One cannot help crying out against the ingratitude of the Spaniards, who not only disclaim the good things thus inherited, but do their best to defile them. Nowhere is this defilement more obvious than at Toledo. It is as if everything Moorish were infected with the plague.
A wonderful lesson in history is this dreary old Spanish town, and offering food enough and to spare for the hungry antiquary. Toledo may be called a palimpsest; in its outermost surface is the Spanish writing, clear, and new, and plain; scratch it, and you see the Moorish, all glowing in colour and gold; scratch deeper, and you have the stately Roman; deeper, still, the rude Gothic; deeper still, the barbaric Carthaginian. Take up a handful of dust, and who can say what it is—ashes of Roman prætors, Gothic kings, or Moorish patrons of art and science? Or cast your eyes over the vast panorama of bridge and gateway, watch-tower and church, fort and pleasure-ground—which of these is not as much Roman as Moorish, more Moorish than Christian, and has not first belonged to an earlier civilization than either?
Nothing more forcibly recalls the East than the embroidered mule-trappings one meets at every step. Here in Toledo, as in all Moorish cities, the mules are as gorgeously dressed up as if each belonged to a prince; and, with that inexhaustible invention and love of ornament one finds among Orientals, no two trappings are made alike. These bits of colour in some measure redeem the monotony of the streets, which are tiring both to feet and eyes. All the beauties are hidden in ugly backgrounds, like toads’ eyes, and without a good guide you would never find them out. With such helps as Ford, Street, and good Señor Cabezas, the intelligent traveller need not remain ignorant of any; and though the relics of Moorish art may not have the attractions for every one that they had for us, none can but admire the exquisite little mosque turned into a place for Christian worship, the superb ceilings of cedar-wood, blue and white, the arches, courts, doors, tiles, and other disjecta membra of the age of the royal race of Granada long passed away.
We were particularly interested in the beautiful encaustic tiles, of which one sees so many specimens here. Cabezas very obligingly took us to a private house rich in this sort of ornament, and we spent the whole afternoon in copying the prettiest specimens. The master and mistress were handsome young people who seemed to have nothing to do but laugh and talk in their balcony, overlooking the patio where we sat. It was a very pretty place, so Eastern in colour and character. The court was open to the sky, the floor was of coloured tiles, the walls pure white above and gay with tiles below, whilst overhead burned and glowed a bright blue Southern sky.
Our host and hostess watched us at our work with child-like curiosity, and quizzing us not a little. “What curious people are they, these English! What in the world do they want to copy our tiles for?” said the lady, and the husband answered, “To sell ’em, I suppose.” “Come now, Señor Cabezas,” said the lady, “and tell us who these ladies are, and what they come here to paint for? I should think they might find something better to do than paint a few old Moorish tiles.” Cabezas explained apologetically that we were tourists much interested in anything Moorish, that one of us had a house in Algiers, that we had come to Spain on purpose to see the beautiful ruins of Toledo and Granada, and so forth.
“But how queerly they dress! Do all English ladies wear those funny things on their heads instead of mantillas?—And then they don’t wear chignons: what frights they look, to be sure!”
To be sure there is no accounting for tastes: we had thought the immense lumps of wool and false hair worn by Spanish women of all classes anything but pretty.
The lady had a hundred more questions to ask, the great object of inquiry seeming to be the relationship between my companion and myself.
“It’s impossible they can be sisters,” she observed, “for one is twice as big as the other.”
“Oh! what has that to do with it?” rejoined her husband; “one often sees sisters as unlike each other as can be.”