As a contrast to this violent scene which was not so wholly violent but that it was relieved by a boy teasing a cat with his cap in the foreground, and the sweet singing of canaries in the windows of the houses near, I may commend the Casa de los Venerables, ecclesiastics somehow related to the cathedral and having their tranquil dwelling not far from it. The street we took from the Duke of Alva’s palace was so narrow and crooked that we scraped the walls in passing, and we should never have got by one heavily laden donkey if he had not politely pushed the side of his pannier into a doorway to make room for us. When we did get to the Casa de los Venerables we found it mildly yellow-washed and as beautifully serene and sweet as the house of venerable men should be. Its distinction in a world of patios was a patio where the central fountain was sunk half a story below the entrance floor, and encircled by a stairway by which the humble neighbor folk freely descended to fill their water jars. I suppose that gentle mansion has other merits, but the fine staircase that ended under a baroque dome left us facing a bolted door, so that we had to guess at those attractions, which I leave the reader to imagine in turn.
I have kept the unique wonder of Seville waiting too long already for my recognition, though in its eight hundred years it should have learned patience enough for worse things. From its great antiquity alone, if from nothing else, it is plain that the Giralda at Seville could not have been studied from the tower of the Madison Square Garden in New York, which the American will recall when he sees it. If the case must be reversed and we must allow that the Madison Square tower was studied from the Giralda, we must still recognize that it is no servile copy, but in its frank imitation has a grace and beauty which achieves originality. Still, the Giralda is always the Giralda, and, though there had been no Saint-Gaudens to tip its summit with such a flying-footed nymph as poises on our own tower, the figure of Faith which crowns it is at least a good weather-vane, and from its office of turning gives the mighty bell-tower its name. Long centuries before the tower was a belfry it served the mosque, which the cathedral now replaces, as a minaret for the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer, but it was then only two-thirds as high. The Christian belfry which continues it is not in offensive discord with the structure below; its other difference in form and spirit achieves an impossible harmony. The Giralda, however, chiefly works its enchantment by its color, but here I must leave the proof of this to the picture postal which now everywhere takes the bread out of the word-painter’s mouth. The time was when with a palette full of tinted adjectives one might hope to do an unrivaled picture of the Giralda; but that time is gone; and if the reader has not a colored postal by him he should lose no time in going to Seville and seeing the original. For the best view of it I must advise a certain beautifully irregular small court in the neighborhood, with simple houses so low that you can easily look up over their roofs and see the mighty bells of the Giralda rioting far aloof, flinging themselves beyond the openings of the belfry and deafeningly making believe to leap out into space. If the traveler fails to find this court (for it seems now and then to be taken in and put away), he need not despair of seeing the Giralda fitly. He cannot see Seville at all without seeing it, and from every point, far or near, he sees it grand and glorious.
I remember it especially from beyond the Guadalquivir in the drive we took through Triana to the village of Italica, where three Roman emperors were born, as the guide-books will officiously hasten to tell, and steal away your chance of treating your reader with any effect of learned research. These emperors (I will not be stopped by any guide-book from saying) were Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius; and Triana is named for the first of them. Fortunately, we turned to the right after crossing the bridge and so escaped the gipsy quarter, but we paused through a long street so swarming with children that we wondered to hear whole schoolrooms full of them humming and droning their lessons as we made our way among the tenants. Fortunately, they played mostly in the gutters, the larger looking after the smaller when their years and riches were so few more, with that beautiful care which childhood bestows on babyhood everywhere in Europe. To say that those Spanish children were as tenderly watchful of these Spanish babies as English children is to say everything. Now and then a mother cared for a babe as only a mother can in an office which the pictures and images of the Most Holy Virgin consecrate and endear in lands where the sterilized bottle is unknown, but oftenest it was a little sister that held it in her arms and crooned whatever was the Spanish of—
Rack back, baby, daddy shot a b’ar;
Rack back, baby, see it hangin’ thar.
For there are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles III., when he came to the Spanish throne from Naples, full of beneficent projects and ideals, bestowed upon his unwilling and ungrateful subjects. These roads were made about the middle of the eighteenth century, and they have been gathering dust ever since, so that the white powder now lies in the one beyond Triana five or six inches deep. Along the sides occasional shade-trees stifled, and beyond these gaunt, verdureless fields widened away, though we were told that in the spring the fields were red with flowers and green with young wheat. There were no market-gardens, and the chief crop seemed brown pigs and black goats. In some of the foregrounds, as well as the backgrounds, were olive orchards with olives heaped under them and peasants still resting from their midday breakfast. A mauve bell-shaped flower plentifully fringed the wayside; our driver said it had no name, and later an old peasant said it was “bad.”
VII
We passed a convent turned into a prosperous-looking manufactory and we met a troop of merry priests talking gayly and laughing together, and very effective in their black robes against the white road. When we came to the village that was a municipium under Augustus and a colonia under Hadrian, we found it indeed scanty and poor, but very neat and self-respectful-looking, and not unworthy to have been founded by Scipio Africanus two hundred years before Christ. Such cottage interiors as we glimpsed seemed cleaner and cozier than some in Wales; men in wide flat-brimmed hats sat like statues at the doors, absolutely motionless, but there were women bustling in and out in their work, and at one place a little girl of ten had been left to do the family wash, and was doing it joyously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry. We did not meet with universal favor as we drove by; some groups of girls mocked our driver; when we said one of them was pretty he answered that he had seen prettier.
At the entrance to the ruins of the amphitheater which forms the tourist’s chief excuse for visiting Italica the popular manners softened toward us; the village children offered to sell us wild narcissus flowers and were even willing to take money in charity. They followed us into the ruins, much forbidden by the fine, toothless old custodian who took possession of us as his proper prey and led us through the moldering caverns and crumbling tiers of seats which form the amphitheater. Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the masonry are broken off from the mass and lie detached, but the mass keeps the form and dignity of the original design; and in the lonely fields there it had something august and proud beyond any quality of the Arena at Verona or the Colosseum at Rome. It is mostly stripped of the marble that once faced the interior, and is like some monstrous oval shaped out of the earth, but near the imperial box lay some white slabs with initials cut in them which restored the vision of the “grandeur that was Rome” pretty well over the known world when this great work was in its prime. Our custodian was qualified by his toothlessness to lisp like any old Castilian the letters that other Andalusians hiss, but my own Spanish was so slight and his patois was so dense that the best we could do was to establish a polite misunderstanding. On this his one word of English, repeated as we passed through the subterranean doors, “Lion, lion, lion,” cast a gleam of intelligence which brightened into a vivid community of ideas when we ended in his cottage, and he prepared to sell us some of the small Roman coins which formed his stock in trade. The poor place was beautifully neat, and from his window he made us free of a sight of Seville, signally the cathedral and the Giralda, such as could not be bought for money in New York.