On gaining the interior of the fortress, the first object that catches the eye, standing towards the centre of the plateau, and looking somewhat contemptuously down upon its Moorish rival, is the gorgeous palace of the Emperor Charles V. It is a large quadrangular building, enclosing a spacious circular court, and its four fronts, constructed entirely of cut stone, have a handsome appearance, albeit, the heterogeneous mixture of the orders of architecture they exhibit, is of rather questionable taste.
Though of so much more recent date than the palace of the Moorish kings, the stately pile of Spain’s mighty monarch seems doomed, like the throne of his successors, to fall to the ground e’en sooner than the tottering fabric of Mohammedanism itself. Indeed it is even now a mere shell, and the few remaining bolts and bars that hold together its shattered walls will, I have no doubt, shortly find their way to the same furnace that has already converted the bronze rings and ornaments with which it was formerly embellished, into the more useful form of maravedis.[135]
The celebrated palace of the Moslem princes, to which our conductor now led the way, was commenced by Mohammed Al Fakir, son of Mohammed Abou Said, the founder of the kingdom of Granada, A.D. 1275. It rests against the north wall of the fortress, and its low and irregular brick walls, overshadowed by the stone palace of the Spanish kings on one side, and by the huge tower of Comares on another, have a mean and very unpromising appearance. It looks like the dilapidated stables and remises attached to a French chateau of the “old school,” the walls of which only have withstood the levelling system of the revolution.
This unpretending exterior being common to all Moorish buildings, did not occasion disappointment. Not so, however, the interior; of which, for I was a young traveller then, I had conceived a much more exalted idea. Indeed, the disappointment was general, for all of us had expected to see, if not a palace on a grand scale and of magnificent proportions, one, at all events, containing suites of courts and apartments, which, on the score of costliness and luxury, would not cede the palm to any erected even in these days of refinement and extravagance. When, therefore, after following our guide through several long dirty passages, we were ushered into a small quadrangular court, laid out like a Dutch garden, but, unlike it, overgrown with sunflowers, larkspurs, and marigolds, so little idea had we of being within the precincts of the royal apartments, that my companions were about to pass on with eager haste, until I called out, “Do stop a moment to look at this, it is so pretty.” “Este es el patio de los Leones,”[136] said our cicerone, describing a wide circle with his stick, to draw our attention to the light and elegant colonnade that encompassed us, adding, after a short but effective pause, and pointing at the same time to a basin in the centre of the court, supported on the backs of twelve nondescript animals which were half concealed in the flowery jungle, “and those are the lions, celebrated in every part of the known world, which have given the name to this terrestrial paradise!” This grandiloquent burst was evidently occasioned by our apparent insousiance. We stood corrected, but not the less disappointed.
On paper—in type as well as in pencil—the Alhambra has generally been represented in too glowing colours. In defence of the painter it may be said that he labours under a peculiar disadvantage, as far as truth is concerned; for, whilst the utmost effort of his art will never enable him to do justice to the lovely tints of nature, he cannot, with all his skill, avoid conveying too favourable an idea of works of art, especially in delineating architectural subjects. It follows, that, in drawings of the building now before us, the elaborately ornamented walls, the delicately wrought arcades, the spouting lions, the flowery parterres, every thing, in fact, connected with it, appears fresh, perfect, and beautiful; the dirt, weeds, cobwebs, and scribbling that disfigure the reality, being omitted as unnecessary adjuncts to the picture; and the palace is thus represented to us (embellished a little, perhaps, according to the artist’s fancy) rather such as it may have been in the days of the Moors, than what it is at the present time;—this leads to one source of disappointment. On the other hand, whilst travellers have given the dimensions of the various courts and apartments with tolerable accuracy, they certainly have misapplied their epithets in describing them. The reader is apt, therefore, to lose sight of the scale in picturing to himself these gorgeous halls, which the spectator, at the first glance, sees are neither grand nor magnificent.
We, at all events, having, from what we had previously read and seen, formed most erroneous conceptions, both as to the size of the building, and of its state of preservation, made the circuit of, and quitted the too celebrated palace, disappointed with every thing within its walls.
The false impression once removed, however, and a few days given to mourn over the sad destruction of our long cherished fancies, we again ascended the wall-girt hill; and, having now brought our visual rays to bear at a proper focus, and allowed greater scope to the imagination—in other words, changing the adjectives grand and magnificent for tasteful and elaborate, and, in some matters, suffering fancy to supply the place of reality—we received much greater pleasure from our second visit to the crumbling pile; a gratification that became less alloyed at each succeeding visit.
I should here observe that, at the period of which I write, A.D. 1822, the Alhambra, like every thing else in Spain at that epoch, was in a deplorable state of dilapidation. No steps had yet been taken to repair the damage done by the French on evacuating the fortress ten years previously; and the Royal Palace, rent and shaken by the same explosions that had thrown down the towers of the Moorish stronghold, was still strewed with ruins, partially unroofed, and exposed to the destructive influence of wind and rain. That it is yet standing we have to thank General Sebastiani, who was governor of the province during a considerable part of the late war, and bestowed great pains upon its preservation. Perhaps, indeed, but for his interference, as well as the repairs he caused to be executed, this chef d’œuvre of Moorish art would have shared the fate of the walls of the fortress.
I am happy, for the sake of future travellers, to be able to add that, on visiting Granada many years after, I found the Alhambra in a much improved state, notwithstanding that it had in the meanwhile suffered severely from the shock of an earthquake. The government seemed at length to have decided that the Royal Palace was worthy of preservation, though the work of infidels. An officer of rank had accordingly been appointed to its guardianship, whose permission it was requisite to obtain ere the stranger could enter its gates; and an old woman was lodged therein as his deputy, to pocket the fees and do the honours.
Under the watchful eye and ever busy broom of this vigilant personage, the place is now kept in excellent “inspection order.” The white marble pillars of its corridors have, under the influence of soap and water and a scrubbing brush, been cleansed of the names, doggrel verses, and maudlin sentiment, with which, from time immemorial, travellers have thought proper to disfigure them; the rubbish of another description that concealed its mosaic pavements has been removed; the weeds with which its courts were overgrown are eradicated; and, in the words of an Arabian poet, “The spider is no longer the chamberlain at the gate of Koshrew.”