II.
San Sebastian is both a city unto itself, and a summer resort unto others. As to the latter, it is among the most popular watering-places in Spain, and is styled "the Brighton of Madrid." As to the former, it is a home for twenty thousand human beings of its own; it earns a sufficing competence, chiefly in exchanges with its surrounding province; and it has a monopoly of centralization over a wide region, for no other important Spanish city lies nearer than Pampeluna or Burgos. Burgos is not actually so very remote,—only a short hundred and fifty miles beyond; and we had spoken of a visit to its renowned cathedral. But we had not reckoned with Spanish railway speed; it was found that the time required solely to go and come would be nearly fifteen hours! Unvisited, we saw, must remain the cathedral within which the hot-headed Protestant missionary blew out the sacred light that had burned for three hundred years. Owing to the Hispanian misconception of horological values, Burgos is practically, if not actually, exceedingly remote from San Sebastian.
The latter, however, is so fortunately close to the edge of France that those who come as near as Biarritz or Pau should assuredly make this brief dip over the border.
San Sebastian is strictly new; its predecessors have been burned five times, one upon the other, the last being brought to ashes by the soldiers of Wellington; and it is liable to be burned again whenever France and Spain begin to fight again across it. It is an excellent model for that worthy fowl, the phoenix, for it has risen with undismayed cheerfulness from each holocaust. The present representative is in three segments. The city itself is composed of two, and the citadel makes a fairly important third. From a military point of view, the citadel was once counted first, and the city itself made an unimportant third,—with no second. But modern gunnery has changed that estimate.
Of the two parts of the city proper, one is national, the other international; they do not unite, but adjoin, welded by a central promenade, the Alameda. Each is distinct, and has little to do with the life of the other. The native population centres wholly in the west half; we drift first over to this, in our afternoon walk, and scan its appearance and people with inquisitive though decorous interest. This section, comprising much of what was the old town, has evidently aimed to reproduce it; it has been rebuilt with persistent regard to the former municipal type, and shows to-day a curious combination of bright, new and well constructed tenements, built on a dark, old and ill instructed plan. The streets are left narrow,—very narrow. The black doorways and halls, as we peer in, in passing, are cramped and forbidding; the projecting balconies approach each other overhead, and the oblong yellow buildings themselves rise to overshadowing height. Like soldiers on dress parade they stand, relentlessly regular and uniform, block after block, and their walled lanes, straight and similar and uncharacteristic, cross and weave themselves into a stiff, right-angled check, exasperating and profitless, unrelieved by a hint at variation of outline, by a picturesque eave or gable, or a single artistic "bit;"
The cathedral does indeed possess some interest, particularly its carved front of light-colored stone; and here and there about it are a few old houses, unsutteed relicts, that have not bowed to the new régime. The shops in this part of the town are less individual than one would expect, though we find them not devoid of a certain variety. The specialty of the place is the enameling of gold and silver upon iron. Jewelry and small articles are made of this ware in elaborate designs and with great daintiness and skill. Outside of this, San Sebastian does not seem to have invented any new wants for humanity, and its shops do not seek to supply any but the old.
The other half of the town I have called international. This is the section of the hotels, of wide streets and flagged walks, of massy squares of business buildings, of villas and a park and the bathing circle. The sea swings around the projecting cape of the citadel into a deeply notched bay, small and still, and on its edge which meets the town you find pavilions and beach-chairs and their usual accompaniment of idling humanity. The Casino stands boldly up, a little to the right, and in front of it, on the Alameda, the band will play in the coming summer evenings for all the élite of Madrid.
The fine Hôtel de Londres is large and well kept, and, like all Spanish hotels, charges on the good American plan of so much per day. One gratefully appreciates this, after juggling every few days with disheartening lists of accumulated coffees and eggs and dinners and rooms and mineral waters and service and bougies, and the others. The infinitude of microscopic book-keeping made necessary by the Continental system is a thought to shudder at. For the rest, the hotel is only unsatisfying because it seems in nowise distinctively Spanish. We almost wish we had chosen a certain other hostelry equally well spoken of, which, instead of Hotel, had alluringly styled itself a Fonda. Probably we might have found as little there as here that was pure Castilian. Save in language and location, San Sebastian is not of Spain, Spanish. And as with Biarritz, it is not to be sought for its reminiscences of old age. It is trim and "kempt" and modern, and lives strictly in the present. We soon come to realize this, cease longing for the unattainable, and enjoy the place for what it is. Perhaps we shall recoup the vanished patina to-morrow, when we visit an older and far different town,—Fuenterrabia.