Romantic Spain Volume I Part 11

"Why does not one see the train start to time?" asked the little gentleman.

"Because this is Spain," answered the courier.

That was conclusive, and the little gentleman drew in his head and sat down opposite me. He was a charming companion, a young American of culture and courtly manners, who was travelling in Spain for his health.

He loved the country and the people, and told me many anecdotes of acts of kindness of which, being sickly, he had been the object from this strange, tender, pa.s.sionate race, as ready with generous help as with the stiletto-point. Poor little gentleman! I fear he has made a void in some fond household long since, for he was sore stricken with decline.

"The Spaniard," he said, "in fine, is the most courteous of men; he never sits down to eat in your presence without offering you a share of his meal." And it is true.

From Cordoba to Seville the way lies through a land of delights--the "tierra deleitosa" of Andalusia. Again we swept by green fields and silvery grey olive groves; anon we skirted vivid cl.u.s.ters of orange-trees laden with the great luscious fruit, which is ever in season. On we pa.s.sed by plains bristling with huge spiky clumps of aloes alternating with growths of Barbary figs, until, towards twilight, we came in sight of the Guadalquivir with its boats, and on the farther side, near a copse of cypress, the walls of the Cartuja Convent, now turned into a porcelain factory by an enterprising Englishman, who makes imitation Moorish tiles where the hooded friars sang matins and lauds.

It was seven o'clock when we drove into "proud Seville," too late to look at any of her marvels, but not too late to enjoy a good dinner in the Fonda de Paris, a namesake and branch of the hotel where I had been stopping at Madrid. My _vis-a-vis_ at the dinner-table was the Saragossa butcher--I began to think now he was a political agent--who had been my _vis-a-vis_ on my tedious ride over the mountains from Beasain to Alsasua. Was this varlet on my track? I began to entertain serious apprehensions on the score. It has been my lot for years to have been shadowed by _mouchards_, gendarmes, detectives, and policemen.

My goings-out and my comings-in have been noted; my house has been watched by hulking louts in uniform whom their foolish superiors pitched upon as accomplished pryers; nay, even a female with _pince-nez_, sealskin jacket, long purse, and an Ollendorffian intimacy with most Continental tongues, has been cunningly slipped at my heels. I have been, thank the Lord, misunderstood by fools, belied by knaves, avoided by the timorous, tabooed by the contemptibly "respectable" (odious word), and slandered by scoundrels whom I had befriended. Heads have been wagged, and I have been adjudged a deep card and a dangerous character. Nothing could be got out of _me_.

The explanation is simple. I had nothing to conceal. You cannot squeeze aqua tofana out of a stone. I was suspected, I take it now, because, in the exercise of my vocation, I had been thrown into the society of Communists, Nihilists, Fenians, and Carbonari. Had I confined myself to card-sharpers, prize-fighters, copper captains, hypocrites, libertines, and ladies of the Loosened Cincture, all would have been well. And yet, 'fore Heaven, I can a.s.sure the Powers, great and small, I have never meditated wrong to a State or a potentate, never harboured an unkind thought for a dog, and never joined a secret society but the Order of Antediluvian Buffaloes, and they expelled me from the lodge for unbuffalo-like behaviour.

If I was sure that Saragossa butcher was a spy, I would not put prussic acid in his chocolate, but I almost think I would sprinkle cowhage between his sheets.

CHAPTER XIV.

Delectable Seville--Don Juan Scapegrace--The Women in Black--In the Triana Suburb--The City of the Seven Sleepers--Guide-Book Boredom--Romance and Reality--The Prosaic Manchester Man--King Ferdinand Puzzling the Judges--Mortification by Proxy--Some Notable Treasures--Papers and Politics--The Porcelain Factory--"The Lazy Andalusiennes"--About Cigars--The Gipsy Dance.

There are but three spots in the world of which I had formed mental pictures from my reading, that rose to the level of antic.i.p.ation when I came to visit them. Venice was one of these, Naples another, and Seville, delectable Seville, the third. There is a Spanish proverb which declares, "Who hath not seen Seville hath not seen a marvel," and I am prepared to own that who doth not believe that proverb is an unenviable sceptic. At first sight the city is a disappointment. Glance at it from the railway and you will have no wish to stop. But alight and remain there a few days, and you will find it hard to drag yourself away. The place grows upon you. Each hour reveals new charms; there is a fascination in the very atmosphere; and in the end you will catch yourself exclaiming that the pearl of Andalusia is the fairest gem in the Spanish crown--would be a priceless ornament to any crown.

The setting of the jewel is not worthy of it--a great plain covered with greyish gra.s.s; clumps of tall, brown-blossomed agave; a sky metallic in its l.u.s.tre, blazing and intense; a dim streak of azure on the horizon indicating the far sierra, and, creeping lazily through the flat, a dull, yellow river. But the city itself! Verily, it is a marvel--a grotto of serene mysteries in a granary of plenty, the true city to cultivate the gay science and savour the delicate relishes of bliss.

Don Juan--I mean the Don Juan of the Tenorio family, linked to fame by Tirso de Molina, Gluck, and Mozart, not the hero of Byron's poem--was born here, lived here, and lies under an ivy-clad sarcophagus in the gardens attached to the Duke de Monpensier's palace. No sweeter nook of earth could he have chosen for life's dreary pilgrimage, which he made as little dreary as he well could, if one-half that is said and sung of him be true. He was a sad scapegrace, and no pattern to the rising generation; his back knew no sackcloth, and his shoes no peas; but he died penitent. His tomb, a chaste thing in marble and bra.s.s, ought to be as attractive for pilgrims of the Wertherian school as the monument to Abelard in the Pere-la-Chaise.

Threading the puzzling maze of Seville streets, one might fancy that all the ladies here had been in love with the wanton rascal, and were still in mourning for him. The dress of womankind of the better cla.s.s is invariably black; their tiny feet, coffined in dainty shoes, peep from under a pall of black skirts; black mantillas float over billows of inky hair, while black eyes flash with the melancholy fire of funeral torches over the tremulous tips of black fans. Why they patronize black (which is a conductor of heat) in this hot climate I cannot for the life of me make out. Certainly it is not because of sympathies solemn or lugubrious; for the character of these lissom damsels of Seville is the reverse of gloomy. There is no taint of Inquisitorial days in their souls. They are grave only externally, and all that is coquettish, winning, and womanly within. If they hang out the undertaker's emblems it can only be through love of the rule of contraries, for they are arch in every step and glance, and bring sunshine with them into shady places. They are fond of seeing and being seen; they cannot be looked on as mutes, for they carry a fan, which in Spain is equivalent to a semaph.o.r.e; why then will they persevere in wearing this sepulchral raiment? I flatter myself I have discovered two reasons, either of which will answer--first, to typify their remorse for all the hearts they have broken; and, next, because it is very becoming.

The women of the lower cla.s.ses do not confine themselves to the same severity of taste. They are as amorous of glaring colours as negresses.

Cross the iron bridge over the Guadalquivir, here a slow current of chocolate and milk, and go into the Triana suburb where Tatterdemalion holds court. There you will meet gowns of printed cotton of the liveliest hue--gowns that flaunt violent pinks and gamboges, but never a violet or a pearl-grey, much less a black. These daughters of the people generally adorn their braided dark hair, which is thick and silky enough to drive a Parisian belle into agonies of jealousy, with a few bright natural flowers, and sport cheap trinkets and ear-rings, and fling gay kerchiefs over their shoulders. The men are as true to the native costume as the women. That abomination, the stove-pipe hat, seldom shocks the aesthetic mind. The head-gear is the wide round hat with low crown and inward-turned brim. The large blue or brown cloak, with parti-coloured lining, is almost universally worn as in Madrid, but with this difference: in Madrid the tail of it is held before the mouth as if there was an epidemic of toothache; in Seville, it drapes full and free.

The Andalusian jacket--broidered with tags, and short so as to show the scarlet waist-sash--tight trousers, and shoes of untanned leather, are likewise common. A tidy active working-suit this Andalusian suit is, but it must no more be argued that the men who wear it are tidy and active and addicted to hard work than that the women who wear black are going to a burial-service. No; Seville is the most deliciously idle place in creation, and the Sevillanos are the most deliciously idle people.

The _vis inertiae_ is cultivated here as a science; the Castle of Indolence is somewhere in the vicinity; the central offices of the Lazy Society are situated in the Calle de las Sierpes. The natives take to lotus-eating naturally. Pure effect of climate. The Seven Sleepers were born in Seville, and their descendants still have their torpid being in the city. It was never meant for the bustle of trade or the whirr of machinery. It is the place of all others to read Theocritus, 'mid bowers dipping their leaves into plashing fountains, to eat fruit, listen to distant music, blow languid wreaths of perfumed smoke, and shut one's eyes to have visions of fair women. It is the veritable opium-eater's Paradise.

Of deliberate design, I abstain from writing of the public buildings and monumental curiosities of Seville. All that can be had by those who choose in the exhaustive guide-books of Richard Ford and Henry O'Shea.

To my thinking, nothing can be more insufferable than the statistics of architecture, the bald jargon of styles plateresque and ornaments charrigueresque, the raptures over chancels and transepts and ogee windows, the precise accounts of such a bell, which would turn the scale at so many hundredweight, and such a spire, which is three yards and a quarter taller than the York Column, with the everlasting sc.r.a.ps of poetry from the treasury of ready-made quotations interlarded between.

It is worse even than the cant of criticism which Laurence Sterne castigated with honest pen. Hugo was a genius, and even Hugo was almost unequal to saving "Notre Dame de Paris" from the dead weight of architectural detail which c.u.mbered its spirit.

Let us look at Seville without the guide-book or guide, walk through its labyrinth of narrow paved streets with mind open to receive, and mark the features of the East side by side with those of the West. Those flat-roofed buildings with greeneries on the summit, those jealous balconies and windows with their iron trellis-work, those cool inner s.p.a.ces with tesselated floors and surrounding of marble pillars of which we catch glimpses through the metal fret-work of the private doors--how Moorish they are! The sights and sounds, the ragged and bronzed beggar urchins, the hawkers of lemons and water, the strings of donkeys and mules in fringed blinkers pattering along under huge net or straw panniers, crammed with fruit, or charcoal, or tiles, or cork-wood--how characteristic, how utterly un-Frankish! That lolling clown, with legs dangling over the tawny sheared sides of a diminutive donkey, is a study in himself. Then the melodious street-cries, the lively braying and whinnying, and the perpetual tinkling of the collar-bells worn by all four-footed beasts that pa.s.s, except n.o.body's dog and the rich man's horse--what a pleasant concert they make!

If you wish to change the scene, roam through the plazas, with their marble water-basins and orange-trees; go to the Duke de Montpensier's garden, with its wealth of myrtles and fern palms; wander to the river-side and look at the ships lading or unlading; or ascend the Giralda, the old mosque steeple from which the muezzin called the faithful to prayer, and take in the comely ma.s.s of colour beneath in one broad sweep. Then the changing sky that canopies this "fragment of heaven let fall upon earth!" The riot of clouds when the elements war, and after the midday heats the genial rain pours down as if the blue expanse overheard were a lake--how fervent and cordial! At night, when the city streets are crowded with groups in conversation; when the fragrant, flower-garlanded patios are visible by mystic lights pendent from gilt chandeliers, like votive lamps before a shrine; when caballeros pay court to their lady-loves through gratings as caballeros are licensed only to pay court in Spain; when plaintive songs, with a reminiscence of the desert about them, are chanted in monotonous cadence to the accompaniment of a guitar--how grateful it all is to him who is not lost to the sense of poetry! Imperceptibly one yields himself to the a.s.sociations of the bygone, and imagination takes wing. As the night ages and silence enwraps the scene--a silence only broken by the deep boom from a clock-tower or the voice of the sereno, the Spanish watchman, hobbling along with his lantern swinging from his pike and his bunch of keys from his girdle, singing out the hours--the effect is stronger; and I confess, while roaming in such a frame once, I so lost myself to the present that I should not have been surprised if I had met the Knight of La Mancha and the three gallants of the _Canard a Trois Becs_ in mocking whispers at his heels, or Figaro himself on a serenading excursion; but with the last puff of my cigar died out the ideal and returned the real. I hastened back to my hotel, which might once have been a Moorish palace, and there, to make the a.s.surance doubly sure that this was the nineteenth century, sat in an American rocking-chair a gentleman in a tweed suit, reading _Galignani's Messenger_ and drinking pale ale.

That gentleman was not a poet; he was an English tourist. It was the period before the Holy Week, with its world-renowned solemnities, celebrated with a pomp second only to that of Rome in her heyday, and drawing strangers in swarms from every point of the compa.s.s. If I expected to enjoy an intellectual chat with that gentleman I was mistaken.

"Only fancy!" he began; "the landlord has been here, and the beggar says we'll have to pay double for board and lodging if we don't clear out before the 5th of April."

To my explanation that a time of deep interest was at hand, and that accommodation would be at a premium, Manchester (I felt instinctively he must be a commercial traveller and in the dry-goods line) continued: "Yes, I know: bull-fights, Italian opera at the San Fernando, races, fat women, talking seals, peep-shows, whirligigs--all the fun of the fair.

By Jove! I've half a mind to hang on."

He had not heard of the grand open-air religious processions from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, nor of the uniquely pathetic service of the _Tenebrae_, nor of the gorgeous jubilance of Easter Sunday. Some enemy to Seville spread the rumour that the Republic had set its face against such ceremonies as mere gauds and vanities, customs more honoured in the breach than the observance, and that this year they would not be held. But Seville would not have it so; she would not relinquish her chance of enjoying a religious raree-show and fleecing the foreigner for any Republicans. The civil governor issued a proclamation comforting the lieges by the pledge that now, as ever, the Holy Week would be grandly kept, kept in a way worthy of cultured Seville, and cultured Seville rubbed her hands with glee. Crowds were expected to flock in, and the master of the hotel intended to act royally by them--that is, exact tribute from them whilst they were at his mercy. Seville meant to be awfully devout during Pa.s.sion Week, and awfully jolly the week after. On Easter Sunday there was to be a bull-fight, one of the finest in Spain, between the greatest of living toreadores and some bulls of choicely savage breed. The annual fair, which was represented to me as a revel of glowing and changing tints in dress--a treat not to be missed by the artist on any account--was to be held in the middle of April, and speculative committees were busy over the details of race-meetings, b.a.l.l.s, fireworks, and merry-making generally.

I pressed the representative of the mart of cotton not to depart. But he was obdurate to arguments touching on the aesthetic. For him the sacred Biblico-traditional drama of "The Seven Dolours of the Virgin Mary" had no attraction. He preferred fireworks and the learned pig.

"No," he added, as if musing; "on second thought, I shan't. Bull-fights I can see at Madrid; and the only race-meeting worth attending, I'm told, is that at the place where the sherry is manufactured."

"Surely," I ventured, with artless good-nature, "you will wait to patronize Mr. Spiller, who is advertised as skater-in-ordinary to the Duke of Edinburgh. It will be something to boast of, that you saw him gliding and gyrating before the astonished natives, whose only idea of ice is in the shape of creams, dyed a delicate amber, and tinctured with essence of lemon. Then, again, your countryman, old Tom Price, the Batty of the Peninsula, has pitched his tent on the Alameda of Hercules. He's not to be missed."

"Tom Price--bah! You should go to Astley's, in the Westminster Bridge Road, my boy. That fairly takes the cake. I'm off!"

He went, and I was not sorry; but the spell was broken. I was guest of an inn. My elysian train of reverie had been smashed up; the genius of dry-goods had evicted poetry under circ.u.mstances of aggravated harshness; before the stamp of the elastic-sided boot of Manchester, Pedro the Cruel and Alonso the Wise, Murillo and Luca Giordano, Maria de Padilla and Leonora de Guzman, "el Rey Chiquito" Boabdil and the heir of Columbus--all had melted into thinnest of air.

Inexorable duty called me elsewhere before the Holy Week solemnities, so that I have no opportunity of describing them _de proprio visu_, and I do not care to rehea.r.s.e twice-told tales. But whilst I was in Seville I wandered to and fro and made good use of my leisure, hearing and seeing as much as most visitors. Of those things which remain imprinted on my memory I may repeat some without incurring--at least so I trust--the imputation of boring the reader. There was a basin in the gardens of the Alcazar, where I was wont to sit beneath the shade of the foliage in the strong heats of noon. There is an anecdote concerning it which impressed me mightily. King Ferdinand was here one day, and was sore perplexed by an affair of state. He required a just and astute judge to decide some vexed question of the first importance. Walking up and down he unconsciously picked an orange, cut it in twain, and flung one half into the water, the cut side downwards. Suddenly an idea struck him. The monarch sent for a judge, and asked what was that floating before him.

"An orange," was the answer.

Irritated, he dismissed him, summoned another, put the same question, and received the same reply. This went on until at length one authority, before answering, drew the fruit towards him with the branch of a tree, picked it out of the water, and gave the true reply:

"Half an orange!"

There is a sound moral at the core of this orange.

There are five-and-twenty parish churches in Seville and two thousand priests; but, as too often happens on the Continent, the women were vastly more attentive than the men to observances of devotion. I made the acquaintance of a wealthy burgess, a dealer in curiosities, who asked me round to his shop to inspect some of the charming peasant costumes of Murcia, now fast falling into disuse--and a grievous pity it is. It was Friday when I visited him, and he was gobbling pork-chops.

"What! you a Christian, you a son of the Church!" I exclaimed.

"Ah! senor," he apologized; "forgive me! I am very frail, but my wife is _so_ good a Christian. I reverence that woman. She has gone to Ma.s.s without breaking her fast, and when she returns she will only take one small cup of chocolate."

But all the burgesses of Seville are not like to him who practised mortification by proxy. The gentlefolk are pious, and the commonalty are not irreligious. Cheerfulness and sobriety are the rule; gambling and an idleness excused by the enervating influences of the too generous sun are the predominating vices, as elsewhere in Southern Spain.

I saw few ebullitions of temper, much hospitality among the poor, no downright thievishness, but the irresistible tendency to pa.s.s bad money--which is accounted a venial failing in the Peninsula.

The Cathedral is a superb pile, and occupies the site of an ancient mosque. The stained-gla.s.s windows are so many captive rainbows.

Pretermitting talk about dimensions and the like, I may note some few of the remarkable features which are most apt to be recalled by the stranger. Foremost among these are the stone pulpit from which St.

Vincent de Ferrer preached; the slab over the remains of Ferdinand, son of Christopher Columbus, whereon are inscribed the words (referring to his ill.u.s.trious father), "A Castilla y a Leon Mundo Nuevo Dio Colon,"

and a Crucifixion by a Mexican negro, who was never known to paint any other subject. It is a peculiarity of artists of the Spanish school, in representations of the Sacrifice on Calvary, to use three nails and place the wound on the right side; Italians use four, and place it on the left. In the Capilla Real is the figure of the "Virgen de los Reyes," the patron of Seville, a gift from St. Louis of France, surmounted by the identical crown with which the brow of the canonized monarch was pressed, and enclasped as to the throat by a diamond necklace valued at ninety thousand duros, presented by Dona Berenguela, the mother of St. Ferdinand. Among the treasures in the relicario of the sacristy is a ma.s.sive gold group made of ore brought by Columbus from America, consisting of two figures sustaining a globe, the globe alone weighing fifteen pounds. Pa.s.sing under a horseshoe arch, in a dusty corridor beside which is preserved the shrivelled mummy of an ungainly alligator sent by the Sultan of Egypt to Alonso the Wise when seeking his daughter's hand, the Chapter Library is reached. The prizes of this collection are the ma.n.u.scripts of the discoverer of the New World and the book, "_Tractatus de Imagine Mundi_," which he took with him on the caravel when he first crossed the Atlantic. There are marginal notes to it in his own minute and legible handwriting, in one of which he lays down this apothegm of sad wisdom: "No one is secure from adversity."

There are no especially beautiful pictures by Murillo--especially, I say, for all of his are beautiful--in the Cathedral, but the church of La Caridad contains two masterpieces: the "Miracle of our Lord feeding the Mult.i.tude," and that of "Moses bringing the Living Water from the Rock of h.o.r.eb." The latter is full of diversity of expression underlain by a thrill of mad eagerness brought out with a terrible truth. Another famous picture is the "Descent from the Cross" of Campana. This was painted in 1548, and was so natural that Murillo was never weary of resting in rapt contemplation before it, and on his death-bed asked to be buried at its feet in the church of Santa Cruz. He had his wish. But the dogs of war came panting that way. Soult entered Seville, pulled down the church, desecrated the master's grave, and stole all of his canvas he could lay his sacrilegious paws upon to grace the Louvre. The Spaniards do not love the French, nor is it astonishing.

Among the delights of Seville one of the chief must not fail to be enumerated--no shrieking newsboys shove latest editions into the face of the lounger. This is not a reading people; for a woman to know how to read was accounted immoral so late as the beginning of this century.

There are some papers at Seville, nevertheless; among others, _El Oriente_, devoted to Carlism, and _La Legitimidad_, which advocated the interests of the ex-Queen Isabella's son and heir; but they have little to say. In the lack of suicides, stabs in the dark, and p.r.o.nunciamientos, they are driven to fill up their s.p.a.ce with extracts from the almanac and lists of letters thrown into the Post Office without prepayment. Some countryman must have caught the local disease, for in one list given in _La Legitimidad_ it was notified that two envelopes had been indolently committed to the box without stamps, one addressed to "Miss Mary, Hyde Park," and the other to "Monsieur" (an evident misprint for "Mister") "Francis O'Mahony, Shankerhill."

It may be a surprise to some that Carlism had its adherents, but wherever the Church is powerful there Carlism exists, and as the Church is particularly powerful amongst the weaker s.e.x, the Spanish women are almost universally Carlists. Many a ferocious Intransigente, who spouts fire and brimstone, and death to kings and priests in the clubs, has to sing very small when he comes home, for the Senora dotes on Don Carlos and works slippers for the father confessor. In Seville I should say the Intransigente element is feeble; it is strongest, perhaps, in the munic.i.p.ality (which, by the way, issued an edict secularizing the cemetery of San Fernando), because this party of action is always on the watch and pushes itself into office; but the immense majority of the business folk are monarchical, only they wish to have the Prince of the Asturias, not Don Carlos, for their monarch, and all the gentlefolk, without exception, are anti-Republican. I had proof of this at the theatre, where "La Ma.r.s.ellesa," a comedy intended to glorify the advent of the Republic, was played. The speeches in favour of Federalism very often fell flat, and occasionally were hissed, while the satirical hits at "social liquidation" and the like were uncommonly relished.