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.