For grace and a certain note of distinction and wealth in its beauty, Santa Maria la Blanca cannot compare with El Transito, which in the days of its splendour, must have been a gem of the most delicate perfection. But as a religious temple, as the expression of solemn worship rooted in the strange and mysterious East, the former is by far the more imposing, the more earnest and harmonious. Prayer in the Transito seems a matter of graceful and artistic dilletantism; here it appears a great racial cry of the soul.
CHAPTER IX
Vanished Palaces
COMING out from the station, instead of taking the road up to the town, you may cross the fields, and thus into the famous Huerta del Rey, where old Arabian splendours and romance once were castled in the legendary palace of Galiana. Now alas! beauty and legend in disgraceful abandonment. All this rich land of the Vega is the property of the ex-Empress of the French, Doña Eugenia de Guzman and Condesa de Teba. To bear a glorious name (beside which the title of French Empress is but a trumpery decoration) and inherit land so crowded with historic interests, inherit above all the ruins of a palace of fairyland, and treat her inheritance as the Empress Eugenie has done, is adequately to explain the reason of Spain’s irretrievable decadence and slow death. The palace of legend is let out in miserable tenements to muleteers and peasants, who little heed the damage done to wrought Arabian wall and ceiling by their smoky lamps, wood fires in unventilated chambers, by beasts and meal-bags housed in a princess’s boudoir, in a dismantled reception chamber. The Empress Eugenie may receive a few pesetas quarterly for this desecration, and we lose a few hours of inestimable musing, while the entire world is the poorer by a dainty monument the less. Even thirty years ago the palace of Galiana was still a constructable dream. The lovely staircase was half preserved, the lace-work was less and less obliterated, the arches still undegraded. But Mlle. de Montijo, seated afar on a foreign throne, was too busy with intrigues destined to ruin France less permanently than her neglect of property she never visits has ruined an historic poem.
Calderon, in his drama, Cado uno por se, speaks of this palace, and its heroine has been immortalised by Moratin in verses forever quoted:
“Galiana de Toledo
Muy hermosa y maravilla!
La Mora la mas celebrada
De toda la Moreria.
Boca de claveles rojas,
Alto pecho que palpita,
Frente eburnea que adorno
Oro flamante de Tyras.”[20]
The story runs that Galafre, the kingling of Toledo, under the great Khalif of Cordova, Abd-er-Rahman I., built a wonder of human dwelling for his beautiful and bewitching daughter, the infanta Galiana. Part of the palace already existed in the eighth century, and was Visigothic. To this he added the ineffaceable Moorish note, the horse-shoe arches, the ajimez windows, still admirably defined despite decay, the Moorish trickery of brickwood, the arabesques and tiled roofs and the square towers of the East. To-day we can trace the ajimez windows, the horse-shoe arches, and even the beautiful arabesques of the walls are faintly discernible through their deplorable coating of smoke-stain. But within the past thirty years the exquisite tiled roof of the tower has disappeared, along with the lovely staircase. The degradation of the Moorish patio, which must have been a thing divine, leaves us in our vulgar modern days, stupefied by man’s indifference to the eternal eloquence of beauty. The mystery of this Arabian genius is forever sealed. Nothing we can strive, nothing we can hope to do, will reveal it to us, will unlock the doors of an enchanted past. Whence it sprung is just as inexplicable to us as how it vanished, but alas! vanished it is like the mysterious city of enchantment and of a civilisation that since has never been equalled—the outlying town of Cordova, built by a mighty Moorish emperor in honour of a loved wife, and but a memory of superlative witchery and delight.