Ave Maria stirps castitatis. Ave profunda viola valis humilitatis. Ave lata rosa campi divine charitatis. Ave abyßalis omnis gratiæ et misericordiæ coeli ros fructifer omnis divine suavitatis er devotionis. Intercede pro nobis gloriosa dei genitrix virgo Maria ad dominum deum nostrumvt ipse misereatur nostri.
Pater noster Ave Maria
The choice of route, then, predetermined by the usual considerations, applicable only to other countries, failed to do justice to Spain. Yet it was accompanied by these special assumptions, as regards political supremacy, at the back of the tourist's mind, no evidence in favour of which was forthcoming; at least, no evidence of a kind which he came prepared to recognise as such. On the contrary, he could not avoid being struck by the insignificance of Spanish buildings, especially, curiously enough, at Madrid itself, where the houses were mostly of one story; a result of it being necessary to obtain a license from the King for anything higher, the conditions imposed by which license, such as that of housing ambassadors in the second story, would prove too burdensome. This particular impression was deepened in the latter half of the period by the linen window-panes, which made the interiors seem gloomy at a date when the use of glass in windows was spreading in the countries which the visitor had come from and had passed through. And so with many other matters, until one Dutchman who had travelled viâ Italy, after being taken to see a water-mill as something quite out of the common, makes the general deduction: "What is very common elsewhere, here often passes for miraculous."
Furthermore, as has been said, there were the historical illusions, too, which would be shaken. What Montaigne experienced at Venice took place on a larger scale in the minds of all who visited Spain. The deeper the previous study, the deeper the disappointment; but the latter was felt nevertheless by him in whom it was unconscious; and in both cases the recovery was slower than at Venice where all that was visible was so near. In fact, it is clear enough that with most a recovery never happened.
The histories they depended on were a variety of heroic fiction whose theory of causation consisted of immediate causes and God. National limitations only appeared, therefore, in so far as they had contributed to national achievements. But to the tourist these limitations, and even the qualities which were simply strange to him, stood out as defects, and the necessary minutiæ of daily life as the unworthy preoccupations of degenerate descendants; while the people, accordingly, whose ancestors were represented as having done nothing but conquer for centuries, showed up as ordinary human beings, muddling along in the way customary among one's own countrymen. Yet successes of Spanish diplomacy were so recent, and the supremacy of Spanish infantry so terribly obvious, that strangers could not account for all this disillusion by assuming degeneration to be the sole reason; while it was likewise too sudden for them to see in it nothing but an example of the falsification of proportions inherent in all knowledge drawn from books or other second-hand sources. Their attitude to Spain when they revised their journals was thus mystification rather than contempt or disgust, though both the latter are usually present.
This same unpreparedness to take a totally fresh point of view is even more marked in relation to religion. However greatly at odds the matter-of-fact foreigner and the matter-of-faith Castilian might be over details, both were equally unwilling to accept the illusions of to-morrow on that subject in place of the illusions of yesterday. The tendency to accept the face values of things theological was then as strong as to-day it is weak; but, with the possible exception of seventeenth-century Ireland, it was nowhere so strong as in Spain. The latter's place in Europe was bound up with leadership of the cause of Roman Catholicism; foreigners took this for granted, and the Spaniards unconsciously set a value on their creed apart from its relation to theological logic or religious experience—it had so long been the only rallying cry which could bring about a sinking of differences and achieve the temporary unity which was essential to success in war. But to the contemporary stranger, the varnish of the water of baptism was opaque, and the Celt, the Moor, the Pre-historic, the Outrageous-Pagan, and the all-pervading Jew, seemed all one thing, ultra-Holy-Roman. Another source of mystification—except to the Protestant, who knew exactly what it all meant and so went further astray than the rest, in the same direction.
Socially, the unintelligible contradictoriness was as great. Witness one whom a Burgos gentleman invited to dinner. The dining-room was that in which the hostess lay ill in bed with a fever; and he remembered afterwards that he had behaved with grossly bad manners inasmuch as he had taken off his hat at meal-time.
To go on to the means whereby geography also contributed to strain the sixteenth-century tourist's easily ruptured sympathy, there was the climate. The majority started in fear of the heat and suffered only from cold, expecting to find an Andalusian spring perpetually reigning at, say Burgos, instead of its "ten months of winter and two of hell" (or, to retain the pun, "diez mezes de invierno y dos de infierno"); whereas the visit to the South which was so rarely paid would have restored beliefs which had foundation enough. Besides, through this fear of the heat they traversed what they did traverse at the seasons when what fascination it possessed was least in evidence.
Among other conditions, the economic seem to have scandalised observers most. Perhaps the student will have noticed that whatever year during the last three hundred he may chance to be reading about in the history of Spain, the country will always at that moment have reached the last stage of economic exhaustion. Another quarter of a century or so, and, curiously enough, a lower stage will have been reached; yet another twenty-five years and one still lower; and so on until one would think the most hypothetical zero of bankruptcy must belong to a happier past and the population can consist of no more than a few emaciated grandees licking the rocks for sustenance. The natural attempt will be to go farther and farther back to trace the steps of the decline; and in time one will come upon these whose accounts are under consideration; but it will be without satisfaction. There is nothing for it but to go right back to the golden age. But in Guicciardini (1513) there is just the same tale, scarcity of inhabitants; poverty; mean aspects of daily life; stagnation in commerce owing entirely to Spanish aversion from work; industries under foreign control. It suggests that possibly the same phenomena have been in existence early and late, and that what earlier writers describe as an undeveloped country is the same as the "exhausted" one of later days; the difference, if this is the case, lying not in the conditions seen but in the extent of the stranger's expectations, moderate when the power of Spain had just become of international account; too high, later, when it was assumed that political power of long standing could not have grown up except in association with economic strength of equal greatness. To travellers of this period any unsoundness or "exhaustion" seemed the more incomprehensible in that Spain was by far the chief importer of bullion, the universal value of which they were accustomed to overrate.
Guicciardini, however, says nothing about the misbehaviour of Spanish women by which the next three or four generations of travellers are invariably shocked, with one exception, that of Lady Fanshawe, who saw much to admire in them and nothing to condemn, and had she seen what the men saw there is no doubt whatever her scorn would have been very pronounced. According to the men, neither the Italian fashion of the men restraining the women, nor the transalpine fashion of the women restraining themselves, was used in Spain. But it must be remembered that the male tourist tends to see the womenfolk of the country he visits nearer their worst than their best.