THERE are but three spots in the world of which I had formed mental pictures from my reading, that rose to the level of anticipation when I came to visit them. Venice was one of these, Naples another, and Seville, delectable Seville, the third. There is a Spanish proverb which declares, "Who hath not seen Seville hath not seen a marvel," and I am prepared to own that who doth not believe that proverb is an unenviable sceptic. At first sight the city is a disappointment. Glance at it from the railway and you will have no wish to stop. But alight and remain there a few days, and you will find it hard to drag yourself away. The place grows upon you. Each hour reveals new charms; there is a fascination in the very atmosphere; and in the end you will catch yourself exclaiming that the pearl of Andalusia is the fairest gem in the Spanish crown—would be a priceless ornament to any crown.
The setting of the jewel is not worthy of it—a great plain covered with greyish grass; clumps of tall, brown-blossomed agave; a sky metallic in its lustre, blazing and intense; a dim streak of azure on the horizon indicating the far sierra, and, creeping lazily through the flat, a dull, yellow river. But the city itself! Verily, it is a marvel—a grotto of serene mysteries in a granary of plenty, the true city to cultivate the gay science and savour the delicate relishes of bliss.
Don Juan—I mean the Don Juan of the Tenorio family, linked to fame by Tirso de Molina, Glück, and Mozart, not the hero of Byron's poem—was born here, lived here, and lies under an ivy-clad sarcophagus in the gardens attached to the Duke de Monpensier's palace. No sweeter nook of earth could he have chosen for life's dreary pilgrimage, which he made as little dreary as he well could, if one-half that is said and sung of him be true. He was a sad scapegrace, and no pattern to the rising generation; his back knew no sackcloth, and his shoes no peas; but he died penitent. His tomb, a chaste thing in marble and brass, ought to be as attractive for pilgrims of the Wertherian school as the monument to Abélard in the Père-la-Chaise.
Threading the puzzling maze of Seville streets, one might fancy that all the ladies here had been in love with the wanton rascal, and were still in mourning for him. The dress of womankind of the better class is invariably black; their tiny feet, coffined in dainty shoes, peep from under a pall of black skirts; black mantillas float over billows of inky hair, while black eyes flash with the melancholy fire of funeral torches over the tremulous tips of black fans. Why they patronize black (which is a conductor of heat) in this hot climate I cannot for the life of me make out. Certainly it is not because of sympathies solemn or lugubrious; for the character of these lissom damsels of Seville is the reverse of gloomy. There is no taint of Inquisitorial days in their souls. They are grave only externally, and all that is coquettish, winning, and womanly within. If they hang out the undertaker's emblems it can only be through love of the rule of contraries, for they are arch in every step and glance, and bring sunshine with them into shady places. They are fond of seeing and being seen; they cannot be looked on as mutes, for they carry a fan, which in Spain is equivalent to a semaphore; why then will they persevere in wearing this sepulchral raiment? I flatter myself I have discovered two reasons, either of which will answer—first, to typify their remorse for all the hearts they have broken; and, next, because it is very becoming.
The women of the lower classes do not confine themselves to the same severity of taste. They are as amorous of glaring colours as negresses. Cross the iron bridge over the Guadalquivir, here a slow current of chocolate and milk, and go into the Triana suburb where Tatterdemalion holds court. There you will meet gowns of printed cotton of the liveliest hue—gowns that flaunt violent pinks and gamboges, but never a violet or a pearl-grey, much less a black. These daughters of the people generally adorn their braided dark hair, which is thick and silky enough to drive a Parisian belle into agonies of jealousy, with a few bright natural flowers, and sport cheap trinkets and ear-rings, and fling gay kerchiefs over their shoulders. The men are as true to the native costume as the women. That abomination, the stove-pipe hat, seldom shocks the æsthetic mind. The head-gear is the wide round hat with low crown and inward-turned brim. The large blue or brown cloak, with parti-coloured lining, is almost universally worn as in Madrid, but with this difference: in Madrid the tail of it is held before the mouth as if there was an epidemic of toothache; in Seville, it drapes full and free. The Andalusian jacket—broidered with tags, and short so as to show the scarlet waist-sash—tight trousers, and shoes of untanned leather, are likewise common. A tidy active working-suit this Andalusian suit is, but it must no more be argued that the men who wear it are tidy and active and addicted to hard work than that the women who wear black are going to a burial-service. No; Seville is the most deliciously idle place in creation, and the Sevillanos are the most deliciously idle people.
The vis inertiæ is cultivated here as a science; the Castle of Indolence is somewhere in the vicinity; the central offices of the Lazy Society are situated in the Calle de las Sierpes. The natives take to lotus-eating naturally. Pure effect of climate. The Seven Sleepers were born in Seville, and their descendants still have their torpid being in the city. It was never meant for the bustle of trade or the whirr of machinery. It is the place of all others to read Theocritus, 'mid bowers dipping their leaves into plashing fountains, to eat fruit, listen to distant music, blow languid wreaths of perfumed smoke, and shut one's eyes to have visions of fair women. It is the veritable opium-eater's Paradise.
Of deliberate design, I abstain from writing of the public buildings and monumental curiosities of Seville. All that can be had by those who choose in the exhaustive guide-books of Richard Ford and Henry O'Shea. To my thinking, nothing can be more insufferable than the statistics of architecture, the bald jargon of styles plateresque and ornaments charrigueresque, the raptures over chancels and transepts and ogee windows, the precise accounts of such a bell, which would turn the scale at so many hundredweight, and such a spire, which is three yards and a quarter taller than the York Column, with the everlasting scraps of poetry from the treasury of ready-made quotations interlarded between. It is worse even than the cant of criticism which Laurence Sterne castigated with honest pen. Hugo was a genius, and even Hugo was almost unequal to saving "Notre Dame de Paris" from the dead weight of architectural detail which cumbered its spirit.
Let us look at Seville without the guide-book or guide, walk through its labyrinth of narrow paved streets with mind open to receive, and mark the features of the East side by side with those of the West. Those flat-roofed buildings with greeneries on the summit, those jealous balconies and windows with their iron trellis-work, those cool inner spaces with tesselated floors and surrounding of marble pillars of which we catch glimpses through the metal fret-work of the private doors—how Moorish they are! The sights and sounds, the ragged and bronzed beggar urchins, the hawkers of lemons and water, the strings of donkeys and mules in fringed blinkers pattering along under huge net or straw panniers, crammed with fruit, or charcoal, or tiles, or cork-wood—how characteristic, how utterly un-Frankish! That lolling clown, with legs dangling over the tawny sheared sides of a diminutive donkey, is a study in himself. Then the melodious street-cries, the lively braying and whinnying, and the perpetual tinkling of the collar-bells worn by all four-footed beasts that pass, except nobody's dog and the rich man's horse—what a pleasant concert they make!
If you wish to change the scene, roam through the plazas, with their marble water-basins and orange-trees; go to the Duke de Montpensier's garden, with its wealth of myrtles and fern palms; wander to the river-side and look at the ships lading or unlading; or ascend the Giralda, the old mosque steeple from which the muezzin called the faithful to prayer, and take in the comely mass of colour beneath in one broad sweep. Then the changing sky that canopies this "fragment of heaven let fall upon earth!" The riot of clouds when the elements war, and after the midday heats the genial rain pours down as if the blue expanse overheard were a lake—how fervent and cordial! At night, when the city streets are crowded with groups in conversation; when the fragrant, flower-garlanded patios are visible by mystic lights pendent from gilt chandeliers, like votive lamps before a shrine; when caballeros pay court to their lady-loves through gratings as caballeros are licensed only to pay court in Spain; when plaintive songs, with a reminiscence of the desert about them, are chanted in monotonous cadence to the accompaniment of a guitar—how grateful it all is to him who is not lost to the sense of poetry! Imperceptibly one yields himself to the associations of the bygone, and imagination takes wing. As the night ages and silence enwraps the scene—a silence only broken by the deep boom from a clock-tower or the voice of the sereno, the Spanish watchman, hobbling along with his lantern swinging from his pike and his bunch of keys from his girdle, singing out the hours—the effect is stronger; and I confess, while roaming in such a frame once, I so lost myself to the present that I should not have been surprised if I had met the Knight of La Mancha and the three gallants of the Canard à Trois Becs in mocking whispers at his heels, or Figaro himself on a serenading excursion; but with the last puff of my cigar died out the ideal and returned the real. I hastened back to my hotel, which might once have been a Moorish palace, and there, to make the assurance doubly sure that this was the nineteenth century, sat in an American rocking-chair a gentleman in a tweed suit, reading Galignani's Messenger and drinking pale ale.
That gentleman was not a poet; he was an English tourist. It was the period before the Holy Week, with its world-renowned solemnities, celebrated with a pomp second only to that of Rome in her heyday, and drawing strangers in swarms from every point of the compass. If I expected to enjoy an intellectual chat with that gentleman I was mistaken.