On entering my room I asked the waiter what those two things on the wall were which I had been seeing since the evening of my arrival, and which seemed to have some claims to pass as paintings.
“Sir,” he replied, “they are nothing less than the brothers Argensola, Arragonese, natives of Barbastro, most celebrated poets of Spain.”
And truly such were the two brothers Argensola, two veritable literary twins, who had the same temperament, studied the same subjects, wrote in the same style, pure, dignified, and refined, striving with all their powers to raise a barrier against the torrent of depraved taste which in their time, the end of the sixteenth century, had begun to invade the literature of Spain. One of them died in Naples, the secretary of the viceroy, and the other died at Tarragona, a priest. The two left a name illustrious and beloved, upon which Cervantes and Lope de Vega have placed the noble seal of their praise. The sonnets of the Argensola brothers are recognized as the most beautiful in Spanish literature for their clearness of thought and dignity of form, and there is one of them in particular, to Lupercio Leonardo, which the legislators repeat in answer to the grandiloquent philippics of the orators on the left, emphasizing the last lines. I quote it with the hope that it may supply some of my readers with an answer to their friends who reprove them for being enamored, as was the poet, of a lady with a weakness for rouge:
“Yo os quiero confesar, don Juan, primero
Que aquel blanco y carmin de doña Elvira
No tiene de ella mas, si bien se mira,
Que el haberle costado su dinero:
“Pero tambien que me confieses quiero
Que es tanto la beldad de su mentira,
Que en vano à competir con ella aspira
Belleza igual de rostro verdadero.
“Mas que mucho que yo perdido ande
Por un engaño tal, pues que sabemos
Que nos engaña asì naturaleza?
“Porque ese cielo azul que todos vemos
No es cielo, ni es azul; làstima grande
Que no sea verdad tanta belleza!”
(First, Don Juan, I wish to confess that the comely white and red of Lady Elvira are no more hers than the money with which she bought them. But in thy turn I wish thee to confess that no like beauty of an honest cheek may dare compete with the beauty of her feigning. But why should I be vexed by such deception if it be known that Nature so deceives us? And, in fact, that the azure sky which we all see is truly neither sky nor is it azure? Alas, that so much beauty is not true!)
The following morning I wished to try a pleasure similar to that which Rousseau indulged in following the flight of flies—the pleasure of wandering through the streets of the city at random, stopping to look at the most insignificant things, as one would do in the streets at home if one were obliged to wait for a friend. I visited some public buildings, among them the palace of the Bourse, containing a magnificent hall in which are twenty-four columns, each ornamented with four shields placed above the four faces of the capital and bearing the arms of Saragossa. I visited the old church of Santiago and the beautiful palace of the archbishop; stood in the centre of the vast, cheerful Square of the Constitution, which divides the Coso, and into which run the two other principal streets of the city; and from that point I set out and wandered about until noon, to my infinite delight. Now I stopped to watch a boy playing nocino; now I poked my curious head into a little café frequented by scholars; now I slackened my pace to overhear servants joking with each other at a street-corner; now I flattened my nose against the window of a bookshop; now I almost pestered a tobacconist to death by asking for cigars in German; now I stopped to chat with a peddler of matches; here I bought a diary, then asked a soldier for a light, again asked a girl to show me the way, and, pondering the lines of Argensola, I commenced facetious sonnets, hummed the hymn of Riego, thought of Florence, the wine of Malaga, the counsels of my mother, of King Amadeus, my purse, a thousand things and nothing; and I would not have changed places with a grandee of Spain.
Toward evening I started to see the New Tower, one of the most curious monuments in Spain. It is eighty-four metres high, or four metres higher than Giotto’s tower, and without a crack leans about two and a half metres from the perpendicular, like the Tower of Pisa. It was erected in 1304. Some affirm that it was built just as it now stands, others that it settled afterward; there are different opinions. It is octagonal in form, and is built entirely of bricks, but presents a marvellous variety of design and ornamentation—a different appearance at every point, a graceful blending of Gothic and Moorish architecture. To gain admittance I was obliged to ask permission of some municipal official who lived hard by, who, after he had eyed me carefully from the tips of my boots to the hairs of my head, gave the key to the keeper and said to me, “You may go, sir.”