One day, long time ago, as the Cid was riding through Toledo, his horse stopped suddenly, and knelt before a wall built against a bank of earth. The hill was opened, and within was found a niche, and in the niche an image of the Saviour, with the same lamps burning in it which the Goths had put there long centuries agone. A Moorish mosque is standing opposite, which has been converted into a Christian church, and in it the first mass was celebrated in 1085. It takes its name from the legend of the Cid, and is called Christo de la Luz. It is perhaps the smallest church in Toledo, only twenty-two feet square, yet the quaintest and most curious thing to be found in the city; short columns support arches in the shape of a horse-shoe, and three narrow naves, crossing each other, cut up the church into nine vaults. There is nothing in it worth seeing.
It took us half an hour to find the sacristan to open the door of Santo Tome, or St. Thomas, where we went to see a famous picture by El Grecco, a burial scene, of considerable power, and were it not that Spain has hundreds of finer pictures than this, it would be worth the time it cost us to see it.
Passing through the Zodocover, the largest public square in the city, where in the “good old times” of torture for the church, the poor unbelievers in papal faith have been made spectacles before the world, I met a boy with a pop-gun, anxious to show his skill in shooting with that formidable weapon. Yielding to his urgent desires, I set up a bit of money which he was to hit and take. A dense crowd, a hundred certainly, were the idle gazers on this ridiculous scene, forming a ring around me and the boy! I confess to a sense of great amusement when I stood where cardinals and bishops and priests, with armed soldiers and executioners, had burnt heretics in sight of kings, and multitudes thronging the tiers of balconies that look down into this square. It was certainly more human, not to say Christian, for me to divert this idle crowd by setting up coppers for a boy to shoot at with a pop-gun, than for my illustrious predecessors to entertain the populace of Toledo with the sight of martyrs burning at a stake.
Tired of walking, for Toledo is so up-and-down, that you might as well ride on a ladder, we entered a café for refreshments. In the wide, open court was a deep well sunk into the solid rock on which the city stands, and the water thereof was as cool and sparkling and delicious as that which the woman of Samaria gave to him who told her all things that ever she did. The saloon was fifty feet long or more, filled with marble-top tables, and men were eating and drinking, playing dominoes, and smoking. It was toward the close of the day. Of all the people there, none called for spirits, scarcely any asked for wine. Coffee and chocolate were the principal drinks. There was no noise, no gambling. It was chilly, and the servant brought in a brazier filled with live coals, and set it near us. Others drew around it, as they did in the high priest’s court-yard when Peter denied his Lord. Many Oriental customs brought in by the Moors are still retained in Spain. I made an excuse for wandering up to the house-top, and found the houses so closely built against each other, with no intervening spaces, that you could easily look into your neighbor’s, and sometimes see what was quite as well not seen.
While here we looked about for some specimens of the famous blades, which have made Toledo as celebrated as Damascus itself in this line. But we found nothing worth seeing. The manufactory of arms is outside of the town, and has no reputation beyond that of others in Spain. England or Connecticut will furnish as perfect a sword to-day as Toledo. Yet this is only another, and a very striking illustration of what Spain is, compared with what Spain was. As far back as under the Romans, Toledo had a character for the perfection of its weapons of steel. The Toledo blade has been a proverb for temper ever since.
The idea has prevailed, and the workers in metals in Toledo have not been unwilling to encourage it, that the waters of the river Tagus have virtues to impart peculiar firmness to the steel that is cooled in them. The manufacturers, of course, have long been constituted into a guild, or corporation, and the secrets of the trade preserved with care. So long ago as in the ninth century Abdur-rhaman II. gave a great impulse to the art in Toledo, and its fame was spread still wider. A thousand years have rolled away since that time, and now, in the nineteenth century, they do not make as good weapons as they did then.
In the museum at Madrid we saw the splendid swords which the famous warriors of Spain have worn, and, in the saloon of the Director of the Generaliffe, in Granada, the identical sword of Boabdil, the last of the Moorish kings; but they make no such steel now. Indeed, the steel they use is imported from England, just as they keep up the stock of horses and cattle and sheep, by importations from other countries. It is very probable that long, thin blades, that may be curled up like a ribbon, can be produced in China, or Persia, or Sheffield, as well as here. The men of Milan and Florence made as good swords as these. The use of fire-arms naturally diminishes the value of a sword as a weapon of war.
Spanish people do not go CRAZY! Now and then there is a lunatic in Spain, but, as compared with the United States, or England, or France, the Spanish people manage to keep what wits they have. Just outside of Toledo there is a lunatic asylum. It is the successor of the one that Don Quixote ought to have been kept in, and which is mentioned in that knight-errant’s biography, the first work of fiction that I ever perused, and which then, in childhood, fired me with a desire to visit Spain. Don Quixote was crazy; and there may be thousands crazy whom the world do not reckon so.
In London the latest tables show that one person in every 200 is insane. In Paris one in every 222 is in a lunatic asylum, or ought to be. In Madrid, the capital of Spain, only one in every 3,350. In the year 1860 there were 2,384 lunatics in Spain, when the population was 15,673,481; and this would show one insane person to 6,566 inhabitants. In 1864 there were 3,818 persons in houses for the insane, but they do not regulate these institutions with the same strictness that prevails in some other countries, and they confine in them many of those criminals who would otherwise be let loose on the community to pursue their career of crime under the cloak of monomania. It would therefore appear, and there is no good reason to doubt the fact, that comparatively little insanity exists in Spain. One report of 1861 gives the following as the percentage of the cases, when pathologically classified: “Maniac exaltation, 31.91; monomaniacs, 11; melancholy, 6; derangement of mental faculties, 20.53; imbecility, 6.15; epileptic madness, 11; undetermined, 10.41.”
The medical faculty will understand this classification, but I do not know the difference between some of the sections into which the victims are thus divided. But when we come to the proximate causes of insanity, we are in a region level to the uninstructed mind, and here we find that moral and mental excitements growing out of love, such as jealousy and disappointment, are prolific causes: that physical ailments badly attended or wholly neglected frequently result in derangement; and the political turmoils of the State are followed by the same effects. But, on the other hand, there are at least three common causes of insanity in the United States, and probably in England also, that have a limited, if any, influence in Spain. These are religious excitements, haste to be rich, and intemperance in drinking. In Spain they take things easily. The people do not work the brain unduly in matters of religion or trade. The church takes care of the souls of the people: the law or the government excludes all disturbing elements that might come from the efforts of others to proselyte the people, and in their ignorance of any other way of getting to heaven than the church teaches them, they are quiet on that subject. Religion never made any one crazy; on the contrary, it has soothed the madness and healed the malady of many a crazed brain and distracted soul. But the wild and unenlightened excitement, begotten of blind fanaticism and erroneous teaching, has often driven men and women mad, as statistics of American insanity fearfully show. And in Spain there is not energy enough, not life enough, to make speculation dangerous in philosophy, morals, or even in money. I think it very unlikely that they will ever go wild after tulips, or mulberries, or petroleum. They are making railroads, but the French and English furnish the capital and send the engineers. And the great safety-valve, or rather the great preserver of the people’s intellects, is found in the fact that they are never in a hurry about any thing. The old Romans had a good motto, Festina lente, hasten slowly; but the Spaniards never hasten at all. They despise punctuality. An hour after the time when a positive appointment had been made with me, a man in Seville said, when I told him I had been waiting, “Why, the Queen never comes till an hour after the time announced for her arrival.” And this utter indifference to the value of time, which is money all the world over, begets, or is begotten, for it is hard to say if it be the cause or the effect, of that perfect sense of ease, content with one’s condition, idle carelessness, that dismisses all anxiety for the future. Such people do not go crazy.