DRERMS-BOOKS ARE EfiCHR WORLD YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ILargrpiprr Coition Casttltan 3Ba#a 2&P 9M>n INp SEGOVIA FROM THE CORNER TOWER Casfttltan Baps Wtty 9IUujstmtion0 bv 3Iogep^ Rennell Cam&ri&ge t&rinteti at rfte ftiber#&e #tt$# jfttmin COPYRIGHT 1871 AND 1899 BY JOHN HAY COPYRIGHT 1903 BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN & CO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (3H)«e Wunbreb anb Jfiftp copied urinteb dumber r.-.^.y.... PUBLISHERS' NOTE In this Holiday Edition of Castilian Days it has been thought advisable to omit a few chapters that appeared in the original edition. These chapters were less descriptive than the rest of the book, and not so rich in the picturesque material which the art of the illustrator demands. Otherwise, the text is reprinted Avithout change. The illustrations are the fruit of a special visit which Mr. Pennell has recently made to Castile for this purpose. Boston, Autumn, 1903 CONTENTS MADRID AL FRESCO 3 SPANISH LIVING AND DYING .... 33 INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE . 59 TAUROMACHY 89 RED-LETTER DAYS 1 17 AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS . . . 1 44 A CASTLE IN THE AIR 187 THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS . . . . 216 THE ESCORIAL 253 A MIRACLE PLAY 277 THE CRADLE AND THE GRAVE OF CERVANTES . 298 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Cathedral of Toledo Half-title Segovia from the Corner Tower Frontispiece The St. Christopher of Toledo Title Inn of Cervantes, Toledo v Gallery of the Prado vii The Fountain playing at La Granfa ix Puerta del Sol, Madrid 3 The Palace, Madrid 6 The Courtyard of the Palace, Madrid 12 The Squares of the Statues, Madrid 20 A Summer Day in Madrid 24 The Bridge of Toledo, Madrid ......... 28 Delightful Pictures of Domestic Life 33 In the Garden of the Prince, Aranjuez 42 x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Gardens of the Royal Palace, Madrid 5° The Bridge of Segovia, Madrid 56 Madrid Market 5$ The Promenades of Madrid 59 The Royal Palace, Madrid 64 Salon de los Reyes Catolicos, Aranfuez 72 New Madrid 82 Madrid al Fresco 88 Cloak-Play 89 Entrance to Bull-Ring, Madrid 94 The Procession 98 Banderillas 104 Cloak-Dance 112 Espada 116 La Granja 117 The Shrine of San Isidro 120 Paula, La Granja 128 The Plaza Major, Madrid 132 In the Park, La Granja 136 The Garden ofthe Island, Aranjues 143 Entrance to the Velazquez Room, the Prado . . . .144 Velazquez Room 152 The Grand Gallery of the Prado 156 The Long Gallery of the Prado 172 La Granja Fountain . 187 The Palace, La Granja 190 San Ildefonso 198 Approach to Segovia 206 The Aqueduct from the Market, Segovia 208 Segovia 212 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi The Alcdzar, Segovia 215 San Juan de los Reyes and Valley of Tagus . . . .216 The Alcdzar, Toledo 218 The Cathedral of Toledo 222 The Gilded Organ-Pipes 224 The Zocodover, Toledo 230 Cloisters, San Juan de los Reyes 238 Interior of San Juan, Toledo 240 Porta Viragia 250 The Bridge, Toledo 252 Endless Escorial 253 Court ofthe Temple, Escorial 258 High Altar, Escorial 260 Interior of Church, Escorial 268 Sacristy, Escorial 272 Side Chapels, the Cathedral of Toledo 277 A Street of Toledo 280 Mozarabic Chapel, Toledo 286 The Cheerful Gothic Cloisters, Toledo 290 The Choir, Toledo 294 An Inn Door, Toledo 297 Chapel of the University, Alcald 298 The University, Alcald 302 The Gorgeous Sarcophagus of Xi?nenez 306 Calle Major, Alcald 308 Baptismal Font of Cervantes, Alcald 312 House of Cervantes, Madrid 316 The Tomb of Cervantes 334 CASTILIAN DAYS MADRID AL FRESCO MADRID is a capital with malice afore thought. Usually the seat of government is established in some important town from the force of circumstances. Some cities have an attrac tion 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 gemiithhch Wien. But there 4 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 jeal ous 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 pre sents in its maturity a curious mixture of lawless ness 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 over hangs the Manzanares. Charles V. found the thin, MADRID AL FRESCO 5 fine air comforting to his gouty articulations. But Philip II. made it his court. It seems hard to con ceive how a king who had his choice of Lisbon, with its glorious harbor and unequalled communi cations ; Seville, with its delicious chmate and nat ural beauty ; and Salamanca and Toledo, with then- 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 6 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 con struction 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 pubhc 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 pil grims of taste, was built by him for a Museum of Natural Science. In nearly all that a stran ger 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 THE PALACE, MADRID MADRID AL FRESCO 7 ruins. There is none of that mysterious and haunting memory that peoples the air with spec tres 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 hfe in the two places resemble each other no more than the beat ing 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 hfe. 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 8 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 hke the mocking bird 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 httle 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, — con quering so far their repugnance to emigration, and living as gayly as possible in the midst of tradi tional 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 Avaked it up to a new life, and the Revolution has set free the thought of its people to an extent which would MADRID AL FRESCO 9 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. Ia 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 io CASTILIAN DAYS 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 execra tion 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 obhvion. 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 MADRID AL FRESCO n 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 com pletely 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 posi tion 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 Pa risian tiring-women ; the men wear the penitential garb of Poole ; the music is by Gounod and Verdi ; Strauss inspires the rushing waltzes, and the mar ried people walk through the quadrilles to the mea sures 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 deni zens 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 12 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 suffi ciently for all social requirements. It is sometimes to be doubted whether this constant use of a for eign language in official and diplomatic circles is a cause or effect of paucity of ideas. It is impossi-* ble 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 THE COURTYARD OF THE PALACE, MADRID MADRID AL FRESCO 13 '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 aUowed 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 consist ent with even their social responsibihties, in com pensation 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 Ma laga, — 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 know ing enough to trouble the soundest sleep. Their voices could interpret the sublimest ideas of Men delssohn. They knew sufficiently of lines and colors to dress themselves charmingly at small cost, and their httle 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 14 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 uncon genial. The principal fortress of the post was the palace of the spirituelle and hospitable lady whose society name is Duchess of Pefiaranda, 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 Bour bon, 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 ele gant hospitality. Beauty and good manners have MADRID AL FRESCO 15 always been a passport there. I have seen a pro consul 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 do main 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 even ing 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 con fined 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 love liness 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 cor ners and outlying boudoirs, is never seen in this 16 CASTILIAN DAYS well-organized society. The mothers in Israel are ranged for the evening around the walls in com fortable 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 intermin able 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 per vades 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 Ital ian in tender melody, is the only medium of con versation ; 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 cul ture. 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 MADRID AL FRESCO 17 dash about the men, and an intelligence and inde pendence about the women, that distinguish them from their cousins of the Peninsula. The Ameri can 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 capi tals, — it has no suburbs. It hes in a desolate table-land in the Avindy Avaste 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 Madrilefios 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 1 8 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Keri 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 Kohlenberg. 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 ver durous 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 MADRID AL FRESCO 19 Grande Duchesse of Gerolstein, the cheeriest moral ist who ever occupied a throne, announces just be fore 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 Avish 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." 20 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Retire 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 Pr6-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 SQUARES OF THE STATUES, MADRID MADRID AL FRESCO 21 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 nobihty, 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 22 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 be side 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 sen sibly at half past nine and going leisurely forward until after midnight. The music is very good. Sometimes Arban comes down from Paris to re cover 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 MADRID AL FRESCO 23 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 tran quilly 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 kind lier 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 su perb 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 liberahty of structure. They are thin, eager, sinewy in ap pearance, — 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 24 CASTILIAN DAYS of the men of Madrid. But it is, hke 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 chmax of their luxury is a cool bed. Walking about the city at midnight, I have seen the foun tains 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 motion less, 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, *t *&w£j w^ THE SHRINE OF SAN ISIDRO RED-LETTER DAYS 121 istence. 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 com position. You never hear of his curing any one of less than princely rank. I read in an old chron icle 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 buUt 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 122 CASTILIAN DAYS timely scout-sendee, 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 VIIL, 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 fur ther 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 toy shops. The principal traffic is in a pretty sort of glass whistle which forms the stem of an arti ficial rose, worn in the button-hole in the inter vals 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 RED-LETTER DAYS 123 bells are rung violently untU the church is full ; then the doors are shut and the kissing begins. They are very expeditious about it. The wor shippers drop on their knees by platoons before the railing. The long-robed rehc-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, tUl 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 merry making. 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 or derly. To the east of the Hermitage, over and beyond the green cool valley, the city rises on its rocky hiUs, 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 dis tance to the Romeria. The sound of guitars and 124 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Cata- lina, but they might be called Bridget and Kath leen. 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 super ficial 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 RED-LETTER DAYS 125 each arm of the service in fresh bright uniforms, and a vast array of ecclesiastics in the most gor geous stoles and chasubles their vestiary contains. The windows along the line of march are gayly decked with flags and tapestry. Work is abso lutely 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 pave ment before the Sacred Presence is announced by the ringing of silver beUs. 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, bo-wing their heads and beating their breasts, they mutter their mechanical prayers. There are think ing men who say these shows are necessary ; that the Latin mind must see with bodily eyes the 126 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 ethno logical theory of necessity, which would reject all principles of progress and positive good, and con demn 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 no thing 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 memo ries of earlier days, but, thanks be to God who has given us the victory, the English race is now incap able of making a new cathedral or a new king. RED-LETTER DAYS 127 Let us not in our safe egotism deny to others the possibUity 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 ta-wny hUls of CastUe. It is sure that midsummer has grown too warm for any field work. So that the Mad- rUefios may be pardoned for spending the day nap ping, 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 famUy has its John, Paul, and Peter, and the crowded barrios of Toledo and the Penue- las pour out their ragged hordes to the popular 128 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 inter vals are the busy groups of fritter merchants ; over the crackling fire a great caldron of boiling oU ; beside it a mighty bowl of dough. The bufio- lero, 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 bub bling 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, " Bu- fiuelos ! 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 loiter ing 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 PAULA, LA GRANJA RED-LETTER DAYS 129 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 oU-pots and manufac ture the brittle forage of the browsing herds. It is a jealous business, and requires the undi vided 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 sendee, full lib erty of barter and sale was allowed to aU 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 periodic- 130 CASTILIAN DAYS ally opened. These fairs begin in Madrid with the autumnal equinox, and continue for some weeks in October. They disappear from the Alcald to break out with renewed virulence in the avenue of Ato- cha, and girdle the city at last with a belt of booths. WhUe 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 Ulegitimate 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." " H ombre ! Are you dreaming or crazy ? " She drops the coveted neck-gear, and moves on, ap parently 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 ? " RED-LETTER DAYS 131 "Caramba! Am I buyer and seller as well? The thing is worth three reals; more is a rob bery." " Jesus ! Maria ! Jose ! and all the family ! Go thou with God! We cannot trade. Sooner than sell for less than eight reals I wiU raise the cover of my brains ! Go thou ! It is eight of the morn ing, and stUl thou dreamest." She lays doAvn 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 132 CASTILIAN DAYS character, bare, bleak, and most forbidding under the ashy sky of the late autumn, the days are de prived 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 be loved 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 THE PLAZA MAJOR, MADRID RED-LETTER DAYS 133 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 surround ing 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-fruit ful provinces of the South are laid under contribu tion, and the result is a Avasteful 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 Estrema- dura, and the hero-nourishing bull-beef of Andalu sian pastures. At night the town is given up to harmless racket. Nowhere has the tradition of the Latin Saturnalia 134 CASTILIAN DAYS been fitted with less change into the Christian calendar. Men, women, and children of the prole tariat — 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 danc ing 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 I " 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." RED-LETTER DAYS 135 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 I " 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 con tinue 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 136 CASTILIAN DAYS loaded Avith 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 con demned 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 ap proached her in private. The true Carnival survives in its naive purity only in Spain. It has faded in Rome into a romp- IN THE PARK, LA GRANJA RED-LETTER DAYS 137 ing 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 fiUed with a double hne of carriages two mUes 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 pay ment of ten dollars a day to city charities, and pro duces 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 1 38 CASTILIAN DAYS jacket, slashed buckskin trousers, and a wide crim son 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 bon bons from plebeian hands. It is true, most of the maskers are of the better class. Some of the cos tumes 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 RED-LETTER DAYS 139 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 gentle men think it worth whUe 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 Conti nent has outgrown the true Carnival. It is plea sant 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 140 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Wednes day is a day of loud merriment and is devoted to a popular ceremony called the Burial of the Sar dine. 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 fashion able for the genteel Christians to repair during this season of mortification to the Church of San Gines, and scourge themselves lustily in its sub terranean chambers. A still more striking de monstration was for gentlemen in love to lash themselves on the sidewalks where passed the ladies of their thoughts. If the blood from the RED-LETTER DAYS 141 scourges sprinkled them as they sailed by, it was thought an attention no female heart could with stand. But these wholesome customs have de cayed of late unbelieving years. The Lenten piety increases with the lengthen ing days. It reaches its climax on Holy Thursday. On this day aU 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 sUence like that of Venice falls on the rattling capital. With three hundred thou sand people in the street, the town seems still. In 1870, a free-thinking cabman dared to drive up the Calle Alcald. He was dragged from his box and beaten half to death by the chastened mourn ers, who yelled as they kicked and cuffed him, " Que bruto ! He wUl wake our Jesus." On Good Friday the gloom deepens. No colors are worn that day by the orthodox. The sefioras appear on the street in funeral garb. I saw a group of fast youths come out of the jockey club, 142 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 ser mons 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 pre siding deity of these final days of meditation is Our Lady of Solitude. But at last the days of mourning are accom plished. The expiation for sin is finished. The grave is vanquished, death is swallowed up in vic tory. 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 awak- RED-LETTER DAYS 143 ening 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 hUls. 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 wih mingle into hope. Hail to the new life and the ever-new religion ! HaU 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 wUl 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 pro ductions of the Castilian mind. All others, he said, were but pale imitations of Spanish master-work. AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 145 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 pic ture-gallery of Madrid is the finest in the world, you may believe him without reserve. He prob ably 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 coUection he is boasting of. He croAvns it with a sweeping superlative simply because it is Spanish. But the statement is never theless true. The reason of this is found in that gigantic and overshadowing fact which seems to be an explana tion 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 chUd 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. 146 CASTILIAN DAYS The dominions he governed and transmitted to his son embraced Spain, the Netherlands, Franche- Comt6, 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 mas ters. He was the friend and patron of Titian, and when, weary of the world and its vanities, he re tired 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 illumi nated with the glowing canvases of the incom- AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 147 parable Italians. The opening up of the New World beyond seas, the meteoric career of Euro pean 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 cen turies, started suddenly out, seeking adventures over the earth. The mind of Spain seemed sud denly to have brightened and developed like that of her great king, who, in his first tourney at Val ladolid, 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 wUds ; 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 148 CASTILIAN DAYS of Castile and the hills of Navarre went, among others, Berruguete, Becerra, and the marvellous deaf-mute Navarrete. The luxurious city of Valen- tia sent Juan de Juanes and Ribalta. Luis de Var gas 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 ap preciation. 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 AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 149 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 vras too powerful for Va lentia. 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 MuriUo, last and greatest of the mighty line. The school of Madrid begins Avith Berruguete and Na- Ararrete, 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 Carrefio, and absorbs the whole hfe 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 ISO CASTILIAN DAYS 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 en couraging and protecting Velazquez and Lope de AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 151 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 chan nels 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 Avas 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 obliv ion in the salons of palaces" and the cells of mon asteries. Had they been scattered over the land and seen by the people, they might have kept alive the spark that kindled their creators. But exclu- siveness is inevitably foUowed by barrenness. When the great race of Spanish artists ended, these matchless works were kept in the safe ob scurity of palaces and religious establishments. History was working in the interests of this Mu seum. The pictures were held by the clenched 152 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 des picable 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 grand father 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 recog nized. 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 exclaustra- tion 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 \ •7 ;¦ '(-7 1 ^ftKK^, ----'"-" t IB ¦- ¦ . b ^¦Bflvv'J [j I .-. J :&! 1 » til jiW^-^ # B 1^ fa * Sh ! ^^^H W^^- J^rrr r&'Vfc3$8 . i,"-H»-v™' SSHWBRfc : "I'-fe-' ' *.»¦». -"SBgB ,|1#V, i « M — -laM^aS Mr -b^tt^£l ~ ' AN HOUR AMONG THE PAINTERS, VELAZQUEZ ROOM AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 153 these there are ten by Raphael, forty-three by Titian, thirty-four by Tintoret, twenty-five by Paul Veronese. Rubens has the enormous contin gent 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 LouArre considers itself rich with fourteen. So much for a few of the foreigners. Among the Spaniards the three great est names could alone fiU 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 col lection. It is not only the greatest coUection in the world, but the greatest that can ever be made until this is broken up. But with aU 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 incu nabula. 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 154 CASTILIAN DAYS Spain were budded on a full-bearing tree. Charles and Philip bought masterpieces, and cared little for the crude efforts of the awkward pencUs 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 Correg- gios. Even in Spanish art the gallery is far from complete. There is almost nothing of such genu ine 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 con solation, as in that graceful Palace of the Prado. AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 155 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 note book I am equally discouraged by the number I have marked for special notice. The masterpieces are simply innumerable. I wUl 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 gaUery where the greatest works of both schools are col lected. In the Spanish saloon there is an indefin able 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 156 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 down wards. So remarkable is the vigor1 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 in visible spirits, and swayed for a moment only be fore 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, THE GRAND GALLERY OF THE PRADO AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 157 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 be fore 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 pro montory between the curling waves and the cir rus 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 brilhant 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 158 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Es corial 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 horse back, 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 sun shine 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 Augs burg, 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 AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 159 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 pro mise 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 IL, the soldier dies out and the bigot is intensified. In the fine portrait by Pantoja, of PhUip 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 aU 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 un fortunate Don Carlos. The forehead of the young prince is narrow and Ul-f ormed ; 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 Phihp IV., — he was fortunate in being the friend 160 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 I 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 accomplish ment bathed the Peninsula in blood. It must be confessed this institution of monarchy is a luxury that must be paid for. AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 161 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 MurUlo'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 Ital ian artists. There are not many pictures of the first 162 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 un worthy 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 apo theosis of Rubens, surrounded by his usual " pro perties " 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 Mu seum are filled with Giordano's canvases. In less than ten years' residence in Spain he covered the AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 163 walls of dozens of churches and palaces with his fatally facile work. There are more than three hun dred 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 draw ing. 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 look ing 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 gaUery 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 164 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 vari- AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 165 ety and truth in the faces and the attitudes of the groups ! What mastery of drawing, and what hon est 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 to gether are two pictures, not of large dimensions, but of exquisite perfection, which will serve as fair Ulustrations of the work of his youth and his age ; the frio and the Araporoso manner. In the former manner is this charming picture of Rebecca at the Well ; a graceful composition, correct and some what 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 1 66 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 httle 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 fasci nating. The Word was made flesh, and not a phos phorescent apparition ; and Murillo knew what he was about when he painted this view of the inte rior of St. Joseph's shop. What absurd presump tion 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 know ledge 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 AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 167 visitor always lingers longest. The face is the pur est 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 impos ing 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. AU 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 immor tal 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 fol low him, this type of the perfect Feminine, — " Thee I standing loveliest in the open heaven I 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 smUe were caught and fixed in some 1 68 CASTILIAN DAYS 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, — hghts painted boldly upon lights, the White Dove sailing out of the dazzhng 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 Found ing of the Church of St. Mary the Greater ; and the powerful composition of St. Elizabeth of Hun gary, 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 slum ber 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 pic ture the happy couple kneel before the pope and AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 169 expose their high commission, and outside a bril liant 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 pay ing him some chivalrous compliment on the gallant fight he has lost. If your eyes Avander through the 170 CASTILIAN DAYS open space between the two escorts, you see a wonderful widespread landscape in the Nether lands, which would form a fine picture if the fig ures 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 theo logy were what it should be, and cannot be, abso lute 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 AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 171 to growl. In the background at the end of a long gallery a gentleman is opening a door to the gar den. 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 mira cle 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 Avithout 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 incom parable in the world. It gained Velazquez his greatest triumph. You see on his breast a sprawl- 172 CASTILIAN DAYS ing 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 consid ered 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 Decem ber. 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 confre'rie. 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 na ture 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 Konig in the Belvedere, but there you see only THE LONG GALLERY OF THE PRADO AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 173 the incidents of the mad revel ; every one is shout ing 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, Avith 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 head 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 aAvay 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 hke Tom Thumb to serve for his twin brother, — and a portrait of ^Esop, which is a flash of intuition, 174 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 hes 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 ascend ing 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 color ing. 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 devo tion 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 AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 175 struggle and hunger and toil among the artists of Rome, — a stranger and pennUess in the magnifi cent 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, Avas 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 be loved 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 176 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 gener ous kindness the shabby young wanderer, clothed him, and taught him, and watched with noble de light 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 mag nanimous 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. Ra phael 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 Ra phael Sanzio. We look at his precious work with a mingled feeling of gratitude for what we have, and of rebellious wonder that hves like his and Shelley's should be extinguished in their glorious AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 177 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 SicUia, 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 briUiantly 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 PhUip 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 178 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 per fection 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 admir ing 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 capri cious 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 AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 179 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 1 " Nowhere, away from the Adriatic, is the Vene tian school so richly represented as in Madrid. Charles and Philip were the most munificent friends and patrons of Titian, and the Royal Mu seum 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 famUy, 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 180 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 en throned 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 dig nity ; 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 AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 181 one day exclaimed in despair before it, " That fel low 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 hes 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 ab- solvit Deoque dicavit opus. The vast representation of Titian rather injures Veronese and Tintoret. Opposite the Gloria of Yuste hangs the sketch of that stupendous Para dise 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. 1 82 CASTILIAN DAYS The sketch was secured by Velazquez in his tour through Italy. The most charming picture of Ver onese 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 gal lery 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 price less 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-whis kered, with that expression of quiet confidence you would expect in the man who said one day, with admirable candor, when people were praising a pic ture 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 Embar- AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 183 cation 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 edu cated as Claude Lorrain. There remain the pictures of the Dutch and the Flemings. It is due to the causes we have men tioned in the beginning that neither in Antwerp nor Dresden nor Paris is there such wealth and profusion of the Netherlands art as in this moun tain-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 cata clysm from the Baltic to the Pyrenees every essen tial 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 hfe, 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 1 84 CASTILIAN DAYS of color andfougue 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 glori- AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS 185 ously 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 resig nation ; 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 origi nal, 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 princi pal 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, 1 86 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 inteUect so vivid and so refined, a mastery of pro cesses 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 IHAVE 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 Avas 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 hke Diomede, he could mend his own breeches hke Dagobert, and never tarnish the lustre of the crown by it. But in later times 1 88 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 embarrass ing in the movement and activity of a great city. The king cannot join in it without a loss of pres tige. Being outside of it, he is vexed and humili ated 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 edu cation will allow. He is surrounded by nothing but the world of servants and courtiers, and it re quires little effort of the imagination to consider himself chief and lord. A CASTLE IN THE AIR 189 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 Avildly beautiful, but now shorn and shaven into a smug likeness of a French garden, Phihp passed all the later years of his gloomy and inglorious life. 190 CASTILIAN DAYS It has been ever since a most tempting summer- house to aU the Bourbons. When the sun is calcin ing 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 busi ness 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 hand writing, and gives its majestic approval with a flourish of the pen, — so that everything waits a week or so, and much business goes finally un done ; 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 pre cedent 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 boudoir on wheels, — not too full of a distinguished THE PALACE, LA GRANJA A CASTLE IN THE AIR 191 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 re modelling its internal structure, the subject most generally discussed is the constitutional system of the United States. The republicans usually adopt it sohd. 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, some thing vast and grandiose, a hfe and movement to which the Old World is stranger." He after wards referred with great interest to the imaginary imperialist movement in America, and raised his eyebrows in polite incredulity when I assured him 192 CASTILIAN DAYS there was as much danger of Spain becoming Mohammedan as of America becommg imperialist. We stopped at the httle station of VUlalba, in the midst of the wide brown table-land that stretches from Madrid to the Escorial. At VUlalba 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 VUlalba and have seen nothing but the station-master and the Avater-vender. But to-day, because there were a half dozen excellencies on the train, the entire mendicant force of the dis trict 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 postihon uniform and the royal crown on their caps. We threw some handfuls of copper and bronze A CASTLE IN THE AIR 193 among the picturesque mendicants. They gathered them up with grave Castilian decorum, and said, "God wUl 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 taAvny slopes and the close-reaped fields. The harvest Avas 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 lazUy tread ing out the corn on the bare ground, to be win- nowed 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 im provements, he utterly despises and rejects them. 194 CASTILIAN DAYS The poorer classes especially, who would find an enormous advantage in increased production, light ening their hard lot by a greater plenty of the means of life, regard every introduction of im proved machinery as a blow at the rights of labor. When many years ago a Dutch vintner went to Valdepenas and so greatly improved the manufac ture of that excellent but ill-made wine that its price immediately rose in the Madrid market, he was mobbed and plundered by his ignorant neigh bors, 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 spank ing 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 A CASTLE IN THE AIR 195 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, com posed 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 CastUian postihon regaled us. The wonderful consistency and perseverance with which the r61e was sustained was worthy of a much better cause. He began by yelling in a coarse, strident voice, " Arr6 ! arre ! " (Get up !) with a vicious emphasis on the final syUable. 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 196 CASTILIAN DAYS of arrieros. This general admonition being ad dressed 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 atten tion 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 jour ney 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 A CASTLE IN THE AIR 197 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 oifaci- 198 CASTILIAN DAYS lis 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 moun tain 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 uncer tain and failing light. We reached the valley and rattled by a sleepy viUage, where we were greeted by a chorus of out raged 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 Ambassa dors jumped to the ground and announced, " El Regente del Reino ! " It was the regent, the ST. ILDEFONSO A CASTLE IN THE AIR 199 courteous and amiable Marshal Serrano, who had ridden out from the palace to welcome his guests, and who, after hasty salutations, gaUoped 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 walk ing about the gardens, we saw looking from the palace window one of the most accomphshed gen tlemen 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 modeUed upon VersaiUes, but the copy is in many respects finer than the original. The peculiarity of the site, whUe offering great difficul ties, 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 hke a baby. There was probably never a garden that grew under such circumstances, 200 CASTILIAN DAYS — 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 morn ing dew. Every alley and avenue is a vista that ends in a vast picture of shaggy hiUs or far-off plains, — while behind the royal gardens towers the lordly peak of the Penalara, thrust eight thou sand 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 Esco rial. 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-Weib- liche " masters and guides him stiU. 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 VII., A CASTLE IN THE AIR 201 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 reach ing the king. Obstinate as the weak often are, he refused at first to listen to them ; but by their womanly wUes, their Italian pohcy, their magnetic force, they at last brought him to revoke his de cree in favor of Don Carlos and to recognize the right of his daughters to the crown. Then, terrible in her triumph, Dona Louisa Carlota sent for the Minister Calomarde, overwhelmed him with the 202 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 weak ness, or weaker than a woman's strength. A few years later, when Ferdinand was in his grave, and the baby Isabel reigned under the re gency 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 consti tution. 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." A CASTLE IN THE AIR 203 Their pohtical economy was somewhat flimsy, but they had the bayonets, and the queen was com pelled to give way and proclaim the constitution. I must add one trifling reminiscence more of La Granja, which has also its httle 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 po sition. " 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 an other 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 204 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 fol lowed 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 aU 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 com parison with those of La Granja. The sense is fatigued and bewildered here with their magnifi cence and infinite variety. The vast reservoir in the bosom of the mountain, filled with the purest A CASTLE IN THE AIR 205 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 caUed 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 206 CASTILIAN DAYS XIV. and his Versailles, ' II se plut a tyranniser la nature.' " As the bUious 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, hke all palaces, too fine and dreary to describe. Miles of drawing-rooms and boudoirs, with an in finity of tapestry and gilt chairs, all the apartments haunted by the demon of ennui. All idea of com fort is sacrificed to costly glitter and flimsy mag nificence. 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 inter- APPROACH TO SEGOVIA A CASTLE IN THE AIR 207 est 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 em ployed 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 unthrif t 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 moun- 208 CASTILIAN DAYS tains 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 mediseval bishops bequeathed to later times their ideas of ecclesiasti cal architecture ; and the Arabs the science of forti fication 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 hfe and activity that shock the artistic sense in other towns. All is old, moribund, and picturesque. It hes here in the heart of the Guadarramas, lost and forgotten by the civilization of the age, muttering in its se nile 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 dili gence. 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 AQUEDUCT FROM THE MARKET, SEGOVIA A CASTLE IN THE AIR 209 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 Al cdzar. 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 utili tarian 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 hghtness 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 au thors do not aUude to it. It was buUt 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 210 CASTILIAN DAYS three thousand feet more and pass the vaUey, 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 re pairs 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 as signed 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 A CASTLE IN THE AIR 211 aqueduct to her door before morning. He worked all night, hke the DevU, 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 hghted on his shining taU. The Church, we think very unfairly, decided that he had failed, and re leased the coquettish contractor from her promise ; and it is said the DevU 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 Bias was once con fined), and of late years a coUege of artUlery. In one of its rooms Alonso the Wise studied the heavens more than Avas good for his orthodoxy, and from one of its Avindows a lady 'of the court once dropped a royal baby, of the bad blood of Trasta- mara. Henry of Trastamara wUl seem more real if we connect him with fiction. He was the son of " La Favorita," who wiU outlast aU legitimate prin cesses, in the deathless music of Donizetti. Driving through a throng of beggars that en- 212 CASTILIAN DAYS cumbered the carriage wheels as grasshoppers sometimes do the locomotives on a Western rail way, 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 grace ful 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 foun dation 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 master pieces of Raphael or — Mengs ;" as if one should say of a poet that he was equal to Shakespeare or Southey. SEGOVIA A CASTLE IN THE AIR 213 We walked through the cloisters and looked at the tombs. A flood of warm light poured through the graceful arches and ht up the trees in the gar den 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 out landish men who had gone into the Cathedral with whole coats, and the result was a levfo en masse of the needy. Every coin that Avas thro-wn to them but increased the clamor, as it confirmed them in their idea of the boundless wealth and munifi cence of the givers. We recalled the profound thought of Emerson, " If the rich were only as rich as the poor think them ! " 214 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 ele gant 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 com pany 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 west ward, — 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, aban doned to its fate among the barren billows of the A CASTLE IN THE AIR 215 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 gather ing in their grain with shining sickles. The bor ders of the Tagus were so cool and fresh that it was hard to believe one was in the arid land of THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 217 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 Cen tral Spain, and only seen in art on the matchless caawas of Velazquez. But from the time you cross the ta-wny flood of the Tagus just north of Aran juez, the valley is gladdened by its waters aU the way to the Primate City. I am glad I am not writing a guide-book, and do not feel any responsibUity resting upon me of advising the gentle reader to stop at Aranjuez or to go by on the other side. There is a most ami able 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 my self 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 218 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Phihp II., mysterious and gal lant as the pleasures of Philip IV." To a revolu tionary mind, it is a certain pleasure to remember that this was the scene of the e"meute 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 Asturia's, reaped the immediate profit of his father's abdica tion ; 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 1 — a siUy 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 P*"™*1**1*,^ • '. %jjk, JElg^2i^«^B '" '. Br*fcB^H?.w H :'°%BB ¦_AiJE Pf; 7. ' - : 7:" • :: .. :-: "¦ ¦¦¦" ~'v . .-4-- -" h^^t* dH^B *^B si -¦¦ ¦ 7. ¦ 7 ' "i*:;' fiPi ?¦ " 1 £*> ^Sf| |£ •.:. :>.";:7*. '''.'-:? - r:: ' »- i» .s ¦* 7 gg d ^*C^^^ 75s^F -^uPKS ' THE ALCAZAR, TOLEDO THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 219 the soaring steeples of a swarm of churches pierc ing 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 Alcdntara 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 dse- 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 turn out 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 220 CASTILIAN DAYS remarkable establishment. The horses can cheer fully 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 waUs, 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 mul titude. 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 hiUs 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 THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 221 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 gov ernments, 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 ex ample 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 no tice 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 net work 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 Cathe dral was chosen from strategic reasons by St. 222 CASTILIAN DAYS Eugene, who built there his first Episcopal Church. The Moors made a mosque of it when they con quered Castile, and the fastidious piety of St. Fer dinand 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 pur pose and execution in this Cathedral, due doubt less 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 fagade is enriched with three splendid portals, — the side ones called the doors of Hell and Judg ment ; and the central a beautiful ogival arch di vided 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. THE CATHEDRAL OF TOLEDO THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 223 To the north of the west fagade rises the mas sive 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 diminish ing in solidity and massiveness from the square base to the high-springing octagonal spire, gar landed 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 tUl 224 CASTILIAN DAYS the sacristan grows peremptory, to watch the gor geous 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 then- 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 mag nificence and beauty. Each of the chapels — and THE GILDED ORGAN PIPES THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 225 there are twenty-one of them — is a separate mas terpiece in its way. The finest are those of Santi ago and St. Ildefonso, — the former built by the famous Constable Alvaro de Luna as a burial-place for himself and famUy, and where he and his wife lie in storied marble ; and the other commemorat ing that celebrated visit of the Virgin to the bishop, which is the favorite theme of the artists and eccle siastical 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, lis tened to the sermon with great edification. After service she presented him with a nice new chas uble, 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 chas uble still exists in a chest in Asturias. If you 226 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 dream ing priest. The subject was unworthy of the painter, and the result is what might have been ex pected, — 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 CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 227 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 appari tion 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 228 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Span ish 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 mag nanimous conquerors guaranteed to those Chris tians who remained within their lines the free exercise of all their rights, including perfect free dom 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 for bade 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 THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 229 lives. Then the priests said, " Perhaps this conver sion 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 chron icler 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 ar rogant humility, Hie 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 hereties. A fresco that adorns the gate ex plains the means employed, adding insult to the 230 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Pro testants, 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 mis sionary 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 mo thers and Catholics. This absurd and devilish charge was seriously made in a Madrid journal, the organ of the Mod- THE ZOCODOVER, TOLEDO THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 231 erates, and caused great fermentation for several days, street rows, and debates in the Cortes, be fore the excitement died away. Last summer, in the old Murcian town of Lorca, an English gentle man, 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 steahng 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 imphcitly to chance in your wanderings. You can never be lost ; the town is so smaU 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 232 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 stUl 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 in fluential 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 ex quisite 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 pomegran ate-tree flings its scarlet blossoms in on the ruined floor. Rude little birds have built their nests in THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 233 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 stroUed 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 Moor ish mills ; to the left the airy arch of San Martin's bridge spanned the bounding torrent, and far be yond stretched the vast expanse of the green val ley refreshed by the river, and rolling in rank waves of verdure to the blue hiUs of Guadalupe. Below us on the slippery rocks that lay at the foot of the sheer cliffs, some luxurious fishermen rechned, idly watching their idle hnes. The hills stretched away, ragged and rocky, dotted with sol itary towers and villas. 234 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 vic tims 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 THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 235 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, deliber ate 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 beau tiful thing ; so was the Transito. Did we see those men and women grubbing in the hillside ? They 236 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 pan ther, 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 syn agogue 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 ware house ; but it is now under the care of the provin- THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 237 cial 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 buUt by Ferdinand and Isabella, before the Columbus days, to com memorate a victory over their neighbors the Portu guese. During a prolonged absence of the king, the pious queen, wishing to prepare him a pleasant surprise, instead of embroidering a pair of imprac ticable 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 238 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 or nate 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 pen sive 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 nifio, as she called it, and had found the sacristan. This person age 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. How- CLOISTERS, SAN JUAN DE LOS REYES THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 239 ever, 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 nar rating the foundation of the church. Everywhere the arms of CastUe and Arragon, and the wedded ciphers of the Catholic kings. Statues of heralds start unexpectedly out from the face of the pUlars. 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 wit ness 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 build ing. 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 240 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 some thing of conscious dignity the blows of time and the ruder wrongs of men, to appreciate fully its proud superiority to aU 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 ma gical shore on which they stand. The Parthenon, fixed like a battered coronet on the brow of the Acropolis, wiU always be the loveliest sight that INTERIOR OF SAN JUAN, TOLEDO THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 241 Greece can offer to those who come sailing in from the blue ^Egean. It is scarcely possible to imagine a condition of thought or feeling in which these master-works shaU 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 passion flowers, and the spreading oleanders to do then- 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 chUd of art is cherished and caressed by the gracious and bountiful hands of Mother Nature. As we came away, httle Francisca plucked one of the five-pointed leaves of the passion-flowers and gave it to La Senora, saying reverentiaUy, " 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. 242 CASTILIAN DAYS Our httle 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 gather ing 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 over looking the baths where, for his woe, Don Rod erick saw Count Julian's daughter under the same inflammatory circumstances as those in which, from a Judaean housetop, Don David beheld Cap tain 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 ser vice. 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 THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 243 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 I Abajo tirania I Pronto llegara el dia De la Restauracion. Carlistas a caballo ! Soldados en Campana I Viva el Rey de Espana, Don Carlos de Borbon I " 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 Avas gnawed by the cancer of sixteen monasteries of monks and t-wice as many convents of nuns, all crowded within these city walls. FuUy one half the ground of the city Avas covered by religious buildings and mortmain pro perty. 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 244 CASTILIAN DAYS nothing but churches and convents. The grass grows green in the silent streets. You hear no thing 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 pave ments, 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, Avith 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 Ossua- THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 245 Hum. 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 jeal ous 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 re captured 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 246 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 vic tory, 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 kind liness and respect for the refined and genial spirit who left this elegant legacy to an alien race and a hostUe creed. The Military College of Santa Cruz is one of the THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 247 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 shm Corinthian columns. In one corner is the most elaborate staircase in Spain. AU the elegance and fancy of Arab and Renaissance art have been lavished upon this mas terly work. Santa Cruz was buUt for a hospital by that haughty Cardinal Mendoza, the Tertius Rex of Ferdinand and Isabella. It is now occupied by the mUitary school, which receives six hundred cadets. They are under the charge of an inspector-general and a numerous staff of professors. They pay forty 248 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Alcdzar. 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 fagades are very fine. The Alcdzar 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 in destructible walls alone remain. Now, after many years of ruinous neglect, the government has be gun 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 Al cazar 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 THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 249 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 traUing 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 won der 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 out grown them, and the people, here as elsewhere, is 250 CASTILIAN DAYS 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 Re public is established, and then may both last for ever ! One morning at sunrise, I crossed the ancient bridge of Alcdntara, and climbed the steep hill east of the river to the ruined castle of San Cer vantes, 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 sprin kled 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 jeal ous 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 PORTA VIRAGIA, TOLEDO THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS 251 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 be fore 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 Crist6bal. 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 unfilled 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 Avas 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 beUs floated softly out on the morning air. They seemed like the requiem of municipal 252 CASTILIAN DAYS life and activity slain centuries ago by the crozier and the crown. Thank Heaven, that double despotism is wounded to death. As Chesterfield predicted, be fore 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. >#*..- * "... Eai }.; .ay-^ 1: 1 1 1 4mp ¦7\| **s% ' $ih' ¦ ii ^fP*1? ;S;