan de
+Juanes, the founder of the Valentian school, who brought back from Italy
+the lessons of Raphael's studio, that firmness of design and brilliancy
+of color, and whose genuine merit has survived all vicissitudes of
+changing taste. He has here a superb Last Supper and a spirited series
+of pictures illustrating the martyrdom of Stephen. There is perhaps a
+little too much elaboration of detail, even for the Romans. Stephen's
+robes are unnecessarily new, and the ground where he is stoned is
+profusely covered with convenient round missiles the size of Vienna
+rolls, so exactly suited to the purpose that it looks as if Providence
+sided with the persecutors. But what a wonderful variety and truth in
+the faces and the attitudes of the groups! What mastery of drawing, and
+what honest integrity of color after all these ages! It is reported of
+Juanes that he always confessed and prayed before venturing to take up
+his pencils to touch the features of the saints and Saviours that shine
+on his canvas. His conscientious fervor has its reward.
+
+Across the room are the Murillos. Hung together are two pictures, not of
+large dimensions, but of exquisite perfection, which will serve as fair
+illustrations of the work of his youth and his age; the frio and the
+vaporoso manner. In the former manner is this charming picture of
+Rebecca at the Well; a graceful composition, correct and somewhat severe
+drawing, the greatest sharpness and clearness of outline. In the
+Martyrdom of St. Andrew the drawing and the composition are no less
+absolutely perfect, but there hangs over the whole picture a luminous
+haze of strangeness and mystery. A light that never was on sea or land
+bathes the distant hills and battlements, touches the spears of the
+legionaries, and shines in full glory on the ecstatic face of the aged
+saint. It does not seem a part of the scene. You see the picture through
+it. A step further on there is a Holy Family, which seems to me the
+ultimate effort of the early manner. A Jewish carpenter holds his
+fair-haired child between his knees. The urchin holds up a bird to
+attract the attention of a little white dog on the floor. The mother, a
+dark-haired peasant woman, looks on the scene with quiet amusement. The
+picture is absolutely perfect in detail. It seems to be the _consigne_
+among critics to say it lacks "style." They say it is a family scene in
+Judaea, _voila tout._ Of course, and it is that very truth and nature
+that makes this picture so fascinating. The Word was made flesh, and not
+a phosphorescent apparition; and Murillo knew what he was about when he
+painted this view of the interior of St. Joseph's shop. What absurd
+presumption to accuse this great thinker of a deficiency of ideality, in
+face of these two glorious Marys of the Conception that fill the room
+with light and majesty! They hang side by side, so alike and yet so
+distinct in character. One is a woman in knowledge and a goddess of
+purity; the other, absolute innocence, startled by the stupendous
+revelation and exalted by the vaguely comprehended glory of the future.
+It is before this picture that the visitor always lingers longest. The
+face is the purest expression of girlish loveliness possible to art. The
+Virgin floats upborne by rosy clouds, flocks of pink cherubs flutter at
+her feet waving palm-branches. The golden air is thick with suggestions
+of dim celestial faces, but nothing mars the imposing solitude of the
+Queen of Heaven, shrined alone, throned in the luminous azure. Surely no
+man ever understood or interpreted like this grand Andalusian the power
+that the worship of woman exerts on the religions of the world. All the
+passionate love that has been poured out in all the ages at the feet of
+Ashtaroth and Artemis and Aphrodite and Freya found visible form and
+color at last on that immortal canvas where, with his fervor of religion
+and the full strength of his virile devotion to beauty, he created, for
+the adoration of those who should follow him, this type of the perfect
+Feminine,--
+
+"Thee! standing loveliest in the open heaven! Ave Maria! only Heaven and
+Thee!"
+
+There are some dozens more of Murillo here almost equally remarkable,
+but I cannot stop to make an unmeaning catalogue of them. There is a
+charming Gypsy Fortune-teller, whose wheedling voice and smile were
+caught and fixed in some happy moment in Seville; an Adoration of the
+Shepherds, wonderful in its happy combination of rigid truth with the
+warmest glow of poetry; two Annunciations, rich with the radiance that
+streams through the rent veil of the innermost heaven,--lights painted
+boldly upon lights, the White Dove sailing out of the dazzling
+background of celestial effulgence,--a miracle and mystery of theology
+repeated by a miracle and mystery of art.
+
+Even when you have exhausted the Murillos of the Museum you have not
+reached his highest achievements in color and design. You will find
+these in the Academy of San Fernando,--the Dream of the Roman Gentleman,
+and the Founding of the Church of St. Mary the Greater; and the powerful
+composition of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, in her hospital work. In the
+first, a noble Roman and his wife have suddenly fallen asleep in their
+chairs in an elegant apartment. Their slumber is painted with curious
+felicity,--you lower your voice for fear of waking them. On the left of
+the picture is their dream: the Virgin comes in a halo of golden clouds
+and designates the spot where her church is to be built. In the next
+picture the happy couple kneel before the pope and expose their high
+commission, and outside a brilliant procession moves to the ceremony of
+the laying of the corner-stone. The St. Elizabeth is a triumph of genius
+over a most terribly repulsive subject. The wounds and sores of the
+beggars are painted with unshrinking fidelity, but every vulgar detail
+is redeemed by the beauty and majesty of the whole. I think in these
+pictures of Murillo the last word of Spanish art was reached. There was
+no further progress possible in life, even for him. "Other heights in
+other lives, God willing."
+
+Returning to the Museum and to Velazquez, we find ourselves in front of
+his greatest historical work, the Surrender of Breda. This is probably
+the most utterly unaffected historical painting in existence. There is
+positively no stage business about it. On the right is the Spanish
+staff, on the left the deputation of the vanquished Flemings. In the
+centre the great Spinola accepts the keys of the city from the governor;
+his attitude and face are full of dignity softened by generous and
+affable grace. He lays his hand upon the shoulder of the Flemish
+general, and you can see he is paying him some chivalrous compliment on
+the gallant fight he has lost. If your eyes wander through the open
+space between the two escorts, you see a wonderful widespread landscape
+in the Netherlands, which would form a fine picture if the figures all
+were gone. Opposite this great work is another which artists consider
+greater,--Las Meninas. When Luca Giordano came from Italy he inquired
+for this picture, and said on seeing it, "This is the theology of
+painting." If our theology were what it should be, and cannot be,
+absolute and unquestionable truth, Luca the Quick-worker would have been
+right. Velazquez was painting the portrait of a stupid little infanta
+when the idea came to him of perpetuating the scene just as it was. We
+know how we have wished to be sure of the exact accessories of past
+events. The modern rage for theatrical local color is an illustration of
+this desire. The great artist, who must have honored his art, determined
+to give to future ages an exact picture of one instant of his glorious
+life. It is not too much to say he has done this. He stands before his
+easel, his pencils in his hand. The little princess is stiffly posing in
+the centre. Her little maids are grouped about her. Two hideous dwarfs
+on the right are teasing a noble dog who is too drowsy and magnanimous
+to growl. In the background at the end of a long gallery a gentleman is
+opening a door to the garden. The presence of royalty is indicated by
+the reflection of the faces of the king and queen in a small mirror,
+where you would expect to see your own. The longer you look upon this
+marvellous painting, the less possible does it seem that it is merely
+the placing of color on canvas which causes this perfect illusion. It
+does not seem possible that you are looking at a plane surface. There is
+a stratum of air before, behind, and beside these figures. You could
+walk on that floor and see how the artist is getting on with the
+portrait. There is space and light in this picture, as in any room.
+Every object is detached, as in the common miracle of the stereoscope.
+If art consist in making a fleeting moment immortal, if the True is a
+higher ideal than the Beautiful, then it will be hard to find a greater
+painting than this. It is utterly without beauty; its tone is a cold
+olive green-gray; there is not one redeeming grace or charm about it
+except the noble figure of Velazquez himself,--yet in its austere
+fidelity to truth it stands incomparable in the world. It gained
+Velazquez his greatest triumph. You see on his breast a sprawling red
+cross, painted evidently by an unskilful hand. This was the gracious
+answer made by Philip IV. when the artist asked him if anything was
+wanting to the picture. This decoration, daubed by the royal hand, was
+the accolade of the knighthood of Santiago,--an honor beyond the dreams
+of an artist of that day. It may be considered the highest compliment
+ever paid to a painter, except the one paid by Courbet to himself, when
+he refused to be decorated by the Man of December.
+
+Among Velazquez's most admirable studies of life is his picture of the
+Borrachos. A group of rustic roysterers are admitting a neophyte into
+the drunken _confrerie._ He kneels to receive a crown of ivy from the
+hands of the king of the revel. A group of older tipplers are filling
+their cups, or eyeing their brimming glasses, with tipsy, mock-serious
+glances. There has never been a chapter written which so clearly shows
+the drunkard's nature as this vulgar anacreontic. A thousand men have
+painted drunken frolics, but never one with such distinct spiritual
+insight as this. To me the finest product of Jordaens' genius is his
+Bohnen Koenig in the Belvedere, but there you see only the incidents of
+the mad revel; every one is shouting or singing or weeping with maudlin
+glee or tears. But in this scene of the Borrachos there is nothing
+scenic or forced. These topers have come together to drink, for the love
+of the wine,--the fun is secondary. This wonderful reserve of Velazquez
+is clearly seen in his conception of the king of the rouse. He is a
+young man, with a heavy, dull, somewhat serious face, fat rather than
+bloated, rather pale than flushed. He is naked to the waist to show the
+plump white arms and shoulders and the satiny skin of the voluptuary;
+one of those men whose heads and whose stomachs are too loyal ever to
+give them _Katzenjammer_ or remorse. The others are of the commoner type
+of haunters of wine-shops,--with red eyes and coarse hides and grizzled
+matted hair,--but every man of them inexorably true, and a predestined
+sot.
+
+We must break away from Velazquez, passing by his marvellous portraits
+of kings and dwarfs, saints and poodles,--among whom there is a dwarf of
+two centuries ago, who is too like Tom Thumb to serve for his twin
+brother,--and a portrait of Aesop, which is a flash of intuition, an
+epitome of all the fables. Before leaving the Spaniards we must look at
+the most pleasing of all Ribera's works,--the Ladder-Dream of Jacob.
+The patriarch lies stretched on the open plain in the deep sleep of the
+weary. To the right in a broad shaft of cloudy gold the angels are
+ascending and descending. The picture is remarkable for its mingling the
+merits of Ribera's first and second manner. It is a Caravaggio in its
+strength and breadth of light and shade, and a Correggio in its delicacy
+of sentiment and refined beauty of coloring. He was not often so
+fortunate in his Parmese efforts. They are usually marked by a timidity
+and an attempt at prettiness inconceivable in the haughty and impulsive
+master of the Neapolitan school.
+
+Of the three great Spaniards, Ribera is the least sympathetic. He often
+displays a tumultuous power and energy to which his calmer rivals are
+strangers. But you miss in him that steady devotion to truth which
+distinguishes Velazquez, and that spiritual lift which ennobles Murillo.
+The difference, I conceive, lies in the moral character of the three.
+Ribera was a great artist, and the others were noble men. Ribera passed
+a youth of struggle and hunger and toil among the artists of Rome,--a
+stranger and penniless in the magnificent city,--picking up crusts in
+the street and sketching on quiet curbstones, with no friend, and no
+name but that of Spagnoletto,--the little Spaniard. Suddenly rising to
+fame, he broke loose from his Roman associations and fled to Naples,
+where he soon became the wealthiest and the most arrogant artist of his
+time. He held continually at his orders a faction of _bravi_ who drove
+from Naples, with threats and insults and violence, every artist of
+eminence who dared visit the city. Car-racci and Guido only saved their
+lives by flight, and the blameless and gifted Domenichino, it is said,
+was foully murdered by his order. It is not to such a heart as this that
+is given the ineffable raptures of Murillo or the positive revelations
+of Velazquez. These great souls were above cruelty or jealousy.
+Velazquez never knew the storms of adversity. Safely anchored in the
+royal favor, he passed his uneventful life in the calm of his beloved
+work. But his hand and home were always open to the struggling artists
+of Spain. He was the benefactor of Alonzo Cano; and when Murillo came up
+to Madrid, weary and footsore with his long tramp from Andalusia,
+sustained by an innate consciousness of power, all on fire with a
+picture of Van Dyck he had seen in Seville, the rich and honored painter
+of the court received with generous kindness the shabby young wanderer,
+clothed him, and taught him, and watched with noble delight the first
+flights of the young eagle whose strong wing was so soon to cleave the
+empyrean. And when Murillo went back to Seville he paid his debt by
+doing as much for others. These magnanimous hearts were fit company for
+the saints they drew.
+
+We have lingered so long with the native artists we shall have little to
+say of the rest. There are ten fine Raphaels, but it is needless to
+speak of them. They have been endlessly reproduced. Raphael is known and
+judged by the world. After some centuries of discussion the scorners and
+the critics are dumb. All men have learned the habit of Albani, who, in
+a frivolous and unappreciative age, always uncovered his head at the
+name of Raphael Sanzio. We look at his precious work with a mingled
+feeling of gratitude for what we have, and of rebellious wonder that
+lives like his and Shelley's should be extinguished in their glorious
+dawn, while kings and country gentlemen live a hundred years. What
+boundless possibilities of bright achievement these two divine youths
+owed us in the forty years more they should have lived! Raphael's
+greatest pictures in Madrid are the Spasimo di Sicilia, and the Holy
+Family, called La Perla. The former has a singular history. It was
+painted for a convent in Palermo, shipwrecked on the way, and thrown
+ashore on the gulf of Genoa. It was again sent to Sicily, brought to
+Spain by the Viceroy of Naples, stolen by Napoleon, and in Paris was
+subjected to a brilliantly successful operation for transferring the
+layer of paint from the worm-eaten wood to canvas. It came back to Spain
+with other stolen goods from the Louvre. La Perla was bought by Philip
+IV. at the sale of Charles I.'s effects after his decapitation. Philip
+was fond of Charles, but could not resist the temptation to profit by
+his death. This picture was the richest of the booty. It is, of all the
+faces of the Virgin extant, the most perfectly beautiful and one of the
+least spiritual.
+
+There is another fine Madonna, commonly called La Virgen del Pez, from a
+fish which young Tobit holds in his hand. It is rather tawny in color,
+as if it had been painted on a pine board and the wood had asserted
+itself from below. It is a charming picture, with all the great Roman's
+inevitable perfection of design; but it is incomprehensible that
+critics, M. Viardot among them, should call it the first in rank of
+Raphael's Virgins in Glory. There are none which can dispute that title
+with Our Lady of San Sisto, unearthly and supernatural in beauty and
+majesty.
+
+The school of Florence is represented by a charming Mona Lisa of
+Leonardo da Vinci, almost identical with that of the Louvre; and six
+admirable pictures of Andrea del Sarto. But the one which most attracts
+and holds all those who regard the Faultless Painter with sympathy, and
+who admiring his genius regret his errors, is a portrait of his wife
+Lucrezia Fede, whose name, a French writer has said, is a double
+epigram. It was this capricious and wilful beauty who made poor Andrea
+break his word and embezzle the money King Francis had given him to
+spend for works of art. Yet this dangerous face is his best excuse,--the
+face of a man-snarer, subtle and passionate and cruel in its blind
+selfishness, and yet so beautiful that any man might yield to it against
+the cry of his own warning conscience. Browning must have seen it before
+he wrote, in his pathetic poem,--
+
+  "Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold,
+  You beautiful Lucrezia, that are mine!"
+
+Nowhere, away from the Adriatic, is the Venetian school so richly
+represented as in Madrid. Charles and Philip were the most munificent
+friends and patrons of Titian, and the Royal Museum counts among its
+treasures in consequence the enormous number of forty-three pictures by
+the wonderful centenarian. Among these are two upon which he set great
+value,--a Last Supper, which has unfortunately mouldered to ruin in the
+humid refectory of the Escorial, equal in merit and destiny with that of
+Leonardo; and the Gloria, or apotheosis of the imperial family, which,
+after the death of Charles, was brought from Yuste to the Escorial, and
+thence came to swell the treasures of the Museum. It is a grand and
+masterly work. The vigorous genius of Titian has grappled with the
+essential difficulties of a subject that trembles on the balance of
+ridiculous and sublime, and has come out triumphant. The Father and the
+Son sit on high. The Operating Spirit hovers above them. The Virgin in
+robes of azure stands in the blaze of the Presence. The celestial army
+is ranged around. Below, a little lower than the angels, are Charles and
+Philip with their wives, on their knees, with white cowls and clasped
+hands,--Charles in his premature age, with worn face and grizzled beard;
+and Philip in his youth of unwholesome fairness, with red lips and pink
+eyelids, such as Titian painted him in the Adonis. The foreground is
+filled with prophets and saints of the first dignity, and a kneeling
+woman, whose face is not visible, but whose attitude and drapery are
+drawn with the sinuous and undulating grace of that hand which could not
+fail. Every figure is turned to the enthroned Deity, touched with
+ineffable light. The artist has painted heaven, and is not absurd. In
+that age of substantial faith such achievements were possible.
+
+There are two Venuses by Titian very like that of Dresden, but the heads
+have not the same dignity; and a Danae which is a replica of the Vienna
+one. His Salome bearing the Head of John the Baptist is one of the
+finest impersonations of the pride of life conceivable. So
+unapproachable are the soft lights and tones on the perfect arms and
+shoulders of the full-bodied maiden, that Tintoret one day exclaimed in
+despair before it, "That fellow paints with ground flesh."
+
+This gallery possesses one of the last works of Titian,--the Battle of
+Lepanto, which was fought when the artist was ninety-four years of age.
+It is a courtly allegory,--King Philip holds his little son in his arms,
+a courier angel brings the news of victory, and to the infant a
+palm-branch and the scroll _Majora tibi._ Outside you see the smoke and
+flash of a naval battle, and a malignant and tur-baned Turk lies bound
+on the floor. It would seem incredible that this enormous canvas should
+have been executed at such an age, did we not know that when the pest
+cut the mighty master off in his hundredth year he was busily at work
+upon a Descent from the Cross, which Palma the Elder finished on his
+knees and dedicated to God: Quod Titianus inchoatum reliquit Palma
+reverenter absolvit Deoque dicavit opus.
+
+The vast representation of Titian rather injures Veronese and Tintoret.
+Opposite the Gloria of Yuste hangs the sketch of that stupendous
+Paradise of Tintoret, which we see in the Palace of the Doges,--the
+biggest picture ever painted by mortal, thirty feet high and
+seventy-four long.
+
+The sketch was secured by Velazquez in his tour through Italy. The most
+charming picture of Veronese is a Venus and Adonis, which is finer than
+that of Titian,--a classic and most exquisite idyl of love and sleep,
+cool shadow and golden-sifted sunshine. His most considerable work in
+the gallery is a Christ teaching the Doctors, magnificent in
+arrangement, severely correct in drawing, and of a most vivid and
+dramatic interest.
+
+We pass through a circular vaulted chamber to reach the Flemish rooms.
+There is a choice though scanty collection of the German and French
+schools. Albert Durer has an Adam and Eve, and a priceless portrait of
+himself as perfectly preserved as if it were painted yesterday. He wears
+a curious and picturesque costume,--striped black-and-white,--a graceful
+tasselled cap of the same. The picture is sufficiently like the statue
+at Nuremberg; a long South-German face, blue-eyed and thin,
+fair-whiskered, with that expression of quiet confidence you would
+expect in the man who said one day, with admirable candor, when people
+were praising a picture of his, "It could not be better done." In this
+circular room are four great Claudes, two of which, Sunrise and Sunset,
+otherwise called the Embarcation of Sta. Paula, and Tobit and the Angel,
+are in his best and richest manner. It is inconceivable to us, who
+graduate men by a high-school standard, that these refined and most
+elegant works could have been produced by a man so imperfectly educated
+as Claude Lorrain.
+
+There remain the pictures of the Dutch and the Flemings. It is due to
+the causes we have mentioned in the beginning that neither in Antwerp
+nor Dresden nor Paris is there such wealth and profusion of the
+Netherlands art as in this mountain-guarded corner of Western Europe. I
+shall have but a word to say of these three vast rooms, for Rubens and
+Van Dyck and Teniers are known to every one. The first has here a
+representation so complete that if Europe were sunk by a cataclysm from
+the Baltic to the Pyrenees every essential characteristic of the great
+Fleming could still be studied in this gallery. With the exception of
+his Descent from the Cross in the Cathedral at Antwerp, painted in a
+moment of full inspiration that never comes twice in a life, everything
+he has done elsewhere may be matched in Madrid. His largest picture here
+is an Adoration of the Kings, an overpowering exhibition of wasteful
+luxuriance of color and _fougue_ of composition. To the left the Virgin
+stands leaning with queenly majesty over the effulgent Child. From this
+point the light flashes out over the kneeling magi, the gorgeously
+robed attendants, the prodigality of velvet and jewels and gold, to fade
+into the lovely clear-obscure of a starry night peopled with dim camels
+and cattle. On the extreme right is a most graceful and gallant portrait
+of the artist on horseback. We have another fine self-portraiture in the
+Garden of Love,--a group of lords and ladies in a delicious pleasance
+where the greatest seigneur is Peter Paul Rubens and the finest lady is
+Helen Forman. These true artists had to paint for money so many ignoble
+faces that they could not be blamed for taking their revenge in painting
+sometimes their own noble heads. Van Dyck never drew a profile so
+faultless in manly beauty as his own which we see on the same canvas
+with that of his friend the Earl of Bristol. Look at the two faces side
+by side, and say whether God or the king can make the better nobleman.
+
+Among those mythological subjects in which Rubens delighted, the best
+here are his Perseus and Andromeda, where the young hero comes
+gloriously in a brand-new suit of Milanese armor, while the lovely
+princess, in a costume that never grows old-fashioned, consisting of
+sunshine and golden hair, awaits him and deliverance in beautiful
+resignation; a Judgment of Paris, the Three Graces,--both prodigies of
+his strawberries-and-cream color; and a curious suckling of Hercules,
+which is the prototype or adumbration of the ecstatic vision of St.
+Bernard. He has also a copy of Titian's Adam and Eve, in an
+out-of-the-way place downstairs, which should be hung beside the
+original, to show the difference of handling of the two master
+colorists.
+
+Especially happy is this Museum in its Van Dycks. Besides those
+incomparable portraits of Lady Oxford, of Liberti the Organist of
+Antwerp, and others better than the best of any other man, there are a
+few large and elaborate compositions such as I have never seen
+elsewhere. The principal one is the Capture of Christ by Night in the
+Garden of Gethsemane, which has all the strength of Rubens, with a more
+refined study of attitudes and a greater delicacy of tone and touch.
+Another is the Crowning with Thorns,--although of less dimensions, of
+profound significance in expression, and a flowing and marrowy softness
+of execution. You cannot survey the work of Van Dyck in this collection,
+so full of deep suggestion, showing an intellect so vivid and so
+refined, a mastery of processes so thorough and so intelligent, without
+the old wonder of what he would have done in that ripe age when Titian
+and Murillo and Shakespeare wrought their best and fullest, and the old
+regret for the dead,--as Edgar Poe sings, the doubly dead in that they
+died so young. We are tempted to lift the veil that hides the unknown,
+at least with the furtive hand of conjecture; to imagine a field of
+unquenched activity where the early dead, free from the clogs and
+trammels of the lower world, may follow out the impulses of their
+diviner nature,--where Andrea has no wife, and Raphael and Van Dyck no
+disease,--where Keats and Shelley have all eternity for their lofty
+rhyme,--where Ellsworth and Koerner and the Lowell boys can turn their
+alert and athletic intelligence to something better than war.
+
+
+
+
+A CASTLE IN THE AIR
+
+
+I have sometimes thought that a symptom of the decay of true kinghood in
+modern times is the love of monarchs for solitude. In the early days
+when monarchy was a real power to answer a real want, the king had no
+need to hide himself. He was the strongest, the most knowing, the most
+cunning. He moved among men their acknowledged chief. He guided and
+controlled them. He never lost his dignity by daily use. He could steal
+a horse like Diomede, he could mend his own breeches like Dagobert, and
+never tarnish the lustre of the crown by it. But in later times the
+throne has become an anachronism. The wearer of a crown has done nothing
+to gain it but give himself the trouble to be born. He has no claim to
+the reverence or respect of men. Yet he insists upon it, and receives
+some show of it. His life is mainly passed in keeping up this battle for
+a lost dignity and worship. He is given up to shams and ceremonies.
+
+To a life like this there is something embarrassing in the movement and
+activity of a great city. The king cannot join in it without a loss of
+prestige. Being outside of it, he is vexed and humiliated by it. The
+empty forms become nauseous in the midst of this honest and wholesome
+reality of out-of-doors.
+
+Hence the necessity of these quiet retreats in the forests, in the
+water-guarded islands, in the cloud-girdled mountains. Here the world is
+not seen or heard. Here the king may live with such approach to nature
+as his false and deformed education will allow. He is surrounded by
+nothing but the world of servants and courtiers, and it requires little
+effort of the imagination to consider himself chief and lord.
+
+It was this spirit which in the decaying ripeness of the Bourbon dynasty
+drove the Louis from Paris to Versailles and from Versailles to Marly.
+Millions were wasted to build the vast monument of royal fatuity, and
+when it was done the Grand Monarque found it necessary to fly from time
+to time to the sham solitude and mock retirement he had built an hour
+away.
+
+When Philip V. came down from France to his splendid exile on the throne
+of Spain, he soon wearied of the interminable ceremonies of the
+Cas-tilian court, and finding one day, while hunting, a pleasant farm on
+the territory of the Segovian monks, flourishing in a wrinkle of the
+Guadarrama Mountains, he bought it, and reared the Palace of La Granja.
+It is only kings who can build their castles in the air of palpable
+stones and mortar. This lordly pleasure-house stands four thousand feet
+above the sea level. On this commanding height, in this savage Alpine
+loneliness, in the midst of a scenery once wildly beautiful, but now
+shorn and shaven into a smug likeness of a French garden, Philip passed
+all the later years of his gloomy and inglorious life.
+
+It has been ever since a most tempting summer-house to all the Bourbons.
+When the sun is calcining the plains of Castile, and the streets of
+Madrid are white with the hot light of midsummer, this palace in the
+clouds is as cool and shadowy as spring twilights. And besides, as all
+public business is transacted in Madrid, and La Granja is a day's
+journey away, it is too much trouble to send a courier every day for the
+royal signature,--or, rather, rubric, for royalty in Spain is above
+handwriting, and gives its majestic approval with a flourish of the
+pen,--so that everything waits a week or so, and much business goes
+finally undone; and this is the highest triumph of Spanish industry and
+skill.
+
+We had some formal business with the court of the regent, and were not
+sorry to learn that his highness would not return to the capital for
+some weeks, and that consequently, following the precedent of a certain
+prophet, we must go to the mountain.
+
+We found at the Estacion del Norte the state railway carriage of her
+late majesty,--a brilliant creation of yellow satin and profuse gilding,
+a bovidoir on wheels,--not too full of a distinguished company. Some of
+the leading men of New Spain, one or two ministers, were there, and we
+passed a pleasant two hours on the road in that most seductive of all
+human occupations,--talking politics.
+
+It is remarkable that whenever a nation is remodelling its internal
+structure, the subject most generally discussed is the constitutional
+system of the United States. The republicans usually adopt it solid. The
+monarchists study it with a jealous interest. I fell into conversation
+with Senor------, one of the best minds in Spain, an enlightened though
+conservative statesman. He said: "It is hard for Europe to adopt a
+settled belief about you. America is a land of wonders, of
+contradictions. One party calls your system freedom, another anarchy. In
+all legislative assemblies of Europe, republicans and absolutists alike
+draw arguments from America. But what cannot be denied are the effects,
+the results. These are evident, something vast and grandiose, a life and
+movement to which the Old World is stranger." He afterwards referred
+with great interest to the imaginary imperialist movement in America,
+and raised his eyebrows in polite incredulity when I assured him there
+was as much danger of Spain becoming Mohammedan as of America becoming
+imperialist.
+
+We stopped at the little station of Villalba, in the midst of the wide
+brown table-land that stretches from Madrid to the Escorial. At Villalba
+we found the inevitable swarm of beggars, who always know by the sure
+instinct of wretchedness where a harvest of cuartos is to be achieved. I
+have often passed Villalba and have seen nothing but the station-master
+and the water-vender. But to-day, because there were a half dozen
+excellencies on the train, the entire mendicant force of the district
+was on parade. They could not have known these gentlemen were coming;
+they must have scented pennies in the air.
+
+Awaiting us at the rear of the station were three enormous lumbering
+diligences, each furnished with nine superb mules,--four pairs and a
+leader. They were loaded with gaudy trappings, and their shiny coats,
+and backs shorn into graceful arabesques, showed that they did not
+belong to the working-classes, but enjoyed the gentlemanly leisure of
+official station. The drivers wore a smart postilion uniform and the
+royal crown on their caps.
+
+We threw some handfuls of copper and bronze among the picturesque
+mendicants. They gathered them up with grave Castilian decorum, and
+said, "God will repay your graces." The postilions cracked their whips,
+the mules shook their bells gayly, the heavy wagons started off at a
+full gallop, and the beggars said, "May your graces go with God!"
+
+It was the end of July, and the sky was blue and cloudless. The fine,
+soft light of the afternoon was falling on the tawny slopes and the
+close-reaped fields. The harvest was over. In the fields on either side
+they were threshing their grain, not as in the outside world, with the
+whirring of loud and swift machinery, nor even with the active and
+lively swinging of flails; but in the open air, under the warm sky, the
+cattle were lazily treading out the corn on the bare ground, to be
+winnowed by the wandering wind. No change from the time of Solomon.
+Through an infinity of ages, ever since corn and cattle were, the
+Iberian farmer in this very spot had driven his beasts over his crop,
+and never dreamed of a better way of doing the work.
+
+Not only does the Spaniard not seek for improvements, he utterly
+despises and rejects them. The poorer classes especially, who would
+find an enormous advantage in increased production, lightening their
+hard lot by a greater plenty of the means of life, regard every
+introduction of improved machinery as a blow at the rights of labor.
+When many years ago a Dutch vintner went to Valdepenas and so greatly
+improved the manufacture of that excellent but ill-made wine that its
+price immediately rose in the Madrid market, he was mobbed and plundered
+by his ignorant neighbors, because, as they said, he was laboring to
+make wine dearer. In every attempt which has been made to manufacture
+improved machinery in Spain, the greatest care has to be taken to
+prevent the workmen from maliciously damaging the works, which they
+imagine are to take the bread from the mouths of their children.
+
+So strong is this feeling in every department of national life, that the
+mayoral who drove our spanking nine-in-hand received with very ill humor
+our suggestion that the time could be greatly shortened by a Fell
+railroad over the hills to La Granja. "What would become of nosotros?"
+he asked. And it really would seem a pity to annihilate so much
+picturesqueness and color at the bidding of mere utility. A gayly
+embroidered Andalusian jacket, bright scarlet silk waistcoat,--a rich
+wide belt, into which his long knife, the navaja, was jauntily
+thrust,--buckskin breeches, with Valentian stockings, which, as they are
+open at the bottom, have been aptly likened to a Spaniard's purse,--and
+shoes made of Murcian matting, composed his natty outfit. By his side on
+the box sat the zagal, his assistant, whose especial function seemed to
+be to swear at the cattle. I have heard some eloquent imprecation in my
+day. "Our army swore terribly" at Hilton Head. The objuration of the
+boatmen of the Mississippi is very vigorous and racy. But I have never
+assisted at a session of profanity so loud, so energetic, so original as
+that with which this Castilian postilion regaled us. The wonderful
+consistency and perseverance with which the role was sustained was
+worthy of a much better cause.
+
+He began by yelling in a coarse, strident voice, "Arre! arre!" (Get up!)
+with a vicious emphasis on the final syllable. This is one of the
+Moorish words that have remained fixed like fossils in the language of
+the conquerors. Its constant use in the mouths of muleteers has given
+them the name of arrieros. This general admonition being addressed to
+the team at large, the zagal descended to details, and proceeded to
+vilipend the galloping beasts separately, beginning with the leader. He
+informed him, still in this wild, jerking scream, that he was a dog,
+that his mother's character was far from that of Caesar's wife, and that
+if more speed was not exhibited on this down grade, he would be forced
+to resort to extreme measures. At the mention of a whip, the tall male
+mule who led the team dashed gallantly off, and the diligence was soon
+enveloped in a cloud of dust. This seemed to excite our gay charioteer
+to the highest degree. He screamed lustily at his mules, addressing each
+personally by its name. "Andaluza, arre! Thou of Arragon, go! Beware the
+scourge, Manchega!" and every animal acknowledged the special attention
+by shaking its ears and bells and whisking its shaven tail, as the
+diligence rolled furiously over the dull drab plain.
+
+For three hours the iron lungs of the muleteer knew no rest or pause.
+Several times in the journey we stopped at a post-station to change our
+cattle, but the same brazen throat sufficed for all the threatening and
+encouragement that kept them at the top of their speed. Before we
+arrived at our journey's end, however, he was hoarse as a raven, and
+kept one hand pressed to his jaw to reinforce the exhausted muscles of
+speech.
+
+When the wide and dusty plain was passed, we began by a slow and winding
+ascent the passage of the Guadarrama. The road is an excellent one, and
+although so seldom used,--a few months only in the year,--it is kept in
+the most perfect repair. It is exclusively a summer road, being in the
+winter impassable with snow. It affords at every turn the most charming
+compositions of mountain and wooded valley. At intervals we passed a
+mounted guardia civil, who sat as motionless in his saddle as an
+equestrian statue, and saluted as the coaches rattled by. And once or
+twice in a quiet nook by the roadside we came upon the lonely cross that
+marked the spot where a man had been murdered.
+
+It was nearly sunset when we arrived at the summit of the pass. We
+halted to ask for a glass of water at the hut of a gray-haired woman on
+the mountain-top. It was given and received as always in this pious
+country, in the name of God. As we descended, the mules seemed to have
+gained new vigor from the prospect of an easy stretch of _facilis
+descensus,_ and the zagal employed what was left of his voice in
+provoking them to speed by insulting remarks upon their lineage. The
+quick twilight fell as we entered a vast forest of pines that clothed
+the mountain-side. The enormous trees looked in the dim evening light
+like the forms of the Anakim, maimed with lightning but still defying
+heaven. Years of battle with the mountain winds had twisted them into
+every conceivable shape of writhing and distorted deformity. I never saw
+trees that so nearly conveyed the idea of being the visible prison of
+tortured dryads. Their trunks, white and glistening with oozing resin,
+added to the ghostly impression they created in the uncertain and
+failing light.
+
+We reached the valley and rattled by a sleepy village, where we were
+greeted by a chorus of outraged curs whose beauty-sleep we had
+disturbed, and then began the slow ascent of the hill where St.
+Ildefonso stands. We had not gone far when we heard a pattering of hoofs
+and a ringing of sabres coming down the road to meet us. The diligence
+stopped, and the Introducer of Ambassadors jumped to the ground and
+announced, "El Regente del Reino!" It was the regent, the courteous and
+amiable Marshal Serrano, who had ridden out from the palace to welcome
+his guests, and who, after hasty salutations, galloped back to La
+Granja, where we soon arrived.
+
+We were assigned the apartments usually given to the papal nuncio, and
+slept with an episcopal peace of mind. In the morning, as we were
+walking about the gardens, we saw looking from the palace window one of
+the most accomplished gentlemen and diplomatists of the new regime. He
+descended and did the honors of the place. The system of gardens and
+fountains is enormous. It is evidently modelled upon Versailles, but the
+copy is in many respects finer than the original. The peculiarity of the
+site, while offering great difficulties, at the same time enhances the
+triumph of success. This is a garden taught to bloom upon a barren
+mountain-side. The earth in which these trees are planted was brought
+from those dim plains in the distance on the backs of men and mules. The
+pipes that supply these innumerable fountains were laid on the bare
+rocks and the soil was thrown over them. Every tree was guarded and
+watched like a baby. There was probably never a garden that grew under
+such circumstances,--but the result is superb. The fountains are fed by
+a vast reservoir in the mountain, and the water they throw into the
+bright air is as clear as morning dew. Every alley and avenue is a vista
+that ends in a vast picture of shaggy hills or far-off plains,--while
+behind the royal gardens towers the lordly peak of the Penalara, thrust
+eight thousand feet into the thin blue ether.
+
+The palace has its share of history. It witnessed the abdication of the
+uxorious bigot Philip V. in 1724, and his resumption of the crown the
+next year at the instance of his proud and turbulent Parmesan wife. His
+bones rest in the church here, as he hated the Austrian line too
+intensely to share with them the gorgeous crypt of the Escorial. His
+wife, Elizabeth Farnese, lies under the same gravestone with him, as if
+unwilling to forego even in death that tremendous influence which her
+vigorous vitality had always exercised over his wavering and sensual
+nature. "Das Ewig-Weibliche" masters and guides him still.
+
+This retreat in the autumn of 1832 was the scene of a prodigious
+exhibition of courage and energy on the part of another Italian woman,
+Dona Louisa Carlota de Borbon. Ferdinand VIL, his mind weakened by
+illness, and influenced by his ministers, had proclaimed his brother Don
+Carlos heir to the throne, to the exclusion of his own infant daughter.
+His wife, Queen Christine, broken down by the long conflict, had given
+way in despair. But her sister, Dona Louisa Carlota, heard of the news
+in the south of Spain, and, leaving her babies at _Cadiz_ (two little
+urchins, one of whom was to be king consort, and the other was to fall
+by his cousin Montpensier's hand in the field of Carabanchel), she
+posted without a moment's pause for rest or sleep over mountains and
+plains from the sea to La Granja. She fought with the lackeys and the
+ministers twenty-four hours before she could see her sister the queen.
+Having breathed into Christine her own invincible spirit, they
+succeeded, after endless pains, in reaching the king. Obstinate as the
+weak often are, he refused at first to listen to them; but by their
+womanly wiles, their Italian policy, their magnetic force, they at last
+brought him to revoke his decree in favor of Don Carlos and to recognize
+the right of his daughter to the crown. Then, terrible in her triumph,
+Dona Louisa Carlota sent for the Minister Calomarde, overwhelmed him
+with the coarsest and most furious abuse, and, unable to confine her
+victorious rage and hate to words alone, she slapped the astounded
+minister in the face. Calomarde, trembling with rage, bowed and said, "A
+white hand cannot offend."
+
+There is nothing stronger than a woman's weakness, or weaker than a
+woman's strength.
+
+A few years later, when Ferdinand was in his grave, and the baby Isabel
+reigned under the regency of Christine, a movement in favor of the
+constitution of 1812 burst out, where revolutions generally do, in the
+south, and spread rapidly over the contiguous provinces. The infection
+gained the troops of the royal guard at La Granja, and they surrounded
+the palace bawling for the constitution. The regentess, with a proud
+reliance upon her own power, ordered them to send a deputation to her
+apartment. A dozen of the mutineers came in, and demanded the
+constitution.
+
+"What is that?" asked the queen.
+
+They looked at each other and cudgelled their brains. They had never
+thought of that before.
+
+"Caramba!" said they. "We don't know. They say it is a good thing, and
+will raise our pay and make salt cheaper."
+
+Their political economy was somewhat flimsy, but they had the bayonets,
+and the queen was compelled to give way and proclaim the constitution.
+
+I must add one trifling reminiscence more of La Granja, which has also
+its little moral. A friend of mine, a colonel of engineers, in the
+summer before the revolution, was standing before the palace with some
+officers, when a mean-looking cur ran past.
+
+"What an ugly dog!" said the colonel.
+
+"Hush!" replied another, with an awe-struck face. "That is the dog of
+his royal highness the Prince of Asturias."
+
+The colonel unfortunately had a logical mind, and failed to see that
+ownership had any bearing on a purely aesthetic question. He defined his
+position. "I do not think the dog is ugly because he belongs to the
+prince. I only mean the prince has an ugly dog."
+
+The window just above them slammed, and another officer came up and said
+that the Adversary was to pay. "THE QUEEN was at the window and heard
+every word you said."
+
+An hour after the colonel received an order from the commandant of the
+place, revoking his leave of absence and ordering him to duty in Madrid.
+It is not very surprising that this officer was at the Bridge of
+Alcolea.
+
+At noon the day grew dark with clouds, and the black storm-wreath came
+down over the mountains. A terrific fire of artillery resounded for a
+half-hour in the craggy peaks about us, and a driving shower passed over
+palace and gardens. Then the sun came out again, the pleasure-grounds
+were fresher and greener than ever, and the visitors thronged in the
+court of the palace to see the fountains in play. The regent led the way
+on foot. The general followed in a pony phaeton, and ministers,
+adjutants, and the population of the district trooped along in a
+party-colored mass.
+
+It was a good afternoon's work to visit all the fountains. They are
+twenty-six in number, strewn over the undulating grounds. People who
+visit Paris usually consider a day of Grandes Eaux at Versailles the
+last word of this species of costly trifling. But the waters at
+Versailles bear no comparison with those of La Granja. The sense is
+fatigued and bewildered here with their magnificence and infinite
+variety. The vast reservoir in the bosom of the mountain, filled with
+the purest water, gives a possibility of more superb effects than have
+been attained anywhere else in the world. The Fountain of the Winds is
+one, where a vast mass of water springs into the air from the foot of a
+great cavernous rock; there is a succession of exquisite cascades called
+the Race-Course, filled with graceful statuary; a colossal group of
+Apollo slaying the Python, who in his death agony bleeds a torrent of
+water; the Basket of Flowers, which throws up a system of forty jets;
+the great single jet called Fame, which leaps one hundred and thirty
+feet into the air, a Niagara reversed; and the crowning glory of the
+garden, the Baths of Diana, an immense stage scene in marble and bronze,
+crowded with nymphs and hunting-parties, wild beasts and birds, and
+everywhere the wildest luxuriance of spouting waters. We were told that
+it was one of the royal caprices of a recent tenant of the palace to
+emulate her chaste prototype of the silver bow by choosing this artistic
+basin for her ablutions, a sufficient number of civil guards being
+posted to prevent the approach of Castilian Actaeons. Ford aptly remarks
+of these extravagant follies: "The yoke of building kings is grievous,
+and especially when, as St. Simon said of Louis XIV. and his Versailles,
+'II se plut a tyranniser la nature.'"
+
+As the bilious Philip paused before this mass of sculptured
+extravagance, he looked at it a moment with evident pleasure. Then he
+thought of the bill, and whined, "Thou hast amused me three minutes and
+hast cost me three millions."
+
+To do Philip justice, he did not allow the bills to trouble him much. He
+died owing forty-five million piastres, which his dutiful son refused to
+pay. When you deal with Bourbons, it is well to remember the Spanish
+proverb, "A sparrow in the hand is better than a bustard on the wing."
+
+We wasted an hour in walking through the palace. It is, like all
+palaces, too fine and dreary to describe. Miles of drawing-rooms and
+boudoirs, with an infinity of tapestry and gilt chairs, all the
+apartments haunted by the demon of ennui. All idea of comfort is
+sacrificed to costly glitter and flimsy magnificence. Some fine
+paintings were pining in exile on the desolate walls. They looked
+homesick for the Museum, where they could be seen of men.
+
+The next morning we drove down the mountain and over the rolling plain
+to the fine old city of Segovia. In point of antiquity and historic
+interest it is inferior to no town in Spain. It has lost its ancient
+importance as a seat of government and a mart of commerce. Its
+population is now not more than eleven thousand. Its manufactures have
+gone to decay. Its woollen works, which once employed fourteen thousand
+persons and produced annually twenty-five thousand pieces of cloth, now
+sustain a sickly existence and turn out not more than two hundred pieces
+yearly. Its mint, which once spread over Spain a Danaean shower of
+ounces and dollars, is now reduced to the humble office of striking
+copper cuartos. More than two centuries ago this decline began. Boisel,
+who was there in 1669, speaks of the city as "presque desert et fort
+pauvre." He mentions as a mark of the general unthrift that the day he
+arrived there was no bread in town until two o'clock in the afternoon,
+"and no one was astonished at it."
+
+Yet even in its poverty and rags it has the air of a town that has seen
+better days. Tradition says it was founded by Hercules. It was an
+important city of the Roman Empire, and a great capital in the days of
+the Arab monarchy. It was the court of the star-gazing King Alonso the
+Wise. Through a dozen centuries it was the flower of the mountains of
+Castile. Each succeeding age and race beautified and embellished it, and
+each, departing, left the trace of its passage in the abiding granite of
+its monuments. The Romans left the glorious aqueduct, that work of
+demigods who scorned to mention it in their histories; its mediaeval
+bishops bequeathed to later times their ideas of ecclesiastical
+architecture; and the Arabs the science of fortification and the
+industrial arts.
+
+Its very ruin and decay makes it only more precious to the traveller.
+There are here none of the modern and commonplace evidences of life and
+activity that shock the artistic sense in other towns. All is old,
+moribund, and picturesque. It lies here in the heart of the Guadarramas,
+lost and forgotten by the civilization of the age, muttering in its
+senile dream of the glories of an older world. It has not vitality
+enough to attract a railroad, and so is only reached by a long and
+tiresome journey by diligence. Its solitude is rarely intruded upon by
+the impertinent curious, and the red back of Murray is a rare apparition
+in its winding streets.
+
+Yet those who come are richly repaid. One does not quickly forget the
+impression produced by the first view of the vast aqueduct, as you drive
+into the town from La Granja. It comes upon you in an instant,--the two
+great ranges of superimposed arches, over one hundred feet high,
+spanning the ravine-like suburb from the outer hills to the Alcazar. You
+raise your eyes from the market-place, with its dickering crowd, from
+the old and squalid houses clustered like shot rubbish at the foot of
+the chasm, to this grand and soaring wonder of utilitarian architecture,
+with something of a fancy that it was never made, that it has stood
+there since the morning of the world. It has the lightness and the
+strength, the absence of ornament and the essential beauty, the vastness
+and the perfection, of a work of nature.
+
+It is one of those gigantic works of Trajan, so common in that
+magnificent age that Roman authors do not allude to it. It was built to
+bring the cool mountain water of the Sierra Fonfria a distance of nine
+miles through the hills, the gulches, and the pine forests of Valsain,
+and over the open plain to the thirsty city of Segovia. The aqueduct
+proper runs from the old tower of Caseron three thousand feet to the
+reservoir where the water deposits its sand and sediment, and thence
+begins the series of one hundred and nineteen arches, which traverse
+three thousand feet more and pass the valley, the arrabal, and reach the
+citadel. It is composed of great blocks of granite, so perfectly framed
+and fitted that not a particle of mortar or cement is employed in the
+construction.
+
+The wonder of the work is not so much in its vastness or its beauty as
+in its tremendous solidity and duration. A portion of it had been cut
+away by barbarous armies during the fifteenth century, and in the reign
+of Isabella the Catholic the monk-architect of the Parral, Juan
+Escovedo, the greatest builder of his day in Spain, repaired it. These
+repairs have themselves twice needed repairing since then. Marshal Ney,
+when he came to this portion of the monument, exclaimed, "Here begins
+the work of men's hands."
+
+The true Segovian would hoot at you if you assigned any mortal paternity
+to the aqueduct. He calls it the Devil's Bridge, and tells you this
+story. The Evil One was in love with a pretty girl of the upper town,
+and full of protestations of devotion. The fair Segovian listened to him
+one evening, when her plump arms ached with the work of bringing water
+from the ravine, and promised eyes of favor if his Infernal Majesty
+would build an aqueduct to her door before morning. He worked all night,
+like the Devil, and the maiden, opening her black eyes at sunrise, saw
+him putting the last stone in the last arch, as the first ray of the sun
+lighted on his shining tail. The Church, we think very unfairly, decided
+that he had failed, and released the coquettish contractor from her
+promise; and it is said the Devil has never trusted a Sego-vian out of
+his sight again.
+
+The bartizaned keep of the Moorish Alcazar is perched on the western
+promontory of the city that guards the meeting of the streams Eresma and
+Clamores. It has been in the changes of the warring times a palace, a
+fortress, a prison (where our friend--everybody's friend--Gil Blas was
+once confined), and of late years a college of artillery. In one of its
+rooms Alonso the Wise studied the heavens more than was good for his
+orthodoxy, and from one of its windows a lady of the court once dropped
+a royal baby, of the bad blood of Trasta-mara. Henry of Trastamara will
+seem more real if we connect him with fiction. He was the son of "La
+Favorita," who will outlast all legitimate princesses, in the deathless
+music of Donizetti.
+
+Driving through a throng of beggars that encumbered the carriage wheels
+as grasshoppers sometimes do the locomotives on a Western railway, we
+came to the fine Gothic Cathedral, built by Gil de Ontanon, father and
+son, in the early part of the sixteenth century. It is a delight to the
+eyes; the rich harmonious color of the stone, the symmetry of
+proportion, the profuse opulence and grave finish of the details. It was
+built in that happy era of architecture when a builder of taste and
+culture had all the past of Gothic art at his disposition, and before
+the degrading influence of the Jesuits appeared in the churches of
+Europe. Within the Cathedral is remarkably airy and graceful in effect.
+A most judicious use has been made of the exquisite salmon-colored
+marbles of the country in the great altar and the pavement.
+
+We were met by civil ecclesiastics of the foundation and shown the
+beauties and the wonders of the place. Among much that is worthless,
+there is one very impressive Descent from the Cross by Juan de Juni, of
+which that excellent Mr. Madoz says "it is worthy to rank with the best
+masterpieces of Raphael or--Mengs;" as if one should say of a poet that
+he was equal to Shakespeare or Southey.
+
+We walked through the cloisters and looked at the tombs. A flood of warm
+light poured through the graceful arches and lit up the trees in the
+garden and set the birds to singing, and made these cloisters pleasanter
+to remember than they usually are. Our attendant priest told us, with an
+earnest credulity that was very touching, the story of Maria del Salto,
+Mary of the Leap, whose history was staring at us from the wall. She was
+a Jewish lady, whose husband had doubts of her discretion, and so threw
+her from a local Tarpeian rock. As she fell she invoked the Virgin, and
+came down easily, sustained, as you see in the picture, by her faith and
+her petticoats.
+
+As we parted from the good fathers and entered our carriages at the door
+of the church, the swarm of mendicants had become an army. The word had
+doubtless gone through the city of the outlandish men who had gone into
+the Cathedral with whole coats, and the result was a _levee en masse_ of
+the needy. Every coin that was thrown to them but increased the clamor,
+as it confirmed them in their idea of the boundless wealth and
+munificence of the givers. We recalled the profound thought of Emerson,
+"If the rich were only as rich as the poor think them!"
+
+At last we drove desperately away through the ragged and screaming
+throng. We passed by the former home of the Jeronomite monks of the
+Parral, which was once called an earthly paradise, and in later years
+has been a pen for swine; past crumbling convents and ruined churches;
+past the charming Romanesque San Millan, girdled with its round-arched
+cloisters; the granite palace of his Reverence the Bishop of Segovia,
+and the elegant tower of St. Esteban, where the Roman is dying and the
+Gothic is dawning; and every step of the route is a study and a joy to
+the antiquarian.
+
+But though enriched by all these legacies of an immemorial past, there
+seems no hope, no future for Segovia. It is as dead as the cities of the
+Plain. Its spindles have rusted into silence. Its gay company is gone.
+Its streets are too large for the population, and yet they swarm with
+beggars. I had often heard it compared in outline to a ship,--the
+sunrise astern and the prow pointing westward,--and as we drove away
+that day and I looked back to the receding town, it seemed to me like a
+grand hulk of some richly laden galleon, aground on the rock that holds
+it, alone, abandoned to its fate among the barren billows of the
+tumbling ridges, its crew tired out with struggling and apathetic in
+despair, mocked by the finest air and the clearest sunshine that ever
+shone, and gazing always forward to the new world and the new times
+hidden in the rosy sunset, which they shall never see.
+
+
+
+
+THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS
+
+
+Emilio Castelar said to me one day, "Toledo is the most remarkable city
+in Spain. You will find there three strata of glories,--Gothic, Arab,
+and Castilian,--and an upper crust of beggars and silence."
+
+I went there in the pleasantest time of the year, the first days of
+June. The early harvest was in progress, and the sunny road ran through
+golden fields which were enlivened by the reapers gathering in their
+grain with shining sickles. The borders of the Tagus were so cool and
+fresh that it was hard to believe one was in the arid land of Castile.
+From Madrid to Aranjuez you meet the usual landscapes of dun hillocks
+and pale-blue vegetation, such as are only seen in nature in Central
+Spain, and only seen in art on the matchless canvas of Velazquez. But
+from the time you cross the tawny flood of the Tagus just north of
+Aranjuez, the valley is gladdened by its waters all the way to the
+Primate City.
+
+I am glad I am not writing a guide-book, and do not feel any
+responsibility resting upon me of advising the gentle reader to stop at
+Aranjuez or to go by on the other side. There is a most amiable and
+praiseworthy class of travellers who feel a certain moral necessity
+impelling them to visit every royal abode within their reach. They
+always see precisely the same things,--some thousand of gilt chairs,
+some faded tapestry and marvellous satin upholstery, a room in
+porcelain, and a room in imitation of some other room somewhere else,
+and a picture or two by that worthy and tedious young man, Raphael
+Mengs. I knew I would see all these things at Aranjuez, and so contented
+myself with admiring its pretty site, its stone-cornered brick facade,
+its high-shouldered French roof, and its general air of the Place
+Royale, from the outside. The gardens are very pleasant, and lonely
+enough for the most philosophic stroller. A clever Spanish writer says
+of them, "They are sombre as the thoughts of Philip II., mysterious and
+gallant as the pleasures of Philip IV." To a revolutionary mind, it is a
+certain pleasure to remember that this was the scene of the _emeute_
+that drove Charles IV. from his throne, and the Prince of Peace from his
+queen's boudoir. Ferdinand VII., the turbulent and restless Prince of
+Asturias, reaped the immediate profit of his father's abdication; but
+the two worthless creatures soon called in Napoleon to decide the
+squabble, which he did in his leonine way by taking the crown away from
+both of them and handing it over for safe-keeping to his lieutenant
+brother Joseph. Honor among thieves!--a silly proverb, as one readily
+sees if he falls into their hands, or reads the history of kings.
+
+If Toledo had been built, by some caprice of enlightened power,
+especially for a show city, it could not be finer in effect. In detail,
+it is one vast museum. In ensemble, it stands majestic on its hills,
+with its long lines of palaces and convents terraced around the rocky
+slope, and on the height the soaring steeples of a swarm of churches
+piercing the blue, and the huge cube of the Alcazar crowning the topmost
+crest, and domineering the scene. The magnificent zigzag road which
+leads up the steep hillside from the bridge of Alcantara gives an
+indefinable impression, as of the lordly ramp of some fortress of
+impossible extent.
+
+This road is new, and in perfect condition. But do not imagine you can
+judge the city by the approaches. When your carriage has mounted the
+hill and passed the evening promenade of the To-ledans, the quaint
+triangular Place,--I had nearly called it Square,--"waking laughter in
+indolent reviewers," the Zocodover, you are lost in the dae-dalian
+windings of the true streets of Toledo, where you can touch the walls on
+either side, and where two carriages could no more pass each other than
+two locomotives could salute and go by on the same track. This
+interesting experiment, which is so common in our favored land, could
+never be tried in Toledo, as I believe there is only one turnout in the
+city, a minute omnibus with striped linen hangings at the sides, driven
+by a young Castilian whose love of money is the root of much discussion
+when you pay his bill. It is a most remarkable establishment. The horses
+can cheerfully do their mile in fifteen or twenty minutes, but they make
+more row about it than a high-pressure Mississippi steamer; and the
+crazy little trap is noisier in proportion to its size than anything I
+have ever seen, except perhaps an Indiana tree-toad. If you make an
+excursion outside the walls, the omnibus, noise and all, is inevitable;
+let it come. But inside the city you must walk; the slower the better,
+for every door is a study.
+
+It is hard to conceive that this was once a great capital with a
+population of two hundred thousand souls. You can easily walk from one
+end of the city to the other in less than half an hour, and the houses
+that remain seem comfortably filled by eighteen thousand inhabitants.
+But in this narrow space once swarmed that enormous and busy multitude.
+The city was walled about by powerful stone ramparts, which yet stand in
+all their massy perfection. So there could have been no suburbs. This
+great aggregation of humanity lived and toiled on the crests and in the
+wrinkles of the seven hills we see to-day. How important were the
+industries of the earlier days we can guess from the single fact that
+John of Padilla, when he rose in defence of municipal liberty in the
+time of Charles V., drew in one day from the teeming workshops twenty
+thousand fighting men. He met the usual fate of all Spanish patriots,
+shameful and cruel death. His palace was razed to the ground. Successive
+governments, in shifting fever-fits of liberalism and absolutism, have
+set up and pulled down his statue. But his memory is loved and honored,
+and the example of this noblest of the comuneros impresses powerfully
+to-day the ardent young minds of the new Spain.
+
+Your first walk is of course to the Cathedral, the Primate Church of the
+kingdom. Besides its ecclesiastical importance, it is well worthy of
+notice in itself. It is one of the purest specimens of Gothic
+architecture in existence, and is kept in an admirable state of
+preservation. Its situation is not the most favorable. It is approached
+by a network of descending streets, all narrow and winding, as streets
+were always built under the intelligent rule of the Moors. They
+preferred to be cool in summer and sheltered in winter, rather than to
+lay out great deserts of boulevards, the haunts of sunstroke and
+pneumonia. The site of the Cathedral was chosen from strategic reasons
+by St. Eugene, who built there his first Episcopal Church. The Moors
+made a mosque of it when they conquered Castile, and the fastidious
+piety of St. Ferdinand would not permit him to worship in a shrine thus
+profaned. He tore down the old church and laid, in 1227, the
+foundations of this magnificent structure, which was two centuries after
+his death in building. There is, however, great unity of purpose and
+execution in this Cathedral, due doubtless to the fact that the
+architect Perez gave fifty years of his long life to the superintendence
+of the early work. Inside and outside it is marked by a grave and
+harmonious majesty. The great western facade is enriched with three
+splendid portals,--the side ones called the doors of Hell and Judgment;
+and the central a beautiful ogival arch divided into two smaller ones,
+and adorned with a lavish profusion of delicately sculptured figures of
+saints and prophets; on the chaste and severe cornice above, a group of
+spirited busts represents the Last Supper. There are five other doors to
+the temple, of which the door of the Lions is the finest, and just
+beside it a heavy Ionic portico in the most detestable taste indicates
+the feeling and culture that survived in the reign of Charles IV.
+
+To the north of the west facade rises the massive tower. It is not among
+the tallest in the world, being three hundred and twenty-four feet high,
+but is very symmetrical and impressive. In the preservation of its
+pyramidal purpose it is scarcely inferior to that most consummate work,
+the tower of St. Stephen's in Vienna. It is composed of three
+superimposed structures, gradually diminishing in solidity and
+massiveness from the square base to the high-springing octagonal spire,
+garlanded with thorny crowns. It is balanced at the south end of the
+facade by the pretty cupola and lantern of the Mozarabic Chapel, the
+work of the Greek Theotocopouli.
+
+But we soon grow tired of the hot glare of June, and pass in a moment
+into the cool twilight vastness of the interior, refreshing to body and
+soul. Five fine naves, with eighty-four pillars formed each of sixteen
+graceful columns,--the entire edifice measuring four hundred feet in
+length and two hundred feet in breadth,--a grand and shadowy temple
+grove of marble and granite. At all times the light is of an unearthly
+softness and purity, toned by the exquisite windows and rosaces. But as
+evening draws on, you should linger till the sacristan grows peremptory,
+to watch the gorgeous glow of the western sunlight on the blazing roses
+of the portals, and the marvellous play of rich shadows and faint gray
+lights in the eastern chapels, where the grand aisles sweep in their
+perfect curves around the high altar. A singular effect is here created
+by the gilded organ pipes thrust out horizontally from the choir. When
+the powerful choral anthems of the church peal out over the kneeling
+multitude, it requires little fancy to imagine them the golden trumpets
+of concealed archangels, who would be quite at home in that incomparable
+choir.
+
+If one should speak of all the noteworthy things you meet in this
+Cathedral, he would find himself in danger of following in the footsteps
+of Mr. Parro, who wrote a handbook of Toledo, in which seven hundred and
+forty-five pages are devoted to a hasty sketch of the basilica. For five
+hundred years enormous wealth and fanatical piety have worked together
+and in rivalry to beautify this spot. The boundless riches of the Church
+and the boundless superstition of the laity have left their traces here
+in every generation in forms of magnificence and beauty. Each of the
+chapels--and there are twenty-one of them--is a separate masterpiece in
+its way. The finest are those of Santiago and St. Ildefonso,--the former
+built by the famous Constable Alvaro de Luna as a burial-place for
+himself and family, and where he and his wife lie in storied marble; and
+the other commemorating that celebrated visit of the Virgin to the
+bishop, which is the favorite theme of the artists and ecclesiastical
+gossips of Spain.
+
+There was probably never a morning call which gave rise to so much talk.
+It was not the first time the Virgin had come to Toledo. This was always
+a favorite excursion of hers. She had come from time to time, escorted
+by St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. James. But on the morning in question,
+which was not long after Bishop Ildefonso had written his clever
+treatise, "De Virginitate Stae Mariae," the Queen of Heaven came down to
+matin prayers, and, taking the bishop's seat, listened to the sermon
+with great edification. After service she presented him with a nice new
+chasuble, as his own was getting rather shabby, made of "cloth of
+heaven," in token of her appreciation of his spirited pamphlet in her
+defence. This chasuble still exists in a chest in Asturias. If you open
+the chest, you will not see it; but this only proves the truth of the
+miracle, for the chroniclers say the sacred vestment is invisible to
+mortal eyes.
+
+But we have another and more palpable proof of the truth of the history.
+The slab of marble on which the feet of the celestial visitor alighted
+is still preserved in the Cathedral in a tidy chapel built on the very
+spot where the avatar took place. The slab is enclosed in red jasper and
+guarded by an iron grating, and above it these words of the Psalmist are
+engraved in the stone, _Adorabimus in loco ubi steterunt pedes ejus._
+
+This story is cut in marble and carved in wood and drawn upon brass and
+painted upon canvas, in a thousand shapes and forms all over Spain. You
+see in the Museum at Madrid a picture by Murillo devoted to this idle
+fancy of a cunning or dreaming priest. The subject was unworthy of the
+painter, and the result is what might have been expected,--a picture of
+trivial and mundane beauty, without the least suggestion of
+spirituality.
+
+But there can be no doubt of the serious, solemn earnestness with which
+the worthy Castilians from that day to this believe the romance. They
+came up in groups and families, touching their fingers to the sacred
+slab and kissing them reverentially with muttered prayers. A father
+would take the first kiss himself, and pass his consecrated finger
+around among his awe-struck babes, who were too brief to reach to the
+grating. Even the aged verger who showed us the shrine, who was so frail
+and so old that we thought he might be a ghost escaped from some of the
+mediaeval tombs in the neighborhood, never passed that pretty
+white-and-gold chapel without sticking in his thumb and pulling out a
+blessing.
+
+A few feet from this worship-worn stone, a circle drawn on one of the
+marble flags marks the spot where Santa Leocadia also appeared to this
+same favored Ildefonso and made her compliments on his pamphlet. Was
+ever author so happy in his subject and his gentle readers? The good
+bishop evidently thought the story of this second apparition might be
+considered rather a heavy draught on the credulity of his flock, so he
+whipped out a convenient knife and cut off a piece of her saint-ship's
+veil, which clinched the narrative and struck doubters dumb. That great
+king and crazy relic-hunter, Philip II., saw this rag in his time with
+profound emotion,--this tiger heart, who could order the murder of a
+thousand innocent beings without a pang.
+
+There is another chapel in this Cathedral which preaches forever its
+silent condemnation of Spanish bigotry to deaf ears. This is the
+Mozarabic Chapel, sacred to the celebration of the early Christian rite
+of Spain. During the three centuries of Moorish domination the
+enlightened and magnanimous conquerors guaranteed to those Christians
+who remained within their lines the free exercise of all their rights,
+including perfect freedom of worship. So that side by side the mosque
+and the church worshipped God each in its own way without fear or wrong.
+But when Alonso VI. recaptured the city in the eleventh century, he
+wished to establish uniformity of worship, and forbade the use of the
+ancient liturgy in Toledo. That which the heathen had respected the
+Catholic outraged. The great Cardinal Ximenez restored the primitive
+rite and devoted this charming chapel to its service. How ill a return
+was made for Moorish tolerance we see in the infernal treatment they
+afterwards received from king and Church. They made them choose between
+conversion and death. They embraced Christianity to save their lives.
+Then the priests said, "Perhaps this conversion is not genuine! Let us
+send the heathen away out of our sight." One million of the best
+citizens of Spain were thus torn from their homes and landed starving on
+the wild African coast. And Te Deums were sung in the churches for this
+triumph of Catholic unity. From that hour Spain has never prospered. It
+seems as if she were lying ever since under the curse of these breaking
+hearts.
+
+Passing by a world of artistic beauties which never tire the eyes, but
+soon would tire the chronicler and reader, stepping over the broad
+bronze slab in the floor which covers the dust of the haughty primate
+Porto Carrero, but which bears neither name nor date, only this
+inscription of arrogant humility, HIC JACET PULVIS CINIS ET NIHIL, we
+walk into the verdurous and cheerful Gothic cloisters. They occupy the
+site of the ancient Jewish markets, and the zealous prelate Tenorio,
+cousin to the great lady's man Don Juan, could think of no better way of
+acquiring the ground than that of stirring up the mob to burn the houses
+of the heretics. A fresco that adorns the gate explains the means
+employed, adding insult to the old injury. It is a picture of a
+beautiful child hanging upon a cross; a fiendish-looking Jew, on a
+ladder beside him, holds in his hand the child's heart, which he has
+just taken from his bleeding breast; he holds the dripping knife in his
+teeth. This brutal myth was used for centuries with great effect by the
+priesthood upon the mob whenever they wanted a Jew's money or his blood.
+Even to-day the old poison has not lost its power. This very morning I
+heard under my window loud and shrill voices. I looked out and saw a
+group of brown and ragged women, with babies in their arms, discussing
+the news from Madrid. The Protestants, they said, had begun to steal
+Catholic children. They talked themselves into a fury. Their elf-locks
+hung about their fierce black eyes. The sinews of their lean necks
+worked tensely in their voluble rage. Had they seen our mild missionary
+at that moment, whom all men respect and all children instinctively
+love, they would have torn him in pieces in their Maenad fury, and would
+have thought they were doing their duty as mothers and Catholics.
+
+This absurd and devilish charge was seriously made in a Madrid journal,
+the organ of the Moderates, and caused great fermentation for several
+days, street rows, and debates in the Cortes, before the excitement died
+away. Last summer, in the old Murcian town of Lorca, an English
+gentleman, who had been several weeks in the place, was attacked and
+nearly killed by a mob, who insisted that he was engaged in the business
+of stealing children, and using their spinal marrow for lubricating
+telegraph wires! What a picture of blind and savage ignorance is here
+presented! It reminds us of that sad and pitiful "blood-bath revolt" of
+Paris, where the wretched mob rose against the wretched tyrant Louis
+XV., accusing him of bathing in the blood of children to restore his own
+wasted and corrupted energies.
+
+Toledo is a city where you should eschew guides and trust implicitly to
+chance in your wanderings. You can never be lost; the town is so small
+that a short walk always brings you to the river or the wall, and there
+you can take a new departure. If you do not know where you are going,
+you have every moment the delight of some unforeseen pleasure. There is
+not a street in Toledo that is not rich in treasures of
+architecture,--hovels that once were marvels of building, balconies of
+curiously wrought iron, great doors with sculptured posts and lintels,
+with gracefully finished hinges, and studded with huge nails whose
+fanciful heads are as large as billiard balls. Some of these are still
+handsome residences, but most have fallen into neglect and abandonment.
+You may find a beggar installed in the ruined palace of a Moorish
+prince, a cobbler at work in the pleasure-house of a Castilian
+conqueror. The graceful carvings are mutilated and destroyed, the
+delicate arabesques are smothered and hidden under a triple coat of
+whitewash. The most beautiful Moorish house in the city, the so-called
+Taller del Moro, where the grim governor of Huesca invited four hundred
+influential gentlemen of the province to a political dinner, and cut off
+all their heads as they entered (if we may believe the chronicle, which
+we do not), is now empty and rapidly going to ruin. The exquisite
+panelling of the walls, the endlessly varied stucco work that seems to
+have been wrought by the deft fingers of ingenious fairies, is
+shockingly broken and marred. Gigantic cacti look into the windows from
+the outer court. A gay pomegranate-tree flings its scarlet blossoms in
+on the ruined floor. Rude little birds have built their nests in the
+beautiful fretted rafters, and flutter in and out as busy as brokers.
+But of all the feasting and loving and plotting these lovely walls
+beheld in that strange age that seems like fable now,--the vivid,
+intelligent, scientific, tolerant age of the Moors,--even the memory has
+perished utterly and forever.
+
+We strolled away aimlessly from this beautiful desolation, and soon came
+out upon the bright and airy Paseo del Transito. The afternoon sunshine
+lay warm on the dull brown suburb, but a breeze blew freshly through the
+dark river-gorge, and we sat upon the stone benches bordering the bluff
+and gave ourselves up to the scene. To the right were the ruins of the
+Roman bridge and the Moorish mills; to the left the airy arch of San
+Martin's bridge spanned the bounding torrent, and far beyond stretched
+the vast expanse of the green valley refreshed by the river, and rolling
+in rank waves of verdure to the blue hills of Guadalupe. Below us on the
+slippery rocks that lay at the foot of the sheer cliffs, some luxurious
+fishermen reclined, idly watching their idle lines. The hills stretched
+away, ragged and rocky, dotted with solitary towers and villas.
+
+A squad of beggars rapidly gathered, attracted by the gracious faces of
+Las Senoras. Begging seems almost the only regular industry of Toledo.
+Besides the serious professionals, who are real artists in studied
+misery and ingenious deformity, all the children in town occasionally
+leave their marbles and their leap-frog to turn an honest penny by
+amateur mendicancy.
+
+A chorus of piteous whines went up. But La Senora was firm. She checked
+the ready hands of the juveniles. "Children should not be encouraged to
+pursue this wretched life. We should give only to blind men, because
+here is a great and evident affliction; and to old women, because they
+look so lonely about the boots." The exposition was so subtle and
+logical that it admitted no reply. The old women and the blind men
+shuffled away with their pennies, and we began to chaff the sturdy and
+rosy children.
+
+A Spanish beggar can bear anything but banter. He is a keen
+physiognomist, and selects his victims with unerring acumen. If you
+storm or scowl at him, he knows he is making you uncomfortable, and
+hangs on like a burr. But if you laugh at him, with good humor, he is
+disarmed. A friend of mine reduced to confusion one of the most
+unabashed mendicants in Castile by replying to his whining petition,
+politely and with a beaming smile, "No, thank you. I never eat them."
+The beggar is far from considering his employment a degrading one. It is
+recognized by the Church, and the obligation of this form of charity
+especially inculcated. The average Spaniard regards it as a sort of tax
+to be as readily satisfied as a toll-fee. He will often stop and give a
+beggar a cent, and wait for the change in maravedises. One day, at the
+railway station, a muscular rogue approached me and begged for alms. I
+offered him my _sac-de-nuit_ to carry a block or two. He drew himself up
+proudly and said, "I beg your pardon, sir; I am no Gallician." An old
+woman came up with a basket on her arm. "Can it be possible in this far
+country," said La Senora, "or are these--yes, they are, deliberate
+peanuts." With a penny we bought unlimited quantities of this levelling
+edible, and with them the devoted adherence of the aged merchant. She
+immediately took charge of our education. We must see Santa Maria la
+Blanca,--it was a beautiful thing; so was the Transito. Did we see those
+men and women grubbing in the hillside? They were digging bones to sell
+at the station. Where did the bones come from? Quien sabe? Those
+dust-heaps have been there since King Wamba. Come, we must go and see
+the Churches of Mary before it grew dark. And the zealous old creature
+marched away with us to the synagogue built by Samuel Ben Levi,
+treasurer to that crowned panther, Peter the Cruel. This able financier
+built this fine temple to the God of his fathers out of his own purse.
+He was murdered for his money by his ungrateful lord, and his synagogue
+stolen by the Church. It now belongs to the order of Cala-trava.
+
+But the other and older synagogue, now called Santa Maria la Blanca, is
+much more interesting. It stands in the same quarter, the suburb
+formerly occupied by the industrious and thriving Hebrews of the Middle
+Ages until the stupid zeal of the Catholic kings drove them out of
+Spain. The synagogue was built in the ninth century under the
+enlightened domination of the Moors. At the slaughter of the Jews in
+1405 it became a church. It has passed through varying fortunes since
+then, having been hospital, hermitage, stable, and warehouse; but it is
+now under the care of the provincial committee of art, and is somewhat
+decently restored. Its architecture is altogether Moorish. It has three
+aisles with thick octagonal columns supporting heavy horseshoe arches.
+The spandrels are curiously adorned with rich circular stucco figures.
+The soil you tread is sacred, for it was brought from Zion long before
+the Crusades; the cedar rafters above you preserve the memory and the
+odors of Lebanon.
+
+A little farther west, on a fine hill overlooking the river, in the
+midst of the ruined palaces of the early kings, stands the beautiful
+votive church of San Juan de los Reyes. It was built by Ferdinand and
+Isabella, before the Columbus days, to commemorate a victory over their
+neighbors the Portuguese. During a prolonged absence of the king, the
+pious queen, wishing to prepare him a pleasant surprise, instead of
+embroidering a pair of impracticable slippers as a faithful young wife
+would do nowadays, finished this exquisite church by setting at work
+upon it some regiments of stone-cutters and builders. It is not
+difficult to imagine the beauty of the structure that greeted the king
+on his welcome home. For even now, after the storms of four centuries
+have beaten upon it, and the malignant hands of invading armies have
+used their utmost malice against it, it is still a won-drously perfect
+work of the Gothic inspiration.
+
+We sat on the terrace benches to enjoy the light and graceful lines of
+the building, the delicately ornate door, the unique drapery of iron
+chains which the freed Christians hung here when delivered from the
+hands of the Moors. A lovely child, with pensive blue eyes fringed with
+long lashes, and the slow sweet smile of a Madonna, sat near us and sang
+to a soft, monotonous air a war-song of the Carlists. Her beauty soon
+attracted the artistic eyes of La Senora, and we learned she was named
+Francisca, and her baby brother, whose flaxen head lay heavily on her
+shoulder, was called Jesus Mary. She asked, Would we like to go into the
+church? She knew the sacristan and would go for him. She ran away like a
+fawn, the tow head of little Jesus tumbling dangerously about. She
+reappeared in a moment; she had disposed of mi nino, as she called it,
+and had found the sacristan. This personage was rather disappointing. A
+sacristan should be aged and mouldy, clothed in black of a decent
+shabbiness. This was a Toledan swell in a velvet shooting-jacket, and
+yellow peg-top trousers. However, he had the wit to confine himself to
+turning keys, and so we gradually recovered from the shock of the
+shooting-jacket.
+
+The church forms one great nave, divided into four vaults enriched with
+wonderful stone lace-work. A superb frieze surrounds the entire nave,
+bearing in great Gothic letters an inscription narrating the foundation
+of the church. Everywhere the arms of Castile and Arragon, and the
+wedded ciphers of the Catholic kings. Statues of heralds start
+unexpectedly out from the face of the pillars. Fine as the church is, we
+cannot linger here long. The glory of San Juan is its cloisters. It may
+challenge the world to show anything so fine in the latest bloom and
+last development of Gothic art. One of the galleries is in ruins,--a sad
+witness of the brutality of armies. But the three others are enough to
+show how much of beauty was possible in that final age of pure Gothic
+building. The arches bear a double garland of leaves, of flowers, and of
+fruits, and among them are ramping and writhing and playing every figure
+of bird or beast or monster that man has seen or poet imagined. There
+are no two arches alike, and yet a most beautiful harmony pervades them
+all. In some the leaves are in profile, in others delicately spread upon
+the graceful columns and every vein displayed. I saw one window where a
+stone monkey sat reading his prayers, gowned and cowled,--an odd caprice
+of the tired sculptor. There is in this infinite variety of detail a
+delight that ends in something like fatigue. You cannot help feeling
+that this was naturally and logically the end of Gothic art. It had run
+its course. There was nothing left but this feverish quest of variety.
+It was in danger, after having gained such divine heights of invention,
+of degenerating into prettinesses and affectation.
+
+But how marvellously fine it was at last! One must see it, as in these
+unequalled cloisters, half ruined, silent, and deserted, bearing with
+something of conscious dignity the blows of time and the ruder wrongs of
+men, to appreciate fully its proud superiority to all the accidents of
+changing taste and modified culture. It is only the truest art that can
+bear that test. The fanes of Paestum will always be more beautiful even
+than the magical shore on which they stand. The Parthenon, fixed like a
+battered coronet on the brow of the Acropolis, will always be the
+loveliest sight that Greece can offer to those who come sailing in from
+the blue Aegean. It is scarcely possible to imagine a condition of
+thought or feeling in which these master-works shall seem quaint or
+old-fashioned. They appeal, now and always, with that calm power of
+perfection, to the heart and eyes of every man born of woman.
+
+The cloisters enclose a little garden just enough neglected to allow the
+lush dark ivy, the passionflowers, and the spreading oleanders to do
+their best in beautifying the place, as men have done their worst in
+marring it. The clambering vines seem trying to hide the scars of their
+hardly less perfect copies. Every arch is adorned with a soft and
+delicious drapery of leaves and tendrils; the fair and outraged child of
+art is cherished and caressed by the gracious and bountiful hands of
+Mother Nature.
+
+As we came away, little Francisca plucked one of the five-pointed leaves
+of the passion-flowers and gave it to La Senora, saying reverentially,
+"This is the Hand of Our Blessed Lord!"
+
+The sun was throned, red as a bacchanal king, upon the purple hills, as
+we descended the rocky declivity and crossed the bridge of St. Martin.
+
+Our little Toledan maid came with us, talking and singing incessantly,
+like a sweet-voiced starling. We rested on the farther side and looked
+back at the towering city, glorious in the sunset, its spires aflame,
+its long lines of palace and convent clear in the level rays, its ruins
+softened in the gathering shadows, the lofty bridge hanging transfigured
+over the glowing river. Before us the crumbling walls and turrets of the
+Gothic kings ran down from the bluff to the water-side, its terrace
+overlooking the baths where, for his woe, Don Roderick saw Count
+Julian's daughter under the same inflammatory circumstances as those in
+which, from a Judaean housetop, Don David beheld Captain Uriah's wife.
+There is a great deal of human nature abroad in the world in all ages.
+
+Little Francisca kept on chattering. "That is St. Martin's bridge. A
+girl jumped into the water last year. She was not a lady. She was in
+service. She was tired of living because she was in love. They found her
+three weeks afterwards; but, Santisima Maria! she was good for nothing
+then."
+
+Our little maid was too young to have sympathy for kings or servant
+girls who die for love. She was a pretty picture as she sat there, her
+blue eyes and Madonna face turned to the rosy west, singing in her sweet
+child's voice her fierce little song of sedition and war:--
+
+  "Arriba los valientes!
+  Abajo tirania!
+  Pronto llegara el dia
+    De la Restauracion.
+
+  Carlistas a caballo!
+  Soldados en Campana!
+  Viva el Rey de Espana,
+    Don Carlos de Borbon!"
+
+I cannot enumerate the churches of Toledo,--you find them in every
+street and by-way. In the palmy days of the absolute theocracy this
+narrow space contained more than a hundred churches and chapels. The
+province was gnawed by the cancer of sixteen monasteries of monks and
+twice as many convents of nuns, all crowded within these city walls.
+Fully one half the ground of the city was covered by religious buildings
+and mortmain property. In that age, when money meant ten times what it
+signifies now, the rent-roll of the Church in Toledo was forty millions
+of reals. There are even yet portions of the town where you find nothing
+but churches and convents. The grass grows green in the silent streets.
+You hear nothing but the chime of bells and the faint echoes of masses.
+You see on every side bolted doors and barred windows, and, gliding over
+the mossy pavements, the stealthy-stepping, long-robed priests.
+
+I will only mention two more churches, and both of these converts from
+heathendom; both of them dedicated to San Cristo, for in the democracy
+of the calendar the Saviour is merely a saint, and reduced to the level
+of the rest. One is the old pretorian temple of the Romans, which was
+converted by King Sizebuto into a Christian church in the seventh
+century. It is a curious structure in brick and mortar, with an apsis
+and an odd arrangement of round arches sunken in the outer wall and
+still deeper pointed ones. It is famed as the resting-place of Saints
+Ildefonso and Leocadia, whom we have met before. The statue of the
+latter stands over the door graceful and pensive enough for a heathen
+muse. The little cloisters leading to the church are burial vaults. On
+one side lie the canonical dead and on the other the laity, with bright
+marble tablets and gilt inscriptions. In the court outside I noticed a
+flat stone marked _Ossuarium._ The sacristan told me this covered the
+pit where the nameless dead reposed, and when the genteel people in the
+gilt marble vaults neglected to pay their annual rent, they were taken
+out and tumbled in to moulder with the common clay.
+
+This San Cristo de la Vega, St. Christ of the Plain, stands on the wide
+flat below the town, where you find the greater portion of the Roman
+remains. Heaps of crumbling composite stretched in an oval form over the
+meadow mark the site of the great circus. Green turf and fields of
+waving grain occupy the ground where once a Latin city stood. The Romans
+built on the plain. The Goths, following their instinct of isolation,
+fixed their dwelling on the steep and rugged rock. The rapid Tagus
+girdling the city like a horseshoe left only the declivity to the west
+to be defended, and the ruins of King Wamba's wall show with what
+jealous care that work was done. But the Moors, after they captured the
+city, apparently did little for its defence. A great suburb grew up in
+the course of ages outside the wall, and when the Christians recaptured
+Toledo in 1085, the first care of Alonso VI. was to build another wall,
+this time nearer the foot of the hill, taking inside all the accretion
+of these years. From that day to this that wall has held Toledo. The
+city has never reached, perhaps will never reach, the base of the steep
+rock on which it stands.
+
+When King Alonso stormed the city, his first thought, in the busy half
+hour that follows victory, was to find some convenient place to say his
+prayers. Chance led him to a beautiful little Moorish mosque or oratory
+near the superb Puerta del Sol. He entered, gave thanks, and hung up his
+shield as a votive offering. This is the Church of San Cristo de la Luz.
+The shield of Alonso hangs there defying time for eight centuries,--a
+golden cross on a red field,--and the exquisite oratory, not much larger
+than a child's toy-house, is to-day one of the most charming specimens
+of Moorish art in Spain. Four square pillars support the roof, which is
+divided into five equal "half-orange" domes, each different from the
+others and each equally fascinating in its unexpected simplicity and
+grace. You cannot avoid a feeling of personal kindliness and respect for
+the refined and genial spirit who left this elegant legacy to an alien
+race and a hostile creed.
+
+The Military College of Santa Cruz is one of the most precious specimens
+extant of those somewhat confused but beautiful results of the
+transition from florid Gothic to the Renaissance. The plateresque is
+young and modest, and seeks to please in this splendid monument by
+allying the innovating forms with the traditions of a school outgrown.
+There is an exquisite and touching reminiscence of the Gothic in the
+superb portal and the matchless group of the Invention of the Cross. All
+this fine facade is by that true and genuine artist, Enrique de Egas,
+the same who carved the grand Gate of the Lions, for which may the gate
+of paradise be open to him.
+
+The inner court is surrounded by two stories of airy arcades, supported
+by slim Corinthian columns. In one corner is the most elaborate
+staircase in Spain. All the elegance and fancy of Arab and Renaissance
+art have been lavished upon this masterly work.
+
+Santa Cruz was built for a hospital by that haughty Cardinal Mendoza,
+the Tertius Rex of Ferdinand and Isabella. It is now occupied by the
+military school, which receives six hundred cadets. They are under the
+charge of an inspector-general and a numerous staff of professors. They
+pay forty cents a day for their board. The instruction is gratuitous and
+comprehends a curriculum almost identical with that of West Point. It
+occupies, however, only three years.
+
+The most considerable Renaissance structure in Toledo is the Royal
+Alcazar. It covers with its vast bulk the highest hilltop in the city.
+From the earliest antiquity this spot has been occupied by a royal
+palace or fortress. But the present structure was built by Charles V.
+and completed by Herrera for Philip II. Its north and south facades are
+very fine. The Alcazar seems to have been marked by fate. The Portuguese
+burned it in the last century, and Charles III. restored it just in time
+for the French to destroy it anew. Its indestructible walls alone
+remain. Now, after many years of ruinous neglect, the government has
+begun the work of restoration. The vast quadrangle is one mass of
+scaffolding and plaster dust. The grand staircase is almost finished
+again. In the course of a few years we may expect to see the Alcazar in
+a state worthy of its name and history. We would hope it might never
+again shelter a king. They have had their day there. Their line goes
+back so far into the mists of time that its beginning eludes our utmost
+search. The Roman drove out the unnamed chiefs of Iberia. The
+fair-haired Goth dispossessed the Italian. The Berber destroyed the
+Gothic monarchy. Castile and Leon fought their way down inch by inch
+through three centuries from Covadonga to Toledo, halfway in time and
+territory to Granada and the Midland Sea. And since then how many royal
+feet have trodden this breezy crest,--Sanchos and Henrys and
+Ferdinands,--the line broken now and then by a usurping uncle or a
+fratricide brother,--a red-handed bastard of Trastamara, a star-gazing
+Alonso, a plotting and praying Charles, and, after Philip, the dwindling
+scions of Austria and the nullities of Bourbon. This height has known as
+well the rustle of the trailing robes of queens,--Berenguela, Isabel the
+Catholic, and Juana,--Crazy Jane. It was the prison of the widow of
+Philip IV. and mother of Charles II. What wonder if her life left much
+to be desired? With such a husband and such a son, she had no memories
+nor hopes.
+
+The kings have had a long day here. They did some good in their time.
+But the world has outgrown them, and the people, here as elsewhere, is
+coming of age. This Alcazar is built more strongly than any dynasty. It
+will make a glorious school-house when the repairs are finished and the
+Republic is established, and then may both last forever!
+
+One morning at sunrise, I crossed the ancient bridge of Alcantara, and
+climbed the steep hill east of the river to the ruined castle of San
+Cervantes, perched on a high, bold rock, which guards the river and
+overlooks the valley. Near as it is to the city, it stands entirely
+alone. The instinct of aggregation is so powerful in this people that
+the old towns have no environs, no houses sprinkled in the outlying
+country, like modern cities. Every one must be huddled inside the walls.
+If a solitary house, like this castle, is built without, it must be in
+itself an impregnable fortress. This fine old ruin, in obedience to this
+instinct of jealous distrust, has but one entrance, and that so narrow
+that Sir John Falstaff would have been embarrassed to accept its
+hospitalities. In the shade of the broken walls, grass-grown and gay
+with scattered poppies, I looked at Toledo, fresh and clear in the early
+day. On the extreme right lay the new spick-and-span bull-ring, then the
+great hospice and Chapel of St. John the Baptist, the Convent of the
+Immaculate Conception, and next, the Latin cross of the Chapel of Santa
+Cruz, whose beautiful fagade lay soft in shadow; the huge arrogant bulk
+of the Alcazar loomed squarely before me, hiding half the view; to the
+left glittered the slender spire of the Cathedral, holding up in the
+pure air that emblem of august resignation, the triple crown of thorns;
+then a crowd of cupolas, ending at last near the river-banks with the
+sharp angular mass of San Cristobal. The field of vision was filled with
+churches and chapels, with the palaces of the king and the monk. Behind
+me the waste lands went rolling away untilled to the brown Toledo
+mountains. Below, the vigorous current of the Tagus brawled over its
+rocky bed, and the distant valley showed in its deep rich green what
+vitality there was in those waters if they were only used.
+
+A quiet, as of a plague-stricken city, lay on Toledo. A few mules wound
+up the splendid roads with baskets of vegetables. A few listless
+fishermen were preparing their lines. The chimes of sleepy bells floated
+softly out on the morning air. They seemed like the requiem of municipal
+life and activity slain centuries ago by the crozier and the crown.
+
+Thank Heaven, that double despotism is wounded to death. As Chesterfield
+predicted, before the first muttering of the thunders of '89, "the
+trades of king and priest have lost half their value." With the decay of
+this unrighteous power, the false, unwholesome activity it fostered has
+also disappeared. There must be years of toil and leanness, years
+perhaps of struggle and misery, before the new genuine life of the
+people springs up from beneath the dead and withered rubbish of temporal
+and spiritual tyranny. Freedom is an angel whose blessing is gained by
+wrestling.
+
+
+
+
+THE ESCORIAL
+
+
+The only battle in which Philip II. was ever engaged was that of St.
+Quentin, and the only part he took in that memorable fight was to listen
+to the thunder of the captains and the shouting afar off, and pray with
+great unction and fervor to various saints of his acquaintance and
+particularly to St. Lawrence of the Gridiron, who, being the celestial
+officer of the day, was supposed to have unlimited authority, and to
+whom he was therefore profuse in vows. While Egmont and his stout
+Flemings were capturing the Constable Montmorency and cutting his army
+in pieces, this young and chivalrous monarch was beating his breast and
+pattering his panic-stricken prayers. As soon as the victory was won,
+however, he lost his nervousness, and divided the entire credit of it
+between himself and his saints. He had his picture painted in full
+armor, as he appeared that day, and sent it to his doting spouse, Bloody
+Mary of England. He even thought he had gained glory enough, and while
+his father, the emperor-monk, was fiercely asking the messenger who
+brought the news of victory to Yuste, "Is my son at Paris?" the prudent
+Philip was making a treaty of peace, by which his son Don Carlos was to
+marry the Princess Elizabeth of France. But Mary obligingly died at this
+moment, and the stricken widower thought he needed consolation more than
+his boy, and so married the pretty princess himself.
+
+He always prided himself greatly on the battle of St. Quentin, and
+probably soon came to believe he had done yeoman service there. The
+childlike credulity of the people is a great temptation to kings. It is
+very likely that after the coup-d'etat of December, the trembling puppet
+who had sat shivering over his fire in the palace of the Elysee while
+Morny and Fleury and St. Arnaud and the rest of the cool gamblers were
+playing their last desperate stake on that fatal night, really persuaded
+himself that the work was his, and that _he_ had saved society. That the
+fly should imagine he is moving the coach is natural enough; but that
+the horses, and the wooden lumbering machine, and the passengers should
+take it for granted that the light gilded insect is carrying them
+all,--there is the true miracle.
+
+We must confess to a special fancy for Philip II. He was so true a king,
+so vain, so superstitious, so mean and cruel, it is probable so great a
+king never lived. Nothing could be more royal than the way he
+distributed his gratitude for the victory on St. Lawrence's day. To
+Count Egmont, whose splendid courage and loyalty gained him the battle,
+he gave ignominy and death on the scaffold; and to exhibit a gratitude
+to a myth which he was too mean to feel to a man, he built to San
+Lorenzo that stupendous mass of granite which is to-day the visible
+demonstration of the might and the weakness of Philip and his age.
+
+He called it the Monastery of San Lorenzo el Real, but the nomenclature
+of the great has no authority with the people. It was built on a site
+once covered with cinder-heaps from a long abandoned iron-mine, and so
+it was called in common speech the Escorial. The royal seat of San
+Ildefonso can gain from the general public no higher name than La
+Granja, the Farm. The great palace of Catharine de Medici, the home of
+three dynasties, is simply the Tuileries, the Tile-fields. You cannot
+make people call the White House the Executive Mansion. A merchant named
+Pitti built a palace in Florence, and though kings and grand dukes have
+inhabited it since, it is still the Pitti. There is nothing so
+democratic as language. You may alter a name by trick when force is
+unavailing. A noble lord in Segovia, following the custom of the good
+old times, once murdered a Jew, and stole his house. It was a pretty
+residence, but the skeleton in his closet was that the stupid commons
+would not call it anything but "the Jew's house." He killed a few of
+them for it, but that did not serve. At last, by advice of his
+confessor, he had the facade ornamented with projecting knobs of stucco,
+and the work was done. It is called to this day "the knobby house."
+
+The conscience of Philip did not permit a long delay in the
+accomplishment of his vow. Charles V. had charged him in his will to
+build a mausoleum for the kings of the Austrian race. He bound the two
+obligations in one, and added a third destination to the enormous pile
+he contemplated. It should be a palace as well as a monastery and a
+royal charnel-house. He chose the most appropriate spot in Spain for the
+erection of the most cheerless monument in existence. He had fixed his
+capital at Madrid because it was the dreariest town in Spain, and to
+envelop himself in a still profounder desolation, he built the Escorial
+out of sight of the city, on a bleak, bare hillside, swept by the
+glacial gales of the Guadarrama, parched by the vertical suns of summer,
+and cursed at all seasons with the curse of barrenness. Before it towers
+the great chain of mountains separating Old and New Castile. Behind it
+the chilled winds sweep down to the Madrid plateau, over rocky hillocks
+and involved ravines,--a scene in which probably no man ever took
+pleasure except the royal recluse who chose it for his home.
+
+John Baptist of Toledo laid the corner-stone on an April day of 1563,
+and in the autumn of 1584 John of Herrera looked upon the finished work,
+so vast and so gloomy that it lay like an incubus upon the breast of
+earth. It is a parallelogram measuring from north to south seven hundred
+and forty-four feet, and five hundred and eighty feet from east to west.
+It is built, by order of the fantastic bigot, in the form of St.
+Lawrence's gridiron, the courts representing the interstices of the
+bars, and the towers at the corners sticking helpless in the air like
+the legs of the supine implement. It is composed of a clean gray
+granite, chiefly in the Doric order, with a severity of facade that
+degenerates into poverty, and defrauds the building of the effect its
+great bulk merits. The sheer monotonous walls are pierced with eleven
+thousand windows, which, though really large enough for the rooms, seem
+on that stupendous surface to shrink into musketry loopholes. In the
+centre of the parallelogram stands the great church, surmounted by its
+soaring dome. All around the principal building is stretched a
+circumscribing line of convents, in the same style of doleful
+yellowish-gray uniformity, so endless in extent that the inmates might
+easily despair of any world beyond them.
+
+There are few scenes in the world so depressing as that which greets you
+as you enter into the wide court before the church, called El Templo.
+You are shut finally in by these iron-gray walls. The outside day has
+given you up. Your feet slip on the damp flags. An unhealthy fungus
+tinges the humid corners with a pallid green. You look in vain for any
+trace of human sympathy in those blank walls and that severe facade.
+There is a dismal attempt in that direction in the gilded garments and
+the painted faces of the colossal prophets and kings that are perched
+above the lofty doors. But they do not comfort you; they are tinselled
+stones, not statues.
+
+Entering the vestibule of the church, and looking up, you observe with a
+sort of horror that the ceiling is of massive granite and flat. The
+sacristan has a story that when Philip saw this ceiling, which forms the
+floor of the high choir, he remonstrated against it as too audacious,
+and insisted on a strong pillar being built to support it. The architect
+complied, but when Philip came to see the improvement he burst into
+lamentation, as the enormous column destroyed the effect of the great
+altar. The canny architect, who had built the pillar of pasteboard,
+removed it with a touch, and his majesty was comforted. Walking forward
+to the edge of this shadowy vestibule, you recognize the skill and taste
+which presided at this unique and intelligent arrangement of the choir.
+If left, as usual, in the body of the church, it would have seriously
+impaired that solemn and simple grandeur which distinguishes this above
+all other temples. There is nothing to break the effect of the three
+great naves, divided by immense square-clustered columns, and surmounted
+by the vast dome that rises with all the easy majesty of a mountain more
+than three hundred feet from the decent black and white pavement. I know
+of nothing so simple and so imposing as this royal chapel, built purely
+for the glory of God and with no thought of mercy or consolation for
+human infirmity. The frescos of Luca Giordano show the attempt of a
+later and degenerate age to enliven with form and color the sombre
+dignity of this faultless pile. But there is something in the blue and
+vapory pictures which shows that even the unabashed Luca was not free
+from the impressive influence of the Escorial.
+
+A flight of veined marble steps leads to the beautiful retable of the
+high altar. The screen, over ninety feet high, cost the Milanese Trezzo
+seven years of labor. The pictures illustrative of the life of our Lord
+are by Tibaldi and Zuccaro. The gilt bronze tabernacle of Trezzo and
+Herrera, which has been likened with the doors of the Baptistery of
+Florence as worthy to figure in the architecture of heaven, no longer
+exists. It furnished a half hour's amusement to the soldiers of France.
+On either side of the high altar are the oratories of the royal family,
+and above them are the kneeling effigies of Charles, with his wife,
+daughter, and sisters, and Philip with his successive harem of wives.
+One of the few luxuries this fierce bigot allowed himself was that of a
+new widowhood every few years. There are forty other altars with
+pictures good and bad. The best are by the wonderful deaf-mute,
+Navarrete, of Logrono, and by Sanchez Coello, the favorite of Philip.
+
+To the right of the high altar in the transept you will find, if your
+tastes, unlike Miss Riderhood's, run in a bony direction, the most
+remarkable Reliquary in the world. With the exception perhaps of Cuvier,
+Philip could see more in a bone than any man who ever lived. In his long
+life of osseous enthusiasm he collected seven thousand four hundred and
+twenty-one genuine relics,--whole skeletons, odd shins, teeth,
+toe-nails, and skulls of martyrs,--sometimes by a miracle of special
+grace getting duplicate skeletons of the same saint. The prime jewels of
+this royal collection are the grilled bones of San Lorenzo himself,
+bearing dim traces of his sacred gridiron.
+
+The sacristan will show you also the retable of the miraculous wafer,
+which bled when trampled on by Protestant heels at Gorcum in 1525. This
+has always been one of the chief treasures of the Spanish crown. The
+devil-haunted idiot Charles II. made a sort of idol of it, building it
+this superb altar, consecrated "in this miracle of earth to the miracle
+of heaven." When the atheist Frenchmen sacked the Escorial and stripped
+it of silver and gold, the pious monks thought most of hiding this
+wonderful wafer, and when the storm passed by, the booby Ferdinand VII.
+restored it with much burning of candles, swinging of censers, and
+chiming of bells. Worthless as it is, it has done one good work in the
+world. It inspired the altar-picture of Claudio Coello, the last best
+work of the last of the great school of Spanish painters. He finished it
+just before he died of shame and grief at seeing Giordano, the nimble
+Neapolitan, emptying his buckets of paint on the ceiling of the grand
+staircase, where St. Lawrence and an army of martyrs go sailing with a
+fair wind into glory.
+
+The great days of art in the Escorial are gone. Once in every nook and
+corner it concealed treasures of beauty that the world had nearly
+forgotten. The Perla of Raphael hung in the dark sacristy. The Cena of
+Titian dropped to pieces in the refectory. The Gloria, which had sunk
+into eclipse on the death of Charles V., was hidden here among
+unappreciative monks. But on the secularization of the monasteries,
+these superb canvases went to swell the riches of the Royal Museum.
+There are still enough left here, however, to vindicate the ancient fame
+of the collection. They are perhaps more impressive in their beauty and
+loneliness than if they were pranking among their kin in the glorious
+galleries and perfect light of that enchanted palace of Charles III. The
+inexhaustible old man of Cadora has the Prayer on Mount Olivet, an Ecce
+Homo, an Adoration of the Magi. Velazquez one of his rare scriptural
+pieces, Jacob and his Children. Tintoretto is rather injured at the
+Museo by the number and importance of his pictures left in this monkish
+twilight; among them is a lovely Esther, and a masterly Presentation of
+Christ to the People. Plenty of Giordanos and Bassanos and one or two
+by El Greco, with his weird plague-stricken faces, all chalk and
+charcoal. A sense of duty will take you into the crypt where the dead
+kings are sleeping in brass. This mausoleum, ordered by the great
+Charles, was slow in finishing. All of his line had a hand in it down to
+Philip IV., who completed it and gathered in the poor relics of royal
+mortality from many graves. The key of the vault is the stone where the
+priest stands when he elevates the Host in the temple above. The vault
+is a graceful octagon about forty feet high, with nearly the same
+diameter; the flickering light of your torches shows twenty-six
+sarcophagi, some occupied and some empty, filling the niches of the
+polished marble. On the right sleep the sovereigns, on the left their
+consorts. There is a coffin for Dona Isabel de Bourbon among the kings,
+and one for her amiable and lady-like husband among the queens. They
+were not lovely in their lives, and in their deaths they shall be
+divided. The quaint old church-mouse who showed me the crypt called my
+attention to the coffin where Maria Louisa, wife of Charles IV.,--the
+lady who so gallantly bestrides her war-horse, in the uniform of a
+colonel, in Goya's picture,--coming down those slippery steps with the
+sure footing of feverish insanity, during a severe illness, scratched
+_Luisa_ with the point of her scissors and marked the sarcophagus for
+her own. All there was good of her is interred with her bones. Her
+frailties live on in scandalized history.
+
+Twice, it is said, the coffin of the emperor has been opened by curious
+hands,--by Philip IV., who found the corpse of his great ancestor
+intact, and observed to the courtier at his elbow, "An honest body, Don
+Luis!" and again by the Ministers of State and Fomento in the spring of
+1870, who started back aghast when the coffin-lid was lifted and
+disclosed the grim face of the Burgess of Ghent, just as Titian painted
+him,--the keen, bold face of a world-stealer.
+
+I do not know if Philip's funeral urn was ever opened. He stayed above
+ground too long as it was, and it is probable that people have never
+cared to look upon his face again. All that was human had died out of
+him years before his actual demise, and death seemed not to consider it
+worth while to carry off a vampire. Go into the little apartment where
+his last days were passed; a wooden table and book-shelf, one arm-chair
+and two stools--the one upholstered with cloth for winter, the other
+with tin for summer--on which he rested his gouty leg, and a low chair
+for a secretary,--this was all the furniture he used. The rooms are not
+larger than cupboards, low and dark. The little oratory where he died
+looks out upon the high altar of the Temple. In a living death, as if by
+an awful anticipation of the common lot it was ordained that in the
+flesh he should know corruption, he lay waiting his summons hourly for
+fifty-three days. What tremendous doubts and fears must have assailed
+him in that endless agony! He had done more for the Church than any
+living man. He was the author of that sublime utterance of uncalculating
+bigotry, "Better not reign than reign over heretics." He had pursued
+error with fire and sword. He had peopled limbo with myriads of rash
+thinkers. He had impoverished his kingdom in Catholic wars. Yet all this
+had not sufficed. He lay there like a leper smitten by the hand of the
+God he had so zealously served. Even in his mind there was no peace. He
+held in his clenched hand his father's crucifix, which Charles had held
+in his exultant death at Yuste. Yet in his waking hours he was never
+free from the horrible suggestion that he had not done enough for
+salvation. He would start in horror from a sleep that was peopled with
+shapes from torment. Humanity was avenged at last.
+
+So powerful is the influence of a great personality that in the Escorial
+you can think of no one but Philip II. He lived here only fourteen
+years, but every corridor and cloister seems to preserve the souvenir of
+his sombre and imperious genius. For two and a half centuries his feeble
+successors have trod these granite halls; but they flit through your
+mind pale and unsubstantial as dreams. The only tradition they preserved
+of their great descent was their magnificence and their bigotry. There
+has never been one utterance of liberty or free thought inspired by this
+haunted ground. The king has always been absolute here, and the monk has
+been the conscience-keeper of the king. The whole life of the Escorial
+has been unwholesomely pervaded by a flavor of holy water and burial
+vaults. There was enough of the repressive influence of that savage
+Spanish piety to spoil the freshness and vigor of a natural life, but
+not enough to lead the court and the courtiers to a moral walk and
+conversation. It was as profligate a court in reality, with all its
+masses and monks, as the gay and atheist circle of the Regent of
+Orleans. Even Philip, the Inquisitor King, did not confine his royal
+favor to his series of wives. A more reckless and profligate young
+prodigal than Don Carlos, the hope of Spain and Rome, it would be hard
+to find to-day at Mabille or Cremorne. But he was a deeply religious
+lad for all that, and asked absolution from his confessors before
+attempting to put in practice his intention of killing his father.
+Philip, forewarned, shut him up until he died, in an edifying frame of
+mind, and then calmly superintended the funeral arrangements from a
+window of the palace. The same mingling of vice and superstition is seen
+in the lessening line down to our day. The last true king of the old
+school was Philip IV. Amid the ruins of his tumbling kingdom he lived
+royally here among his priests and his painters and his ladies. There
+was one jealous exigency of Spanish etiquette that made his favor fatal.
+The object of his adoration, when his errant fancy strayed to another,
+must go into a convent and nevermore be seen of lesser men. Madame
+Daunoy, who lodged at court, heard one night an august footstep in the
+hall and a kingly rap on the bolted door of a lady of honor. But we are
+happy to say she heard also the spirited reply from within, "May your
+grace go with God! I do not wish to be a nun!"
+
+There is little in these frivolous lives that is worth knowing,--the
+long inglorious reigns of the dwindling Austrians and the parody of
+greater days played by the scions of Bourbon, relieved for a few
+creditable years by the heroic struggle of Charles III. against the
+hopeless decadence. You may walk for an hour through the dismal line of
+drawing-rooms in the cheerless palace that forms the gridiron's handle,
+and not a spirit is evoked from memory among all the tapestry and
+panelling and gilding.
+
+The only cheerful room in this granite wilderness is the library, still
+in good and careful keeping. A long, beautiful room, two hundred feet of
+bookcases, and tasteful frescos by Tibaldi and Carducho, representing
+the march of the liberal sciences. Most of the older folios are bound in
+vellum, with their gilded edges, on which the title is stamped, turned
+to the front. A precious collection of old books and older manuscripts,
+useless to the world as the hoard of a miser. Along the wall are hung
+the portraits of the Escorial kings and builders. The hall is furnished
+with marble and porphyry tables, and elaborate glass cases display some
+of the curiosities of the library,--a copy of the Gospels that belonged
+to the Emperor Conrad, the Suabian Kurz; a richly illuminated
+Apocalypse; a gorgeous missal of Charles V.; a Greek Bible, which once
+belonged to Mrs. Phoebus's ancestor Cantacuzene; Persian and Chinese
+sacred books; and a Koran, which is said to be the one captured by Don
+Juan at Lepanto. Mr. Ford says it is spurious; Mr. Madoz says it is
+genuine. The ladies with whom I had the happiness to visit the library
+inclined to the latter opinion for two very good reasons,--the book is a
+very pretty one, and Mr. Madoz's head is much balder than Mr. Ford's.
+Wandering aimlessly through the frescoed cloisters and looking in at all
+the open doors, over each of which a cunning little gridiron is inlaid
+in the woodwork, we heard the startling and unexpected sound of boyish
+voices and laughter. We approached the scene of such agreeable tumult,
+and found the theatre of the monastery full of young students rehearsing
+a play for the coming holidays. A clever-looking priest was directing
+the drama, and one juvenile Thespis was denouncing tyrants and dying for
+his country in hexameters of a shrill treble. His friends were
+applauding more than was necessary or kind, and flourishing their wooden
+swords with much ferocity of action. All that is left of the once
+extensive establishment of the monastery is a boys' school, where some
+two hundred youths are trained in the humanities, and a college where an
+almost equal number are educated for the priesthood.
+
+So depressing is the effect of the Escorial's gloom and its memories,
+that when you issue at last from its massive doors, the trim and
+terraced gardens seem gay and heartsome, and the bleak wild scene is
+full of comfort. For here at least there is light and air and boundless
+space. You have emerged from the twilight of the past into the present
+day. The sky above you bends over Paris and Cheyenne. By this light
+Darwin is writing, and the merchants are meeting in the Chicago Board of
+Trade. Just below you winds the railway which will take you in two hours
+to Madrid,--to the city of Philip II., where the nineteenth century has
+arrived; where there are five Protestant churches and fifteen hundred
+evangelical communicants. Our young crusader, Professor Knapp, holds
+night schools and day schools and prayer meetings, with an active
+devotion, a practical and American fervor, that is leavening a great
+lump of apathy and death. These Anglo-Saxon missionaries have a larger
+and more tolerant spirit of propaganda than has been hitherto seen. They
+can differ about the best shape for the cup and the platter, but they
+use what they find to their hand. They are giving a tangible direction
+and purpose to the vague impulse of reform that was stirring, before
+they came, in many devout hearts. A little while longer of this state of
+freedom and inquiry, and the shock of controversy will come, and Spain
+will be brought to life.
+
+Already the signs are full of promise. The ancient barriers of
+superstition have already given way in many places. A Protestant can not
+only live in Spain, but, what was once a more important matter, he can
+die and be buried there. This is one of the conquests of the revolution.
+So delicate has been the susceptibility of the Spanish mind in regard to
+the pollution of its soil by heretic corpses that even Charles I. of
+England, when he came a-wooing to Spain, could hardly gain permission to
+bury his page by night in the garden of the embassy; and in later days
+the Prussian Minister was compelled to smuggle his dead child out of the
+kingdom among his luggage to give it Christian burial. Even since the
+days of September the clergy has fought manfully against giving
+sepulture to Protestants; but Rivero, alcalde of Madrid and president of
+the Cortes, was not inclined to waste time in dialectics, and sent a
+police force to protect the heretic funerals and to arrest any priest
+who disturbed them. There is freedom of speech and printing. The
+humorous journals are full of blasphemous caricatures that would be
+impossible out of a Catholic country, for superstition and blasphemy
+always run in couples. It was the Duke de Guise, commanding the pope's
+army at Civitella, who cried in his rage at a rain which favored Alva,
+"God has turned Spaniard;" like Quashee, who burns his fetish when the
+weather is foul. The liberal Spanish papers overflowed with wit at the
+proclamation of infallibility. They announced that his holiness was now
+going into the lottery business with brilliant prospects of success;
+that he could now tell what Father Manterola had done with the thirty
+thousand dollars' worth of bulls he sold last year and punctually
+neglects to account for, and other levities of the sort, which seemed
+greatly relished, and which would have burned the facetious author two
+centuries before, and fined and imprisoned him before the fight at
+Alcolea. The minister having charge of the public instruction has
+promised to present a law for the prohibition of dogmatic doctrine in
+the national schools. The law of civil registry and civil marriage,
+after a desperate struggle in the Cortes, has gone into operation with
+general assent. There is a large party which actively favors the entire
+separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, making religion
+voluntary, and free, and breaking its long concubinage with the crown.
+The old superstition, it is true, still hangs like a malarial fog over
+Spain. But it is invaded by flashes and rays of progress. It cannot
+resist much longer the sunshine of this tolerant age.
+
+Far up the mountain-side, in the shade of a cluster of chestnuts, is a
+rude block of stone, called the "King's Chair," where Philip used to sit
+in silent revery, watching as from an eyry the progress of the enormous
+work below. If you go there, you will see the same scene upon which his
+basilisk glance reposed,--in a changed world, the same unchanging
+scene,--the stricken waste, the shaggy horror of the mountains, the
+fixed plain wrinkled like a frozen sea, and in the centre of the perfect
+picture the vast chill bulk of that granite pile, rising cold,
+colorless, and stupendous, as if carved from an iceberg by the hand of
+Northern gnomes. It is the palace of vanished royalty, the temple of a
+religion which is dead. There are kings and priests still, and will be
+for many coming years. But never again can a power exist which shall
+rear to the glory of the sceptre and the cowl a monument like this. It
+is a page of history deserving to be well pondered, for it never will be
+repeated. The world which Philip ruled from the foot of the Guadarrama
+has passed away. A new heaven and a new earth came in with the thunders
+of 1776 and 1789. There will be no more Pyramids, no more Versailles, no
+more Escoriais. The unpublished fiat has gone forth that man is worth
+more than the glory of princes. The better religion of the future has
+no need of these massive dungeon-temples of superstition and fear. Yet
+there is a store of precious teachings in this mass of stone. It is one
+of the results of that mysterious law to which the genius of history has
+subjected the caprices of kings, to the end that we might not be left
+without a witness of the past for our warning and example,--the law
+which induces a judged and sentenced dynasty to build for posterity some
+monument of its power, which hastens and commemorates its ruin. By
+virtue of this law we read on the plains of Egypt the pride and the fall
+of the Pharaohs. Before the fagade of Versailles we see at a glance the
+grandeur of the Capetian kings and the necessity of the Revolution. And
+the most vivid picture of that fierce and gloomy religion of the
+sixteenth century, compounded of a base alloy of worship for an absolute
+king and a vengeful God, is to be found in this colossal hermitage in
+the flinty heart of the mountains of Castile.
+
+
+
+
+A MIRACLE PLAY
+
+
+In the windy month of March a sudden gloom falls upon Madrid,--the
+reaction after the _folie gaiete_ of the Carnival. The theatres are at
+their gayest in February until Prince Carnival and his jolly train
+assault the town, and convert the temples of the drama into ball-rooms.
+They have not yet arrived at the wonderful expedition and despatch
+observed in Paris, where a half hour is enough to convert the grand
+opera into the masked ball. The invention of this process of flooring
+the orchestra flush with the stage and making a vast dancing-hall out of
+both is due to an ingenious courtier of the regency, bearing the great
+name of De Bouillon, who got much credit and a pension by it. In Madrid
+they take the afternoon leisurely to the transformation, and the
+evening's performance is of course sacrificed. So the sock and buskin,
+not being adapted to the cancan, yielded with February, and the theatres
+were closed finally on Ash Wednesday.
+
+Going by the pleasant little theatre of Lope de Rueda, in the Calle
+Barquillo, I saw the office-doors open, the posters up, and an
+unmistakable air of animation among the loungers who mark with a seal so
+peculiar the entrance of places of amusement. Struck by this apparent
+levity in the midst of the general mortification, I went over to look at
+the bills and found the subject announced serious enough for the most
+Lenten entertainment,--Los Siete Dolores de Maria,--The Seven Sorrows of
+Mary,--the old mediaeval Miracle of the Life of the Saviour.
+
+This was bringing suddenly home to me the fact that I was really in a
+Catholic country. I had never thought of going to Ammergau, and so, when
+reading of these shows, I had entertained no more hope of seeing one
+than of assisting at an auto-da-fe or a witch-burning. I went to the
+box-office to buy seats. But they were all sold. The forestallers had
+swept the board. I was never able to determine whether I most pitied or
+despised these pests of the theatre. Whenever a popular play is
+presented, a dozen ragged and garlic-odorous vagabonds go early in the
+day and buy as many of the best places as they can pay for. They hang
+about the door of the theatre all day, and generally manage to dispose
+of their purchases at an advance. But it happens very often that they
+are disappointed; that the play does not draw, or that the evening
+threatens rain, and the Spaniard is devoted to his hat. He would keep
+out of a revolution if it rained. So that, at the pleasant hour when the
+orchestra are giving the last tweak to the key of their fiddles, you may
+see these woebegone wretches rushing distractedly from the Piamonte to
+the Alcala, offering their tickets at a price which falls rapidly from
+double to even, and tumbles headlong to half-price at the first note of
+the opening overture. When I see the forestaller luxuriously basking at
+the office-door in the warm sunshine, and scornfully refusing to treat
+for less than twice the treasurer's figures, I feel a divided
+indignation against the nuisance and the management that permits it. But
+when in the evening I meet him haggard and feverish, hawking his unsold
+places in desperate panic on the sidewalk, I cannot but remember that
+probably a half dozen dirty and tawny descendants of Pelayo will eat no
+beans to-morrow for those unfortunate tickets, and my wrath melts, and I
+buy his crumpled papers, moist with the sweat of anxiety, and add a
+slight propina, which I fear will be spent in aguardiente to calm his
+shattered nerves.
+
+This day the sky looked threatening, and my shabby hidalgo listened to
+reason, and sold me my places at their price and a _petit verre._
+
+As we entered in the evening the play had just begun. The scene was the
+interior of the Temple at Jerusalem, rather well done,--two ranges of
+superimposed porphyry columns with a good effect of oblique perspective,
+which is very common in the Spanish theatres. St. Simeon, in a dress
+suspiciously resembling that of the modern bishop, was talking with a
+fiery young Hebrew who turns out to be Demas, the Penitent Thief, and
+who is destined to play a very noticeable part in the evening's
+entertainment. He has received some slight from the government
+authorities and does not propose to submit to it. The aged and
+cooler-blooded Simeon advises him to do nothing rash. Here at the very
+outset is a most characteristic Spanish touch. You are expected to be
+interested in Demas, and the only crime which could appeal to the
+sympathies of a Castilian crowd would be one committed at the promptings
+of injured dignity.
+
+There is a soft, gentle strain of music played pianissimo by the
+orchestra, and, surrounded by a chorus of mothers and maidens, the
+Virgin Mother enters with the Divine Child in her arms. The Madonna is a
+strapping young girl named Gutierrez, a very clever actress; and the
+Child has been bought in the neighboring toy-shop, a most palpable and
+cynical wax-doll. The doll is handed to Simeon, and the solemn ceremony
+of the Presentation is performed to fine and thoughtful music. St.
+Joseph has come in sheepishly by the flies with his inseparable staff
+crowned with a garland of lilies, which remain miraculously fresh during
+thirty years or so, and kneels at the altar, on the side opposite to
+Miss Gutierrez.
+
+As the music ceases, Simeon starts as from a trance and predicts in a
+few rapid couplets the sufferings and the crucifixion of the child. Mary
+falls overwhelmed into the arms of her attendants, and Simeon exclaims,
+"Most blessed and most unfortunate among women! thy heart is to be
+pierced with Seven Sorrows, and this is the first." Demas rushes in and
+announces the massacre of the innocents, concluding with the appropriate
+reflection, "Perish the kings! always the murderers of the people." This
+sentiment is so much to the taste of the gamins of the paraiso that they
+vociferously demand an encore; but the Roman soldiers come in and
+commence the pleasing task of prodding the dolls in the arms of the
+chorus.
+
+The next act is the Flight into Egypt. The curtain rises on a rocky
+ravine with a tinsel torrent in the background and a group of robbers on
+the stage. Gestas, the impenitent thief, stands sulky and glum in a
+corner, fingering his dagger as you might be sure he would, and
+informing himself in a growling soliloquy that his heart is consumed
+with envy and hate because he is not captain. The captain, one Issachar,
+comes in, a superbly handsome young fellow, named Mario, to my thinking
+the first comedian in Spain, dressed in a flashy suit of leopard hides,
+and announces the arrival of a stranger. Enters Demas, who says he hates
+the world and would fain drink its foul blood. He is made politely
+welcome. No! he will be captain or nothing. Issachar laughs scornfully
+and says _he_ is in the way of that modest aspiration. But Demas
+speedily puts him out of the way with an Albacete knife, and becomes
+captain, to the profound disgust of the impenitent Gestas, who exclaims,
+just as the profane villains do nowadays on every well-conducted stage,
+"Damnation! foiled again!"
+
+The robbers pick up their idolized leader and pitch him into the tinsel
+torrent. This is also extremely satisfactory to the wide-awake young
+Arabs of the cock-loft. The bandits disperse, and Demas indulges in some
+fifty lines of rhymed reflections, which are interrupted by the approach
+of the Holy Family, hotly pursued by the soldiery of Herod. They stop
+under a sycamore tree, which instantly, by very clever machinery, bends
+down its spreading branches and miraculously hides them from the
+bloodthirsty legionaries. These pass on, and Demas leads the saintly
+trio by a secret pass over the torrent,--the Mother and Child mounted
+upon an ass and St. Joseph trudging on behind with his lily-decked
+staff, looking all as if they were on a short leave of absence from
+Correggio's picture-frame.
+
+Demas comes back, calls up his merrymen, and has a battle-royal with the
+enraged legionaries, which puts the critics of the gallery into a frenzy
+of delight and assures the success of the spectacle. The curtain falls
+in a gust of applause, is stormed up again, Demas comes forward and
+makes a neat speech, announcing the author. Que salga! roar the
+gods,--"Trot him out!" A shabby young cripple hobbles to the front,
+leaning upon a crutch, his sallow face flushed with a hectic glow of
+pride and pleasure. He also makes a glib speech,--I have never seen a
+Spaniard who could not,--disclaiming all credit for himself, but lauding
+the sublimity of the acting and the perfection of the scene-painting,
+and saying that the memory of this unmerited applause will be forever
+engraved upon his humble heart.
+
+Act third, the Lost Child, or Christ in the Temple. The scene is before
+the Temple on a festival day, plenty of chorus-girls, music, and
+flowers. Demas and the impenitent Gestas and Barabbas, who, I was
+pleased to see, was after all a very good sort of fellow, with no more
+malice than you or I, were down in the city on a sort of lark, their
+leopard skins left in the mountains and their daggers hid under the
+natty costume of the Judaean dandy of the period. Demas and Gestas have
+a quarrel, in which Gestas is rather roughly handled, and goes off
+growling like every villain, _qui se respecte,--_"I will have
+r-revenge." Barabbas proposes to go around to the cider-cellars, but
+Demas confides to him that he is enslaved by a dream of a child, who
+said to him, "Follow me--to Paradise;" that he had come down to
+Jerusalem to seek and find the mysterious infant of his vision. The
+jovial Barabbas seems imperfectly impressed by these transcendental
+fancies, and at this moment Mary comes in dressed like a Madonna of
+Guido Reni, and soon after St. Joseph and his staff. They ask each other
+where is the Child,--a scene of alarm and bustle, which ends by the door
+of the Temple flying open and discovering, shrined in ineffable light,
+Jesus teaching the doctors.
+
+In the fourth act, Demas meets a beautiful woman by the city gate, in
+the loose, graceful dress of the Hetairai, and the most wonderful
+luxuriance of black curls I have ever seen falling in dense masses to
+her knees. After a conversation of amorous banter, he gives her a
+golden chain, which she assumes, well pleased, and gives him her name,
+La Magdalena. A motley crowd of street loafers here rushed upon the
+scene, and I am sure there was no one of Northern blood in the theatre
+that did not shudder for an instant at the startling apparition that
+formed the central figure of the group. The world has long ago agreed
+upon a typical face and figure for the Saviour of men; it has been
+repeated on myriads of canvases and reproduced in thousands of statues,
+till there is scarcely a man living that does not have the same image of
+the Redeemer in his mind. Well, that image walked quietly upon the
+stage, so perfect in make-up that you longed for some error to break the
+terrible vraisemblance. I was really relieved when the august appearance
+spoke, and I recognized the voice of a young actor named Morales, a
+clever light comedian of the Bressant type.
+
+The Magdalene is soon converted by the preaching of the Nazarene
+Prophet, and the scene closes by the triumphant entry into Jerusalem
+amid the waving of palm-branches, the strewing of flowers, and "sonorous
+metal blowing martial sounds." The pathetic and sublime lament,
+"Jerusalem! Jerusalem! thou that killest the prophets!" was delivered
+with great 'feeling and power.
+
+The next act brings us before the judgment-seat of Pontius Pilate. This
+act is almost solely horrible. The Magdalene in her garb of penitence
+comes in to beg the release of Jesus of Nazareth. Pontius, who is
+represented as a gallant old gentleman, says he can refuse nothing to a
+lady. The prisoner is dragged in by two ferocious ruffians, who beat and
+buffet him with absurd and exaggerated violence. There is nothing more
+hideous than the awful concreteness of this show,--the naked
+helplessness of the prisoner, his horrible, cringing, overdone humility,
+the coarse kicking and cuffing of the deputy sheriffs. The Prophet is
+stripped and scourged at the pillar until he drops from exhaustion. He
+is dragged anew before Pilate and examined, but his only word is, "Thou
+hast said." The scene lasts nearly an hour. The theatre was full of
+sobbing women and children. At every fresh brutality I could hear the
+weeping spectators say, "Pobre Jesus!" "How wicked they are!" The bulk
+of the audience was of people who do not often go to theatres. They
+looked upon the revolting scene as a real and living fact. One
+hard-featured man near me clenched his fists and cursed the cruel
+guards. A pale, delicate-featured girl who was leaning out of her box,
+with her brown eyes, dilated with horror, fixed upon the scene, suddenly
+shrieked as a Roman soldier struck the unresisting Saviour, and fell
+back fainting in the arms of her friends.
+
+The Nazarene Prophet was condemned at last. Gestas gives evidence
+against him, and also delivers Demas to the law, but is himself
+denounced, and shares their sentence. The crowd howled with exultation,
+and Pilate washed his hands in impotent rage and remorse. The curtain
+came down leaving the uncultivated portion of the audience in the frame
+of mind in which their ancestors a few centuries earlier would have gone
+from the theatre determined to serve God and relieve their feelings by
+killing the first Jew they could find. The diversion was all the better,
+because safer, if they happened to the good luck of meeting a Hebrew
+woman or child.
+
+The Calle de Amargura--the Street of Bitterness--was the next scene.
+First came a long procession of official Romans,--lictors and swordsmen,
+and the heralds announcing the day's business. Demas appears, dragged
+along with vicious jerks to execution. The Saviour follows, and falls
+under the weight of the cross before the footlights. Another long and
+dreary scene takes place, of brutalities from the Roman soldiers, the
+ringleader of whom is a sanguinary Andalusian ingeniously encased in a
+tin barrel, a hundred lines of rhymed sorrow from the Madonna, and a
+most curious scene of the Wandering Jew. This worthy, who in defiance of
+tradition is called Samuel, is sitting in his doorway watching the show,
+when the suffering Christ begs permission to rest a moment on his
+threshold. He says churlishly, Anda!--"Begone!" "I will go, but thou
+shalt go forever until I come." The Jew's feet begin to twitch
+convulsively, as if pulled from under him. He struggles for a moment,
+and at last is carried off by his legs, which are moved like those of
+the walking dolls with the Greek names. This odd tradition, so utterly
+in contradiction with the picture the Scriptures give us of the meek
+dignity with which the Redeemer forgave all personal injuries, has taken
+a singular hold upon the imaginations of all peoples. Under varying
+names,---Ahasuerus, Salathiel, le Juif Errant, der ewige Jude,--his
+story is the delight and edification of many lands; and I have met some
+worthy people who stoutly insisted that they had read it in the Bible.
+
+The sinister procession moves on. The audience, which had been somewhat
+cheered by the prompt and picturesque punishment inflicted upon the
+inhospitable Samuel, was still further exhilarated by the spectacle of
+the impenitent traitor Gestas, staggering under an enormous cross, his
+eyes and teeth glaring with abject fear, with an athletic Roman haling
+him up to Calvary with a new hempen halter.
+
+A long intermission followed, devoted to putting babies to sleep,--for
+there were hundreds of them, wide-eyed and strong-lunged,--to smoking
+the hasty cigarette, to discussing the next combination of Prim or the
+last scandal in the gay world. The carpenters were busy behind the
+scenes building the mountain. When the curtain rose, it was worth
+waiting for. It was an admirable scene. A genuine Spanish mountain,
+great humpy undulations of rock and sand, gigantic cacti for all
+vegetation, a lurid sky behind, but not over-colored. A group of Roman
+soldiers in the foreground, in the rear the hill, and the executioners
+busily employed in nailing the three victims to their crosses. Demas was
+fastened first; then Gestas, who, when undressed for execution, was a
+superb model of a youthful Hercules. But the third cross still lay on
+the ground; the hammering and disputing and coming and going were
+horribly lifelike and real.
+
+At last the victim is securely nailed to the wood, and the cross is
+slowly and clumsily lifted and falls with a shock into its socket. The
+soldiers _huzza.,_ the fiend in the tin barrel and another in a tin hat
+come down to the footlights and throw dice for the raiment. "Caramba!
+curse my luck!" says our friend in the tin case, and the other walks off
+with the vestment.
+
+The Passion begins, and lasts an interminable time. The grouping is
+admirable, every shifting of the crowd in the foreground produces a new
+and finished picture, with always the same background of the three high
+crosses and their agonizing burdens against that lurid sky. The
+impenitent Gestas curses and dies; the penitent Demas believes and
+receives eternal rest. The Holy Women come in and group themselves in
+picturesque despair at the foot of the cross. The awful drama goes on
+with no detail omitted,--the thirst the sponge dipped in vinegar, the
+cry of desolation, the spear-thrust, the giving up of the ghost. The
+stage-lights are lowered. A thick darkness--of crape--comes down over
+the sky. Horror falls on the impious multitude, and the scene is
+deserted save by the faithful.
+
+The closing act opens with a fine effect of moon and stars. "Que linda
+luna!" sighed a young woman beside me, drying her tears, comforted by
+the beauty of the scene. The central cross is bathed in the full
+splendor that is denied the others. Joseph of Abarimathea (as he is here
+called) comes in with ladders and winding-sheets, and the dead Christ is
+taken from the cross. The Descent is managed with singular skill and
+genuine artistic feeling. The principal actor, who has been suspended
+for an hour in a most painful and constrained posture, has a corpse-like
+rigidity and numbness. There is one moment when you can almost imagine
+yourself in Antwerp, looking at that sublimest work of Rubens. The
+Entombment ends, and the last tableau is of the Mater Dolorosa in the
+Solitude. I have rarely seen an effect so simple, and yet so
+striking,--the darkened stage, the softened moonlight, the now Holy Rood
+spectral and tall against the starry sky, and the Dolorous Mother, alone
+in her sublime sorrow, as she will be worshipped and revered for coming
+aeons.
+
+A curious observation is made by all foreigners, of the absence of the
+apostles from the drama. They appear from time to time, but merely as
+supernumeraries. One would think that the character of Judas was
+especially fitted for dramatic use. I spoke of this to a friend, and he
+said that formerly the false apostle was introduced in the play, but
+that the sight of him so fired the Spanish heart that not only his life,
+but the success of the piece was endangered. This reminds one of Mr. A.
+Ward's account of a high-handed outrage at "Utiky," where a young
+gentleman of good family stove in the wax head of "Jewdas Iscarrit,"
+characterizing him at the same time as a "pew-serlanimous cuss."
+
+"To see these Mysteries in their glory," continued my friend, "you
+should go into the small towns in the provinces, uncontaminated with
+railroads or unbelief. There they last several days The stage is the
+town, the Temple scene takes place in the church, the Judgment at the
+city hall, and the procession of the Via Crucis moves through all the
+principal streets. The leading roles are no joke,--carrying fifty kilos
+of wood over the mud and cobble-stones for half a day. The Judas or
+Gestas must be paid double for the kicks and cuffs he gets from
+tender-hearted spectators,--the curses he accepts willingly as a tribute
+to his dramatic ability. His proudest boast in the evening is Querian
+matarme,--'They wanted to kill me!' I once saw the hero of the drama
+stop before a wine-shop, sweating like rain, and positively swear by the
+life of the Devil, he would not carry his gallows a step farther unless
+he had a drink. They brought him a bottle of Valdepenas, and he drained
+it before resuming his way to Golgotha. Some of us laughed
+thoughtlessly, and narrowly escaped the knives of the orthodox ruffians
+who followed the procession."
+
+The most striking fact in this species of exhibition is the evident and
+unquestioning faith of the audience. To all foreigners the show is at
+first shocking and then tedious; to the good people of Madrid it is a
+sermon, full of absolute truth and vivid reality. The class of persons
+who attend these spectacles is very different from that which you find
+at the Royal Theatre or the Comic Opera. They are sober, serious
+bourgeois, who mind their shops and go to mass regularly, and who come
+to the theatre only in Lent, when the gay world stays away. They would
+not dream of such an indiscretion as reading the Bible. Their doctrinal
+education consists of their catechism, the sermons of the curas, and the
+traditions of the Church. The miracle of St. Veronica, who, wiping the
+brow of the Saviour in the Street of Bitterness, finds his portrait on
+her handkerchief, is to them as real and reverend as if it were related
+by the evangelist. The spirit of inquiry which has broken so many idols,
+and opened such new vistas of thought for the minds of all the world, is
+as yet a stranger to Spain. It is the blind and fatal boast of even the
+best of Spaniards that their country is a unit in religious faith. Nunca
+se disputo en Espana,--"There has never been any discussion in
+Spain,"--exclaims proudly an eminent Spanish writer. Spectacles like
+that which we have just seen were one of the elements which in a
+barbarous and unenlightened age contributed strongly to the
+consolidation of that unthinking and ardent faith which has fused the
+nation into one torpid and homogeneous mass of superstition. No better
+means could have been devised for the purpose. Leaving out of view the
+sublime teachings of the large and tolerant morality of Jesus, the
+clergy made his personality the sole object of worship and reverence. By
+dwelling almost exclusively upon the story of his sufferings, they
+excited the emotional nature of the ignorant, and left their intellects
+untouched and dormant. They aimed to arouse their sympathies, and when
+that was done, to turn their natural resentment against those whom the
+Church considered dangerous. To the inflamed and excited worshippers, a
+heretic was the enemy of the crucified Saviour, a Jew was his murderer,
+a Moor was his reviler. A Protestant wore to their bloodshot eyes the
+semblance of the torturer who had mocked and scourged the meek Redeemer,
+who had crowned his guileless head with thorns, who had pierced and
+slain him. The rack, the gibbet, and the stake were not enough to glut
+the pious hate this priestly trickery inspired. It was not enough that
+the doubter's life should go out in the blaze of the crackling fagots,
+but it must be loaded in eternity with the curses of the faithful.
+
+Is there not food for earnest thought in the fact that faith in Christ,
+which led the Puritans across the sea to found the purest social and
+political system which the wit of man has yet evolved from the tangled
+problems of time, has dragged this great Spanish people down to a depth
+of hopeless apathy, from which it may take long years of civil tumult to
+raise them? May we not find the explanation of this strange phenomenon
+in the contrast of Catholic unity with Protestant diversity? "Thou that
+killest the prophets!"--the system to which this apostrophe can be
+applied is doomed. And it matters little who the prophets may be.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRADLE AND THE GRAVE OF CERVANTES
+
+
+In Rembrandt Peale's picture of the Court of Death a cadaverous shape
+lies for judgment at the foot of the throne, touching at either
+extremity the waters of Lethe. There is something similar in the history
+of the greatest of Spanish writers. No man knew, for more than a century
+after the death of Cervantes, the place of his birth and burial. About a
+hundred years ago the investigations of Rios and Pellicer established
+the claim of Alcala de Henares to be his native city; and last year the
+researches of the Spanish Academy have proved conclusively that he is
+buried in the Convent of the Trinitarians in Madrid. But the precise
+spot where he was born is only indicated by vague tradition; and the
+shadowy conjecture that has so long hallowed the chapel and cloisters of
+the Calle Cantarranas has never settled upon any one slab of their
+pavement.
+
+It is, however, only the beginning and the end of this most chivalrous
+and genial apparition of the sixteenth century that is concealed from
+our view. We know where he was christened and where he died. So that
+there are sufficiently authentic shrines in Alcala and Madrid to satisfy
+the most sceptical pilgrims.
+
+I went to Alcala one summer day, when the bare fields were brown and dry
+in their after-harvest nudity, and the hills that bordered the winding
+Henares were drab in the light and purple in the shadow. From a distance
+the town is one of the most imposing in Castile. It lies in the midst of
+a vast plain by the green water-side, and the land approach is fortified
+by a most impressive wall emphasized by sturdy square towers and
+flanking bastions. But as you come nearer you see this wall is a
+tradition. It is almost in ruins.
+
+The crenellated towers are good for nothing but to sketch. A short walk
+from the station brings you to the gate, which is well defended by a
+gang of picturesque beggars, who are old enough to have sat for Murillo,
+and revoltingly pitiable enough to be millionaires by this time, if
+Castilians had the cowardly habit of sponging out disagreeable
+impressions with pennies. At the first charge we rushed in panic into a
+tobacco-shop and filled our pockets with maravedis, and thereafter faced
+the ragged battalion with calm.
+
+It is a fine, handsome, and terribly lonesome town. Its streets are
+wide, well built, and silent v as avenues in a graveyard. On every hand
+there are tall and stately churches, a few palaces, and some two dozen
+great monasteries turning their long walls, pierced with jealous grated
+windows, to the grass-grown streets. In many quarters there is no sign
+of life, no human habitations among these morose and now empty barracks
+of a monkish army. Some of them have been turned into military casernes,
+and the bright red and blue uniforms of the Spanish officers and
+troopers now brighten the cloisters that used to see nothing gayer than
+the gowns of cord-girdled friars. A large garrison is always kept here.
+The convents are convenient for lodging men and horses. The fields in
+the vicinity produce great store of grain and alfalfa,--food for beast
+and rider. It is near enough to the capital to use the garrison on any
+sudden emergency, such as frequently happens in Peninsular politics.
+
+The railroad that runs by Alcala has not brought with it any taint of
+the nineteenth century. The army is a corrupting influence, but not
+modern. The vice that follows the trail of armies, or sprouts,
+fungus-like, about the walls of barracks, is as old as war, and links
+the present, with its struggle for a better life, to the old mediaeval
+world of wrong. These trim fellows in loose trousers and embroidered
+jackets are the same race that fought and drank and made prompt love in
+Italy and Flanders and butchered the Aztecs in the name of religion
+three hundred years ago. They have laid off their helmets and hauberks,
+and use the Berdan rifle instead of the Roman spear. But they are the
+same careless, idle, dissolute bread-wasters now as then.
+
+The town has not changed in the least. It has only shrunk a little. You
+think sometimes it must be a vacation, and that you will come again when
+people return. The little you see of the people is very attractive.
+Passing along the desolate streets, you glance in at an open door and
+see a most delightful cabinet picture of domestic life. All the doors in
+the house are open. You can see through the entry, the front room, into
+the cool court beyond, gay with oleanders and vines, where a group of
+women half dressed are sewing and spinning and cheering their souls with
+gossip. If you enter under pretence of asking a question, you will be
+received with grave courtesy, your doubts solved, and they will bid you
+go with God, with the quaint frankness of patriarchal times.
+
+They do not seem to have been spoiled by overmuch travel. Such
+impressive and Oriental courtesy could not have survived the trampling
+feet of the great army of tourists. On our pilgrim-way to the cradle of
+Cervantes we came suddenly upon the superb facade of the university.
+This is one of the most exquisite compositions of plateresque in
+existence. The entire front of the central body of the building is
+covered with rich and tasteful ornamentation. Over the great door is an
+enormous escutcheon of the arms of Austria, supported by two finely
+carved statues,--on the one side a nearly nude warrior, on the other the
+New World as a feather-clad Indian woman. Still above this a fine, bold
+group of statuary, representing, with that reverent naivete of early
+art, God the Father in the work of creation. Surrounding the whole front
+as with a frame, and reaching to the ground on either side, is carved
+the knotted cord of the Franciscan monks. No description can convey the
+charming impression given by the harmony of proportion and the loving
+finish of detail everywhere seen in this beautifully preserved fagade.
+While we were admiring it an officer came out of the adjoining cuartel
+and walked by us with jingling spurs. I asked him if one could go
+inside. He shrugged his shoulders with a Quien sabe? indicating a doubt
+as profound as if I had asked him whether chignons were worn in the
+moon. He had never thought of anything inside. There was no wine nor
+pretty girls there. Why should one want to go in? We entered the cool
+vestibule, and were ascending the stairs to the first court, when a
+porter came out of his lodge and inquired our errand. We were wandering
+barbarians with an eye to the picturesque, and would fain see the
+university, if it were not unlawful. He replied, in a hushed and
+scholastic tone of voice, and with a succession of confidential winks
+that would have inspired confidence in the heart of a Talleyrand, that
+if our lordships would give him our cards he had no doubt he could
+obtain the required permission from the rector. He showed us into a dim,
+claustral-looking anteroom, in which, as I was told by my friend, who
+trifles in lost moments with the integral calculus, there were
+seventy-two chairs and one microscopic table. The wall was decked with
+portraits of the youth of the college, all from the same artist, who
+probably went mad from the attempt to make fifty beardless faces look
+unlike each other. We sat for some time mourning over his failure, until
+the door opened, and not the porter, but the rector himself, a most
+courteous and polished gentleman in the black robe and three-cornered
+hat of his order, came in and graciously placed himself and the
+university at our disposition. We had reason to congratulate ourselves
+upon this good fortune. He showed us every nook and corner of the vast
+edifice, where the present and the past elbowed each other at every
+turn: here the boys' gymnasium, there the tomb of Valles; here the new
+patent cocks of the water-pipes, and there the tri-lingual patio where
+Alonso Sanchez lectured in Arabic, Greek, and Chaldean, doubtless making
+a choice hash of the three; the airy and graceful paraninfo, or hall of
+degrees, a masterpiece of Moresque architecture, with a gorgeous
+panelled roof, a rich profusion of plaster arabesques, and, _horresco
+referens,_ the walls covered with a bright French paper. Our good rector
+groaned at this abomination, but said the Gauls had torn away the
+glorious carved panelling for firewood in the war of 1808, and the
+college was too poor to restore it. His righteous indignation waxed hot
+again when we came to the beautiful sculptured pulpit of the chapel,
+where all the delicate details are degraded by a thick coating of
+whitewash, which in some places has fallen away and shows the gilding of
+the time of the Catholic kings.
+
+There is in this chapel a picture of the Virgin appearing to the great
+cardinal whom we call Ximenez and the Spaniards Cisneros, which is
+precious for two reasons. The portrait of Ximenez was painted from life
+by the nameless artist, who, it is said, came from France for the
+purpose, and the face of the Virgin is a portrait of Isabella the
+Catholic. It is a good wholesome face, such as you would expect. But the
+thin, powerful profile of Ximenez is very striking, with his red hair
+and florid tint, his curved beak, and long, nervous lips. He looks not
+unlike that superb portrait Raphael has left of Cardinal Medici.
+
+This university is fragrant with the good fame of Ximenez. In the
+principal court there is a fine medallion of the illustrious founder and
+protector, as he delighted to be drawn, with a sword in one hand and a
+crucifix in the other,--twin brother in genius and fortune of the
+soldier-priest of France, the Cardinal-Duke Richelieu. On his gorgeous
+sarcophagus you read the arrogant epitaph with which he revenged himself
+for the littleness of kings and courtiers:--
+
+"Praetextam junxi sacco, galeamque galero, Frater, dux, praesul,
+cardineusque pater. Quin, virtute mea junctum est diadema cucullo, Dum
+mihi regnanti patuit Gesperia."
+
+By a happy chance our visit was made in a holiday time, and the students
+were all away. It was better that there should be perfect solitude and
+silence as we walked through the noble system of buildings and strove to
+re-create the student world of Cervantes's time. The chronicle which
+mentions the visit of Francis I. to Alcala, when a prisoner in Spain,
+says he was received by eleven thousand students. This was only twenty
+years before the birth of Cervantes. The world will never see again so
+brilliant a throng of ingenuous youth as gathered together in the great
+university towns in those years of vivid and impassioned greed for
+letters that followed the revival of learning. The romance of Oxford or
+Heidelberg or Harvard is tame compared with that electric life of a
+new-born world that wrought and flourished in Padua, Paris, and Alcala.
+Walking with my long-robed scholarly guide through the still, shadowy
+courts, under Renaissance arches and Moorish roofs, hearing him talking
+with enthusiasm of the glories of the past and never a word of the
+events of the present, in his pure, strong, guttural Castilian, no
+living thing in view but an occasional Franciscan gliding under the
+graceful arcades, it was not difficult to imagine the scenes of the
+intense young life which filled these noble halls in that fresh day of
+aspiration and hope, when this Spanish sunlight fell on the marble and
+the granite bright and sharp from the chisel of the builder, and the
+great Ximenez looked proudly on his perfect work and saw that it was
+good.
+
+The twilight of superstition still hung heavily over Europe. But this
+was nevertheless the breaking of dawn, the herald of the fuller day of
+investigation and inquiry.
+
+It was into this rosy morning of the modern world that Cervantes was
+ushered in the season of the falling leaves of 1547. He was born to a
+life of poverty and struggle and an immortality of fame. His own city
+did not know him while he lived, and now is only known through him.
+Pilgrims often come from over distant seas to breathe for one day the
+air that filled his baby lungs, and to muse among the scenes that shaped
+his earliest thoughts.
+
+We strolled away from the university through the still lanes and squares
+to the Calle Mayor, the only thoroughfare of the town that yet retains
+some vestige of traffic. It is a fine, long street bordered by stone
+arcades, within which are the shops, and without which in the pleasant
+afternoon are the rosy and contemplative shopkeepers. It would seem a
+pity to disturb their dreamy repose by offering to trade; and in justice
+to Castilian taste and feeling I must say that nobody does it. Halfway
+down the street a side alley runs to the right, called Calle de
+Cervantes, and into this we turned to find the birthplace of the
+romancer. On one side was a line of squalid, quaint, gabled houses, on
+the other a long garden wall. We walked under the shadow of the latter
+and stared at the house-fronts, looking for an inscription we had heard
+of. We saw in sunny doorways mothers oiling into obedience the stiff
+horse-tail hair of their daughters. By the grated windows we caught
+glimpses of the black eyes and nut-brown cheeks of maidens at their
+needles. But we saw nothing to show which of these mansions had been
+honored by tradition as the residence of Roderick Cervantes.
+
+A brisk and practical-looking man went past us.
+
+I asked him where was the house of the poet. He smiled in a superior
+sort of way, and pointed to the wall above my head: "There is no such
+house. Some people think it once stood here, and they have placed that
+stone in the garden-wall to mark the spot. I believe what I see. It is
+all child's play anyhow, whether true or false. There is better work to
+be done now than to honor Cervantes. He fought for a bigot king, and
+died in a monk's hood."
+
+"You think lightly of a glory of Castile."
+
+"If we could forget all the glories of Castile it would be better for
+us."
+
+"Puede ser," I assented. "Many thanks. May your grace go with God!"
+
+"Health and fraternity!" he answered, and moved away with a step full of
+energy and dissent. He entered a door under an inscription, "Federal
+Republican Club."
+
+Go your ways, I thought, radical brother. You are not so courteous nor
+so learned as the rector. But this Peninsula has need of men like you.
+The ages of belief have done their work for good and ill. Let us have
+some years of the spirit that denies, and asks for proofs. The power of
+the monk is broken, but the work is not yet done. The convents have been
+turned into barracks, which is no improvement. The ringing of spurs in
+the streets of Alcala is no better than the rustling of the sandalled
+friars. If this Republican party of yours cannot do something to free
+Spain from the triple curse of crown, crozier, and sabre, then Spain is
+in doleful case. They are at last divided, and the first two have been
+sorely weakened in detail. The last should be the easiest work.
+
+The scorn of my radical friend did not prevent my copying the modest
+tablet on the wall:--
+
+"Here was born Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote. By
+his fame and his genius he belongs to the civilized world; by his cradle
+to Alcala de Henares."
+
+There is no doubt of the truth of the latter part of this inscription.
+Eight Spanish towns have claimed to have given birth to Cervantes, thus
+beating the blind Scian by one town; every one that can show on its
+church records the baptism of a child so called has made its claim. Yet
+Alcala, who spells his name wrong, calling him Carvantes, is certainly
+in the right, as the names of his father, mother, brothers, and sisters
+are also given in its records, and all doubt is now removed from the
+matter by the discovery of Cervantes's manuscript statement of his
+captivity in Algiers and his petition for employment in America, in both
+of which he styles himself "Natural de Alcala de Henares."
+
+Having examined the evidence, we considered ourselves justly entitled to
+all the usual emotions in visiting the church of the parish, Santa Maria
+la Mayor. It was evening, and from a dozen belfries in the neighborhood
+came the soft dreamy chime of silver-throated bells. In the little
+square in front of the church a few families sat in silence on the
+massive stone benches. A few beggars hurried by, too intent upon getting
+home to supper to beg. A rural and a twilight repose lay on everything.
+Only in the air, rosy with the level light, flew out and greeted each
+other those musical voices of the bells rich with the memories of all
+the days of Alcala. The church was not open, but we followed a sacristan
+in, and he seemed too feeble-minded to forbid. It is a pretty church,
+not large nor imposing, with a look of cosy comfort about it. Through
+the darkness the high altar loomed before us, dimly lighted by a few
+candles where the sacristans were setting up the properties for the
+grand mass of the morrow,--Our Lady of the Snows. There was much talk
+and hot discussion as to the placing of the boards and the draperies,
+and the image of Our Lady seemed unmoved by words unsuited to her
+presence. We know that every vibration of air makes its own impression
+on the world of matter. So that the curses of the sacristans at their
+work, the prayers of penitents at the altar, the wailing of breaking
+hearts bowed on the pavement through many years, are all recorded
+mysteriously, in these rocky walls. This church is the illegible history
+of the parish. But of all its ringing of bells, and swinging of censers,
+and droning of psalms, and putting on and off of goodly raiment, the
+only show that consecrates it for the world's pilgrimage is that humble
+procession that came on the 9th day of October, in the year of Grace
+1547, to baptize Roderick Cervantes's youngest child. There could not be
+an humbler christening. Juan Pardo--John Gray--was the sponsor, and the
+witnesses were "Baltazar Vazquez, the sacristan, and I who baptized him
+and signed with my name," says Mr. Bachelor Serrano, who never dreamed
+he was stumbling into fame when he touched that pink face with the holy
+water and called the child Miguel. It is my profound conviction that
+Juan Pardo brought the baby himself to the church and took it home
+again, screaming wrathfully; Neighbor' Pardo feeling a little sheepish
+and mentally resolving never to do another good-natured action as long
+as he lived.
+
+As for the neophyte, he could not be blamed for screaming and kicking
+against the new existence he was entering, if the instinct of genius
+gave him any hint of it. Between the font of St. Mary's and the bier at
+St. Ildefonso's there was scarcely an hour of joy waiting him in his
+long life, except that which comes from noble and earnest work.
+
+His youth was passed in the shabby privation of a poor gentleman's
+house; his early talents attracted the attention of my Lord Aquaviva,
+the papal legate, who took him back to Rome in his service; but the
+high-spirited youth soon left the inglorious ease of the cardinal's
+house to enlist as a private soldier in the sea-war against the Turk. He
+fought bravely at Lepanto, where he was three times wounded and his left
+hand crippled. Going home for promotion, loaded with praise and kind
+letters from the generous bastard, Don Juan of Austria, the true son of
+the Emperor Charles and pretty Barbara Blumberg, he was captured with
+his brother by the Moors, and passed five miserable years in slavery,
+never for one instant submitting to his lot, but wearying his hostile
+fate with constant struggles. He headed a dozen attempts at flight or
+insurrection, and yet his thrifty owners would not kill him. They
+thought a man who bore letters from a prince, and who continued cock of
+his walk through years of servitude, would one day bring a round ransom.
+At last the tardy day of his redemption came, but not from the
+cold-hearted tyrant he had so nobly served. The matter was presented to
+him by Cervantes's comrades, but he would do nothing. So that Don
+Roderick sold his estate and his sisters sacrificed their dowry to buy
+the freedom of the captive brothers.
+
+They came back to Spain still young enough to be fond of glory, and
+simple-hearted enough to believe in the justice of the great. They
+immediately joined the army and served in the war with Portugal. The
+elder brother made his way and got some little promotion, but Miguel got
+married and discharged, and wrote verses and plays, and took a small
+office in Seville, and moved with the Court to Valladolid; and kept his
+accounts badly, and was too honest to steal, and so got into jail, and
+grew every year poorer and wittier and better; he was a public
+amanuensis, a business agent, a sub-tax-gatherer,--anything to keep his
+lean larder garnished with scant ammunition against the wolf hunger. In
+these few lines you have the pitiful story of the life of the greatest
+of Spaniards, up to his return to Madrid in 1606, when he was nearly
+sixty years old.
+
+From this point his history becomes clearer and more connected up to the
+time of his death. He lived in the new-built suburb, erected on the site
+of the gardens of the Duke of Lerma, first minister and favorite of
+Philip III. It was a quarter much affected by artists and men of
+letters, and equally so by ecclesiastics. The names of the streets
+indicate the traditions of piety and art that still hallow the
+neighborhood. Jesus Street leads you into the street of Lope de Vega.
+Quevedo and Saint Augustine run side by side. In the same neighborhood
+are the streets called Cervantes, Saint Mary, and Saint Joseph, and just
+round the corner are the Magdalen and the Love-of-God. The actors and
+artists of that day were pious and devout madcaps. They did not abound
+in morality, but they had of religion enough and to spare. Many of them
+were members of religious orders, and it is this fact which has procured
+us such accurate records of their history. All the events in the daily
+life of the religious establishments were carefully recorded, and the
+manuscript archives of the convents and brotherhoods of that period are
+rich in materials for the biographer.
+
+There was a special reason for the sudden rise of religious brotherhoods
+among the laity. The great schism of England had been fully completed
+under Elizabeth. The devout heart of Spain was bursting under this
+wrong, and they could think of no way to avenge it. They would fain have
+roasted the whole heretical island, but the memory of the Armada was
+fresh in men's minds, and the great Philip was dead. There were not
+enough heretics in Spain to make it worth while to waste time in hunting
+them. Philip could say as Narvaez, on his death-bed, said to his
+confessor who urged him to forgive his enemies, "Bless your heart, I
+have none. I have killed them all." To ease their pious hearts, they
+formed confraternities all over Spain, for the worship of the Host. They
+called themselves "Unworthy Slaves of the Most Holy Sacrament." These
+grew at once very popular in all classes. Artisans rushed in, and wasted
+half their working days in processions and meetings. The severe Suarez
+de Figueroa speaks savagely of the crowd of Narcissuses and petits
+maitres (a word which is delicious in its Spanish dress of petimetres)
+who entered the congregations simply to flutter about the processions in
+brave raiment, to be admired of the multitude. But there were other more
+serious members,--the politicians who joined to stand well with the
+bigot court, and the devout believers who found comfort and edification
+in worship. Of this latter class was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who
+joined the brotherhood in the street of the Olivar in 1609. He was now
+sixty-two years old, and somewhat infirm,--a time, as he said, when a
+man's salvation is no joke. From this period to the day of his death he
+seemed to be laboring, after the fashion of the age, to fortify his
+standing in the other world. He adopted the habit of the Franciscans in
+Alcala in 1613, and formally professed in the Third Order in 1616, three
+weeks before his death.
+
+There are those who find the mirth and fun of his later works so
+inconsistent with these ascetic professions, that they have been led to
+believe Cervantes a bit of a hypocrite. But we cannot agree with such.
+Literature was at that time a diversion of the great, and the chief aim
+of the writer was to amuse. The best opinion of scholars now is that
+Rabelais, whose genius illustrated the preceding century, was a man of
+serious and severe life, whose gaulish crudeness of style and brilliant
+wit have been the cause of all the fables that distort his personal
+history.
+
+No one can read attentively even the Quixote without seeing how powerful
+an influence was exerted by his religion even upon the noble and kindly
+soul of Cervantes. He was a blind bigot and a devoted royalist, like all
+the rest. The mean neglect of the Court never caused his stanch loyalty
+to swerve. The expulsion of the Moors, the crowning crime and madness of
+the reign of Philip III., found in him a hearty advocate and defender.
+_Non facit monachum cucullus,--_it was not his hood and girdle that made
+him a monk; he was thoroughly saturated with their spirit before he put
+them on. But he was the noblest courtier and the kindliest bigot that
+ever flattered or persecuted.
+
+In 1610, the Count of Lemos, who had in his grand and distant way
+patronized the poet, was appointed Viceroy of Naples, and took with him
+to his kingdom a brilliant following of Spanish wits and scholars. He
+refused the petition of the greatest of them all, however, and to soften
+the blow gave him a small pension, which he continued during the rest of
+Cervantes's life. It was a mere pittance, a bone thrown to an old hound,
+but he took it and gnawed it with a gratitude more generous than the
+gift. From this time forth all his works were dedicated to the Lord of
+Lemos, and they form a garland more brilliant and enduring than the
+crown of the Spains. Only kind words to disguised fairies have ever been
+so munificently repaid, as this young noble's pension to the old genius.
+
+It certainly eased somewhat his declining years. Relieving him from the
+necessity of earning his daily crust, it gave him leisure to complete
+and bring out in rapid succession the works which have made him
+immortal. He had published the first part of Don Quixote in the midst of
+his hungry poverty at Valladolid in 1605. He was then fifty-eight, and
+all his works that survive are posterior to that date. He built his
+monument from the ground up, in his old age. The Persiles and
+Sigis-munda, the Exemplary Novels, and that most masterly and perfect
+work, the Second Part of Quixote, were written by the flickering glimmer
+of a life burnt out.
+
+It would be incorrect to infer that the scanty dole of his patron
+sustained him in comfort. Nothing more clearly proves his straitened
+circumstances than his frequent change of lodgings. Old men do not move
+for the love of variety. We have traced him through six streets in the
+last four years of his life. But a touching fact is that they are all in
+the same quarter. It is understood that his natural daughter and only
+child, Isabel de Saavedra, entered the Convent of the Trinitarian nuns
+in the street of Cantarranas--Singing Frogs--at some date unknown. All
+the shifting and changing which Cervantes made in these embarrassed
+years are within a small half-circle, whose centre is his grave and the
+cell of his child. He fluttered about that little convent like a gaunt
+old eagle about the cage that guards his callow young.
+
+Like Albert Duerer, like Raphael and Van Dyck, he painted his own
+portrait at this time with a force and vigor of touch which leaves
+little to the imagination. As few people ever read the Exemplary
+Novels,--more is the pity,--I will translate this passage from the
+Prologue:--
+
+"He whom you see there with the aquiline face, chestnut hair, a smooth
+and open brow, merry eyes, a nose curved but well proportioned, a beard
+of silver which twenty years ago was of gold, long mustaches, a small
+mouth, not too full of teeth, seeing he has but six, and these in bad
+condition, a form of middle height, a lively color, rather fair than
+brown, somewhat round-shouldered and not too light on his feet; this is
+the face of the author of Galatea and of Don Quixote de la Mancha, of
+him who made the Voyage to Parnassus, and other works which are straying
+about without the name of the owner: he is commonly called Miguel de
+Cervantes Saavedra."
+
+There were, after all, compensations in this evening of life. As long as
+his dropsy would let him, he climbed the hilly street of the Olivar to
+say his prayers in the little oratory. He passed many a cheerful hour of
+gossip with Mother Francisca Romero, the independent superior of the
+Trinitarian Convent, until the time when the Supreme Council, jealous of
+the freedom of the good lady's life, walled up the door which led from
+her house to her convent and cut her off from her nuns. He sometimes
+dropped into the studios of Carducho and Caxes, and one of them made a
+sketch of him one fortunate day. He was friends with many of the
+easy-going Bohemians who swarmed in the quarter,--Cristobal de Mesa,
+Quevedo, and Mendoza, whose writings, Don Miguel says, are distinguished
+by the absence of all that would bring a "blush to the cheek of a young
+person,"--
+
+"Por graves, puros, castos y excelentes."
+
+In the same street where Cervantes lived and died, the great Lope de
+Vega passed his edifying old age. This phenomenon of incredible
+fecundity is one of the mysteries of that time. Few men of letters have
+ever won so marvellous a success in their own lives, few have been so
+little read after death. The inscription on Lope's house records that he
+is the author of two thousand comedies and twenty-one million of verses.
+Making all possible deductions for Spanish exaggeration, it must still
+be admitted that his activity and fertility of genius were prodigious.
+In those days a play was rarely acted more than two or three times, and
+he wrote nearly all that were produced in Spain. He had driven all
+competitors from the scene. Cervantes, when he published his collection
+of plays, admitted the impossibility of getting a hearing in the theatre
+while this "monster of nature" existed. There was a courteous
+acquaintance between the two great poets. They sometimes wrote sonnets
+to each other, and often met in the same oratories. But a grand seigneur
+like Frey Lope could not afford to be intimate with a shabby genius like
+brother Miguel. In his inmost heart he thought Don Quixote rather low,
+and wondered what people could see in it. Cervantes, recognizing the
+great gifts of De Vega, and, generously giving him his full meed of
+praise, saw with clearer insight than any man of his time that this
+deluge of prodigal and facile genius would desolate rather than fructify
+the drama of Spain. What a contrast in character and destiny between our
+dilapidated poet and his brilliant neighbor across the way! The one
+rich, magnificent, the poet of princes and a prince among poets, the
+"Phoenix of Spanish Genius," in whose ashes there is no flame of
+resurrection; the other, hounded through life by unmerciful disaster,
+and using the brief respite of age to achieve an enduring renown; the
+one, with his twenty millions of verses, has a great name in the history
+of literature; but the other, with his volume you can carry in your
+pocket, has caused the world to call the Castilian tongue the language
+of Cervantes. We will not decide which lot is the more enviable. But it
+seems a poet must choose. We have the high authority of Sancho for
+saying,--
+
+  "Para dar y tener
+  Seso ha menester."
+
+  He is a bright boy who can eat his cake and have it.
+
+In some incidents of the closing scenes of these memorable lives there
+is a curious parallelism. Lope de Vega and Cervantes lived and died in
+the same street, now called the Calle de Cervantes, and were buried in
+the same convent of the street now called Calle de Lope de Vega. In this
+convent each had placed a beloved daughter, the fruit of an early and
+unlawful passion. Isabel de Saavedra, the child of sin and poverty, was
+so ignorant she could not sign her name; while Lope's daughter, the
+lovely and gifted Marcela de Carpio, was rich in the genius of her
+father and the beauty of her mother, the high-born Maria de Lujan.
+Cervantes's child glided from obscurity to oblivion no one knew when,
+and the name she assumed with her spiritual vows is lost to tradition.
+But the mystic espousals of the sister Marcela de San Felix to the
+eldest son of God--the audacious phrase is of the father and priest Frey
+Lope--were celebrated with princely pomp and luxury; grandees of Spain
+were her sponsors; the streets were invaded with carriages from the
+palace, the verses of the dramatist were sung in the service by the
+Court tenor Florian, called the "Canary of Heaven;" and the event
+celebrated in endless rhymes by the genteel poets of the period.
+
+Rarely has a lovelier sacrifice been offered on the altar of
+superstition. The father, who had been married twice before he entered
+the priesthood, and who had seen the folly of errant loves without
+number, twitters in the most innocent way about the beauty and the charm
+of his child, without one thought of the crime of quenching in the gloom
+of the cloister the light of that rich young life. After the lapse of
+more than two centuries we know better than he what the world lost by
+that lifelong imprisonment. The Marquis of Mo-lins, director of the
+Spanish Academy, was shown by the ladies of the convent in this year of
+1870 a volume of manuscript poems from the hand of Sor Marcela, which
+prove her to have been one of the most vigorous and original poets of
+the time. They are chiefly mystical and ecstatic, and full of the
+refined and spiritual voluptuousness of a devout young heart whose
+pulsations had never learned to beat for earthly objects. M. de Molins
+is preparing a volume of these manuscripts; but I am glad to present one
+of the seguidillas here, as an illustration of the tender and ardent
+fantasies of virginal passion this Christian Sappho embroidered upon the
+theme of her wasted prayers:--
+
+  Let them say to my Lover
+  That here I lie!
+  The thing of his pleasure,
+  His slave am I.
+
+  Say that I seek him
+  Only for love,
+  And welcome are tortures
+  My passion to prove.
+
+  Love giving gifts
+  Is suspicious and cold;
+  I have _all,_ my Beloved,
+  When thee I hold.
+
+  Hope and devotion
+  The good may gain,
+  I am but worthy
+  Of passion and pain.
+
+  So noble a Lord
+  None serves in vain,--
+  For the pay of my love
+  Is my love's sweet pain.
+
+  I love thee, to love thee,
+  No more I desire,
+  By faith is nourished
+  My love's strong fire.
+
+  I kiss thy hands
+  When I feel their blows,
+  In the place of caresses
+  Thou givest me woes.
+
+  But in thy chastising
+  Is joy and peace,
+  O Master and Love,
+  Let thy blows not cease!
+
+  Thy beauty, Beloved,
+  With scorn is rife!
+  But I know that thou lovest me,
+  Better than life.
+
+  And because thou lovest me,
+  Lover of mine,
+  Death can but make me
+  Utterly thine!
+
+  I die with longing
+  Thy face to see;
+  Ah! sweet is the anguish
+  Of death to me!
+
+This is a long digression, but it will be forgiven by those who feel how
+much of beautiful and pathetic there is in the memory of this mute
+nightingale dying with her passionate music all unheard in the silence
+and shadows. It is to me the most purely poetic association that clings
+about the grave of Cervantes.
+
+This vein of mysticism in religion has been made popular by the recent
+canonization of Saint Theresa, the ecstatic nun of Avila. In the
+ceremonies that celebrated this event there were three prizes awarded
+for odes to the new saint. Lope de Vega was chairman of the committee of
+award, and Cervantes was one of the competitors. The prizes it must be
+admitted were very tempting: first, a silver pitcher; second, eight
+yards of camlet; and third, a pair of silk stockings. We hope
+Cervantes's poem was not the best. We would rather see him carry home
+the stuff for a new cloak and pourpoint, or even those very attractive
+silk stockings for his shrunk shank, than that silver pitcher which he
+was too Castilian ever to turn to any sensible use. The poems are
+published in a compendium of the time, without indicating the successful
+ones; and that of Cervantes contained these lines, which would seem
+hazardous in this colder age, but which then were greatly admired:--
+
+  "Breaking all bolts and bars,
+  Comes the Divine One, sailing from the stars,
+  Full in thy sight to dwell:
+  And those who seek him, shortening the road,
+  Come to thy blest abode,
+  And find him in thy heart or in thy cell."
+
+The anti-climax is the poet's, and not mine.
+
+He knew he was nearing his end, but worked desperately to retrieve the
+lost years of his youth, and leave the world some testimony of his
+powers. He was able to finish and publish the Second Part of Quixote,
+and to give the last touches of the file to his favorite work, the long
+pondered and cherished Persiles. This, he assures Count Lemos, will be
+either the best or the worst work ever produced by mortal man, and he
+quickly adds that it will not be the worst. The terrible disease gains
+upon him, laying its cold hand on his heart. He feels the pulsations
+growing slower, but bates no jot of his cheerful philosophy. "With one
+foot in the stirrup," he writes a last farewell of noble gratitude to
+the viceroy of Naples. He makes his will, commanding that his body be
+laid in the Convent of the Trinitarians. He had fixed his departure for
+Sunday, the 17th of April, but waited six days for Shakespeare, and the
+two greatest souls of that age went into the unknown together, on the
+23d of April, 1616.
+
+The burial of Cervantes was as humble as his christening. His bier was
+borne on the shoulders of four brethren of his order. The upper half of
+the coffin-lid was open and displayed the sharpened features to the few
+who cared to see them: his right hand grasped a crucifix with the grip
+of a soldier. Behind the grating was a sobbing nun whose name in the
+world was Isabel de Saavedra. But there was no scenic effort or display,
+such as a few years later in that same spot witnessed the laying away of
+the mortal part of Vega-Carpio. This is the last of Cervantes upon
+earth. He had fought a good fight. A long life had been devoted to his
+country's service. In his youth he had poured out his blood, and dragged
+the chains of captivity. In his age he had accomplished a work which
+folds in with Spanish fame the orb of the world. But he was laid in his
+grave like a pauper, and the spot where he lay was quickly forgotten. At
+that very hour a vast multitude was assisting at what the polished
+academician calls a "more solemn ceremony," the bearing of the Virgin of
+the Atocha to the Convent of San Domingo el Real, to see if peradventure
+pleased by the airing, she would send rain to the parching fields.
+
+The world speedily did justice to his name. Even before his death it had
+begun. The gentlemen of the French embassy who came to Madrid in 1615 to
+arrange the royal marriages asked the chaplain of the Archbishop of
+Toledo in his first visit many questions of Miguel Cervantes. The
+chaplain happened to be a friend of the poet, and so replied, "I know
+him. He is old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor." At which they
+wondered greatly. But after a while, when the whole civilized world had
+trans-lated and knew the Quixote by heart, the Spaniards began to be
+proud of the genius they had neglected and despised. They quote with a
+certain fatuity the eulogy of Montesquieu, who says it is the only book
+they have; "a proposition" which Navarrete considers "inexact," and we
+agree with Navarrete. He has written a good book himself. The Spaniards
+have very frankly accepted the judgment of the world, and although they
+do not read Cervantes much, they admire him greatly, and talk about him
+more than is amusing. The Spanish Academy has set up a pretty mural
+tablet on the facade of the convent which shelters the tired bones of
+the unlucky immortal, enjoying now their first and only repose. In the
+Plaza of the Cortes a fine bronze statue stands facing the Prado,
+catching on his chiselled curls and forehead the first rays of morning
+that leap over the hill of the Retiro. It is a well-poised, energetic,
+chivalrous figure, and Mr. Ger-mond de Lavigne has criticised it as
+having more of the sabreur than the savant. The objection does not seem
+well founded. It is not pleasant for the world to be continually
+reminded of its meannesses. We do not want to see Cervantes's days of
+poverty and struggle eternized in statues. We know that he always looked
+back with fondness on his campaigning days, and even in his decrepit age
+he called himself a soldier. If there were any period in that troubled
+history that could be called happy, surely it was the time when he had
+youth and valor and hope as the companions of his toil. It would have
+been a precious consolation to his cheerless age to dream that he could
+stand in bronze, as we hope he may stand for centuries, in the
+unchanging bloom of manhood, with the cloak and sword of a gentleman and
+soldier, bathing his Olympian brow forever in the light of all the
+mornings, and gazing, at evening, at the rosy reflex flushing the
+east,--the memory of the day and the promise of the dawn.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Castilian Days, by John Hay
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