Thus we had seen some twenty-five Spanish cities—some twenty-five glorious cathedrals!—in a leisurely journey of eight months. Any spot along the southern fringe is suitable for the winter, any spot along the northern coast for the summer, but in high cold middle-Spain travel for pleasure must be limited to early autumn or late spring: we froze to death in Burgos and Salamanca during October, and again shivered and chattered with the April cold of Guadalajara and Sigüenza.
As to guide books, Baedeker is as good as any, though the Baedeker for Spain is not equal to that firm's guides for the rest of Europe. Murray's "Hand-book" is more entertaining, but is rather to be kept as amusing literature than used as a guide book, much of it being the personal opinions and prejudices of Richard Ford, and bristling all over with slurs at Spain's religion. It does not seem reasonable for English-speaking travelers to see this original country through the eyes of a clever but crochety Englishman who wandered over it on horseback eighty years ago: we should not like a European to judge America by Dickens' notebook dating back to the forties.
There are two bits of advice I would give to those who would thoroughly enjoy traveling in the Peninsula. Pick up as soon as possible something of the tongue or you miss shadings that give depth and strength to the impression. If one knows Latin or French or Italian, it is easy to read Spanish. And I would beg every unhurried traveler to carry in his pocket the "Romancero del Cid," Spain's epic, and "Don Quixote," her great novel, the truest-hearted book ever written. I defy a man to while away a winter in Spain with el ingenioso hidalgo his daily companion, or sit reading the "Cid" above the Tajus gorge at Toledo, and not learn to love this virile, ascetic, realistic, exalted, and passionate land, where a peasant is instinctively a gentleman, where a grandee is in practice a democrat, where certain small meanesses, such as snobbishness, close-fisted love of money, are unknown.
The second advice is to bring to Spain some smattering of architectural knowledge, or half the charm of lingering in her old cities is lost,—also is lessened one's chance to catch unaware the soul of this mystic, profoundly religious race. Here I should end, as I head these lines of introduction with the words: Practical hints. And yet, just as it is well nigh impossible in Spain to dissociate the churches themselves from the religious scenes daily witnessed under their Romanesque or Gothic arches, so I cannot help begging the traveler, along with his smattering of architecture to bring a little liberality toward a faith different perhaps from his own, a little openness of mind. To one who goes to Spain in the holier-than-thou attitude, she is dumb and repellent,—she who can be so eloquent!
In each of her cities is a cathedral built when faith was gloriously generous and untamable, and in them one feels, unless blinded by prejudices of early environment or birth, that here indeed man is bowed in the humble self-abasement of worship, here is not only æsthetic beauty but a burning soul; the incense, the lights, the inherited lavish wealth speak with the spirituality of symbols, of ritual, that utterance of the soul older than hymns or voiced prayer.
This record of the journey through Spain will be called too partial, and yet I started without the slightest intention of liking or praising her. A month before going to Spain, on reading in the Bodleian Library certain accounts of St. Teresa, about whom I had but vague ideas, I exclaimed in distress, "What a morbid mind!" I went far from sympathetic, but bit by bit my prejudices dropped away. With the cant and smug self-conceit of northern superiority, I expected among other jars a shock to my religious belief. And after eight months I left Spain with the conviction that magnificently faulty though she is with her bull-fights, a venal government, and city loafers, she can give us lessons in mystic spirituality, in an unpretentious charity, in heroic endurance, in a very practical not theoretic democracy.
ESPAÑA LA HEROICA
Deep learned are the poor in many ways,
Their hearts are mellowed by sweet human pain,
And she has learned the lesson of the waifs,
This sadly-ravaged, stern, soul-moving Spain!
Rugged and wild, wind-swept, and bleak, and drear,
She has a ruined splendor all her own,
It seizes even while you ask in fear
The reason man should choose this waste for home.
Her cities rise, ascetic, lofty, proud,
Forever haunted by high souls that dare,
And from her wondrous churches rings aloud
A heaven-storming radiance of prayer;