Spanish Vistas

by George Parsons Lathrop

To accept Sevilla without disappointment, however, a robust appreciation is needed. Its squalors and splendors are impartially distributed. Luxurious mansions are dropped down indiscriminately among mean abodes and the homes of dirt. Poverty and showiness, supreme beauty and grotesque ugliness, jostle each other at close quarters. It is a sort of olla podrida among cities; but the total result is exceedingly curious, and piques the observation.

The first of it that met our eyes was the Giralda tower of the cathedral, rising in unique majesty above the unseen town, and as if inspired with a fresher grace by its own fame. If the bronze female figure of Faith on the summit could have spoken, it might have said: "In all the range of view from this pinnacle there is nothing so fair as Sevilla." The very next object of notice was a woman in the street, who began begging from below the instant we set foot on the balcony for a general survey. She gave us our money's worth of misery, but the supply afterward proved too great for our demand. The mendicants of Sevilla are much more daring and pertinacious than their craft elsewhere. They call your attention with a sharp "tst, tst," as if you were hired to go through life casually, stopping the instant they summon you. There was in particular one energetic man who never failed to pounce upon us from his lair, and place some few inches in front of us the red and twisted stump from which his hand had been severed. He had seemingly persuaded himself that our journey of several thousand miles was undertaken principally to inspect this anatomical specimen. The amount of execution he did with that mutilated member was enough to shame any able-bodied, self-supporting person. With a single wave of it he could put us to flight.

The effect would not have been more instantaneous if he had suddenly unmasked a mitrailleuse a yard from our noses. To assume unconsciousness was futile, for, whichever way we turned, he was always (it would hardly be correct to say "on hand," but) on time with his fingerless deformity—he always placed it, with the instinct of a finished artist, in the best light and most effective pose—getting it adroitly between us and anything we pretended to look at.

I imagined the noble cathedral might afford a refuge from such attacks, but every door was guarded by a squad of the decrepit army, so that entrance there became a horror. These sanctuary beggars serve a double purpose, however. The black-garbed Sevillan ladies, who are perpetually stealing in and out noiselessly under cover of their archly draped lace veils—losing themselves in the dark, incense-laden interior, or emerging from confession into the daylight glare again—are careful to drop some slight conscience-money into the palms that wait. Occasionally, by pre-arrangement, one of these beggars will convey into the hand that passes him a silver piece a tightly-folded note from some clandestine lover. It is a convenient underground mail, and I am afraid the venerable church innocently shelters a good many little transactions of this kind.

Nothing can surpass in grandeur, in solemn and restful beauty, the hollow mountain of embellished stone which constitutes this cathedral. It does not present the usual cross shape, but is based upon the oblong form of an old mosque, originally formed somewhat like that at Cordova, but now wholly gone, excepting for the unequalled Giralda, and a few other minor muezzin towers. The Court of Oranges is another relic of the mosque-builders, where clumps of polished leafage contrast their own vivid strength with the energetic lines of flying-buttresses in the background—a florid yet melancholy height of trellised stone. The enclosing walls of the Orange Court, made of firmly cohering mud, or tapia, are tipped with flame-pointed battlements. At their eastern end rises the tall, square Giralda, with a serenity in its simple lines expressing, like Greek temples, the satisfied senses controlled by an elevated mind. The lower portion bears other impress of its Moorish origin in variously patterned courses of sunken brick; but the whole tower terminates in a filigree Christian spire of the sixteenth century, with a row of queer rusty iron ornaments, imitating vases filled with flowers, placed on the ledge above the belfry at the spire's base. Then, as you continue the circuit on the east, you arrive opposite the apse curve marking the chancel of the Chapel Royal; and here the wall is moulded to the taste of Charles V.'s time, which affected Roman simplicity and weight, adding to it a trace of feudal pomp in high-relief coats of arms. On the third and south side a crumbling frieze of deer's heads and flower garlands skirts the cornice above a long plain front, the straightness of which our friend Whetstone, clambering up on a low coping so as to squint along the side, and see if the lines were perfectly true, admired more than anything else. Afterward one reaches a corner where the work remains unfinished, and the blackened trunks of incomplete pinnacles in graded ranks suggest the charred fragments of a faith once all afire, now darkened and cold. There is no all-dominating dome; but there are two or three bulbous upheavals in the roof, some spindling turrets on the north, and a square elevation in the middle revealing the form of the transept. The whole top is ribbed with stone, serrated with ornate crockets, crowded with bosses and small spires, or edged with a double balustrade mimicking in its flame-points a thousand altar lights. Petrified rosettes and spiral wreathings project from the sides in unchangeable efflorescence, and great arches, furrowed around by concentric ripples of carving, and sometimes overpeered by quaint terra-cotta heads, give entrance to the interior of the gigantic marvel. And over all towers the Giralda to a height of three hundred and fifty feet, surmounted by the Giraldillo vane—a woman's form, which turns its twenty-five hundred-weight of bronze from point to point at the slightest veering of the wind. But the consummate wonder of this great fabric, under which prostrate ages seem to crouch while lifting it to heaven, is the union of diverse styles and spirits in its construction. The different schools conglomerated in such an exterior give the cathedral a great and mysterious power of variety; yet, decided though their contrasts are, the effect is not harsh. It bears witness to the truth that the spirit of man when attuned to the mood of sincere worship, however unlike its expression may be at different epochs and through different races, will always make a certain grand inclusive harmony with itself.

The coolness of the lofty and umbrageous aisles within is not penetrated by the fiercest summer heats; but their religious twilight, though inciting to a devout and prayerful sentiment, wraps in obscurity the crowded works of art, the emblazoned retablos, the paintings of Murillo, Campaña, and Morales, and the costly ornaments bestowed upon the high altar, as well as those of some thirty side-chapels. In the central nave, before a shrine at the choir-back, lies the tomb of Ferdinand, son of Christopher Columbus. The colossal form of another Christopher, the saint, lifts itself up the wall to a height of thirty-two feet, near the Gate of the Exchange. Whoever looks upon St. Christopher, to him no harm shall come during that day; hence this worthy is a common object in Spanish cathedrals, and always painted so large that no one who diligently attends mass can possibly miss seeing him. A curious relic on the Chapel Royal altar is the Battle Virgin, a small ivory image which King Ferdinand the Sainted always carried in war firmly fixed on his saddle-bow. There, too, the King himself, embalmed, is preserved in a chiselled silver case, to be uncovered and shown three times a year with great pomp of military music. A life-size Virgin with movable joints and spun-gold hair watches over him, but did not prevent his crown from being stolen a few years ago. Not far away Murillo's San Antonio hangs, the chief figure in which was also stolen, being cut out in 1874, as many who read this will remember, and carried to New York, where it was recovered. Innumerable other works and wonders there are, and the sacristies contain great value of goldsmiths' products; but, unless it be made a subject of long artistic study, the fundamental charm of the cathedral consists in its general aspects, its mysterious perspectives, its proportions so simple and grandiose; the isolated pictures formed at almost any point by jewelled and candle-lit chapels sparkling dimly through a permanent dusk, rainbowed here and there by the light from old stained windows.

From the Giralda, which is mounted by inclined planes in place of stairs, one looks down upon the glorious building as if it were something belonging to a lower and different world. All around, beyond, the mazy city flattens itself out in a confusion of white walls and tiled roofs, that look like the armored backs of scaly monsters huddled sluggishly in the powerful sunshine, with impossible streets among them reduced to mere thin lines of shadow. The tawny river touches it; palaces and gardens and abandoned monasteries fringe it. Quite near you see the Tower of Gold—a surviving outwork of the Moorish defences—which was formerly coated with orange-colored tiles on the outside, while the inside furnished a repository for treasure brought from the New World. A crenellated Moorish fortification rises up dreamily at one point, but finding itself out of date, abruptly subsides again. Farther out are the seven suburbs, including the gypsy and sailor quarter, the Triana; and then the plains stretch into an immense area of olive, gold, and white, reaching to mountains on the north and east. A multitude of doves inhabit the spire, and there is almost always a hawk sailing above it, higher than anything else under the cloudless sky. At the base lives the bell-ringer, through whose stone-paved dining-room and nursery, filled with his family, we had to pass in order to ascend. Once, as we stood toward sunset in the high gallery where the bells are hung in rectangular or arched apertures, we heard the repique sounding the Angelus. It was a furious explosion of metallic resonance.