The richness of Spanish cathedrals at first is overpowering, that they are too rich and overloaded is a criticism which is quite justified, but it is the profusion of strength, not the cluttering of details to hide a weak understructure; it is a profusion that speaks the nation's character, her burning faith, her oriental generosity. In antique silver, jewels, vestments, wood carvings, tombs, they are veritable museums of art. A Spaniard has given generously to the church in all ages. Though even when prosperous he is content to live with a frugal simplicity hardly understood by our luxury-loving time, it is a law of his nature that his ideas of grandeur and of beauty should find their free expression in the House of God. I often had the sensation that the beggar kneeling in these truly royal churches felt himself a part of them; his own poor home was but one side of the picture, he could claim this other home as well.
It was at Burgos we first met in the churches minor features that are essentially Spanish. The organ pipes flare out like trumpets; the reredos, or retablo, made up of carved wood panels, rises sometimes to a hundred feet behind the altar; and there is the metal-work of the great screens or rejas. This last was an art de propia España, and her churches would lack half their sublimity without the massive fretwork of iron or brass that shuts in the richly-decked altars. At Burgos we especially noticed the reja of the Condestable chapel, with graceful wind-blown figures at the top. In the choir, round the lectern were piled ancient psalm books, some of them three feet high, their calfskin covers strengthened with metal claspings. The naturalness with which these priceless books are treated shows how happily bound to preceding generations, with no break of revolution and destruction, is this old land. This thought of the antiquity of her usages is a very potent one to every Spaniard, and the stranger too finds the purple robed canons chanting in their choir-stalls more impressive because for six hundred years in this same Cathedral they have intoned daily these same psalms.
Another national talent is her carving in wood. The choir-stalls here were a revelation. The masters of this art, Berruguete, Vigarni, Montañés, may not be known to the rest of Europe, but they are locally very famous. Their intense realism appeals to the popular mind, and though in later centuries this realism degenerated into the bad taste of hanging the statues with robes, enough of earlier art remains to make one overlook these lapses. Should not a poet be judged by his best lines? Why must an image in wig and jewels blind one to the remarkable carved statues found side by side with it?
The wood carvers of Spain speak the same language of sincerity as the mystic writers, and a knowledge of Luis de León, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa, makes one better appreciate the sculptors. Not that they too are mystical. They do not soar so high. It is only a few chosen souls here and there through the centuries who can walk that perilous path, and probably they can express themselves only through the more intangible medium of speech. But these wood carvings are the fruit of men who understood the mystics and who worked in a like spirit of intense faith. I should say it was not in her paintings that the religious essence of this race was to be found, not in the somewhat posing monks of Zurbaran, nor in the gentle religiosity of Murillo's madonnas. Though a master of color, Murillo is too often akin in spirit to Carlo Dolce and Sassoferrato. It is the fashion to call these typically religious painters. But in the carved biblical scenes of retablo and sillería is shown more truly the inner spiritual intelligence of the serious Spaniard. Velasquez spoke for the reality of his time, its chivalry, its material force; and these masters of wood carving in more halting speech expressed the religious aspirations of the people. They worked with a realism that is often painful, yet the intensity with which they felt the scenes they depicted links them with the mystics. The wood carvings have not had justice done them, perhaps because they are for the most part painted, which certainly detracts from them. Fortunately choir-stalls were left in the natural wood, those at Burgos being a rich dark walnut with the polish that time only can give. We spent many happy hours studying this twelve years' work of the sculptor Vigarni. The seats are carved with grotesque, fantastic creatures, half man, half beast, the arm of the chair now made by an acrobat bent double backward, now by a monster with a tail in his mouth, or some bat-like demon. There is a frieze of Old Testament scenes too high to be well seen, but below them the New Testament story is told from the Annunciation to the Doubting Thomas after the Resurrection. Though the simpleness of earlier times is shown in the miniature devil that passes from the possessed man's lips, and in Mary Magdalene's dropped jaw of surprise when she meets her risen Lord, these carvings are not merely curious, they are soul-touching and beautiful. The type of face is the high-boned one the Spaniard prefers, with well-cut brows and aquiline nose. Notice the solemn beauty of Christ's face in the qui ci ne pecato. In the panel, the blind cured, seldom has the expression of absolute faith been better rendered than in the raised face of the old blind man. Do not pass by the Garden of Gethsemane with the three Apostles lying heavily asleep, the human shrug of the shoulder and outstretched hand of the Master: "Could ye not watch with me one hour?"
While the Cathedral of Burgos shows much florid later work, especially the central tower and that of the Condestable chapel, under the too ornate additions the ancient purer church is plainly perceptible. It belonged to the Gothic of the Northern-France type, for pilgrims to her shrines and to fight in her crusades, brought foreign ideas to Spain at so early a date that it is useless to speculate about what a native architecture might have been.
Some of the smaller churches of the town are worth visiting, such as San Nicolás, with a stone retablo which is a tour de force of handicraft; San Lermes, and facing it the hospital of San Juan, where we first met the escutcheoned doorways of Spain, which, if kept within bounds, are arrogantly effective and national. Throughout the city are good examples of domestic architecture, such as the Casa del Cordón, built by the Constable of Castile, Don Pedro Fernández de Velasco, whose sumptuous tomb lies in the center of the Condestable Chapel, and whose pride as a Castilian speaks in the family proverb:
"Antes que Dios fuese Dios,
O que el sol iluminaba los peñascos,
Ya era noble la casa de los Vélascos."
"Before God was God, or the sun shone upon the rocks, already was the house of Velasco noble."[4] Above the entrance to his house the girdle of St. Francis connects his arms with those of his wife, as proud as he, for she was a Mendoza. One rainy afternoon we spent in the Museo over the Gateway of Santa María, and there, step by step, traced Spain's art history,—statues from the former Roman city of Clunia in this province, a remarkable enameled altar-front of the Byzantine period, Romanesque and Gothic relics from the monasteries out on the plains, a Moorish arch found in situ, and tombs of that transition time from Gothic to Renaissance which in Spain was so flourishing a phase of art.
Much as there is to hold one in the town, the bleak uplands outside have a desolate fascination that calls one out to them. There is an excursion to be made not far away to the Monastery of Miraflores, where Isabella built for her parents "the most perfectly glorious tomb in the world." Personally I prefer the quieter art of a Mino da Fiesole to this work of Gil de Siloe, rich though it is. The tomb is white marble, octagonal in shape, with sixteen lions supporting it. The weak Juan II lies by the side of his queen, who is turned slightly from him to read in her Book of Hours, in a natural attitude, as if she said pleasantly, "Now do be silent, I must read in peace for a few minutes." At Miraflores is a wooden statue of St. Bruno, with a keen and subtle face of the same ascetic type as that of the young monk we watched praying quite oblivious of the gaping tourists. It is of this statue that Philip IV remarked: "It does not speak, but only because he is a Carthusian monk." The indifference to strangers in the mystic young penitent before the altar was our second meeting with a trait found in the average Spaniard. He does not care an iota what the stranger thinks of him. He is not like the Italian, inclined to put his best foot forward. He will not change his ways because they are criticised; you can admire or you can dislike, it makes little difference to him; and this quiet poise, in peasant as well as grandee, is not fatuous, for its root lies in an innate self-respect. He feels he is loyal to his God, to his King, and to himself,—what better standards can you have?
Avenues of trees lead out to another house of the Benedictine rule, a convent for nuns founded by the sister of Richard Cœur de Lion. Many ladies of the royal line have retired to Las Huelgas, the nuns brought their dowries, and the mitered abbess held the rank of Princess-Palatine, with the power of capital punishment. The church has outside cloisters for the laity; the cloisters within the convent are never seen except on the rare occasions of a king's visit, when all who are able crowd in at the moment he enters. We were standing before the chancel where so many knights had performed the vigil of the armor—among others Edward I of England was knighted here—when a nun entered the coro, and in her trailing white robes bowed toward the altar—rather it was the slow courtesy of a court lady. We shrank away with the feeling that we had intruded uninvited on a ceremony, that the days of the abbess, Princess-Palatine, were the reality and we, inquisitive guide-book tourists, the anacronism, a sensation not uncommon in Spain.