Frontispiece SPANISH SKETCHES BY A. B. PIDDINGTON, K.C WITH THIRTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY 1916 PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS A MI MUJER 41 657 NOTE THE following sketches first appeared in 1913 in the Sydney Morning Herald and are republished now by the courteous permission of that j ournal's proprietors. Their reprinting has been delayed by the war. A. B. P. SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, December 1915. CONTENTS PAGE CANALEJAS i AT THE CORTES ...... 13 IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ AT THE PRADO. I . 26 IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ AT THE PRADO. II 34 TOLEDO ....... 45 CORDOVA. I 56 CORDOVA. II. THE MOSQUE ... 67 SEVILLE 86 COLUMBUS IN SEVILLE . . . . 103 GRANADA : THE HILL OF THE ALHAMBRA . 120 GRANADA : EL PALACIO ARABE. I . . . 130 GRANADA : EL PALACIO ARABE. II . . 148 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Senor Don Jose Canalejas . . Frontispiece Facing page Madrid. The Congreso Building ... 13 Velazquez. Portrait of Philip IV . . .26 Portrait of the Duque d'Olivares, Minister of Philip IV . . .27 El Primo ..... 29 Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) 35 The Surrender of Breda . . 39 Toledo. The Puerite de Alcantara, over the Tagus 45 San Juan de los Reyes ... 47 Cordova. ' Cordoba Muerta ' ... 56 In the Campina .... 60 Scenes in the City ... 62 (a) A Plaza ; (b) Moorish Bridge over the Guadalquivir . . 64 Puerta del Perdon ... 66 Aisles in the Mosque (i) . 70 Aisles in the Mosque (2) . . 72 Sequence of Arches in the Mosque . 80 The last Arch of the Sequence . 81 The Mihrab . 82 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii Facing page Seville. The Alcazar, or Palace of the Moorish Kings ..... 102 The Cathedral the Giralda Tower . 104 The Cathedral (Interior) . . . 107 The Cathedral Tomb of Columbus . 118 Granada. General View of the Alhambra Hill, with the Sierra Nevada . . 120 The Alhambra. Mirador de la Reina . . 134 Recess in Sala de los Embaj adores (Hall of the Ambassadors), showing gallery leading to the Mirador de la Reina ..... 135 Patio de los Leones (Court of the Lions) ..... 143 Patio de los Leones, showing Sta- lactite roof in one Portico . . 145 Sala de las Dos Hermanas (Hall of the Two Sisters) . . . 146 (a) Design of a Stalactite Ceiling ; (b) Mosaic, showing the geometrical composition of pattern . .152 Sala de los Abencerrajes . . 154 Courtyard of the Mosque . . 159 CANALEJAS [This chapter relates to an interview at Madrid on October 25, 1912, and was written in London on November 10. Canalejas was shot while walking in the Puerta del Sol, Madrid, on November 12, and died in a few moments. He was in his 5Qth year. The narrative has been left, as it was written, in the tense of the living.] FOR many reasons Senor Don Jose Canalejas, the Premier (or Presidente del Consejo, to give him his exact title) of Spain, is one of the most interesting of European political leaders. He is the man whom observers from without regard as the only man able to remake Old Spain ; he has already done much to establish a firm and ordered govern- ment ; he is quite likely to have a revolution on his hands ; and he has recently drawn the eyes of Europe upon him by breaking a great railway strike through one of those sudden coups de main which, whatever their ultimate effect, win admiration at the time by reason B >; ;/j :;;;-;/:;SP^ISH SKETCHES of their ingenious application of little-used resources to meet the sudden needs of a country. In Spain the railways are owned by private companies, who pay very low wages and exact very long hours the ordinary railway hand receiving only two or three pesetas (15. 8d. or zs. 6d.) for a day never less than ten and often twelve hours long. A railway strike almost universal in its extent was begun, and threatened to paralyse the country's internal and external business, including postal communication. Canalejas soon found a way to deal with it. He sum- moned, under the powers of the military law, all the railway employees who were reservists to attend for military duty at their ordinary posts of railway work ; and being there they were ordered to do their usual tasks, and, as soldiers, they had to do anything they were told. Such a straining of the law would never be tolerated in a British com- munity there would be hosts of far from mute or inglorious Hampdens to raise the point that such a summons was not a bona fide CANALEJAS 3 call to military service ; but the Spanish strikers, without education, without strong leaders, and with the Spaniards' recent knowledge of the swiftness of military tri- bunals as evidenced in the shooting of Ferrer, did not care to risk it. There was no Winkel- ried amongst them to break the enemy's line by gathering a sheaf of spears into his own bosom, and the strike collapsed. Conscious, no doubt, that such a device of law could not be practised again, and ought not to be necessary where services of the State, such as the carriage of mails, are in question, Canalejas has introduced a Bill to punish with imprisonment the men who lead in railway strikes. It was during the Cortes' debates on this measure that I saw Canalejas at his house in the busy Calle de las Huertas, the Street of the Orchards, a name about as descriptive now as is St. Martin in-the-Fields or Emu Plains. The house is a splendid modern mansion formerly belonging to the Duchess of San Antonio, and connected, in street gossip, with one of those legends about B2 4 SPANISH SKETCHES prominent men which are believed or dis- believed according to party predilections. It is said that Canalejas, when he practised as an advocate, was counsel for the duchess in a long law-suit and lost the case ; and that as she did not pay his fees he insisted on her giving him this house. Canalejas has publicly denied this, with the usual consequences. His enemies say that a man who would do such a thing would think nothing of denying it ; his friends claim the denial of a Spanish caballero as conclusive. And as no black crow is ever lonely for long, some other houses which Canalejas owns (or is said to own) are, according to the same gossip, similarly associated with lost causes and impossible beliefs. My own first visit took place at midday, when Canalejas habitually receives as many newspaper representatives as choose to come, or any friend they bring. We assembled first in the secretary's room, where about a score of men from Madrid and other capitals were waiting. A young Government official CANALEJAS 5 was discussing with my sponsor, a famous German correspondent, his invention for recording in notation music as it is played, an invention which, strange to say, was stated a week later in a London paper to have been recently made by a Swiss electrician. Pre- sently we were summoned to another room and trooped across the fine outer court- yard of the house (where with characteristic Spanish happy-go-lucky incongruity a horse was being clipped and shod), then up a dwarf flight of stairs, along a narrow passage, and into a spacious reception-room, handsomely furnished and adorned at one end with a glass wall-case full of dolls 'his colleagues', whis- pered a perky little reporter as he whisked out his note-book. At this moment Canalejas bustled in with the quick footstep so notice- able in the Madrileno, and indeed in all Spaniards of the north, shook hands with such of the reporters as came in his way, and having nodded and laughed himself through the throng, stood leaning lightly on a chair and dashed off rapidly and quite impromptu 6 SPANISH SKETCHES his remarks on the Government's intentions as to the Strike Bill, his treatment by one of the Madrid papers over that matter, the purchase by the Government of Cervantes' house at Valladolid, and the expected compact with France it was accomplished two days later over Morocco. During the interview Canalejas answered at once and without apparent reservation such questions as the native or the acquired modesty of any reporter permitted him to ask, and finally beamed pleasantly at us all with the remark that he could think of nothing further to say. This was accepted as ' closing the incident '. Hearing from my friend that I had had some experience of the working of com- pulsory arbitration in Australia, Canalejas, observing that that country is muy socialista, invited me to meet him later, when he would be alone. At my next visit the lack of ceremony as to admission struck me even more than before. True, there were two men in uniform at the conciergerie who knew me ; but once past CANALEJAS 7 them, I was apparently free to find or lose my way in any part of the great mansion. Disliking this unchartered freedom, I loudly addressed an invisible ' Sefior ' and a door opened, disclosing a coachman in shirt-sleeves and with a lathered face. He told me to ' go straight on ' the invariable formula used in all countries by people who know the way to those who do not, as if in unconscious imitation of many of the moral philosophers and ethical guides of humanity. Interpreting this direction freely but cautiously, I found myself at Canalejas' door, and was admitted by the Premier with that particular enthu- siasm which is the essence of a Spanish greeting. It was certainly a great surprise that a man at the very time violently de- nounced by a great gathering of heady Socialists assembled at Madrid, and in a high degree unpopular with a class dangerous through its ignorance as well as through its miseries, should sit, as it were, with open doors and all the blinds pulled up. Probably, like Caesar, Canalejas thinks life not worth 8 SPANISH SKETCHES living if so much care has to be taken to preserve it. Taking both hands warmly and with a running comment of pleasure and welcome, Canalejas took me to a divan and sat down with a manner of cordial intimacy. He spoke admiringly of the great wealth and widespread prosperity of Australia, and then at once began to ask for information as to the working of compulsory arbitration there. He said he had tried in vain to get any literature on the subject (for he reads English), but he was familiar with the federal system, in which a single judge decides inter-State disputes in all industries, and the wages-board system of our individual States, in which the tribunal varies with varying trades or groups of trades. What he specially wanted to know was how far the system had succeeded in preventing or ending strikes, and what had been done with regard to imprisonment for striking. I told him that in very large industries and with bitter differences to excite them, working men could not always be brought to a standard CANALEJAS 9 of law so advanced as that which forbids strikes ; while in numberless instances, not heard of because they led to no sensation, strikes were avoided and arbitration resorted to as a matter of course. He heard with interest and approval what I had to say about the harmonizing effect of bringing the two sides together with an impartial chairman in private conference and letting them talk out their respective points of view ; but I think the practical partisan was not far off when I described the prosecution of leaders in the great coal strike. 'That involved', said he, ' holding up the railways, a great inter- ference with public services/ I pointed out that apart from a few isolated instances of light penalties, imprisonment was only im- posed on this one occasion, and that was when the strike was launched with less warning than Italy's descent on Tripoli, and in an industry which was not only vital to our private businesses and public services, but which bulked largely in our overseas trading. Canalejas wholly approved of imprisonment io SPANISH SKETCHES in a case of such a strike without notice, for his own proposal involves an ' embargo ' of a month's notice, in the case of a railway strike. He does not, however, propose com- pulsory arbitration (which he had a day or two before denounced in the Cortes as ' hate- ful to liberty and to Liberals' abomination de la liber tad y del Liberalismo) but a voluntary tribunal, with representatives for each side, and a representative of the State, as being a third but neutral party. This last ingredient, logical as it is, the Socialists oppose out of utter, and, I am convinced, sincere, distrust of the neutrality of the Government. And on the main question, the taking away of the right to strike el derecho de huelga the Conservatives, led by Maura, are at one with the Socialists. There are evidently, then, troublous days ahead for Canalejas; but he is a brave, resourceful, and alert man. Meredith denned humour as ' strength and to spare ', and I left Canalejas feeling that his not undignified bonhomie, his gaiety and seeming happiness, cover a very CANALEJAS n strong and resolute nature, equal to its task and something more par negotiis atque supra. In personal appearance as well as in manner, Canalejas is the last man one would picture as quelling a revolt. He has nothing leonine, nothing severe, nothing intense about him. A shade below middle height, he stands, sits, or walks, with a loose and easy fashion of carelessness, though his build, if somewhat slack, is solid and strong. His face is by no means ' sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ' ; on the contrary, his very dark complexion is richly warmed and humanized by a lively blood. His hair and heavy moustache are without a touch of grey in them, though he is over fifty. His eyes dark and bright, though not piercing, are full of kindness, and a sort of buoyant mirth. He has a high and narrow forehead, such as we associate with the notion of a Castilian hidalgo, whether from Velazquez or from the portraits or prints of Pizarro, and a broad mobile mouth, with a jaw where especially 12 SPANISH SKETCHES you will see the outward signs of a strong pugnacious spirit. But (pace Lavater) . . . there is no art To read the mind's construction in the face ; one can only say of Canalejas that his face bespeaks force, courage, and intellect, and these, with his pervading friendliness of nature, are no bad equipment for a statesman who has to remake modern Spain. b/D o < s (3 (U H (13) AT THE CORTES THE popular chamber in Spain is the Congreso, a body of 406 members or diputa- dos, elected by the equal (and compulsory) suffrage of all men over 25, and making up with the Senado the Cortes. It meets in a spacious hall shaped like a semicircular theatre, of which the presidential bench (el sillon presidential) is the stage, but which has neither orchestra stalls nor boxes. All round the free floor-space run the members' seats, and above them galleries large enough for hundreds of spectators. On the right of the President, the front bench for ministers is the famous Banco Azul, so called because it is upholstered in rich blue cloth, bearing a golden crown in the centre, while the rest of the benches are crimson. The Banco Azul is fronted by a broad polished table running its whole length. There is no table of the House nor Bar. The rich and stately effect of this fine chamber is enhanced by a bright carpet in i 4 SPANISH SKETCHES the centre, displaying the arms and motto of Charles V two columns to represent the Pillars of Hercules, having the Globe between them, and the proud legend ' Plus Ultra'. Proud as is this motto, it was justly conceived in the epoch when two great victories of peace and war, the discovery of America and the Conquest of Granada, the last of the Moorish strongholds, had synchronized ; when the national mind had been exalted by Pizarro's conquest of Peru, and the national wealth increased by those vast wagon-loads of gold and silver, which the skill of Toledo and Valencia was to transmute into the exquisite jewel-work still sometimes seen in Spain ; and when the humblest Spaniard in the streets of any southern port might rub shoulders with the very men who had over- run Mexico and had stood, in fact, as Keats afterwards stood in the noble projection of a poet's imagination, beside ' stout Cortez ', . . . when, with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien. AT THE CORTES 15 But seen now, in a nation moth-eaten like its own antique tapestries and chasubles and robes of state, which has lost by sheer decay all its old expansion beyond the limits of its birth, this motto ' Further Yet ' seems at first only, in Burke' s words, ' to remind us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we are pursuing*. Yet here, if anywhere, in the Parliament of the modern nation, to these words of aspiration might be given a range and a meaning more glorious than in the days of Ferdinand and Isabella, if the high natural intelligence of the race could be turned to the prime necessity of education, and the amelioration of Spain's social condi- tions. And then, by the individual self- discipline and self-development which go with self-government, Spain might yet achieve a greatness more real than any she has yet known. The galleries were filled, for the most part by working men, when the deputies strolled in. A dozen ushers (porteros) in swallow- tailed blue costumes, loaded with gold braid, hastily drew on their white gloves as the 16 SPANISH SKETCHES President came in, accompanied by the vice- presidents and four secretaries. This official procession was preceded by a pair of amazing figures, perhaps best described as Beefeaters. These were the maceros or mace-bearers of the Chamber, and, except that they wore trousers andboots instead of knee-breeches and buckled shoes, their costume was very much like that of the traditional halberdiers. The gorra, or flat-topped head-dress such as still figures on the jack in a suit of cards, the capes, the doublets, the slashed sleeves in sumptuous velvet and silk, and the lace ruffles at the wrist, were all present ; while a sort of apron, stretched with a comfortable rotundity under the open cloak, displayed, just where bodily well-being had reached for the time its maximum outward curve, the legend, proud of the present and not unhopeful of the future, 'Plus Ultra'. In Spain the great ambition is to obtain some Government post in which to live the life of a Canon (vida de canonigos), and so reach the felicity expressed in the proverb ' as fat as a Canon ' gordo como un canonigo. AT THE CORTES 17 The maceros stood solemn and silent at each side of the curtained alcove at the extreme rear of the stage, and in the unfailing punc- tuality with which they changed guard every half-hour, if in no other respect, they main- tained the claims of order and settled practice in the Assembly. The President and secre- taries (all in ordinary dress and without any robes of office) filed into their places at the long table in front of the stage or rostrum, a clerk sat below in a box like that of an associate, and throughout the session deputies strolled up between the maceros and the President, talking to him or his confreres as they wished. Very soon a votacion nominal or vote without going into the lobby (which is never done) and without written papeles, which is the most solemn form of voting, was taken. The secretaries, aided by the clerk, wrote down the names of those present on what seemed from the gallery a vast balance- sheet. No vote by voices or show of hands preceded this tiresome process ; apparently the lists of the result were drawn up according to the member's seat in the chamber or the c i8 SPANISH SKETCHES officers' knowledge of his party allegiance. The list was next read out, and each member rose at hearing his name and bowed silently, much as on motion day in the courts the presiding judge asks each barrister ' Do you move ? ' and the latter proves that he does not move by rising and bowing. The votacion nominal having concluded, the clerk announced the concurrence of the Senado (which has equal powers with the Congreso) in various bills, and then the debate on the proyecto de ley against railway strikes followed. During the first half-hour of flowery but quite unnoticed rhetoric from a graceful young Republican, conversation ran on freely, both on the benches and in the galleries. Spanish courtesy seemed to be proof against interrupting the speaker's evi- dent, though solitary, enjoyment, but it would not forgo the right to talk about the things that really mattered. Long before the speech was over, an exchange of wireless messages between one of the conservadores and the clerk (who had meantime moved up on to the rostrum) led to the latter pro- AT THE CORTES 19 ducing from a drawer in the presidential table some packets of pastilles of cafe y leche wrapped in white paper, with the Govern- ment stamp in gold. By this time members were in all attitudes and in all parts of the chamber, and the gold-braided ushers moved busily amongst them, handing out this literal variety of the sweets of power. All was going smoothly, when the first speaker gave way to Sefior Y , a big and burly Re- publican, with a voice to vanquish the clamours of the bull-ring. He had strong views about regulation 506 and the votacion nominal of the previous day. Pastilles were soon forgotten as members shouted support or defiance wherever they happened to be. In the midst of these rumores (the modern Spanish frequently harks back to pure Latin), the jangling of the President's bell (cam- panillazo) broke, but broke unheeded. At last his high thin voice was audible, and he began his ruling. After two or three quiet and judicial sentences, the slight but fiery count broke suddenly out into a willing onslaught on the speaking deputy, accusing C 2 20 SPANISH SKETCHES him of piling up palabras y palabras y pala- bras, and freely expressing his own view on the strike question. Sefior Y- replied with equal passion and a louder voice ; the house took sides vocally ; while the President rang his bell, pounded it on the table, almost sprang out of his seat, and finally in despair gave the right-hand secretary a vigorous and reproachful nudge, with an evident appeal to him to do something to assist. That officer sprang to his feet, and poured fresh reproof on the offender, while the clerk below rose up, pale but helpful, with his tiny missal of Standing Orders or reglamentos del Congreso. It was all useless ; but at last a chain of members standing between the Banco Azul and the rostrum passed the word that Cana- lejas would speak. The President swung to his right, caught the Premier's pido la palabra ' I claim to speak ' and called him. At once the waves died down as the master of Spain arose. His fine oratory, notable even in a nation of orators, soon reduced the bull- voice to silence, and he then took the oppor- tunity, whether by design or by a rare AT THE CORTES 21 impulse of impatience, to denounce the revo- lutionaries who were imperilling the monarchy and the whole social order. The effect was astonishing. The bull-voiced deputy glided out silent through silent members, and Cana- lejas' ascendancy was so manifest that one ceased to wonder that whenever he was half an hour late the political world began to talk of a crisis. All the more so because he was too straightforward ever to catch el catarw de Sagasta the cold which used to keep Sagasta, a former Premier, away from the Cortes whenever a difficult situation arose. But even though it succeeded, it was doubtful whether this challenge to the violent sections of the community was judicious. In travelling through Spain, I had found that, to a stranger from the Antipodes, people of all sorts talked freely enough about the doubtful permanence of the existing order. In Granada, for instance, a thoughtful man, who had given his hostages to fortune, pre- dicted that a republic would come very soon, and that it would come as the result of dis- 22 SPANISH SKETCHES content throughout all classes, and not only in the industrial world. This was, it is true, in southern Spain, where, it is said, most people are either Republicans or else Carlists adhering to Don Jaime ; but for many reasons the country as a whole has in its soil the germs of revolution. While the rich Spaniard lives out of Spain, the mass of the people is in terrible poverty a few minutes* walk from the heart of Madrid will show you the wretched and also dear odds and ends of foodstuffs the people have to eat. ' A poor widow/ wrote Carlyle of the days before 1789, ' is gathering nettles for her children's dinner. A perfumed seigneur, lounging in the (Eil-de-Bceuf , hath an alchemy by which he can extract the third nettle, and call it rent.' The streets of every town are crowded with abject mendicants, appealing to 'charitable souls' (almas caritativas), and at every railway stop in Andalucia swarms of ill-clad women and children clamber up to the carriage windows, with the gipsy-whine of ' Senorito, sefiorito ! un po j de comer (a little food) !', and hang on like flies till the train, so to speak, brushes AT THE CORTES 23 them off ; there is a visible blight of penury even in the public offices of the country. Lastly, there is a widespread disbelief in the integrity of the officials, and even of the deputies. ' We have good laws enough/ said one Spaniard, voicing a common senti- ment of Spanish writers, ' but they are never enforced/ For more than half a century edu- cation has been according to the statute-book compulsory, yet 63 per cent, of the nation can neither read nor write. With a population of 20,000,000, only 32,000,000 pesetas the peseta is a shade less than the franc was spent on education in 1911, about is. 3^. per person. Nine million pesetas, more than a quarter of the cost of education for the whole country, is the Civil List for the king and his family. But though uneducated, the Spanish proletariat is not, like the Russian, stupid and apathetic. In the country dis- tricts the untutored wit of the people is alert, ready, and seasoned with refmnes, or proverbs and saws, such as those with which Sancho Panza still delights us. Educated Spaniards are proud of this ' grey grammar ' 24 SPANISH SKETCHES (gramdtica parda) of the common people ; and the newspapers (which can be posted throughout Spain for a tiny stamp sold at forty for a penny) carry political information broadcast any man who can read gathering his unlettered comrades about him, when at once there begins a keen discussion. Away in the north, Barcelona is a volcano always threatening and often breaking out, and every city and village in Spain has its political seismographs, which record each tremor of that fierce centre. In Madrid, a stone's throw from the Cortes, there is a stately corner house, the property of a clerical order, the street-door of which is armoured and opens outwards only, while the balcony shutters are of steel construction pierced with rifle- holes commanding three streets. All this was due to the experience of one eruption of Barcelona. And thus, for all the gaiety, kindness, and innate hospitality of the Spanish, the secret fires of revolution find a sensitive area for their influence all over Spain. A population more truly naive, warm-hearted, and lovable, AT THE CORTES 25 it would be hard to find the Spaniards are by nature the happy children of the western family a nation more undermined by desperate ignorance, bitter need, and burning discontent perhaps does not exist in Europe. IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ AT THE PRADO THE visitor who, with the Australian's bent for scrutinizing the horse and his rider, sits in the Museo del Prado at Madrid and looks at Velazquez' famous equestrian por- traits of Philip IV and his minister, the Count-Duke Olivares, becomes conscious of a difference amounting to contrast which at first is hard to define. Presently he realizes that this difference lies not in the way either man or horse is treated, but in the way each man sits his horse. The king young, lithe, fresh-complexioned rides like a man who finds his daily pleasure in the saddle ; and, more striking still, Velazquez has chosen just the moment when the huntsman or the warrior in him has been stirred by the sight of a distant quarry not in the picture. His easy and confident seat at once becomes a little straighter, a little more vigilant, and VELAZQUEZ Portrait of Philip IV (painted about 1627) Anderson Photo] (26) VELAZQUEZ Portrait of the Duque d'Olivares, Minister of Philip IV (painted about 1640) Anderson Photo} (27) IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ 27 this added alertness is expressed, too, in a slight erectness of the head and a search- ing gaze in the eye. Olivares, on the other hand, bulky and overgrown, sits bunched up in, rather than on, his military saddle, like a sack of meal, and would apparently slip over his horse's tail but for the saddle's high afterpiece. Velazquez, of course, intended no such contrast. That it exists is due not to an effort to make his patron look less a horse- man than his king, but to his infallible eye for human character, as betrayed by every incident of pose and look and gait. Olivares sits, as Heine says Napoleon sat, ' carelessly, almost hanging from his horse ' (nachlassig, fast von seinem Pferde abhangend), because, like Napoleon, he cared nothing for horse- manship. Long years spent, not in the saddle, but in the cushioned seat of Chief Councillor of State, have left him flabby and ungainly, just as the love of exercise and sport has given the king the ease and grace and level glance which Pater so admired in the procession of young Athenian knights 28 SPANISH SKETCHES from the frieze of the Parthenon. True, Velazquez would paint nothing in these pictures from life, except the faces, and these at brief sittings (Pacheco, his father- in-law, records, as something remarkable, one sitting of three hours when the king ' actually laid aside his state for all that long time '). But when the painter came to complete his work as equestrian portraits he was not content merely to hoist his sitters on to the conventional rocking-horses of the court artist; to carry out the full presentment he made them live and look and ride as he had seen them. It is for such a faculty that Velazquez deserves to be called the king of naturalistic painting. From the age of 25 till his death at 61 he was court painter, and therefore restricted chiefly to reproducing the royal family, the great personages of the court, and also the dwarfs, buffoons, and idiots, whom the strange taste of the times kept in every palace entourage. Yet, whatever por- trait he was painting, Velazquez seems first to have presented his own mind as a mirror VELAZQUEZ El Primo (painted in 1644) Anderson Photo] (29) IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ 29 to the character as well as the figure and lineaments, or better perhaps to the character seen in the figure and lineaments, of his sitter. Compare, for example, the buffoon Pablillos with the dwarf El Primo. Pablillos is declaim- ing, he stands legs wide apart, right arm flung out, left arm clutching his robes. The face is vacant and stupid, the pose forced and awkward a professional fool is imitating the gestures of an actor or orator, but cannot simulate his fire or his intelligence one is sorry for the exhibition and the man who makes it. The dwarf, El Primo, on the other hand, is less than a man only in the length of his legs. Velazquez must have respected the self-respect of this grave-eyed earnest son of affliction. He paints him in a wild and hilly solitude, a fine chambergo a wide, flat, voluminous head-dress on his head ; books, ink, and pen by his side, and on his knees a noble parchment volume, of which he turns the leaves thoughtfully as he looks up. Over the strong saddened features and splendid expanse of forehead broods a look of reserve almost forbidding ; this man has learnt how 30 SPANISH SKETCHES readily the scorn of the empty-headed is vented on physical defects, and his face carries a constant guard against such obloquy. Both pictures are marvels of technical skill. Pablillos' swinging entrance on the stage and the flowered black on black of El Primo's costume would alone make them master- pieces, but it is the penetrative sympathy of Velazquez' genius for type and character which makes them more. Was it this power in Velazquez that made one artist describe his work as the ' theology of painting ', and that made Reynolds exclaim that ' Velazquez does at once what we others spend a lifetime trying to do ' ? If so, Reynolds himself succeeded in such noble portraits as those of Johnson and Burke in the National Portrait Gallery, even if many of his court and fashion- able people seem the quintessence of formalism compared to the living and breathing realities of Velazquez. It is common to speak of the few sacred and mythological pictures painted by Velaz- quez as wanting in imaginative power or idealization. This is probably true in that, IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ 31 except in one picture ' The Crucified ' Velazquez never pushed open the ivory gates between the world as we know it and the other world of poetry and of worship. Thus ' La Fragua de Vulcano ', in which the Vulcan, an ordinary Spanish smith, naked to his apron, turns away from working with his mates at the forge to listen to Mercury's tale of his wife's infidelity, though depicting admirably the start of puzzle and incredulity in a common man made cuckold, is for this very reason a travesty of the passions that vexed Olympus. Not at the foot of Jove's throne should such a Vulcan, himself the maker of the Avenger's thunderbolts, lay bare the guilt of Venus and of Mars. This is more a matter for the blacksmith to bring before the divorce judge in proceedings by way of rule nisi against the guardsman. Granted, however, the lack of the divine or the heroic in the picture, Velazquez, who probably knew quite well that air and not aether was the natural breath of his own nostrils, has painted the scene as he thought it out with a splendid fidelity. His other 32 SPANISH SKETCHES classical picture of Mars again, though only a magnificent young model in a helmet, with the heavy moustache of a cavalry colonel, is a piece of flesh-painting Rubens would have admired, for Velazquez was the only Spanish artist of whom Rubens spoke with any enthusiasm or with whom he would consort during his long stay at Madrid in 1628. The pose of this little-known picture suggests an imitation of Michael Angelo's ' II Pensieroso ', though Velazquez had not been to Florence when he painted it. If so, it is the only instance of any sort of imitation, or perhaps even of influence, in Velazquez* works. Critics assert that the teaching of Titian and of Tintoret is to be seen in the pictures painted after his first visit to Italy ; others reject this, and say that Rubens alone, or El Greco alone, ever affected him. It might with greater force be argued that the twelve portraits of the Apostles painted by Rubens for the Due de Lerma, and now hanging in the long corridor of the Prado, disclose in their unwonted sobriety of colour and their patient attempt at IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ 33 characterization, the influence which is not unusually exerted by a sterner nature over a man of a genius more florid and diffuse. In point of fact, Velazquez seems to have borrowed little from any painter. Nor did he need. For his own work his own method was early perfected, and he would have spoilt the master-talent of all his talents fidelity to visual impression had he engaged in a futile pursuit of Renascence idealization or tried to impart to his work the coarse exuberance of Rubens's palette or the fine exuberance of Titian's. IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ AT THE PRADO II IN the Velazquez Sala hang no less than forty pictures, and elsewhere in the gallery are another twenty, so that it has been the unique good fortune of Velazquez to have the greater number of his works, including the best, left where he painted them. Of those in the Sala two are without equal, and, indeed, without rival, of their kind amongst the world's masterpieces 'Las Meninas' as an interior, and ' La Rendici6n de Breda ' or ' Las Lanzas ' as an historical painting. Both are familiar in engravings and photographs, though for some reason possibly the thin- ness of the paint, through which you can almost see the canvas at times Velazquez* pictures seem to bear reproduction of any sort worse than any other painter's. This is most marked in the case of the picture known as 'The Topers' (Los Borrachos), where the VELAZQUEZ Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) (painted in 1656) Anderson Photo} (35) IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ 35 laugh of the young peasant in the centre of the picture has, even in the best engravings and photographs, a touch of the cynical and saturnine, always disagreeable, but in a young face intolerable. In the original, by some subtle and untranslatable delicacy of line, either in the upper lip or in the eye- brows, the whole expression is that of a care-free and jolly carcajada, or explosion of mirth. To paint ' Las Meninas ', which is a very large picture, 10 ft. 4 in. high and 8 ft. n in. wide, and in which nine life-size figures are seen without the slightest effect of crowding, Velazquez is said to have stood as we see him, at his great easel, but with a mirror reflecting his studio in the royal palace. In the centre is the dainty, prim little figure of the four-year-old Infanta, Dona Margarita Maria. Baby as she is, she seems (at least in this scene, for in other pictures by Velaz- quez she is a delightful little blossom) too much the child of both her parents to be altogether pleasing. Her somewhat hard little mouth is a direct inheritance from her mother, D 2 36 SPANISH SKETCHES Mariana de Austria, the king's second wife, to be seen in a picture in the same room ; while the stiffness and disdain of the half- averted head recall the story of her father's royal capacity to sit through a comedy or an audience of state without once moving a muscle. She is taking, without so much as a glance of thanks, a goblet of water from one of the meninas (maids-of -honour), while the other bends with a pretty deference to assist in the solemn function. So much, probably, Velazquez was commanded to paint. But his feeling for life led him to make out of the command-picture only the nucleus of interest in a broadly-painted scene, rich in incident and glowing with the radiance and intimacy of a royal home. On the left he stands himself, looking up from his easel to paint from the reflection in the mirror ; on the right the foreground is taken up by a charming piece of by-play I shall presently describe. In the middle distance are faintly visible two members of the household, and on the wall at the back of the room hangs a mirror in which can be seen the long, IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ 37 pointed face of the King, Philip IV, and by it his wife's. The royal pair helped to give the picture its former name, ' La Familia ', but it is still a puzzle how Velazquez arranged to get their reflection in a painting itself reflected. Possibly the whole picture was painted naturally, the king and queen stand- ing by Velazquez' side out of the picture, but opposite the wall-mirror, and the artist adding afterwards his own portrait, with the customary aid of a mirror in front of him, used for this- purpose only. One of the greatest marvels in this beauti- fully ordered and balanced composition is the effect of the open door at the back of the studio, which lets in a flood of sunlight the golden beam at the foot of the door was done in one amazing brush-stroke and shows behind it a dwarf stair leading to a further cabinet. This distant chamber gets a bright lighting of its own, in which is seen a man's figure (said to be the queen's quartermaster, Don Jose Nieto) in the act of raising a curtain and turning to look at the principal scene. Nothing ever done by Van Hoogh in the way 38 SPANISH SKETCHES of prolonging the feast of light from a mellow interior onwards and outwards into a second picture (in higher tones) of a court or garden seen through some door, or passage, or arch- way, excels in its happy suggestion this exquisite interior, brighter because nearer to the sunshine of the world without. It is a long way from Van Hoogh, with his slow- footed, silent-seeming housewives at their homely tasks, to the animated moment in which the Princess of all the Asturias, the cynosure of many eyes, takes a glass of water with indispensable state and ritual ; but the truth to nature of two great artists has bridged the gulf, not only in the similarity of the scheme of composition and of the effects of lighting, but in the resultant felicity with which the privacy, order, and peace of home are suggested to the spectator's mind. The ugly squat figure of the idiot dwarf, Barbola, who gazes vacantly at the twentieth century as she gazed vacantly at the seventeenth, is no blemish on the total effect, while Landseer himself never painted the nature one might almost say the human nature of VELAZQUEZ The Surrender of Breda (painted in 1647) Anderson Photo'] (39) IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ 39 the dog better than Velazquez has done in the mastiff who lies in the right of the fore- ground. A male dwarf, Pertusato, this time a perfectly-made little mannikin, has put his foot with an impish air on the dog's hindquarters as he dozes. Lazily, sulkily, doubtfully, the dog turns without opening his eyes or even raising his drooping muzzle. You feel that he is thinking how much further he will submit to be disturbed, while the dwarf is thinking whether he dare disturb him any further. The drawing is so perfect that you can see through the silk stocking how the dwarf's delightful little leg is just held in poise, ready to squeeze harder or to pull back according to the tactical develop- ments of the moment in this battle of wits. 'The Surrender of Breda/ often called ' Las Lanzas ' , shows the same sympathy in the conception of a scene on its human side, when Velazquez came to imagine this hard- won and belated triumph of Spain's war with the Netherlands. Justin of Nassau has brought out the city's massive key, and his staff and burghers stand in dejected attitudes 40 SPANISH SKETCHES to see it handed over. But by a most happy stroke of invention, Velazquez represents the victorious Spinola as not even looking at the key in the ardent haste of a generous conqueror to embrace and console the beaten foe. Spinola stretches out his right arm eagerly to take Justin by the shoulder a gesture common in Spain between relations or friends when meeting and his face (to which a singular refinement is given by the delicate moulding of the brow and temples) is aglow with a kindness and a sympathy which outshine its intellectual power and keenness. One recalls Roberts to Cronje at Paardeberg : ' You have made a brave defence, sir/ The incident is absent from the formal court reproduction of the actual scene by one Jose Leonardo, hanging in another room ; to have invented it was a fine compliment to Spinola, the friend and once the travelling-companion of Velazquez, but it was a finer compliment still to the character of his countrymen. Volumes might be and have been written IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ 41 upon Velazquez' power of painting light and air in great, free spaces, where his figures live, and move, and have their being, delivered from any appearance of artifice or imitation, real men in a real atmosphere on a real earth. Philip IV is said once to have entered Velazquez' studio towards twilight, and to have said to the portrait (now in the National Gallery of London) of Admiral Pareja, whom he had ordered to sea, ' What, still here ? ' It does not need such stories, always current since the birds pecked at the grapes of Zeuxis, to make good Velazquez' fame as a realist. But as well as realism on the plastic side Velaz- quez has a perfection as a colourist, which is implicitly denied to him by those who label him as a painter with a ' pervading silver-grey ' or a ' subtle blue-grey undertone '. A great English etcher perhaps the greatest living English etcher whom I met at Madrid, was indignant at this generalization. Velazquez, in fact, has no mannerism, or even any dominating tendency in his use of colour. There are silver-greys in the splendid sagacious 42 SPANISH SKETCHES old head of the Aesop, just as there are in the beflounced and crinolined dress of the Infanta in ' Las Meninas', and again in the portrait (so called) of Maria Theresa ; but that is because the objects Velazquez was painting were silver-grey, not because he washed his canvas, so to speak, with that pre-ordained colouring. His tones are as various as those he had before him the soft rich yellow jerkin on the young Dutchman's back in ' Las Lanzas ' has nothing in common with the dead lustreless yellow in ' The Cruci- fixion ' and his values melt into one another, not into a common bath. There have been artists who, whatever the colours they set out on the palette, yet had a habit of reducing them all to one common denominator. Rem- brandt did this with but a few tones, out of an idolater's love for chiaroscuro. Whistler too, though not for ever wedded to one set of colours, deliberately painted and named his pictures according to one prevailing note, ' A Symphony in White/ ' A Nocturne in Blue and Gold/ &c. Again, Giorgione, with IMPRESSIONS OF VELAZQUEZ 43 his glowing reds, is never the slave of the same lamp as Carlo Dolci, with that incessant trick of getting transparency of skin by a plentiful infusion of blue. But Velazquez, who now and then might be thought to have used Dolci's artifice, had no fixed preference for any one overmastering tint ; he painted all complexions, all fabrics, and all surfaces with the colours and values that belonged to them. No painter has less subjectivity or predisposition in the use of pigments ; his only pervading characteristic is that, while he used all colours, he used them with the restraint and severity which are as much the expression of mastery as is variety or fearlessness. And if, after all, half the interest of pictures is in their revelation of the man behind them, one cannot leave the Prado without feeling, more than before, that with all Velazquez' uncompromising seriousness in painting just what he saw, be it the cunning eye and pursy dewlap of Olivares, the petulant mouth of the queen, or the melancholy, irregular 44 SPANISH SKETCHES beauty of the widow Ipenarrieta, yet the painter whose stern, proud features look out at us over the heads of * Las Meninas ' had a soul sensitive to the lightest stroke of beauty, and a nature that saw and enjoyed all that was genial and human in the life around him. o Q W O h C\J . ,, c U -a s I 53 Cu QJ (47) TOLEDO 47 house of El Greco, now one of the sights of Toledo, was originally the home of the famous Rabbi Ben Ezra, a man who might have stood beside Lessing's Nathan der Weise for character, and who, besides, carried all the learning of the time. Certainly it has been the ruin of Toledo to have chased into more tolerant countries the most indus- trious artificers the Moors and the most capable merchants the Jews to be found within its walls. In wandering through Toledo you never lose for long the recollection that you are walking over the battlefield of opposing faiths. Out- side the church of San Juan de los Reyes there still hang, rusting but slowly in the dry upland air of central Spain, scores upon scores of the very chains in which the Moors in their day of domination hanged the Christians at this spot, or imprisoned them in dungeons elsewhere. To balance this spectacle you may see just behind the cathedral an inn, called the Posada de la Hermandad the Inn of the Brotherhood. This is the old house of the Holy Inquisition, and over the Gothic 48 SPANISH SKETCHES gateway are the arms of the Catholic kings and quaint wooden figures of an archer and an alguacil. The door of this building (which smacks more of brotherhood now than it ever did when it was named) is like many portals in Toledo, a lofty and solid structure, studded all over with great metal bosses, and having two large knockers, one at the height of a rider's hand, and one for people on foot. The fastenings are many and strong, and above is a spy- window, so that, short of artil- lery fire, or treachery, there was little chance of visitors entering without welcome. Inside the great door a wide built-in courtyard, with casks and two-eared pipkins of wine, prettily decorated now with a little shelf of flower-pots, leads by a narrow passage into the main room of the inn. In one corner of this the landlady was cooking a dinner, fragrant enough to melt the judgement of Esau, at a fireplace obviously built after the room ; a few wicker chairs and wooden tables stood about ; on the walls were saddle- pegs covered with gear, and along one side TOLEDO 49 ran a broad bench, opposite the centre of which can still be seen one big flagstone. A splendid panelled ceiling, black with age, is the only thing of dignity left in what was the dread tribunal of olden times. The accused stood on the central flagstone, which was lifted if he was found guilty, to lower him into the dungeons below. Returning to the entrance-court in order to see these dungeons, I was led through a labyrinth of narrow twisting passages, with doorways every few feet at some turning for no risks of escape were taken in those days down a cobble-stone slope, flanked on one side by a fowl-roost, every prisoner in which looked dejected as if with the presage of a coming fire, into a sort of small patio, well lighted from above. Round three sides of this tiny courtyard were the dungeons, walls and arches three feet thick in solid masonry, and in one of them two chambers for immuring alive the worst offenders. These chambers are simply niches, such as those used for the figures of saints, man-high, and needing only to be bricked up in front to settle the fate of the heretic E 50 SPANISH SKETCHES if not that of his heresy. The whole place is used now as donkey-stables to the inn. The vicissitudes of creed through which Toledo has lived are naturally reflected in the remains of public monuments here. True there is no mosque (except the small Cristo de la Luz) at Toledo ; for the Moors, when they took the town, found a Christian church on the site of the present cathedral and con- verted that into their chief mosque. But the Christian churches contain portions of Moorish edifices which are often considerable, as in the case of the noble tower of San Tome ; and the opulence and piety of the Jews have left their traces in the Sinagoga del Transito and in the converted synagogue now known as the Church of Santa Maria la Blanca. Both these places of Hebrew worship seem to have been built on the outskirts almost of the then city. The synagogue was built at the expense of Samuel Levy (Abu-leifa), treasurer to Peter the Cruel. Though said to have been consecrated as a church in honour of the death (trdnsito) of the Virgin, it has neither aisles nor altar, chapels nor nave, but TOLEDO 51 is simply a great hall, austere almost to the point of barrenness, if it were not for the rich arabesques graven on its walls, which carry Hebrew texts from the Psalms of David. Few buildings suggest so impressively as this the house of prayer, and one is thankful that the perverted taste of the Renaissance for florid decoration was never set to work on this masterpiece of simplicity and reverent dignity. It is a common and just complaint that the great Gothic cathedrals of Spain have been robbed in Renaissance times of all, or almost all, the noble effects of their designers by building across the nave a gaudy choir or trascoro. Fortunately in the other synagogue (i.e. Santa Maria la Blanco), which has served in its turn as an asylum for Magdalenes, a barrack, and a storehouse, and even (as an inscription records) as a market for 'enseres' or chattels, the original design was never broken in upon by a mad desire to enrich and glorify. Its fine aisles and massive Moorish arches, on rich columns, still give what they were meant to give, a feeling every worshipper must have had E2 52 SPANISH SKETCHES whenever he knelt upon his praying-mat, that a forest of tree-trunks and overshadowing foliage surrounded him and his orisons with the very breath and majesty of nature itself. In the cathedral, on the other hand, for all its renown as ' la rica ', the unity of plan has been spoilt by planting across a nave that would have been as magnificent as that of Cologne a great intrusive break-of-view in the shape of a trascoro and choir adorned with exterior altars, elaborate carvings, stately choir-seats, and finally the high altar and the retablo filled with statuary and with multiplied adornments in the wrong place. It must strike any spectator that in accepting gifts of pictures or of images for its great churches the Catholic Church has been all too catholic. It seems to have been enough that a pious donor was willing to give even the worst of pictures or statues or the tawdriest of votive offerings, for the gift to be accepted. And yet the cathedral, as it is, overtops, after all, the best of Moorish or of Hebrew work, and it does this by the deeper thoughtfulness of its true original plan, and still more by those TOLEDO 53 indescribable glories of colour used to fill up and at the same time define exquisite outlines, which early Christian builders had at their command in the traceried windows of glass, stained as no modern glass can be stained. In Toledo the nave is flanked on either side by two aisles running up to a double ambulatory at the high-altar end of the church, and the architect has so placed the windows that those of the exterior aisle are visible for their full length below the arches of the interior aisle, and the windows of this latter again are seen clear of the arches of the nave, as if, indeed, it had been deliberately done to give an instance of . . . storied windows richly dight Casting a dim religious light. But it is here, and here only, that Christian influence has triumphed. The manner of life and the living-houses of Toledo are all pure Oriental. Cervantes' house, now the Posada de la Sangre, like many others, has a large courtyard surrounded by a balcony, exactly like those patios of southern Spain which have 54 SPANISH SKETCHES proved one of the most exquisite gifts of the Moorish mind to the invaded country. You see all kinds of trades carried on in low-arched hutches on the street front just as at Cairo. At midday the population lie down in their blankets in the Zocodover or market-place, warmed by a kindlier fire than that which was often lighted here for an auto de ft ; the men draw their capes up over the mouth just as the conquered Moors are shown in a contemporary picture of their gregarious baptism after Granada's fall, and just as Italian soldiers in Tripoli could see the Bedouin guarding himself against sudden dust whirls ; the women wear black shawls coming over the forehead, and covering the mouth in a way that recalls the yashmak of the Mohammedan ; the girls go pitcher on head or at hip to the fountain just as the maiden Rebecca may have done when she lifted her eyes upon the young travel-stained Jacob. A city quite untouched by modern notions (except that, as generally in Spain, the electric light has succeeded lamplight without any interregnum of gas), with no footpaths or TOLEDO 55 kerbs, no building-line for its houses, no alignment for its tortuous and innumerable streets, and not even a horse-tram, Toledo, whose slender traffic is done by porters or primitive mule-drawn carts, and even by shod bulls and bullocks, gives the visitor first and last an indelible and a unique impression that he has lived for a while in the time as well as in the place of creeds and customs and people centuries in the wake of modern thought and modern activity. CORDOVA I ' CORDOBA MUERTA ', says the Spaniard, and says it, not with the contempt with which the Italian talks of ' Pisa morta ' but with the tone of regret for vanished glory which haunts the verse of some of the modern poets of Spain a regret which has only of late years been displaced by the manlier music, calling in harmony though not in unison for a national resurgence, which is heard in the speeches of Spain's orators of every party, in the songs of her theatres and in the writings of her public men. In truth, by no other comparison than by that with Death itself could the impression be conveyed which this ancient capital produces by its melancholy, its silence, and its white- ness, and the ever-present sense that here a myriad human activities have been stilled and frozen as if touched by the very wing of Azrael, the Angel of Death. The streets, as CORDOVA Cordoba Muerta : From a Photograph kindly lent by G. D. Delprat, Esq., Broken Hill, N.S. W. (56) -V I/IU CORDOVA 57 narrow in many places as a cart-track just formed in our own virgin bush, give back but rarely any echo from their grass-grown cobble stones, which look as if they did but barely hold their own against Nature's incessant effort to retrieve what man has won from her. It is a city where it would always be siesta, but for an occasional peasant moving slowly by his donkey's side, or a shovel-hatted priest in flowing soutane who paces on, his mouth covered with the end of his capa as if to protect him from the pestilence, the pictured embodiment of the leisurely dignity proper to a shepherd unencumbered by the care of many sheep. And yet for generations of the Arab dominion in Andalucia, the name of * Cordoba ! ' was like a trumpet at the lips of warlike Moors and in the ears of coveting Christians. Its rulers aimed at greatness in business as well as in religion, anticipating thus, in the days of high romance, the combining genius which was so often feted in Exeter Hall, and which prompted Holy Willie's petition That I for grace and gear may shine Abune them a* 58 SPANISH SKETCHES Here was the great but now decayed craft of the filigree workers, as well as a famous industry in morocco leather and the kindred trade in the stamped and gilded leather known as Cordovan, to supply material for which there must have been hecatombs of goats in the hills of the neighbouring campina, just as there are now in India for export to our industries at Botany. It was probably this Cordovan leather that Whistler smothered in the gorgeous blue and gold of the Peacock Room against the paltry and ignorant pre- dilections of the owner, according to Menpes's amusing story. Next perhaps to Toledo, Cordova was for centuries the richest centre of Spain's glory. And when the Christians came, it sent forth the Gran Capitan, Gonzalo Hernandez ; and later again, over its bridge rode forth the fanatic knot of regenerating cavaliers who are said to have suggested Don Quixote's adventures. But before this, in this same mosque at Cordova, which was a western Mecca to millions of Mohammedans, must have worshipped that learned Arab, Averroes, whom Dante honours with a place CORDOVA 59 in the Limbo of the good not-Christians as having made the great commentary (che il gran comento feo) on Aristotle ' the master of those who know '. And this tribute to the intellectual greatness of Averrofcs may well remind the Australian wandering in this land of golden memories, that it was from a Moorish or at least an Arabian source that Dante, himself a master of the science of his day, came to hear of the Southern Cross, becoming so fired by the thought of such a miracle in the heavens, that he feigns to have seen it at the beginning of his journey on the Hill of Purgatory. And as ours is the one country which can say that a part of its national flag was celebrated 600 years ago by Dante, I may be pardoned for quoting the passage lo mi volsi a man destra, e posi mente All' altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle Non viste mai fuor che alia prima gente. Coder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle. O settentrional vedovo sito, Poiche privato sei di mirar quelle ! Purg. i. 22-27. 60 SPANISH SKETCHES Then turned I to the right and gazed awhile, Where in the other pole four stars appear Known to our race before the great exile. Their cresset seemed the very heavens to cheer. O widowed region of the Northern sky That may 'st not look upon that glorious sphere ! (BADHAM.) But to return to the ' settentrional vedovo sito '. There is in Cordova one spot where life, vigour, and movement are still to be found, and that is in the morning market. Here, as in the markets of all the older European towns, you see the local and characteristic life of the people not yet planed down and sandpapered to a uniform type such as the dress, the wares, the doings, and the manners tend to attain in the commercial parts of all capitals. In the morning the peasant, munching his mouthful of bread and raw onion, brings in his mule, loaded with produce from what was once a very rich campina outside the city, but has now fallen into poverty with the neglect of the old irrigation (another science in which the Moors everywhere excelled) ; and by seven o'clock the market-place is packed so densely with laughing, quarrelling, cheating, and bar- .1 >> OH 2 Q u u (60) CORDOVA 61 gaining men and women that you can hardly see the merchandise for the merchants. When you do see what is for sale, a market in southern Spain eclipses in brightness and in the suggestion of richness and diversity the more business-like Halles of Paris or of Brussels. The exotic colouring of semi-tropical fruits and vegetables contributes to this, and so too does the fact that both small stock and poultry are more often sold alive than as meat, while quaint cheeses, bright fishes, and glossy giant chillies (as we call them) startle the eye, and sausages, rivalling those of the Fatherland in variety and equal to a Dutch picture by Snyders for gorgeous colouring, appeal to the picturesque in the stranger and to the practical in a race defiant of the virulence of ptomaine. Of all these edibles the best is also the least pretentious, viz. the Spanish fig, green when ripe, and so small that it might easily be passed over in contempt. It is in fact a very sweet and luscious variety, with a flesh so red that it is called in the happy homespun of the vernacular el hi go de sang' de rocin, the fig of hack's blood. Bearing in mind that both 62 SPANISH SKETCHES c and z are in Spanish pronounced ih y the reader will recognize the last word of this epithet in the name, ' famous and altisonant ' (to use the old translator's phrase), of Don Quixote's battle-charger ' Rozinante ', which is indeed but a baptismal euphemism invented after days of cogitation by the hero, in order to lift into the dialect and anticipated annals of chivalry a horse who had been ' a hack formerly ' (Rocin-antes). But above all, in its suggestion of the Orient, is the redolent atmosphere of peppers and spices that feelingly persuades the visitor how southern Spain still treasures what was brought to it from Arabia the fabled land of fragrance and sweet savours. And, thus prompted, you understand, too, why the Spaniards (as indeed all the southern races of Europe) are such good cooks. England has been said to have a hundred religions and only one sauce ; in Spain there may be only one religion, but there are certainly quite a hundred condiments. So wedded are these people to strong flavours that there may, after all, be something in the theory of these modern historians of the economic fur, who, believing O -B Q G o S (62) CORDOVA 63 that mankind, like an army, marches on its stomach, tell us that the desire to restore the supply of spices, unguents, and essences, which had been cut off when the Turks blocked the way from India, was the motive which first of all led men to speculate on the western route to that blessed and productive clime. Another point of interest in this market is that here, as elsewhere in Europe, the ab- surdity still prevails of the local octroi, and officials of the Customs see sharply to it that no peasant woman sells a basket of eggs, a sucking-pig, or a string of garlic before it has paid its good round ad valorem. The seller on her side, like a rustic Hampden in petticoats, fights valiantly against the tyranny of the tax-gatherer. The result is that the market is recognized as a sort of stadium, where those who are fond of seeing other people fight attend and support their fancy vocally, or silently enjoy the punishment of both champions ; or in a more sober simile, the crowded onlookers are like the audience in a court (but a court where no usher cries ' silence ') following the turns and twists of 64 SPANISH SKETCHES a cause celebre. It is, however, a very partisan public which looks on at an appeal case about the valuation for taxation purposes of a pig, brought before the Jefe de Consumos or Chief Octroi Officer, in which the argument, well sustained on both sides, becomes at length vociferous, the pig also having intervened at the hearing, though not in strictness an inter- ested party, at any rate at that stage. Leaving the Mercado, it is but a short walk to the famous mosque (La Mezquita), as every- one still calls it, though the Church authorities have baptized it as the Cathedral of Santa Maria de la Sede, this being the title they always gave to a captured and converted mosque as being henceforth a seat of the Faith. On the way, line after line is passed of low quiet houses all fresh from the white- washer's brush, the brocha del Uanqueador , which is never at rest in Andalucia, and which has covered up so much in decoration, and even blinded by its sterile monotony so much in design, of the older buildings. It is another point in which the Moorish practice persists in the life of the common people even against CORDOVA (a) A Plaza (/>) Moorish Bridge over the Guadalquivir, showing the Cathedral and old Walls From Photographs kindly lent by G. D. Delpmt, Esq., Broken Hill. N.S. W. (64) CORDOVA 65 their own racial promptings (for the Spaniards are a nation of colourists), and the contrast is sharp between the universal dead white of Andalucian buildings and the brilliant exuber- ance of house-colouring which is seen, for example, in Naples, and which is visibly the offspring of the very pigments used before Vesuvius blotted out Pompeii. In the old days the population must have been densely crowded in these great cities. It would take, for example, only twenty minutes to walk all round Toledo, a city once contain- ing 200,000 inhabitants, all of whom lived within the walls, and for the best of reasons because away from the walls there was more certainty about death than uncertainty about life. It is not, therefore, a tiresome stretch from the market to the mosque through what is a cemetery almost as much as a city ; but the view is hemmed in so that not even the campanario of the mosque is seen till you reach the crenellated walls, studded with watch-towers which now seclude, as they once protected, the House of Allah. The entry to the mosque is by the Door of Pardon (Puerta 66 SPANISH SKETCHES del Perdon) in the western wall, and on the kerb, opposite to this door, is a string of half a dozen stunted columns, said to be milestones taken from the Roman roads. All the pave- ment-space between this line of posts and the door was, in Christian times, ' sanctuary ' into which any criminal could come, if swift enough, to be sure of immunity from the civil arm. The Puerta del Perdon served, therefore, just the purpose of the old sanctuary crosses still to be seen in some English towns, the touching of which gave safety to the hunted murderer or thief. Strange that, when our Australian youngsters reach ' home ' in the game of 'tibbie, tibbie, touchwood', they keep alive the memory of the practice which gave its name to this Puerta del Perdon ! CORDOVA Puerta del Perdon (66) CORDOVA II. THE MOSQUE THE Puerta del Per don, through which the mosque is reached, is a noble door of Moorish design and plated with copper, now grey-green with age, on which is to be found the inscrip- tion, in Cufic characters, ' The lordship belongs to Allah and his protection/ For the characters and their translation, I take the word of Baedeker, but that they are here at all in a door built by a Christian emperor is not a new thing, for Moorish workmen, before the final expulsion of their race, took pleasure in the pious trick of making the Christian pay for Mohammedan inscriptions, which they passed off, no doubt, as so much mere flowing decoration. The Puerta leads first to the spacious Orange Court or Patio de los Naranjos a vast and desert courtyard, whose trees, now old and scraggy, and whose famous fountain, Al-Mida, now dingy and grey, carry forward into the desolate enclosure a melan- F2 68 SPANISH SKETCHES choly iteration of the threnody of sadness and decay in the city without. All the more sudden is the shock of wonder when, having crossed the Patio and entered the wall of the mosque, through the Puerta de las Palmas, the visitor wakes, as it were, out of the modern and real world to gaze with a start of delight that no heart could be too young or too old to feel, upon a wide and silent fairyland of antique beauty, mystery, and devotion. True, the design of this interior is almost childlike in the simplicity of its invention, the architectural plan having been to cover a vast area, almost equal to the floor-space of St. Peter's in Rome, with low parallel aisles of pillars surmounted by arches. Any child with a set of wooden blocks could have thought out such a scheme, or perhaps built it without thought by merely marshal- ling one arch behind another and flanking the colonnade thus formed by others parallel to it. But beauty in architecture is often what Horace found woman's beauty to be, ' simplex munditiis,' and the builders for the Abd-er-rahmans and other caliphs were of CORDOVA : THE MOSQUE 69 those who builded better than they knew, for this seemingly simple-minded notion of plant- ing some eighteen thousand square yards of land with rows of overarching trees in masonry has produced, as a result, not monotony, but an infinite variety of vistas according to the spectator's point of view and the direction of his gaze. The huge oblong is traversed by nineteen aisles or colonnades in its length from east to west, and as the arches over these aisles are placed at equal distances, there are resultant aisles from east to west, fourteen in number. It may seem difficult to believe how such a composition can give anything but repetition of the same view up and down each aisle, and of course this would be the case if the eye could be confined to looking merely from one end of an aisle to another. The secret of the infinite variety in this Cleopatra amongst buildings is that, as well as the straight up- and-down gaze (such as is to be had in the nave, for example, of a Gothic church) the vision of the spectator in this mosque takes in a fan-shaped area to right and to left of the 70 SPANISH SKETCHES aisle down which he is looking, and this area is full of colonnades seen slantwise. A well- planned orchard or nursery gives just the same experience. And as in such an orchard you see broad ways diagonally on either hand, as well as straight in front of you, so here from any point at the end of a colonnade, the arches right and left of the direct line of forward observation, fall into radiating lines seen at different angles to that direct line. Fill an oblong paper with nineteen equidistant dots in its length and fourteen in its breadth, and it will be seen that, from any spot on one side between two of such points, you can draw to the adjacent sides a whole series of lines running clear or nearly clear between the dots which cover the page. Further, the outside lines which bound this radiating series will be exactly equal if the spot from which all spring is in the centre of the line. But if that spot is near the end of the line, the outside rays of the fan will be very unequal, both in length and in the angles they make with a line drawn straight from the spot that is chosen to the opposite side. o| Q