The Magic of Spain

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

II.—Basque Customs

An old Latin account speaks of the Basques as going nowhere—not even to church—without arms, usually a bow and arrows, and says that they are “gens affabilis, elegans et hilaris—courteous, graceful, and light-hearted;”[66] but, in spite of their known hospitality, their distrust of the foreigner and their hatred of intrusion are shown in more than one of their proverbs, as “The stranger-guest does not work himself, and prevents you from working.” The Basques are, indeed, the most energetic, as they are the most ancient people of the Peninsula. “Naguia bethi lansu—The idle man is ever busy,” says another of their proverbs; and, again, “Idle youth brings needy old age.”[67] Their fields are well and economically cultivated, and if their methods are antiquated, this is partly due to the mountainous nature of the country and the smallness of the holdings, making it simpler, e.g., to thresh corn by beating it sheaf by sheaf against a stone. Numerous small factories—of cloth as at Vergara, of paper at Tolosa, of iron and steel at Eibar and Elgoibar, of furniture at Azpeitia—and many quarries and tile-factories prove their industry; and entering a small Basque town such as Elgoibar, one may hear in tiny shops on all sides the sound of sandal-makers and workers in wood and leather. They know how to work, and they know how to enjoy themselves with thoroughness at the village fêtes. From dawn to dusk the ball is to be heard against the wall of the pelota court on Sundays, with intervals of dancing to the shrill pipe and drum of the chunchunero. Voltaire, thinking of their love of dancing, described them as “un petit peuple qui danse sur les Pyrénées,” and certain dances still survive. The sword-dance, ezpata danza, is one of the most remarkable, and has been described by Pierre Loti in “Figures et choses qui passaient;” and other dances are those representing the primitive methods of agriculture, the vintage, weaving, etc. The Basque pelota has, unfortunately, become, of recent years, a game of professionals, and as played, e.g., at Madrid, the interest is rather in the betting than in the play. The enthusiasm formerly excited among the Basques by the game is illustrated by the story that several Basque soldiers left the Army of the Rhine, returned to their country to play a game of ball, and, having played and won it, rejoined the army in time to take part in the battle of Austerlitz.[68] A game played in the immense court of a small Basque village is still a splendid sight, though it has lost much of its splendour, and the old Rebot is fast dying out. Pierre Loti has described a game of Blaid, as seen in a French-Basque village, in his novel of the Basque country, “Ramuntcho”; and this form of the game has been played in Paris and London. But old peasants will shake their heads and say it is no longer “as of old.” The expression “of old” is common on the lips of both French and Spanish Basques;[69] they willingly praise the past, and are intensely conservative of all their customs, their immemorial language, their games, privileges, religion. The ox-carts, with wheels of solid wood, to be seen under the vine-trellises of Basque farms, seem as old as the withered trunk of the oak of Guernica, and similarly many ancient customs have been retained. In some parts, at funerals, the men wear long cloaks reaching to the feet, the women also wearing long, full cloaks with hoods, that completely hide the face. The men go first, and then all the women—men and women in single file—the chief mourners coming last. Both at weddings and funerals, feasts were formerly given on such an extensive scale that the family was often nearly ruined, and a law (fuero) was passed forbidding to invite any but relations to the third degree. But the wedding-feast is still sufficiently imposing; it continues for many hours, and immediately afterwards the young begin dancing, while the old play cards. As to the offerings at funerals, “none but an eye-witness,” says Larramendi, in the eighteenth century, “could believe the quantity of bread and wax that is offered. Moreover, at these big funerals, in some places a live ox, and in others a sheep, is brought as an offering to the church door, and when the service is over it is taken away, and a fixed sum of money is given to the priest.”[70] This curious custom, a survival of the offerings to the dead and a trace of ancestor-worship, has not yet wholly died out. In one village at least (Arriba, on the borders of Navarre and Guipúzcoa) it is customary at funerals to offer bread and wax, and to bring to the church either a quarter of veal or a live sheep, which is afterwards given to the priest. The Basques are intensely religious, and it is characteristic of them that before they were converted to Christianity they were the terror of the Christians—indeed, the pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella at all times feared the passage through the Basque Provinces, the strange language adding to their difficulties (“La Biscaye,” they said, “où il y a d’étrange monde, où l’on n’entend pas les gens”). The Basques troop in to early Mass every Sunday, often by rough mountain paths, from farms lying a league away. Yet it must not be thought that the Basques are priest-ridden; the priests are respected, and often take part in their games or walk many miles across the hills to visit the sick. But though the Basques are often narrow and fanatical, they have far too much dignity and independence to be the blind followers of the priests. In the Carlist wars they fought chiefly for their old privileges, or fueros, and the result of the wars was that nearly all their fueros were lost, in 1839 and 1876. “Nothing is so fair as liberty,” says one of their songs, and their national song, “Guernikako Arbola,”[71] with its stirring air, celebrates “the holy tree of Guernica, loved by all the Basques.” In the little green-set town of Guernica a fine new oak, some forty years old, has taken the place of the old tree, now a mere trunk protected by glass, while in the little pillared temple are still to be seen the seven marble seats on which assembled—

“Peasant and lord in their appointed seat,
Guardians of Biscay’s ancient liberty.”

These are the two last lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet to the

“Oak of Guernica! Tree of holier power
Than that which in Dodona did enshrine,
So faith too fondly deemed, a voice divine.”

Noble, handsome, graceful in all their movements, hardy and shrewd, the Basques are active and untiring whether as farmers, smugglers, soldiers, or pelotaris. They live aloof in scattered farms, a healthy open-air life (their word for rich is aberatz, from abere, head of cattle), and, indeed, in a town they tend to lose some of their good qualities. Their dress has always an air of careful neatness and distinction, with the béret, white shirt (without a tie), dark blue or black coat thrown over shoulder (or long blouse), silent sandals and the peculiar makhila, a stout iron-pointed stick of medlar. They are shrinking into their mountains, a race doomed to perish, “un peuple qui s’en va.” They have watched during thousands of years new races spring up and prosper around them, and in the twentieth century they see trains and motors penetrate to the inaccessible places where the Roman legions were checked, or Charlemagne with all his peerage fell. An inscription here and there shows them bowing to destiny and the relentless march of time in saddened resignation, or betaking themselves to the consolation of their religion—the following inscriptions, for instance, along the frontier: “Man is beaten by every hour, and the last leads him to the grave.”[72] “Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.”[73] “Ici fait l’home cequi pevt et fortune ce que elle vevt.”[74] “Post fata resurgo.”[75] “Deum time, Mariam invoca.”[76] “Orhoit hilcea.”[77] The privileges that remain to the Basques are few, consisting in a slightly less acute centralization than obtains in other provinces of Spain.[78] They have no fueros left to make it worth their while to take up arms afresh, and they still have vivid memories of their wasted fields and desolate farms in the last Carlist war. But were their ancient religion to be really attacked, or were an attempt made to expel the monks from the Basque provinces, the peasants could be counted upon to make a desperate resistance, more in defence of their independence than on behalf of the monks themselves. Foreigners have often misunderstood the Basques,[79] for they are reserved and silent towards the new-comer (“Gizonciki arabotz andi,” they say—“Little man, much noise”; “the empty barrel makes the most noise,” and so on). But there is no suspicion of commercialism about their love of liberty such as has often been attributed to the Catalans: they love their beautiful land, the Eskual-erria, for its own sake and the religion and customs of their forefathers, and the strangers who visit their country soon learn to love and admire its broad healing power and spirit of ancient peace. It is a country of civilization without great cities, where exists an intimate and ennobling relation between the soil and the inhabitants.

V
IN REMOTE NAVARRE

NAVARRE is held to be one of the chief bulwarks of Clericalism in Spain, and so remote and isolated are its villages, so primitive its life and agriculture, so few its means of communication, that it might seem that no breath of modern times could have penetrated to this province. Lying on the frontier of France, it is defended from the inroads of civilization by its mountains and wide wastes of desert land. In those lonely groups of houses of massive yellow-brown stone, clustered around their church, and crowning rocky hills of the same colour, there is no room for differences of opinion, and he who does not attend Mass at least once in the year is forced to go and live elsewhere. Should you ask how he can be forced to go, the answer you will receive is, “By the law, by public opinion.” Quite recently a traveller, arriving famished at one of these villages of Navarre, with no smaller change than a French napoleon, went from door to door in vain. No one would accept this doblón de oro (gold doubloon). Finally, a woman who had lived for a time at Salies de Béarn consented to receive it, and sent it later to be changed at the capital, Pamplona. Yet even here in Navarre there is an appreciable body of liberal opinion, and even in the heart of the Carlist country, at Estella, the Club Carlista is faced by the ensign of the Círculo Liberal; even here in all but the smaller villages opinion is divided, and the policy of Clericals and anti-Clericals discussed with animation. Those who served in the second Carlist war recognize that the times have altered, and that leaders, or cabecillas, are no longer forthcoming to lead them in swift night marches across the hills, willing though they might be to follow. At Estella a fort taken by the Carlists is now a peaceful covered market-place, and the palace where Don Carlos held his court is a pleasant fonda with a cool patio of flowers. Those who enter Navarre by the Convent of Roncesvalles and the Pass where Roland was slain, and which Byng a thousand years later, in 1813, was forced to evacuate with ten thousand troops, may be easily deceived into imagining that Navarre is a land of meadows and green woods and pleasant streams. The swift river Urrobi runs through passes of rugged hills, but overgrown with box and beech trees and pines. Steep walls of rock are in summer covered with foxgloves and bramble and broom, scabious, St. John’s wort, mallow, bell heather, and many other flowers and ferns, and in places the hills are red with wild strawberries. The Urrobi forces its way through barriers of grey rock and over ledges in green pools and white rushing torrents. But this is not the true Navarre. There no trees are to be seen, and one is perpetually in a wide circle of bare hills. The country is the most desolate imaginable, formed by bare, ashen-grey hills (scored and gashed by dry torrent-beds) and valleys equally barren. The wind hisses, and crickets chatter loudly in a few stunted elms by the roadside. All is greyness without colour, and in late summer the stubble-fields far and near add a new note of desolation, and it seems out of keeping with the character of the country that these fields should ever be a fresh green in spring. Indeed, the occasional hollows of olives and plots of vineyards have an air of unreality in the surrounding wilderness of crumbling dust and shale. Yet some welcome patches of colour are to be found, if it is only a line of chicory or of huge purple thistles along a stubble-field, or a blue-bloused peasant jogging down the dusty road on a mule with crimson trappings. And on the threshing-floors around the villages, where work is carried on far into the night, often by lightning flash, the white shirts and blue blouses of the men, and the pink and red dresses and long white headkerchiefs of the women form a picturesque and beautiful scene through the clouds of flying chaff and ruddy golden grain falling in heavier, more compact masses. For here the threshing is all done by hand with the help of mules, oxen, and horses, which are driven round and round, drawing all the children of the village on little wooden sledges. When the grain has been thus sifted, the process is completed by throwing it into the air from long wooden shovels and close-pronged wooden forks. The corn is grown on precipices and sheer mountain-sides, and is brought down to the threshing-floors on donkeys, which disappear beneath their rustling load. The men who live in this grim country are also stern and grim, harsh featured, hard, and strong; and, though hospitable and not unkindly, they are fierce and obstinate upon occasion, and sometimes cruel to their animals. Their food is rough, but not unplentiful; of wheat there is no lack, and with some vines and olives they are content to have the three necessities of a Spanish peasant’s life. The villages would often pass unnoticed on their rocky hills were it not for the outstanding feature of their grim, massive churches; the church of Gallipienzo dominates a mountain, and is so solid and fine that it seems to dwarf it. These churches are to be seen for very many miles across the completely bare country, and at night the lights of the village streets form, from long distances, strange, irregular letters on a mountain-side, making the village far more conspicuous than it would be by day. Sansol, a little village not far from Logroño, looks from some distance like a great fortress of brown stone with tiny black loop-holes (the glassless windows); behind is a long backbone of grey, rocky hill, and beyond the purple-black Monte Jura with a glimpse of white road. Bitter and fierce are the winters in Navarre, and pitiless the sun in summer; but for all its forbidding aspects it repays the discomforts of a visit to its remote districts. Lumbier is like a miniature Toledo, on its bare hill above the winding river, and Sanguesa, of brown yellow stone, on the Aragón, of the same colour, has its magnificently sculptured church of Santa María, and other beautiful carvings on private houses. And after a few weeks’ acquaintance with the harsh country and the proud inhabitants, the traveller will realize the possibility of those relentless Carlist wars which still send a thrill through those who recall them, and the difficulty of hunting down cabecillas who knew the country and of bringing the war to an end.

VI
SPANISH CITIES

SPAIN is pre-eminently a land of cities. Often they stand conspicuous in an arid and treeless tract of country, glancing like jewels in a sunburnt land. The pleasant and fertile strip of country, on the French frontier is not properly Spanish, but Basque. On the other hand, nothing could be more Spanish than the little quaint old town of Fuenterrabía. The original name was Basque—Ondarrabia, “The two banks of sand.” The Romans, hearing the name, but ignorant of its meaning and seeing, moreover, the swift flow of the tide beneath the walls of the town, called it Unda Rapida.[80] From the Latin Unda Rapida or Fons Rapidus came the Spanish Fuenterrabía,[81] and the French in their turn, connecting it with the Arabs, called it Fontarabie. The Basque name is, however, still in use, and one of the streets of Irun where, as in many other towns and villages, the street names are written up both in Spanish and Basque, has the full-sounding name Ondarrabiko Karreka—the street of Ondarrabia. If one may compare small things with great, the cities of Northern Spain are like castles built by children in the sand, and left high and dry by the receding tide. City after city stood walled and bulwarked on the extreme fringe of the Christian territory, for a time the court and capital of Spain, till a fresh conquest drove back the Moors a lap further south. This in part accounts for the grim and wonderful Spanish cities, with their magnificent buildings and fortifications, that still exist, but exist with no longer the stir of a great destiny within their walls, but merely as it were the mighty shells of an extinct life. So Burgos, León, Toledo, were capital cities for a space, thronged with the busy traffic of courtiers and warriors, and Avila, the city of saints, has the great fortifications of a frontier town. It is difficult to believe that Toledo has at all changed since the Cid’s horse miraculously stayed before the burning light hidden in the wall of one of its streets, and the water-carriers to-day go leisurely down to the river, their donkeys’ panniers laden with earthen jars, as when Cervantes wrote “La Ilustre Fregona.” And, indeed, Spanish cities are little liable to change. The steep uneven ways of Toledo and Salamanca and Segovia scorn modern traffic. The passing of a carriage is possible in the main streets, but is a rare event that rattles and reverberates along the walls. More suitable are the stately processions, their banners showing brightly against the brown-yellow buildings. Segovia has been called the queen of Castilian cities, as Toledo is the king. And Segovia must ever remain mediæval, a city of a hundred levels, sinking by terraces of half-ruinous walls, tufted with grass and flowers, from the Cathedral down to the foot of its mighty Roman aqueduct. A Latin author three hundred years ago wrote that “in Segovia nemo otiosus, nemo mendicus”—there were no beggars at Segovia. It would be unsafe to assert this of any Spanish town to-day. Spain is no country of “neat cities and populous towns full of most industrious artificers.” Such towns—Barcelona,[82] Bilbao—there are, but mostly the cities are, in the words of Burton, “cities decayed,” which contain many “Spanish loiterers,” though they are not “base and poor towns,” nor are the people “squalid, ugly, uncivil.” The southern cities show a softer influence. The surrounding country is less abrupt and harsh, and the stern features of the north are forgotten. Cadiz lies out into the sea, a Spanish Venice, cut in straight white streets, like the slices of an iced cake. Seville is wonderful at all times, a maravilla to foreigners and Spaniards. The Spanish novelist Palacio Valdés, in “La Hermana San Sulpicio,” has described it during nights of midsummer, when to go through the city was to visit the interior of the houses, for from the patios, where the families were assembled, great rays of light shot through the iron screen-doors into the dark and stifled streets, and guitar and song broke the stillness: “Seville at such an hour had a magical look, a charm that disturbed the mind.” But of all the cities of the south Granada has a peculiar fascination. This is largely due to its many contrasts. It is a city of orange groves and fountains, yet it lies over two thousand feet above sea-level, and is a summer rather than a winter city; the fiercest heat is relieved by cool air from the eternal snows of the Sierra Nevada, and the gardens of the Alhambra and the Generalife, with their myrtles, cypresses and cedars, give a delicious shade. In winter icy cold strikes through the marble halls of the Alhambra; yet it is never more beautiful than seen in February from San Cristobal, or from the cactus-covered hill beneath San Miguel, or from where the Darro flows rapidly far below. For it rises above the slender branches of elms and poplars, grey and in parts purple from their swelling buds—the red and yellow-brown towers, the crumbling walls of red earth and brick and large smooth rounded stones of white, or black, or red, the trailing ivy, the open white-pillared galleries. A few almond-trees are in flower, and above to the left stand the long lines of cypresses of the grey-white Generalife, where flower celandines and daffodils. Many of these Spanish cities are visited chiefly for their great ancient buildings and Cathedrals; yet the most part of them deserve a more patient study for their own sake, for their memories of old, and for the life of their narrow winding streets. The Spanish writer Azorín (Martínez Ruiz), in a book of few pages,[83] conveys some wonderfully clear-cut impressions of Spain. He turns with preference to details of the centuries of Spain’s greatness, when Murcia, Valencia, and Seville were famous for their silks, Talavera for its earthenware, Toledo for its swords, when the gloves of Ocaña or the spurs of Ajofrín were unrivalled; or to the survival of old Spain in a picture, or a building, or a city. Thus he loves to wander through León with its spirit of ancient Spain and its classical street-names—here a cobbled grass-grown plaza with pale acacias and ancient walls, the slow flight of doves and the wind rustling torn pieces of paper; there a quiet convent patio with bays and rigid cypresses. For him the narrow streets of Córdoba have a deeper charm than those of any other Spanish city. He wanders through the labyrinth of intricate winding ways, with glimpses of small pillared patios of flowers and fountains, and finds everywhere silence and a deep serene melancholy, restfulness, oblivion, and a harmony of soft shades, nowhere the light-hearted frivolity conventionally attributed to Andalucía. Azorín’s originality consists in forcing a few apparently insignificant details to yield the whole spirit of a city, a country, a people. If he mentions the Mosque of Córdoba, it is but to note the beggars taking the sun in the Patio de los Naranjos, the sparrows twittering in the orange-trees, the sound of pitchers filling at the fountain. He gives us poignant descriptions of dead provincial cities and ruined ancestral houses. The decadence of Spain brought flourishing cities to low estate: Spain’s revival menaces them with a fresh ruin. Old narrow passages and intricate courts and sculptured houses make place for the introduction of tramways and broad asphalt streets. The old Santander described by Pereda survives only in his books, the old parts of Barcelona and Valencia are fast disappearing, and happy is the city such as Toledo whose position on abrupt rocks with no level spaces seems to promise an eternity of mediævalism and individuality.

VII
IN OLD CASTILLE

IT is with astonishment and a kind of fear that the traveller passes through the high-lying plains of Old Castille, journeying swiftly from city to city, to

“Old towns whose history lies hid
In monkish chronicle or rhyme,
Burgos, the birthplace of the Cid,
Zamora and Valladolid....”

for in these intervening tracts, sun-parched and windswept, it seems scarcely possible that men should live. The villages are closely huddled together, little compact masses of low, unwhitewashed houses, without a tree or garden, so colourless, and clinging to the soil as sometimes to pass unnoticed. Rivers flow between low, bare banks without bush or tree, like streaks of mother-of-pearl inlaid in earthenware. And there are wide tracts of land without a house or boundary, a continuous desolation with no signs of life, except here and there a flock of sheep or herd of goats, or a line of peasants returning at sunset from their work. Surely life here can have but few attractions; there can be no joy of the soil, little temptation for Berceo’s “mal labrador” of the thirteenth century, who “loved the earth more than he loved the Creator,” and “would alter landmarks to enlarge his estate”—cambiaba los mojones por ganar eredat. Yet the slower trains are invaded by a merry throng of pleasant, courteous, good-looking peasants, oval-faced, with splendid teeth and eyelashes, who speed the journey with gay conversation and shrill singing, and pass constantly from one carriage to another to greet friends or to avoid the officials who inquire awkwardly after tickets. They have plenty of life and cheerfulness, and it is with renewed wonder that one looks at the dead, crumbling villages where they live, and remembers the piercing force of the Castilian sun in summer and the icy, penetrating winter winds. All day they must work without the shelter of a single hedge or tree in the searching wind[84] that sifts the soil, or under a sun that parches and shrivels it into dust. But a nearer acquaintance reveals a certain charm[85] about these villages of hard, clear names: Campillo, Cantalapedra, Pedroso, Madrigal—a charm of clean-swept spaces, and clear, luminous air and silent intensity; and the country ceases to be uniformly colourless. Here a woman in a dress of light-blue linen, with long flowing headkerchief of white, passes on a donkey through fields of golden ripe corn; there, from narrow windows in a street of yellow-brown houses, hang bright patches of geraniums and carnations in flower. And the doorways of square or round or pointed arches give entrance to cool, silent courts. Azorín has described the old Castilian hidalgo, who has never left his ancestral house, with its large rooms, many of them unfurnished, and old portraits consigned to an attic and covered with the dust of centuries: “His lands have disappeared, his furniture has disappeared; he does nothing; he has a sad intensity of expression,” and when further misfortune befalls him he says, “There is no help for it—qué le vamos á hacer!” Everywhere is decay, and the trace of vanished splendour. So these old ruined hidalgos live out their grey, monotonous lives in some ancient town or village of Castille, amid the immense plains with “distances of radiant sky and faint blue lines of mountains.” The blue smoke rises from scented fires of rosemary, and, as the bells ring to Matins, the doves swerve and circle, the grey doves sweep slowly across the sky perpetually blue. And night and day the doors of the houses are kept continually closed, with a deserted air beneath the broad coats-of-arms carved in stone. Azorín describes minutely a Castilian town, standing among cornfields and olives—one of those towns that the foreigner rarely has the courage to visit. Its streets are narrow and tortuous. It contains three ancient inns, four churches, three hermitages, two convents. It has no industries save a few ruined cloth manufactures, and only the usurer flourishes. It contains fourteen students (who have not taken their degree), four doctors, twelve lawyers (only six of whom earn a living, and this by slandering one another, and from time to time bringing a blackmail suit against some poor-spirited inhabitant). There is a Guild of the Christ of the Dying, and when a member dies a messenger goes through the streets ringing a bell and crying: “At such an hour the funeral of Don Fulano.” The summers are fiery, the winters are long and cruel. No visits are paid; doors and windows remain closed; few persons go through the streets, but in the plazas, on clear days of winter, dense groups of men may be seen taking the sun, wrapped in their brown plaids and capas. Nothing happens; the deep silence is broken by the clang of a forge-hammer or by the crowing of a cock. In time of Carnival a few “masks” pass, dressed up with mats and carrying old brooms. The labourers are poverty-stricken, and meat is the luxury of a few “rich” inhabitants. Azorín notes the Castilian’s “fundamental energy, aloofness, indifference, and lofty disdain, with sudden inspirations of heroism”; and we may count it no small heroism to live on, proudly uncomplaining, in surroundings so harsh and discomfortable.

VIII
THE DESERT AND THE SOWN

THE French soldiers, looking at the trifling Manzanares and its mighty bridges, may have exclaimed, “So even the Spanish rivers ran away.” But those who, at sight of tiny threads of water in immense river-beds, are inclined to ask, with Don Pedro in Much Ado about Nothing, “What need the bridge much broader than the flood?” find their answer after a few days of heavy rain. Marks six feet and more high on houses many hundreds of yards from the banks of the Ebro record the rising of the waters. Thus, in many districts, crops which have survived the summer drought are swept away by the autumn deluge, and those who have cried for rain are mocked with ruin when the waters “prevail exceedingly upon the earth.” Spain’s agriculture perishes for lack of water, yet water abounds, whether subterranean, as in parts of Castille, or in the copious snows of the high-lying regions, where the snow is sometimes preserved in snow-pits, pozos de nieve, or in these periodical floods; and it would seem that the philologist had Spain in his mind who connected the Basque adjective idorra, meaning “dry,” with ὓδωρ, the Greek for water. To utilize, extend, and regulate the water supply is a problem of vital importance to Spain—a problem which has long occupied the thoughts of Spanish statesmen. Alfonso the Learned, in his “Crónica General,” says, “This Spain, then, of which we speak is as the paradise of God.... For the most part, it is watered with streams and fountains, and wells are never lacking in all places that have need of them;” but Strabo, more impartial, had remarked of Spain that, “For the most part, it yields but a poor sustenance. For large districts are composed of mountains and woodland and plains, with thin and, moreover, not uniformly well-watered soil—οὐδἐ ταὐτην ὁμαλῶς εὔυδρον.” And since Strabo’s time many have been the alterations for the worse. Turdetania, for instance, the country between Seville and Huelva, is no longer marvellously prosperous—θαυμα-στῶς εὐτυχεῖ; in fact South Estremadura, of old one of Rome’s granaries, is now one of the most desolate regions in Spain. But the worst decay is that of the forests. The woods have fallen and fallen, and still the axe rings avidly in those woods that remain. The very words for a wood, bosque or selva, have become rare and poetical. Thus the soil is further parched and impoverished, while towns and villages stand unsheltered from wind and sun. The Escorial, which grew up among woods, may now be seen from afar in its almost sinister magnificence across grey hills and plains without a tree; and Madrid, though a tree figures prominently in the city arms, looks out upon plains from which all traces of former oak and chestnut forests have long since vanished. The absence of trees in Spain increases both the dryness and the floods, and afforestation is therefore quite as important as irrigation. The canalization of rivers may diminish the floods, but while there is no soil on the hill-sides—or soil so light that it is swept away by heavy rainfalls—the rain must continue to be a blessing strangely disguised. It is calculated that in six or eight years the trees would knit the soil together, and give it sufficient staying power to resist and absorb the rains, though, of course, there would as yet be no actual profit of timber. Outlay of toil and money for so distant a remuneration is not congenial to the Spanish temperament. The great land-owners do nothing. The State spends a few thousand pesetas every year; but at the present rate afforestation will need hundreds of years, bearing a resemblance to that long-desired map of Spain, which is to be issued in some eleven hundred sections, and of which from two to three sections appear annually.[86] The advantages of irrigation have been amply proved in Spain, justifying the juxtaposition of water and gold in Pindar’s ode; but only about a fiftieth of Spain’s total area—and especially the plain of Granada and the strip of coast of Málaga and Valencia—can at present show the immense productiveness due to irrigation, combined with the swift-maturing sun of Spain. There are, of course, immense difficulties, and not the least are the ignorance and the poverty of the peasants. Water added to a poor soil will be of little value if the peasants are not taught artificial means of enriching the soil, and modern methods of cultivating it. The extreme poverty of the peasants would, however, prevent them at present from employing any but the simplest methods; in many districts they mortgage their land in order to be able to sow their crops, and Spanish farmers are often in the hands of the usurers. The usurer has been their only resource in moments of distress, and finally they are driven to emigrate, leaving their land to the usurer. A narrow strip of fertile land along the rivers stands out in contrast to the desolate country beyond. Thus the Ebro flows through Aragon, among woods of silver birch and poplars, and plantations of olives and vines and maize; but on either side appears the barren country of perfectly bare reddish or brown hills of crumbling earth, like great sand-dunes, without a plant, curiously folded and scored by rushing water, with intricate, abrupt hollows and catacombs. The villages are the colour of the soil, and at no great distance are scarcely distinguishable from a bare hill-side. Or desert plains are thinly covered with grey thyme, and in the more fertile parts produce dwarfed vines and corn, so that in autumn one looks across immense, undivided plains of stubble and yellowing vineyards to the distant horizon of dim blue hills. The cruel winds[87] of Spain blow straight from the iced mountain ridges, unstemmed by any barrier of woods. The first snows fall early round Avila and on the uplands, but in the towns snow at Christmas is rare. The foreigner sometimes has a capricious wish to see these wide, tawny plains covered with snow—après la plaine blanche une autre plaine blanche, like the Queen Romayquia, wife of Abenabet, Moorish King of Seville, who could find no solace in her longing for the sight of snow. The King ordered almond-trees to be planted all about the city of Córdoba, that in early spring at least, if not at Christmas, the Queen might beguile her fancy with the snow-white almond blossoms.[88] But even in Andalucía, towards the end of December, one may see several comparatively low mountain ranges thickly coated with snow. Stores of firing are then brought down to the villages from the treeless hills. Further north the vines have been pruned, and the vine-twigs brought in for burning; but here the vines have not yet lost their leaves, and the firing consists of thyme and whin and rosemary, mint and lavender and other scented hill-plants. Troops of donkeys arrive at sunset, with immense, sweet-smelling loads, that entirely hide the red or purple tassels and fringes of their harness. The oranges now gleam in myriads along the eastern coast; sometimes the icy winds from inland freeze them, and fires of smouldering straw are burnt round and in the orange groves, after the wind has ceased, that a dense smoke may hang about the trees and warm them. Weeks before Christmas the turroneros from Jijona, noticeable for their small peaked hats of black velvet, appear in nearly every city and town of Spain. In porches or in large bare shops they set out their layers of white wooden boxes, and samples of the turrón, or almond-paste, which is an essential part of Spanish Christmas fare. For the time, Jijona, the grey town in the hills, is deserted, though but a few weeks ago every house was a busy scene of turrón making, and nailing thin white planks into boxes. The snow will soon lie deep on the Carrasqueta hill-range above the town. The almond-trees, whose pink flowers in February form a solitary belt of colour between Jijona and the rocky mountains, are now as bare and grey as the surrounding country. Some of the inhabitants have gone to the warmer south, taking the diligencia to Alicante; others have scaled the steep, winding road past the Barranco de la Batalla, where once the Cid wrought havoc of the Moors, and now herds of goats feed apparently on nothing, and have taken train at Alcoy for the cold, high-lying cities of the north. But not in the northern uplands only are Spanish winters cruel; the dehesas of Andalucía are equally unprotected, the silent, icy winds blow subtle and fierce and penetrating over the undulating hill country round Córdoba, and one may see shepherd boys, closely muffled in their plaids, standing frozen and motionless, the sheep pressing around them and against one another for shelter.

IX
THE COAST OF CATALONIA IN AUTUMN

A FIRST view of Catalonia from the sea shows at any rate the stones from which, according to the proverb, the Catalans make bread. For great spines of rust-coloured rock, covered here and there by pines of a crude green, run to the sea and break off in abrupt cliffs. In the valleys of these ridges towns and villages skirt the shore, Rosas, Palamos, San Feliú de Guixols with its cork industry, and lace-making Arenys de Mar. Towards Barcelona both soil and villages become greyer, but Barcelona itself has colour in plenty. The Spanish and foreign ships in the harbour, the palm-trees near the quay, above them the tall white and yellow houses with shutters of green and brown, and above these again a view of the great Cathedral—all this, bounded by the purple mountains, makes the sight of Barcelona from the sea very picturesque and attractive.

The coast to the south of Barcelona is very fertile. There are hedges of reeds twenty feet high, of cactus and of aloe, aloes of that exquisite blue-green which is so often the colour of the Mediterranean in September. Through yellowing orchards of magnificent peaches, of figs and apples in great abundance, come glimpses of the intense leaden-blue hill-ranges to the west. The grapes have already for the most part been gathered for wine, but there are still many vines that, earlier in the year, are cut back to the ground, and have the look of blighted potato-plants, and that now, grown to the size of currant-bushes and unstaked, are laden with large yellow grapes. Occasionally, too, one sees tall date-palms and orange-trees.

After Casteldefels the hills are covered with pines, and the nights, which are warm but have heavy dew, bring out their scent so strongly that it is at times almost oppressive. The nights are silent but for the continual chirping of crickets and the sound of the unquiet sea. The stars are strangely bright, Sirius burns large and intense, and Orion nightly stalks the sky in all his glory till the sun catches him in mid-heaven. The sea is alive with phosphorus, and far out are seen the lights of fishing-boats, while on land the glow-worms are almost as many as the stars. The orange and purple sunrises and sunsets of pink and amethyst are very lovely, and the sails of the fishing-boats continue white, and the sea retains its blue for some time after the light of the after-glow is gone. A little further south the cliffs are covered with dwarf palms, rosemary in flower, and other shrubs. The road here is good, but one meets no pedestrians, for a path along the railway is the accepted thoroughfare between village and village in spite of the notices that forbid its use. The men for the most part wear a black peaked cap, a long blouse, and trousers of brown or blue. The sash is nearly always black and is worn wide, the sandals have a tip and heel covering only, with fastenings of leather or black cloth from the tip. The women wear handkerchiefs that entirely cover the head. The predominant colours are blue and black. A kilomètre or more before wine-making Sitges the road is bounded by rough terraces of stone with vines and dark green carob-trees. A succession of terraces on the one side runs far up the hills, and on the other the rude-walled vineyards stretch to the edge of the sea. Sitges, a village of less than four thousand inhabitants, is prettily placed, its octagonal-towered church rising from a rock in the sea. A few kilomètres further Villanueva y Geltrú is but a fairly large and rather ordinary provincial town, though it has its picturesque corners, with its houses washed in various shades of blue, pink, green, or yellow, and views of vineyard country appearing at the end of many of its long, straight streets. After Villanueva the hills recede further inland, and there is a little more flat country, but it is occupied largely by great marshes, loud with the croaking of frogs.

It is not till one reaches Roda and Creixell that any villages have a really Spanish, or rather Castilian, look. Creixell, especially, with its massive church and great square building of stone standing haughtily on a hill of wall-terraces sprinkled with carob-trees, and with its houses the colour of the soil, has all the air of a little Toledo. Early on an autumn morning it may be seen reflected, with every house and window, in a blue lagoon hundreds of yards from the village and separated by sandbanks from the sea. The olives and vineyards now extend to the shore, and above San Vicente great white country-houses stand among orchards and olives. After Creixell there are but two villages, Torredenbarra and Altafulla, before Tarragona, the second coast-town of Catalonia. Here, indeed, the sun beats with a fiery strength; here, indeed, the Mediterranean is “crystalline,” and “the lightning of the noon-tide ocean flashes.” Here is excellent firm sand for bathing and, swimming far out, the sun is still seen shining through the transparent water on the waved sand below. At the end of September the season is over, yet the days are still almost too hot, and the deep blue of the bay and the long purple line of hills to the north-west are indescribably beautiful. Tarragona, the favoured city of the Romans, is the possessor of many noble Roman ruins, and wonderful Cyclopean walls, and its outline, seen against the sky from the road leading to Tortosa, is one of the most magnificent in Spain. The town and its neighbourhood, as well as the whole coast of Catalonia is, perhaps, not as well known as it deserves. In autumn, if the days and even the nights are hot, there is always a refreshing coolness in the early mornings; the people are, as a rule, pleasant and courteous; in some villages many speak Catalan only, and at times, catching a word here and there, one may think oneself to be in Italy.

X
AN EASTERN VILLAGE

THERE is no cloud in the clear March sky, filled with radiant light. Beyond the dark green of orange-trees and grey olives lies the sea, a faint line of blue. And, to the west, the mountains of bare rock are faintly purple, looking frail and brittle in their clear but distant outlines. A herd of goats passes slowly down a wide river-bed of smooth white stones, with no shred or vestige of water. Lines of aloes and tall reeds grow along its banks, and on either side peasants dressed in black are at work in the fields, ploughing with single mules between the brown stems of vines recently pruned, or pruning the orange-trees and olives. Bundles of vine and olive twigs lie ready to be carted to the village for fuel. Women in dresses of white and pink and scarlet are hoeing the green corn. The pear- and peach-trees are in flower, and the almond-trees fully arrayed in freshest green. At intervals, wells or norias explain the green fresh look of the country, so different from the burnt desolation of the waterless regions further north. For Oropesa, the neighbouring village, is but some sixty miles north of Valencia, and is bordered on the one side by the full fertility of the Valencian plain, though on the other it is surrounded by barren hills. In each noria a long crooked branch forms the handle to the iron wheel and to this a mule is tied, and as the mule turns, the wheel revolves with a slow clinking sound, and the long earthenware jars (arcaduces) attached to the wheel gush water into a trough and so by small channels of dry earth into the fields of brown and reddish soil. A path leads through green fields and clumps of orange-trees to the village. In some fields further south the last oranges have been gathered, and thousands of pearl-shaped buds tell that the trees before long will be covered with a glistening snow of scented blossoms. But in many the oranges still reign resplendent: on a grey day they stand out with more vivid distinctness than when the sun blurs them in a luminous haze, leaving them clearly visible only in the level light of its rising or its setting. The trees are bowed with fruit, and the laden branches are propped up from the ground. The thronging oranges glow in myriad spheres of gold, here and there lie golden mounds of gathered oranges, and below the trees the ground is a strewn pavement of gold. On every side beneath the trees may be seen a magic land of myriad golden lamps; single or in trefoils and clusters of seven and ten and twenty, the oranges hang within a few inches of the ground. Hundreds of yards away through intervals of trees appears the same foison of gleaming fruit, and the air is all scented with oranges. From time to time a light wind blows beneath the trees, and the twigs with their burdens of crowding oranges sway heavily to and fro, like slowly swung censers of burning gold. But near Oropesa the oranges are comparatively few. The village is built on a steep precipitous hill of grey rock, crowned by the ruinous walls of a great castle. The houses clamber roof over roof, in ragged disarray up the rock. They are of yellowish-brown stone with rough cement, and mostly innocent of glass, but have a touch of whitewash in front, so that they wear shining morning faces to the rising sun. In the mistless radiant mornings the village stands out clearly, its sharp rock rising sheer from the plain. The sea beyond is silver, and on the other side every wrinkle in the rocks of the grey mountains is distinctly visible. There is no sound but the occasional voices of children, the clink and clang of a forge-hammer, the crowing of a cock, or a faint crystal crash of waves breaking; but from time to time there is a dry rumour of wheels, and the cry of a man to his mule as he passes down the road in his cart. Wrapped in their plaids against the keen morning air, the peasants pass leisurely in carts and on mules to work in the fields until the evening. At dusk the slow procession returns, with many a greeting and bona nit and smiles of sunburnt wrinkled faces. Thin lines of blue smoke go up from swiftly flaring fires of vine twigs and rosemary and dry plants gathered from the hills, and an hour or two hours later Oropesa is given over to sleep and the silence of the stars, broken only by the deep rhythmic cry of the sereno calling the hours. To the south a road goes up through grey rocky hills with thyme and dwarf-palms and cistus. The bare smooth rocks have a metallic ring, and there is no sign of life save for a herd of goats far above, the goat-herd with his plaid and wide felt hat clearly outlined on the sky, and the sound of his flute distinct in the solitude of the hills, utterly silent save for the silver tinkling of goat-bells. No water can remain on these rocky hills, it pours immediately away to the plains beyond, where, by a stream bed barely a yard wide, a pillar tells of those who perished there in 1850, in “the diligencia carried away by the waters of the torrent.” Though Oropesa now has a railway station, the diligencias still ply between it and Castellón and Torreblanca, and it might be fifty miles from any railway, so primitive and self-centred is its life. Occasionally comes a sunless morning with a quiet grey sky, rare on the east coast of Spain except in the days of early spring. The sea lies motionless and grey, with pale reflections of light in coils and patches of gold. So still is the air that the quiet piping of birds among the olives falls like a stone in hushed waters. As the day advances the mountains, which earlier were mingled and lost in the grey of the sky, grow more distinct, till towards sunset every line and crevice in their sharp ranges becomes marked, and the overhanging mist of cloud melts away into the grey of evening, sprinkled with the gold-dust of the stars.

XI
OFF THE EAST COAST OF SPAIN

THE Mediterranean off the coast of Spain is not always calm. Sometimes the east wind, the Llevant, lashes the waves to fury, and the shores along the villages and towns are black with lines of fishing-boats that dare not put out to sea. But for weeks together it is “lulled in the coil of its crystalline streams,” and the sun rises and sets across a silken plain of blue. In such weather a journey along the coast has a wonderful freshness and a fascinating charm. Again and again the traveller recalls the magic of those lines of the old romance:

“Quién hubiese tal ventura,
Sobre las aguas del mar,
Como hubo el conde Arnaldos,
La mañana de San Juan!”

“Oh for a chance as happy,
Where the deep sea waters swell,
As on the morn of St. John’s Day,
Count Arnaldos befel,” etc.

By St. John’s Day, however, the sun flashes its rays too fiercely, and it is in late spring or early autumn that the voyage is most enjoyable. A land journey can give no idea of the loveliness of these coasts, and towns such as Alicante and Almería lose much of their beauty if deprived of their background of mountains, which can only be seen fully out at sea. The sea and sky are unfailingly beautiful, and the life of the ports, full of colour and movement, never loses its interest. Almería, fallen from its ancient greatness, is yet active in its “purple-shadowed bay,”[89] and exports every year two million barrels, a hundred million pounds, of grapes, chiefly to America and England. Torrevieja, further north, is a small town or village of some seven thousand inhabitants, at which steamers touch to take in a cargo of salt, but which the tourist, on his way from Elche to Murcia, rarely turns aside to visit. It has a thoroughly African look, with its flat-roofed, grey-white houses on a bare, level strip of sandy coast, with no trees except palms, that stand conspicuous like trees of the desert; the sand in places is thinly covered with grass, of lightest, almost yellow, green. To the left, seen from the sea, is a long line of gleaming salt, drawn from the sea-water by evaporation under the summer sun, and now ready to be exported. Beyond the line of salt is a distant range of bare mountains, faintly purple. The town has one or two small towers, four factory chimneys, and half a dozen round mills, with arms as slender as the cranes on the loading steamers in the harbour. A continual rosary of barges, yellow, white, green, or black, carries the salt across the bay. The heavy load weighs the barge to the water’s edge, and the glistening white salt seems to float on the blue surface. In the barge, at either end, go as many as twenty or even thirty men, some sitting rowing, others facing them and standing to row, and others punting with their poles of immense length that taper away at the top to the slight girth of a fishing rod. The shirts of the men, mauve, pink, white, red, or purple, their light blue or black coats, red sashes, trousers of velvet or velvet corduroy of many shades, from bright yellow to dark brown, the long shining yellow punt poles, and the white pyramids of salt on the sea of sapphire, combine to form a strange and beautiful sight. The empty barges return high in the water, with little mounds of salt left along their ledges. At midday the houses seem to faint and grow indistinct, the mountains fade to a hardly perceptible outline, only the salt reflects the sun in every facet of its countless grains, and glitters whiter than snow. In the sunset the lines resume their sharpness, and the mountains are grey or blue-grey or intense leaden blue or purple, according to their distances. The Murcian sky is famous for its clear serenity, and the sunsets and sunrises are of surpassing fairness. Alicante, too, which is nearer to Murcia than to Valencia, has a wonderful sky and a wonderful sea, and here, too, the “sunrise is a glorious birth.” “Alicante aux clochers mêle les minarets,” says Victor Hugo in one of the poems of “Les Orientales,” and from the sea Alicante has an Oriental look, with its lines of palms, stories of flat roofs, and bare background of hills and mountains. But it is at evening that Alicante is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The lights shine softly through the four lines of palm-trees along the Paseo de los Mártires, and are reflected across the water; in the harbour the last radiance of evening sets the tracery of masts and cranes and rigging in clear relief. To the west the sea is already dark, almost wine-coloured, the οἲνψ of the Greeks, but in the east it is a most exquisite blue, a blue that seems to be a transparent surface of turquoise covering a layer of white chalk. The eastern horizon is faintly purple, and against it the sails of a fleet of fishing-boats are whiter than at any other time, and gleam long after the sun has set. Later the sea catches for an instant the faint purple of the sky, the sky loses its colour, and finally a mistiness of softest grey merges them together, so that one may no longer distinguish where the sky ceases or the sea begins. On the rocks of the coast the waves at night break, filled with phosphorus, in a luminous spray, “like light dissolved in star showers thrown.” The low line of pale lights along El Grao, Valencia’s harbour, if approached at night, has a look, from some distance at sea, of such a phosphorus wave. By day the harbour is seen to be a forest of masts, and far away the towers of Valencia, round the tall Miguelete, appear as numerous, and in the distance almost as slender as the masts of the harbour: “les clochers de ses trois cents églises.” Along the coast of the Huerta, especially to the south of Valencia, glisten a number of snow-white pyramids, that seem at first to be more salt, having the exact look of the mounds that lie along the bay of Cadiz. They are the whitewashed, triangular fronts of the peasants’ thatched cottages or barracas, standing in the fertile plain, “Spain’s Orchard.”

One of the most lovely and original sights along the whole coast is that of the high range of bare, treeless mountains south of Cartagena, falling sheer into the sea, a delicate purple above the light blue water. There is not the merest rim of coast, in fact the sea flows round the mountains’ flanks, and they continue far out from the land, their tops occasionally appearing as small islands.

But especially will the traveller who has the happy chance to find himself at dawn of a cloudless day in a boat an hour west of Almería—especially then will he be ready to repeat the lines:

“Quién hubiese tal ventura
Sobre las aguas del mar.”

A slight gleam in the east warns the moon that its reign of quiet light is to finish, and begins the long prelude of day. Above a dark line of sea a faint orange creeps into the sky, deepening to orange-purple, and soon fringing off in pale yellow, saffron, and daffodil. Then, later, above this, widens a space of clearest green, and at last the body of the sky changes from grey to a light blue. In the west all is still grey, as with a soft woof of hanging mists. The sails of a boat going out to sea are white in the first glow of dawn, and the gently swelling sea eastwards reflects the light in level gleams of gold, like smooth, burnished meadows of buttercups. Then the sun rises, red-orange, on a cloudless sea line, the sea becomes light blue, and along the rest of the horizon lie spaces of pearl and opal, while in the east a dim, silver moon fades slowly. The scene is of such enchanting loveliness, like the birth of a new world, that if the Sierra Nevada chances to be for the most part hidden in a long cloud of mist, the traveller scarcely notices one or two peaks that seem to be floating snow-white clouds. Then the mist of cloud melts away, and, one by one, the snow summits appear, till the whole immense range stands bare, looking incredibly high in a heaven of clear, faint green. It is a sight to make men hold their breath. The ship, night’s shadows scarce driven from her deck, passes slowly, almost noiselessly through the water as if she, too, understood that here is some enchanted country. The view of the Sierra Nevada from Granada, lovely as it is, gives no hint of a sight so incomparable as this. The range is of such vast length, the snow is so deep and soft. Long, almost level lines, huge, abrupt crags, gently sloping gullies, smooth, pyramid-shaped peaks, shelves and pinnacles, crevices and ledges, are all entirely wrapped in deep, much-sunned snow, without a break. Each look, after turning for a moment to the grey western horizon or the waving, crystalline surface of blue sea, brings a new wonder and a fresh surprise; so marvellous is the radiance of white appearing in the full glow from the east, and such is the infinite clearness and subtlety of the outlines on a sky varying from blue-grey to transparent green. The long massive range, seen from some distance out at sea, gives the impression of a height of twenty thousand feet, whereas from Granada it is difficult to realize that the highest peak is over eleven thousand. Below the snow-line, a high range of bare grey-purple mountains seems to sink into the sea, though there is, in fact, a line of level coast. Far or near no tree is to be seen; a white lighthouse stands on the coast, and on the silken blue sea gleams an occasional white sail or the flash of a seagull’s wing. As the sun rises higher the softly folding mountains beneath the Sierra Nevada grow more purple above the sea, and the shadows of their dimpling hollows blacken. Above, the wide, smooth spaces and the deep ravines present their broad surplice of glistening white to the sun without a shadow. It is all unimaginably lovely, with a breathless purity of things primeval—

“Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.”

This and other hours of delight during a coasting voyage in the Spanish Mediterranean are not soon forgotten, and, though they cannot be translated into words—

“They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.”

The voyage may be prolonged on the south coast, and, from the time when, on his left, Tarifa lies along the sea, like a line of melting snow under smoothly moulded hills of green, and, on the right, Tangiers shows its white houses indistinctly beneath the bare, grey mountains of Africa, to the time when at Port Bou he bids farewell to the Catalan coast and to Spain, the traveller will not have a dull or unenjoyable moment; if only the gods send him propitious, cloudless days—

“Quién hubiese tal ventura
Sobre las aguas del mar!”

XII
THE JUDGING OF THE WATERS

IT was a cloudless day of November. The Cathedral of Valencia stood grey against a sky of soft blue. In the Plaza de la Constitución the sun shone on the central fountain and marked in dark lines the shadows of the houses and the Cathedral. From the great “Door of the Apostles” came a smell of incense as people went out and in. Surmounted by its large rose-window, the doorway has a worn and ancient air, and the plants growing here and there in the wall add to its look of venerable splendour. Some of the apostles stand there headless, some without arms, some mere trunks of stone. Above, the tall Miguelete tower rises conspicuous here, as it is conspicuous far and wide across the Valencian plain. A few priests passed, a few carts drawn by long strings of mules, a newspaper-seller cried the Heraldo de Madrid, and some peasants in black or blue-grey groups talked together, leaning on their sticks. Shortly after eleven a long, green sofa was set up on the pavement immediately in front of the Cathedral door, and a narrow space round it was enclosed with an iron railing. Sofa and railing, carried across the street in sections, bore the inscription Tribunal de las Aguas. For it was Thursday, the meeting-day of the tribunal which judges disputes arising from the irrigation of the Huerta.

To the peasant of the Valencian Huerta loss of water for his land means starvation, and the hours at which each is allowed to draw off water from the narrow channels that cross his land are carefully regulated. If one takes water out of his turn the fields of another must suffer, and the case must be brought before the judges sitting in weekly council. Against their sentence there is no protest or appeal; it is absolutely final, and though there must be cases of injustice, the peasants are very proud of their tribunal. There is no writing—the cases are not even recorded—the matter is decided on the spot and in the open air between man and man; there are no clerks or advocates; no table, ink, or papers to confuse the simple;[90] no fees or anxious delays, and the judges, moreover, chosen by and from the peasants themselves, thoroughly understand the questions brought before them. It is a strange sight, the sitting of this all-powerful institution, centuries old, in the Plaza de la Constitución, in the twentieth century. There is a dignified simplicity about it, a lack of display which is imposing. The peasants have a conscious pride in being able to arrange their own affairs without interference of the men of learning, just as they are ready to settle their more private quarrels without recourse to the law. The man who has been stabbed in a quarrel will conceal the name of his assailant from the police, always reserving for himself the pleasure of taking vengeance later on. The character of the peasants of the Huerta is indeed a mixture of haughtiness and cunning, of simplicity and shrewdness, and the word that best describes them is the Spanish socarronería—a certain malicious humour.[91] Living isolated in the vast open plain, they form a community apart, and resent external interference. Their tribunal is entirely primitive and rustic; in all its years of city life it has adopted none of the city’s ways, and has not even the shelter of a roof.

In the present instance there was but a single question to be settled, and the proceedings lasted less than five minutes, passing all but unnoticed. At about a quarter to twelve the judges, five in number, and dressed in black as ordinary peasants, walked slowly into the enclosure and occupied their places on the official sofa, taking off their black felt hats. The full body of the judges is seven, chosen from different districts to represent the principal canals of irrigation. Another peasant, officer of the tribunal (on his cap is written A. de T. Aguas, the alguacil, that is, of the Tribunal of Waters), standing at the small gate in the railing, formally declared the tribunal open: S’obri el tribunal are the consecrated words. He then introduced the plaintiff and defendant, who stood bareheaded and without their sticks at half a yard’s distance from the judges. After each had stated his case—and any interruption is rigorously fined—one of the judges at once passed sentence. The verdict was against the old man, and he turned without a word to leave the enclosure. His wife, however, without the railing, though he put his finger to his lips to silence her, was not to be overawed, and in a shrill torrent of words reproached the judges as they filed solemnly into the Plaza. The Tribunal de las Aguas was closed; the judges dispersed to their silent fields, to meet again in the rattle and clamour of the crowded city on the following Thursday. Every Thursday throughout the year the plain green sofa and circular railing are brought out in sections, and the judges make their appearance in the Plaza. They do not always enter the enclosure, for sometimes there is no dispute pending, or the disputants have come to an agreement in the Plaza without recourse to the tribunal, and when the clock strikes twelve, railing and sofa are carried back. The judges help to bring about a settlement, and this perhaps explains that their official verdicts are given instantaneously, with no pause for thought or consultation; they have no doubt heard every detail of the case and come to a decision beforehand.

Readers of Don Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’ gloomy but delightful novel, “La Barraca,” will remember the scene at the “Door of the Apostles” when Batiste, unable to check his indignation at the unjust charge brought against him, is fined for his excited interruptions and fined too for the misdeed which he had not committed. But as a rule the scene is a quiet and almost a solemn one. The tribunal has the sanctity of years; the peasant respects an institution which was the same in his father’s time and in his grandfather’s, and in that of his ancestors five centuries ago. The judges who before and after are simple peasants, are, for the moment invested with the power of settling matters of vital importance; for disregarding the sentence of the tribunal they may deprive a man entirely of his right of water, and so render him and his family penniless. They represent the whole Huerta, embodying alike its independent spirit and its conservative traditions. A few minutes after the judges have risen, and sometimes before the Cathedral clock has struck twelve, sofa and railing have disappeared, and it is hard to realize that the time-honoured Judging of the Waters, so primitive and impressive, has actually been held in this city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, and in this paved square where now there are but few wayfarers, and the central fountain flows and trickles in silence.

XIII
SEVILLE IN WINTER

IT is in spring, from March to May, that Seville is chiefly visited; the warm air and hot sun, the orange-trees in flower, the great religious festivals, the famous bull-fights, attract a host of foreigners, and the city has an animation unwonted even in the gay and lively capital of Andalucía. In winter Seville has a quieter, but perhaps not less potent charm. Winter often brings with it a succession of cool clear days, when the sky is of a serene, almost transparent blue, with golden sunsets. The white lines of flat-roofed houses seen against the blue of the evening sky have the soft light and colouring of opals, while the distant hills of the horizon are faintly purple. On these still days the motionless river reflects the lines of leafless silver birch and yellow tamarisks in all the tracery of their slender branches. A few yards further from the bank on either side thousands of dark orange-trees are hung with gleaming fruit, circling the city with a fringe of lamps. Above and through the trees, now bare and grey, of the Paseo de las Delicias show the various greens of the tall eucalyptus-trees and palms, the orange-trees and cypresses of the Santelmo gardens. On the quay lie immense mounds of oranges ready to be packed: the hot sun fills the air with their scent, children make flying attacks and retire precipitately with an orange apiece, while an occasional beggar also receives his dole from the apparently inexhaustible store. In the ever-crowded Calle de las Sierpes small open stalls display fresh violets and magnificent carnations and roses, and in some gardens one may see roses and geraniums in flower. In the lovely gardens of the Alcázar the sun draws a deliciously mingled scent from the box-hedges, myrtles and oranges.

Occasionally—still in unclouded weather—the wind is cold and piercing and all go muffled to the eyes, the men in their capas, the women with long shawls. In the Patio de los Naranjos, beneath the trees laden with oranges, the wind sweeps across the pavement of rough bricks, intergrown with grass and the duller green of mosses, and rattles the fallen leaves in lines and circles. Far above, the great Giralda tower stands pink and creamy grey in the clear winter sky. By the Gate of Pardon, in a corner of hot sun and sheltered from the wind, a few beggars sit warming themselves and watching with Oriental patience and immobility. The streets are mostly too narrow to let in the sun, but in the plazas and any open space men are seen basking in sunshine, tomando el sol. Along the bridge that leads to the suburb of Triana the seats on both sides are crowded. Triana, better than Seville, corresponds to Cervantes’ description of a city where adventures are to be met at every street corner, and Triana supplies an army of loiterers whose life’s mission in winter is to “take the sun.”

On the eve of high festivals in winter, such as the Epiphany, it is already growing dark when services are held, and the vast Cathedral is faintly lit with hundreds of candles and dim hanging lamps, though the last daylight still lingers awhile in the deep reds and purples, green, orange, and every colour of the windows overhead. There is no procession of the Three Kings through the city; at Alcoy, in the province of Valencia, the Three Kings come riding, laden with presents, into the town from beyond the grey mountains that surround it, and half the population goes out to meet them, but Seville is too “civilized” for this.

Even in Seville not all the winter days are cloudless and serene. On some of them the sky is a uniform grey, and the rain falls unceasingly till the centre of the narrower, unevenly cobbled streets, raised at either side and without a pavement, becomes a running stream. But when the Andalusian sun reappears, the houses have an added freshness in their glowing white, or in their coats of faint green or red, yellow or purple (though even these usually have a line of white along the roof), and in the air is a feeling of spring. There is an ancient Andalusian song that makes March say to January—

“Con tres días que me quedan
Y tres que me preste mi compadre Abríl
He de poner tus ovejas
Que te acordarás de mí.”

(With the three days that are left me and three lent me by my friend April, I will put your sheep in such a plight that you will remember me.) This is the Cumbrian:—

“March said to Aperill
‘I see three haggs [sheep] upon a hill.
And if you will lend me dayes three
I’ll find a way to make them dee.’”

But the rigour of the days that follow in Cumberland has no place or parallel in the low-lying districts of Andalucía:—

“The first of them was wind and weet,
The second of them was snaw and sleet,
The third of them was sic a freeze
It froze the birds’ nebs to the trees;
When the three days were past and gane
The three silly haggs came hirpling hame.”

At Seville a few weeks after the Day of the Kings winter is really over: in February the sky has an intenser blue, and with the longer sunshine the warmth increases. The spring days follow in their matchless splendour, till finally the sun’s fiery heat drives all who can leave the city to the cooler refuge of the sea or the hills.

XIV
FROM A SEVILLE HOUSETOP

IN winter Seville’s sky is sometimes for weeks entirely cloudless. Day after day opens and dies peacefully away like a perfect flower; or, if a strong cold wind drives across the day, it still blows in a heaven of limitless clear blue. But in early spring the sky is often veiled in a floating canopy of grey, or one may watch the white masses of clouds thin and melt on the blue. And the blue is no longer fixed, distant, and serene; even when apparently clear it has a vague movement of dissolving mists, an intangible white softness interlacing it. It is this quality of the sky, harmonizing so well with the soft lines and delicate colours of the city, that gives to Seville in spring its unfailing charm. Especially is that charm felt in the hour when men’s cigarettes begin to glow and dot the streets with tiny fire-flies, distinct as the white flowers worn by the women in their hair. The deep-red carnations and dark violets of the open flower-stalls fade into shadow; the light greens, lilacs, yellows, browns, and blues of the houses take a greyer tinge. The last sunshine throws its thinner radiance along the white lines of flat roofs that stand out in many levels and angles on the blue or blue-and-white sky, and the effect is of pearls and opals, not the flash of polished opals, but, as it were, blue veins of opal in white chalk. The west is filled with a level radiance of pure gold, and presently the eastern sky also changes from blue to a faint golden grey. One by one the hanging street lamps begin to shed their soft glow of white light, and overhead the first stars shine faintly and vanish and reappear. The bells of goats and the mellower note of cowbells are heard as they go their evening round to be milked, driven by a boy astride his donkey, or by an old man with faded-pink umbrella; or a donkey passes laden with oranges, the fruit’s gold gleaming through the twilight afterglow from between the netting of the panniers. A breath of country air invades the city; the day’s work is ended, and perhaps from some church or convent you may hear “a distant bell that seems to mourn the dying of the day”:

“Squilla di lontano
Che paia ’l giorno pianger che si muore.”

The swift Southern twilight soon dies, but this short hour more than any other embodies the magic of a Seville spring. For Seville at other times is “a city full of stirs, a tumultuous city, a joyous city.” It wakes to a discordant music of many street cries. All kinds of wares are hawked shrilly, with loud shouts, or slow, dirge-like chants. Later in the day come the more melodious cries of “Oranges! Water! Violets! Carnations!—¡Qué buenas naranjas! Agua, quien quiere agua! Violetas! Claveles!” But to the flat brick-paved housetops, surrounded with walls of different height, from three to twenty feet, all whitewashed to their level tops, these sounds of the street come faintly. The rattle of wheels over the cobbles is deadened, the bells of slowly driven cows and goats chime distantly; sometimes one hears the intricate whistle of the knife-grinder, or a barrel-organ plays an interminable dance to the clacking of castañets, that fascinates by its ceaseless repetition. But the sounds are vague and muffled, without harshness or stridency, and here reigns more uninterrupted quiet than in the cool marble patios below, with the frequent goings out and in through the door’s iron reja. On the walls or in the line of shade beneath them stand rows of plants—roses, geraniums, heliotrope, and especially carnations. From here the street sellers fill their open stalls and baskets with the huge carnations of spring, the smaller early carnations coming chiefly from Málaga. And the carnations never look more beautiful than seen, dark red or pink or yellow, against these walls of glistening white; one is fain to call them by their German or “soft Spanish name”—Nelken, claveles. The sun rising lights up the housetops so that they gleam like snow between the dark spaces of bronze or green or blue glazed tiles, slender-springing towers, and infrequent roofs, covered thickly in spring with grass, like small fields. Or on a night of moon the city has a phantom look of whited sepulchres, and if no moon looks round her with delight when the heavens are bare, there is an uninterrupted view of stars in the whole sky, as from a ship’s deck. At midday, when the sun is all fire and narrows the lines of shadow to mere rims of black, one may not look for more than an instant across the glaring radiance of white. In the morning there is an exquisite freshness. Little smoke rises from the houses—only an occasional tiny wraith of grey—but, beyond, a dense line goes up from the Cartuja factory of azulejos, and hangs black-purple on the blue sky—the morning sky streaked with waving outdrawn wisps of white mist-like cloud. There is a flapping of pigeons’ wings as they flutter from wall to wall, and the twittering of innumerable sparrows. The hours are marked by the crystal striking of many clocks that are heard only dim and intermittently from below in the street traffic. But it is at evening that the housetop has an almost magical charm, when the sun has set in a sky of delicate gold, and in the east long thin lines of white and faint purple cloud lie across a sky of lightest blue. Then the flowers along the wall give out all their scent. Swallows whirl and swerve far overhead or lightly skim the hundred levels of whitewashed turret and wall. The claveles fade slowly in the growing dusk; the wide, uneven plain of glowing walls gradually becomes indistinct and blurred; finally the sky, too, is moulded to a perfect symmetry of grey, and perhaps an immense orange-coloured moon climbs slowly above the city. Seville is lovely in winter, when the sky is a cold, serene blue, and night by night the stars glint and glitter; lovely in spring, when everywhere, in roof and patio and garden, is a triumph of green, when the oranges still hang on the orange-trees in flower—like yellow crocuses peering from the snow—and the corn is already high in the olives beyond the river; lovely in summer, when the greens are parched and shrivelled, and a hot wind blows heavily across the fainting housetops, or in nights of sultry stillness the intense glow from many a lighted patio falls across the velvet darkness of the narrow streets. Lovely at all times, but never more lovely than in the temperate days of spring, when a hundred bells are ringing for the Feast of Resurrection, and the flowers from countless roofs are gathered for the fête; when, in scenes of fairy magic, the slow pasos move with their myriad candles burning through the twilight, along the crowded streets and plazas to the Cathedral, while still peacefully above its Court of Oranges the tall Giralda looks across the city that hems it in, to the wide dehesas of Andalucía, to the green fields and olive-covered hills beyond the gently flowing Guadalquivir, and to the distant line of the Sierra Morena.

XV
FEBRUARY IN ANDALUCÍA

NOT one perhaps in a hundred of those who visit Seville and Granada sees more than a glimpse of the beautiful country and curious villages of Andalucía; yet there is much pleasure and interest to be had from a journey through all this region. In February an early start with the sun will enable the traveller on horseback or on foot to accomplish a fair day’s journey, since the sun has not yet begun to burn and force him to rest for some six central hours of the day, as later in the year. And the outlines on every side are exquisitely clear, the sky usually cloudless, and streams flow where later there will be but dry channels. In parts the fields and roadside spaces are blue and purple with dwarf-irises (the peasants call them simply lirios, lilies), and the almond-trees are in flower; and at no time of the year is there a greater and more delightful contrast between spring in the valley and winter on the hills. Near Seville the immense plains stretch interminably to the faint mountains, brown and dull-green pastures of heather and dwarf-palm, flecked with silver-white streaks of water; herds of cattle, glossy black with white horns, pigs, horses, and great flocks of sheep graze there. Or the country is gently undulating like Sussex downs, but with softlier-moulded outlines and a horizon of faint blue mountains, in February exquisitely distinct in faintness. A village often entirely covers one of the small hills, not a house venturing forward to form an outskirt, but all clustered and compact. Steep, perfectly straight streets of sharp narrow cobbles, without side pavements, run up to the church at the top through rows of low, whitewashed houses, of a single storey and of a dazzling whiteness. At evening the labourers come in from the far distant fields in a continuous line, on foot or on mules and donkeys, and children go out to meet them and are given a ride back into the village. Sometimes their return is of several kilomètres, over deep earthy or stony paths, and, with their gleaming mattocks (pioches, azadones) over their shoulders, they are now to be seen clearly outlined on the evening sky, and now are lost from view in one of the many hollows of the hills. Far and near there is no tree, “neither bush nor shrub to bear off any weather at all,” and the winds seem to have sifted and moulded the hills into softly folding mounds and hollows. In February the winds still blow occasionally with icy breath, and you will meet men on crimson and magenta-tasselled mules and donkeys, closely wrapped in old-fashioned capas of brown, only their eyes visible. On the road there are few travellers—charcoal-burners coming down with troops of laden donkeys from the hills, or a slow cart drawn by a string of mules, the driver lazily asleep, and the reins appearing from between the soles of his sandals,[92] or a troop of gipsies, or orange sellers with the panniers of their mules brimmed with oranges, now selling at six reales, a little over a shilling, the hundred. Sometimes the country is all grey-pinched and icy, and but a little further (as near snow-white Arcos de la Frontera) are great hedges of shrubs and aloes and brambles and cactus, with a sound of bees, and hovering white and yellow butterflies, and wide spaces of tall branched flowers of asphodel and grey scented rosemary. Or in a corner of windswept hills you may find a sheltered huerta with thick hedge of tall black cypresses; the oranges crowd the trees with gold, and the almond-trees shed across the dusty road a thick carpet of broken flowers, pink and white. To Grazalema leads only a steep and narrow foot-path after one has left the road not far from Algodonales (pronounced by the peasants in a torrent of vowels Aooae) and crossed the river Guadalete. In the valley the oranges gleam in myriads, and the hills immediately above are coloured with a continuous spray of almond-trees in flower, entirely covering their sides, and sometimes crowning them in triumph. And far above, over woods of cork and evergreen oak from which rise frail blue lines of smoke from charcoal-burners’ fires, appear two or three peaks of snow clear against a pale blue sky. The path goes up along hedges of brambles through asphodels and hundreds of trailing periwinkles, with stepping-stones and flowing streams; here and there a snow-white olive-oil mill with sentinel cypresses. And, below, the pale snow-fed Guadalete flows swiftly over white stones through groves of oranges. From a distance Grazalema gives the fanciful idea of broken shells on a stony shore, with its houses of white and pink and brown, many of them overhanging and seeming to grow out of steep rocks. From the village a path leads through corkwoods, the stripped trunks of the trees a deep maroon colour, to Ronda on its sheer hill. From Antequera to Málaga by road is some fifty kilomètres, and here, too, are wonderful contrasts and sudden change from winter to summer. In the unsheltered plains round Bobadilla the almond-trees show no sign of flower, and the grey mountains above the stern frowning towers of Antequera are ice-bound. Turning the pass, appears a magnificent view of six or seven serrated hill-ranges to the line of sea beyond hidden Málaga—on the left a fantastically jagged range, sprinkled in parts with snow; on the right a long line of snow-mountains that ends in a bare range rising purple from the sea. And the ice soon grows thin and vanishes, giving place to irises, tiny jonquils, and periwinkles, and descending half-way down the mountain side, to Villanueva, the almond-trees have already lost half their blossoms, grass and white dusty road and dark new-ploughed soil are thickly strewn with their petals, and the fields of broad beans are in scented black and white flower. Along the coast full summer reigns, the balconies are heavy with trailing flowers, the sea is deepest blue, and the wind blows half-sultrily across the fields of beans and the faded-green leaves of sugar-cane, with their scent of hay. Sometimes the road is lined with poplars, and ox-carts go laden with grass and trefoil and leaves from the sugar-canes. Elsewhere the road winds inland through grey rocky hills and woods of strong-scented pines, with glimpses of blue sea; or passes high above cliffs, the sea swelling dull green immediately below or foaming round dark rocks. From Motril or some other point one may go up to Granada, the Sierra Nevada appearing and altering continually; and thoughts of the Alhambra and other names of magic shorten the road, though it has many a beautiful view and village, such as Pino to the left on the mountain side, with its white houses and deep red-brown roofs. But of the many fair districts of Andalucía perhaps the most delightful in scenery is that lying between the Guadalquivir and La Mancha, a region of brushwood and mountain. The road from Marmolejo runs up through hills covered with shrubs of every shade of green, from grey-blue to shrill yellow, many of them scented, lentiscus, escalonia, adelfa, cistus, rosemary, and a hundred more; even in February the mid-day sun scents the whole air with them. Near the village of Cardeña, some thirty miles from Marmolejo, a ruin is supposed to be that of the inn where many scenes of “Don Quixote” occurred, but only a few stones remain. Leaving the village in early morning in frost and ice in order to go down to Montoro on the Guadalquivir, the road at first is wild, bordered by oak-trees, with flocks of sheep, a few patches of corn, many magpies, the plaining of birds and the occasional whirr of a partridge. Yet even here in a few hollows are vines and almond-trees, and spaces of scented plants and wild yellow jonquils, with white or brown or yellow butterflies, a humming of bees and rustling of lizards. The road now cuts through hills of scented shrubs, so various and ordered with such careful harmony as could be rivalled by no garden planted by man. On either side are range and range of hills shrub-covered, dull green, brown and blue, brown where the shrubs have been cut for firing. To the right is a wide deep gorge with tiny river far below, and glimpses of blue distances and valleys of more hills. To the left more hills, and across a blue distance of hill valleys the Sierra de Jaen with its beautiful pyramid-shaped peak of deepest snow, and far to the right of it the two more pointed peaks of Granada’s Sierra Nevada, marvellously clear in distance. Between them and the Sierra de Jaen runs the snow-sprinkled range above the village of Los Villares de Jaen. In the transparent might of even a February noon the more distant and the higher of the near hills are purple, and the great snow-mountains below the snow-line grow faint and grey. Montoro is a beautiful quaint town rising above the Guadalquivir in seven or eight storeys of houses of red stone and whitewash. The tall church-tower, also of red stone, stands massively above the town, and precipitously steep and cobbled streets lead up to it. Houses look sheer down from windows, balconies, and gardens to the river far below, which flows over a weir above and below the town, so that there is a perpetual sound of rushing water. From Montoro one may follow the Guadalquivir, now a majestic river, through its olive groves to the famous bridge of Alcolea, and the low white line beneath bare hills and wooded mountains which is Córdoba, seen from the East. Everywhere on the roads and in the inns of Andalucía the peasants are courteous, pleasant, intelligent, picturesque; always ready to give any service in their power, often immensely ignorant. They will ask if “Ingalaterra” is not Spain’s border-country and confuse it with Gibraltar, or if the Queen was a Christian before her marriage. For the most part they cannot read or write;[93] yet they converse willingly on the most various subjects, especially on politics and religion, the mayor and the priest. Here a woman complains: “Nine children I had, and the nine are dead; it’s better so in these times of misery”; there a peasant describes the snowy Sierra in the month of August, how it glows whiter than lilies across the plain—más blanca, que una azucena; or tells how beautiful is the country in later spring when the quinces, apples, and pomegranates are in flower, que es un paraiso—a very paradise. As they sit round the candela, in the cold evenings of early spring, talk flows on into the night, always pleasant and courteous, as of one gran señor to another.

XVI
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH LITERATURE

THERE is not a literature in Europe more individual than that of Spain. It has been influenced greatly at various times by other countries, especially Italy and France, but in its many masterpieces it has a flavour of the soil, a local colouring that is all its own. Even when Spanish authors have borrowed most freely they have usually succeeded in casting their own individuality over their “honourable kind of thieving.” Who has a more individual genius than Juan Ruiz, the merry Archpriest of Hita? Yet it has been shown that his debt to French, Latin, and other authors is very considerable. In this form of borrowing—practised by Shakespeare—which is not a direct imitation but a loan of bricks to make them marble, there is in fact a high originality. The phrase in which the merits of the Marqués de Santillana have been summed up might be applied to the whole of Spanish literature: when it ceases to imitate it is inimitable. Santillana’s mountain songs—his serranillas are scented as it were with the thyme of the Castilian hills, whereas his sonnets in the Italian manner are colourless and artificial.

Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly speaks of “that forcible realistic touch, that alert vision, that intense impression of the thing seen and accurately observed which give to Spanish literature its peculiar stamp of authenticity.” The clear atmosphere of Spain, in which distant mountains seem to be close at hand, is also the atmosphere of Spanish literature. The Spaniard may have little subtlety of insight or critical judgment, but he has a directness of vision that has manifested itself in bigotry, brutality, and cynical satire, as well as in keen humour, straight-forwardness, and dignity of character. The realism which has produced the terrible Christs of the Cathedrals, with their long human hair and life-like wounds, or the polychrome statues of Spanish carvers, with a presentation of pain on the human face in all and more than all its horror—this realism may be due either to a hatred of all that is false and factitious or to a lack of sensibility, an inability to sympathize without a harsh shock, a thrill of terrified awe. What would the Greeks have said to these tortured features, these agonizing brows and flowing wounds? It is as false art to perpetuate in wood or stone the agony of a few culminating moments as it is to picture a face laughing or yawning, from whose perpetually open mouth we will soon turn with a laugh or a yawn. This realism has found a less harsh expression in Spanish literature, as in the sane and brilliant art of Velázquez. The brutality occasionally makes itself felt, as in some of Quevedo’s bitter writings, but most often the spirit is nobler and more human. In the twelfth-century “Poema del Cid” all the figures stand out in wonderful clearness, from the Cid himself to the nine years’ old child at Burgos, who tells the Cid that they dare not open their doors to him for fear of the King’s edict. And the events of the poem are brought to pass before our eyes with a joyful zest and rapidity and a stamp of truth that are worthy of Homer. We see the Cid ride with a hundred chosen knights across the Bridge of Alcántara and up Toledo’s narrow streets. We see him knocking at the gate of San Pedro de Cardeña to bid farewell to his wife Doña Jimena, and the abbot, who was saying Mass for the return of dawn, running out with lights and torches to welcome “him who was born in happy hour.” We see him again in battle as the pennants rise and fall, we hear “the sword’s griding screech” and the trampling of the horses at which the earth trembles. In “Celestina,” the long prose drama of the end of the fifteenth century, we have the same truth to life, though in very different scenes. Here it is not knights and battles, but common people of the street—the old hag Celestina, or Calisto’s servants—that are drawn with a master hand.

“Celestina” gives some inkling of the picaresque novels to come, of which the flower and cream is “Lazarillo de Tormes” (1554 is the date of our earliest edition), to be followed by “Guzmán de Alfarache,” “El Buscón,” and a long posterity in Spain, France, and England. This is no tale of true love like the “Celestina,” but of gnawing hunger and of the ingenious efforts of Lazarillo to procure himself bread. His successive masters, the blind beggar, the miserly priest, the penniless Castilian gentleman, the rascally seller of Papal bulls, are sketched in the autobiography of their servant Lazarillo, with the keen eye of famine, and are unforgettable, as is Lazarillo himself, whose name has become the common name in Spain for a blind man’s guide, just as Victor Hugo’s immortal Gavroche gave his name to the Paris gamin. It is, in fact, a masterpiece of seven short chapters, lively in every sentence, of a direct and biting humour, perhaps the most graphic story ever penned. A few terse phrases throw a scene or a character into amazingly high relief, and the picture is as fresh and living to-day as when it first appeared three and a half centuries ago. No other country and no other language could have produced a piece of realism so cynically bare, so completely charming. It has the caustic pithiness of Spanish proverbs, the bitter flavour of harsh Iberia. It belongs to life rather than to literature, but life portrayed with the restraint and force of a consummate art. It was early translated into English as “The Marvelus Dedes and the Lyf of Lazaro de Tormes.” The authorship of “Lazarillo” has been ascribed to this man and to that, and there has been great argument about it and about, without the least degree of certainty. The name of Hurtado de Mendoza is frequently to be found upon the title-page. Born in 1503, he was alive when the novel appeared; he was an author; he could write in trenchant, nay, in scurrilous style, as his letters concerning the Pope show—he calls him an old rascal, vellaco; but these are hardly conclusive proofs. Whoever the author, the work still reigns supreme, though many may have thought with Ginés de Pasamonte in “Don Quixote” that it would be an evil moment for “Lazarillo” when their memoirs appeared. Half a century after “Lazarillo” the same faithfulness to picaresque reality, with a broader outlook and a more universal sympathy, is to be found in the “Novelas Ejemplares” of Cervantes. Rinconete and Cortadillo, the eponymous heroes of one of his best-known stories, are closely related to Lazarillo; they are in fact the Lazarillos of the South of Spain. On the realism of “Don Quixote” it is unnecessary to lay stress. Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, referring to its immediate triumph, says: “To contemporary readers the charm of ‘Don Quixote’ lay in its amalgamation of imaginative and realistic elements, in its accumulated episodes, in its infinite sympathy and its persuasive humour. There was no question, then, as to whether ‘Don Quixote’ was a well of symbolic doctrine. The canvas was crowded with types familiar to every one who had eyes to see his companions on the dusty highways of Spain. The wenches who served Don Quixote with stockfish and black bread; the lad Andrés, flayed in the grove of oaks by Juan Haldudo the Rich of Quintanar; the goatherds seated round the fire on which the pot of salted goat was simmering; the three lively needle-makers from the Colt of Córdoba; the midnight procession escorting the dead body from Baeza to Segovia, and chanting dirges on the road; the dozen galley-slaves tramping on, strung together like beads on an iron chain; all these are observed and presented with masterly precision of detail.”[94]

In spite of Censors and Inquisitors Spanish literature was free and outspoken, for it portrayed life as it was. If it shows devotion to Church and King it is because these were deeply-rooted national convictions. But the priests sometimes meet with less respect. The Cid threatens to make of the Pope’s vestments trappings for his horse, and we have seen that Hurtado de Mendoza, the King of Spain’s ambassador in Rome, speaks of his Holiness in terms that call to mind Benvenuto Cellini’s passionate outbursts. We have seen, too, the unflattered portraits of priest and pardon-seller in “Lazarillo de Tormes.” Cervantes, who “respects and adores the Church as a Catholic and faithful Christian,” does not fail to thrust fun at the fat alforjas, the well-provisioned saddle-bags of the señores clérigos, “who rarely allow themselves to fare ill,” and he deals more sternly with the household priests who “govern princes’ houses, and, not being of princely birth themselves, are unable to guide the conduct of those who are,” and who “in trying to teach those they govern to be narrow and limited make them miserable.” He gives us the picture of the false pilgrims who travel through the length and breadth of Spain, “and there is not a village in which they do not receive meat and drink and at least a real in money, and at the end of their journey they leave the country with a treasure of over a hundred ducats,” and he even allows himself to wonder why Ginés de Pasamonte’s clever monkey has not been arraigned before the gentlemen of the Inquisition.

There are in Spanish literature occasional signs of a distorted imagination, a restless longing to materialize the invisible, which is not a fanciful dreaming, but rather a kind of super-realism, a strained and persistent effort to attain a tangible perfection—the spirit which in some Spanish buildings has added ornament to ornament till the result is a rich magnificence in an infinity of details but hideousness as a whole. One form of this we have in such works as Quevedo’s “Sueños,” another, the Churrigueresque, in the later style of Góngora. On the other hand, we have the great Spanish mystics in their sincerity, reflected in the exquisite simplicity of their style, one of the noblest glories of the literature of their country. Yet they, too, as has often been pointed out, were pre-eminently practical; Luis de León, for instance, energetic head of the Augustinian Order; Santa Teresa, the wise, untiring administrator. Their writings have the fiery transparency of Pascal, and all the clear and vivid precision of military writers of many countries, in whose case, as in that of so large a number of Spaniards, “the lance has not blunted the pen.”[95] The mystics rise to noble heights of sublimity, but the virtue of their writing is that it is to the point, with no vague rhetoric; and no advocate could surpass the lucidity with which Luis de León conducted his own defence before the Inquisition.

Perhaps the weakest side of Spanish literature is its deficiency in critical insight. Few, indeed, are the Spanish authors of whom it might be said, as Ticknor said long ago of Luis de León, that there is scarcely a line of their poetry that is not exquisite. Espronceda’s undeniable genius, for instance, shatters itself on that unwieldy fragment “El Diablo Mundo.” Excessive facility of composition has been the stumbling-block of the authors as it has been the stumbling-block of the orators of Spain. Hardly a speaker in the Spanish Cortes is ever at a loss for words to give expression to his ideas or to conceal the lack of them. Each, as Don Adriano de Armado in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” is one

“That hath a mint of phrases in his brain,
One whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony.”

Even so marvellous an orator as Emilio Castelar was at times carried away by the magnificent eloquence that flowed unfailingly from his lips. In the same way Lope de Vega could throw off a play in a few days. Over 2000 plays and autos are ascribed to him, and in the 450 that remain his most ardent admirers confess that there are arid tracts. And, ordinarily, this copiousness has been a fault, telling against Spanish literature, and it continues to be a fault: Señor Blasco Ibáñez writes his brilliant novels in evident haste; Señor Perez Galdós has entered on the fifth series of ten of his “Episodios Nacionales,” and his other novels and plays are very numerous. Such wealth of production could not but be harmful to critical judgment. In the nineteenth century Spain produced one or two excellent critics, especially Larra and Clarín, the pseudonym of Leopoldo Alas, author of “La Regenta,” one of the most striking psychological novels of the century. Generally, however, if German literary criticism is circular and, however illuminating the by-paths of its learning, wanders round the point without ever quite touching it, Spanish literary criticism is superficial, and either veils the point in a polite mesh of words, or is prevented by this very rhetoric from seeing the point at all. Even Valera, who so carefully limned his own prose, and whose verse, though not inspired, is always delicate and polished, was far from being a good critic. He praised effusively works that at best deserved silence, and this insincerity in literary matters is, it is to be feared, a common weakness in Spain.

The characteristic of Spanish literature that unites it in a special bond of sympathy with English literature is its large store of humour. It meets us in the “Poema del Cid,” in the character of the Cid, and in the quick detection of the ludicrous; the poems of the Archpriest of Hita are full of merriment and of humorous portrayal of character; the humour of the Archpriest reappears in “Lazarillo de Tormes,” but without his jovial gaiety; with Quevedo its vein becomes cruelly satirical. Humour did not desert Luis de León when ill and solitary in the dark Valladolid prison of the Inquisition; and it is to be found in a large majority of Spanish authors, being but another side of their direct, unclouded observation. In the most humorous of all books, even Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, is constrained to laugh: at the sight of Sancho, we read, his melancholy was not strong enough to prevent him from joining in his laughter—and the whole world laughs with, not at him.

It is because Spanish literature is intensely national that it has so universal an interest, and in its most recent phase, the novel, it has a local character that is full of charm. José María de Pereda, for instance, scarcely ever left his native Cantabrian province. He wrote of the places and people that he understood and loved. Yet no one who has read his great novels, “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” or “Sotileza,” or “Peñas Arriba,” will contend that they are provincial, or that their interest is merely local.[96] His characters are universal, and Pereda is another instance of the truth that he who digs a little land deep reaps a better reward than he who works shallowly over a wide extent. So Señor Blasco Ibáñez is read with most delight when he cultivates his own garden—the city and province of Valencia.

XVII
THE POEM OF THE CID