Before leaving Triana, visit the Church of Santa Ana, to see the exquisite Madonna of Alejo Fernandez, whom Lord Leighton considered the most conspicuous among the Gothic painters. There is a regard for beauty in the figures, not by any means obtrusive in most of the paintings of the period, though the awkward pose of some of the angels shows that the artist had not quite emancipated himself from Byzantine influence. And the thought occurred to me as I made my way back to the Delicias Gardens, where the people were driving out to take the air, and knots were collecting round musicians and mountebanks—when the whole city was yielding itself up to the sensuous charm of the summer night—that the art of Fernandez was expressive of Seville: of a people in whom the sense of beauty and the joy of living cannot be extinguished, though at the call of religion they reluctantly keep their faces half turned towards sad facts and yet more sombre unrealities.
CHAPTER III
CORDOVA
| "They say the Lion and the Lizard keep |
| The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep." |
THE sands of Asia are strewn with the ruins of cities once the gorgeous capitals of mighty empires. Here in Spain the followers of the Prophet raised a metropolis as splendid as any of the new Babylons of the East; and its fall has been wellnigh as great as theirs. We need not credit all the assertions of the Arabian writers (for the scribes of that nation, as Cervantes remarks, are not a little addicted to fiction). We can hardly believe that Cordova in its prime contained 300,000 inhabitants, 600 mosques, 50 hospitals, 800 public schools, 900 baths, 600 inns, and a library of 600,000 volumes; but there is evidence enough to satisfy us that this was in the tenth century the most magnificent and populous city in Europe, Byzantium alone excepted. Now it is a small provincial capital, bright, white, and coquettish, utterly without the solemnity and majesty which should invest the seats of vanished empires. Here greatness has been swallowed up in insignificance, not in desolation. The Court of the Khalifas, the Western Mecca, does not lie in lordly ruin like a fallen Colossus, but has sunk into mere pettiness.
Victor Hugo draws, as only he knew how, in a couple of lines, a picturesque sketch of Cordova, but this hardly corresponds to the impressions of the modern traveller. The houses may be old (some of them certainly are), but in their coats of dazzling whitewash they look brand-new. Gautier very sensibly remarks that, thanks to whitewash, the wall which was erected a century ago cannot be distinguished from that which was erected yesterday. Its general application "imparts a uniform tint to all buildings, fills up the architectural lines, effaces all their delicate ornamentation, and does not allow you to read their age." Cordova, which was formerly a centre of Arabian civilization, is now nothing more than a confused mass of small white houses, above which rise a few mangrove trees, with their metallic green foliage, or some palm trees with their branches spread out like the claws of a crab; while the whole town is divided by narrow passages into a number of separate blocks, where it would be difficult for two mules to pass abreast. Such is Cordova to-day, and I doubt very much if its external aspect was a whit more splendid or by any means as pleasing in the days of its glory. Some authors write as if they imagined the Mohammedans built their capitals on the lines of Paris and Washington. A visit to Constantinople or to Cairo would remove that impression. Imagine Cordova covering three or four times its present area, its windows obscured with lattices, its walls less white, its streets filled with a noisy mob of beshawled and beturbaned men—black, brown, and white—with noble mosques and elegant minarets here and there, and you will have a fair picture of the capital of the Western Khalifate.
Of its outward seeming only. Its culture and refined social life merited for Cordova the title of the Athens of the West. When all Europe was sunk in barbarism, medicine and chemistry, the natural sciences, the arts and philosophy, all found a refuge here. Culture was diffused through all classes of the population, if only very superficially, to an extent never perhaps equalled elsewhere. And though there was little initiative or originality about the scholars at Cordova, their labours contributed to keep alive a taste for the humanities which otherwise would never have revived in Europe. The comforts and amenities of life were carefully studied in the Western Khalifate. All the products which minister to luxury were at that time the almost exclusive property of the Moslem world, and to the bazaars of Cordova were brought the choicest spoils of Egypt, Persia, Arabia, and Hindostan. And at the head of this urbane and flourishing commonwealth sat the great Umeyyad khalifa, emulous of the glories of Bagdad and Cairo, and eager to surpass them in elegance and splendour.