Panels on Walls.
no need to consider the grave youth, the ‘Penseroso,’ of the Medicis Chapel; he may also do without the biography and the ‘Pensées’ of Blaise Pascal. With the very sentiment realised by these great solitary works he will be filled, if he but give himself up to the tragic fierceness of the magnificences in ruins upon these high rocks. Toledo, on its hillside, with the tiny half circle of the Tagus at its feet, has the colour, the roughness, the haughty poverty of the sierra on which it is built, and whose strong articulations from the very first produce an impression of energy and passion. It is less a town, a noisy affair yielding to the commodities of life, than a significant spot for the soul. Beneath a crude illumination, which gives to each line of its ruins a vigour, a clearness, by which the least energetic characters acquire backbone, at the same time it is mysterious, with its cathedral springing towards the sky, its alcazars and palaces, that only take sight from their invisible patios. Thus, secret and inflexible, in this harsh, overheated land, Toledo appears like an image of exaltation in solitude, a cry in the desert.”
Grim, austere, and forbidding is the general type of the Gothic character; the history of their kings in Spain is a long story of menace, bloodshed, and persecution; and that history covers Toledo as with a suit of battered mail. Christianity without the practice of the Christian virtues, valour divorced from mercy, power disjoined from justice—the religion, the might and majesty of the Gothic sovereigns, is a record of gloomy and revengeful despotism. Hermengildo, the Gothic saint, used his religion as an excuse for attempting to wrest the throne of Toledo from his father, Leovigildo, whom he denounced as a minister of the devil; Recaredo, who has been painted by historians as a model of all the Christian virtues, practiced a rigorous system of cruelty and vindictive bigotry; and his successors were notorious for their queer morality, and their persecution of the Jews. Yet San Ildephonso, the most famous archbishop of Toledo under the Goths, has enriched the history of Spain with many splendid fables of heavenly manifestations; and the piece he cut from the veil of a visiting saint, and the chasuble, with which the Virgin invested him with her own hands, are still displayed among the treasures of Toledo cathedral. The figures of Wamba and Rodrigo—the warrior king who was offered the alternative of the crown of Toledo, or the thrust of a Toledan dagger, and “the Last of the Goths”—stand out with dominating prominence on the stage of Gothic history, on which warriors and priests are the principal actors.
The doctrine of the Gothic priesthood has been described as the “hardest, meanest, and brutallest imaginable,” and the Gothic warriors as men who were never other than savage tyrants, who “aped a culture which they could not understand, and with whose aims and tendencies their inmost character was powerless to sympathise.” These are the people who gave Toledo its character, a character which the art-adoring Arabs were unable to change or even to greatly modify. It is so important to understand the influence which was at work in the creation of the Toledan character, the atmosphere in which it was reared, and the discipline under which it developed, that I make no excuse for quoting the following illuminating appreciation of the Gothic nature from Mr. Leonard Williams’ chapter on Toledo: “Originally barbaric in their ferocity, the Goths became as their domination approached its inevitable end, barbaric in their effeminacy. So, too, with their religious beliefs. Excepting the clergy, who were men of some education and unlimited unscrupulousness,
PLATE XLV.
From one of the centre arches. | From the entrance to the Divan. | |
Spandrils of Arches. | ||