unquestioning faith of the audience. To all foreigners the show is at
first shocking and then tedious; to the good people of Madrid it is a
sermon, full of absolute truth and vivid reality. The class of persons
who attend these spectacles is very different from that which you find
at the Royal Theatre or the Comic Opera. They are sober, serious
bourgeois, who mind their shops and go to mass regularly, and who come
to the theatre only in Lent, when the gay world stays away. They would
not dream of such an indiscretion as reading the Bible. Their doctrinal
education consists of their catechism, the sermons of the curas, and the
traditions of the Church. The miracle of St. Veronica, who, wiping the
brow of the Saviour in the Street of Bitterness, finds his portrait on
her handkerchief, is to them as real and reverend as if it were related
by the evangelist. The spirit of inquiry which has broken so many idols,
and opened such new vistas of thought for the minds of all the world, is
as yet a stranger to Spain. It is the blind and fatal boast of even the
best of Spaniards that their country is a unit in religious faith. Nunca
se disputo en Espana,--"There has never been any discussion in
Spain,"--exclaims proudly an eminent Spanish writer. Spectacles like
that which we have just seen were one of the elements which in a
barbarous and unenlightened age contributed strongly to the
consolidation of that unthinking and ardent faith which has fused the
nation into one torpid and homogeneous mass of superstition. No better
means could have been devised for the purpose. Leaving out of view the
sublime teachings of the large and tolerant morality of Jesus, the
clergy made his personality the sole object of worship and reverence. By
dwelling almost exclusively upon the story of his sufferings, they
excited the emotional nature of the ignorant, and left their intellects
untouched and dormant. They aimed to arouse their sympathies, and when
that was done, to turn their natural resentment against those whom the
Church considered dangerous. To the inflamed and excited worshippers, a
heretic was the enemy of the crucified Saviour, a Jew was his murderer,
a Moor was his reviler. A Protestant wore to their bloodshot eyes the
semblance of the torturer who had mocked and scourged the meek Redeemer,
who had crowned his guileless head with thorns, who had pierced and
slain him. The rack, the gibbet, and the stake were not enough to glut
the pious hate this priestly trickery inspired. It was not enough that
the doubter's life should go out in the blaze of the crackling fagots,
but it must be loaded in eternity with the curses of the faithful.
Is there not food for earnest thought in the fact that faith in Christ,
which led the Puritans across the sea to found the purest social and
political system which the wit of man has yet evolved from the tangled
problems of time, has dragged this great Spanish people down to a depth
of hopeless apathy, from which it may take long years of civil tumult to
raise them? May we not find the explanation of this strange phenomenon
in the contrast of Catholic unity with Protestant diversity? "Thou that
killest the prophets!"--the system to which this apostrophe can be
applied is doomed. And it matters little who the prophets may be.
THE CRADLE AND THE GRAVE OF CERVANTES
In Rembrandt Peale's picture of the Court of Death a cadaverous shape
lies for judgment at the foot of the throne, touching at either
extremity the waters of Lethe. There is something similar in the history
of the greatest of Spanish writers. No man knew, for more than a century
after the death of Cervantes, the place of his birth and burial. About a
hundred years ago the investigations of Rios and Pellicer established
the claim of Alcala de Henares to be his native city; and last year the
researches of the Spanish Academy have proved conclusively that he is
buried in the Convent of the Trinitarians in Madrid. But the precise
spot where he was born is only indicated by vague tradition; and the
shadowy conjecture that has so long hallowed the chapel and cloisters of
the Calle Cantarranas has never settled upon any one slab of their
pavement.
It is, however, only the beginning and the end of this most chivalrous
and genial apparition of the sixteenth century that is concealed from
our view. We know where he was christened and where he died. So that
there are sufficiently authentic shrines in Alcala and Madrid to satisfy
the most sceptical pilgrims.
I went to Alcala one summer day, when the bare fields were brown and dry
in their after-harvest nudity, and the hills that bordered the winding
Henares were drab in the light and purple in the shadow. From a distance
the town is one of the most imposing in Castile. It lies in the midst of
a vast plain by the green water-side, and the land approach is fortified
by a most impressive wall emphasized by sturdy square towers and
flanking bastions. But as you come nearer you see this wall is a
tradition. It is almost in ruins.
The crenellated towers are good for nothing but to sketch. A short walk
from the station brings you to the gate, which is well defended by a
gang of picturesque beggars, who are old enough to have sat for Murillo,
and revoltingly pitiable enough to be millionaires by this time, if
Castilians had the cowardly habit of sponging out disagreeable
impressions with pennies. At the first charge we rushed in panic into a
tobacco-shop and filled our pockets with maravedis, and thereafter faced
the ragged battalion with calm.
It is a fine, handsome, and terribly lonesome town. Its streets are
wide, well built, and silent v as avenues in a graveyard. On every hand
there are tall and stately churches, a few palaces, and some two dozen
great monasteries turning their long walls, pierced with jealous grated
windows, to the grass-grown streets. In many quarters there is no sign
of life, no human habitations among these morose and now empty barracks
of a monkish army. Some of them have been turned into military casernes,
and the bright red and blue uniforms of the Spanish officers and
troopers now brighten the cloisters that used to see nothing gayer than
the gowns of cord-girdled friars. A large garrison is always kept here.
The convents are convenient for lodging men and horses. The fields in
the vicinity produce great store of grain and alfalfa,--food for beast
and rider. It is near enough to the capital to use the garrison on any
sudden emergency, such as frequently happens in Peninsular politics.
The railroad that runs by Alcala has not brought with it any taint of
the nineteenth century. The army is a corrupting influence, but not
modern. The vice that follows the trail of armies, or sprouts,
fungus-like, about the walls of barracks, is as old as war, and links
the present, with its struggle for a better life, to the old mediaeval
world of wrong. These trim fellows in loose trousers and embroidered
jackets are the same race that fought and drank and made prompt love in
Italy and Flanders and butchered the Aztecs in the name of religion
three hundred years ago. They have laid off their helmets and hauberks,
and use the Berdan rifle instead of the Roman spear. But they are the
same careless, idle, dissolute bread-wasters now as then.
The town has not changed in the least. It has only shrunk a little. You
think sometimes it must be a vacation, and that you will come again when
people return. The little you see of the people is very attractive.
Passing along the desolate streets, you glance in at an open door and
see a most delightful cabinet picture of domestic life. All the doors in
the house are open. You can see through the entry, the front room, into
the cool court beyond, gay with oleanders and vines, where a group of
women half dressed are sewing and spinning and cheering their souls with
gossip. If you enter under pretence of asking a question, you will be
received with grave courtesy, your doubts solved, and they will bid you
go with God, with the quaint frankness of patriarchal times.
They do not seem to have been spoiled by overmuch travel. Such
impressive and Oriental courtesy could not have survived the trampling
feet of the great army of tourists. On our pilgrim-way to the cradle of
Cervantes we came suddenly upon the superb facade of the university.
This is one of the most exquisite compositions of plateresque in
existence. The entire front of the central body of the building is
covered with rich and tasteful ornamentation. Over the great door is an
enormous escutcheon of the arms of Austria, supported by two finely
carved statues,--on the one side a nearly nude warrior, on the other the
New World as a feather-clad Indian woman. Still above this a fine, bold
group of statuary, representing, with that reverent naivete of early
art, God the Father in the work of creation. Surrounding the whole front
as with a frame, and reaching to the ground on either side, is carved
the knotted cord of the Franciscan monks. No description can convey the
charming impression given by the harmony of proportion and the loving
finish of detail everywhere seen in this beautifully preserved fagade.
While we were admiring it an officer came out of the adjoining cuartel
and walked by us with jingling spurs. I asked him if one could go
inside. He shrugged his shoulders with a Quien sabe? indicating a doubt
as profound as if I had asked him whether chignons were worn in the
moon. He had never thought of anything inside. There was no wine nor
pretty girls there. Why should one want to go in? We entered the cool
vestibule, and were ascending the stairs to the first court, when a
porter came out of his lodge and inquired our errand. We were wandering
barbarians with an eye to the picturesque, and would fain see the
university, if it were not unlawful. He replied, in a hushed and
scholastic tone of voice, and with a succession of confidential winks
that would have inspired confidence in the heart of a Talleyrand, that
if our lordships would give him our cards he had no doubt he could
obtain the required permission from the rector. He showed us into a dim,
claustral-looking anteroom, in which, as I was told by my friend, who
trifles in lost moments with the integral calculus, there were
seventy-two chairs and one microscopic table. The wall was decked with
portraits of the youth of the college, all from the same artist, who
probably went mad from the attempt to make fifty beardless faces look
unlike each other. We sat for some time mourning over his failure, until
the door opened, and not the porter, but the rector himself, a most
courteous and polished gentleman in the black robe and three-cornered
hat of his order, came in and graciously placed himself and the
university at our disposition. We had reason to congratulate ourselves
upon this good fortune. He showed us every nook and corner of the vast
edifice, where the present and the past elbowed each other at every
turn: here the boys' gymnasium, there the tomb of Valles; here the new
patent cocks of the water-pipes, and there the tri-lingual patio where
Alonso Sanchez lectured in Arabic, Greek, and Chaldean, doubtless making
a choice hash of the three; the airy and graceful paraninfo, or hall of
degrees, a masterpiece of Moresque architecture, with a gorgeous
panelled roof, a rich profusion of plaster arabesques, and, _horresco
referens,_ the walls covered with a bright French paper. Our good rector
groaned at this abomination, but said the Gauls had torn away the
glorious carved panelling for firewood in the war of 1808, and the
college was too poor to restore it. His righteous indignation waxed hot
again when we came to the beautiful sculptured pulpit of the chapel,
where all the delicate details are degraded by a thick coating of
whitewash, which in some places has fallen away and shows the gilding of
the time of the Catholic kings.
There is in this chapel a picture of the Virgin appearing to the great
cardinal whom we call Ximenez and the Spaniards Cisneros, which is
precious for two reasons. The portrait of Ximenez was painted from life
by the nameless artist, who, it is said, came from France for the
purpose, and the face of the Virgin is a portrait of Isabella the
Catholic. It is a good wholesome face, such as you would expect. But the
thin, powerful profile of Ximenez is very striking, with his red hair
and florid tint, his curved beak, and long, nervous lips. He looks not
unlike that superb portrait Raphael has left of Cardinal Medici.
This university is fragrant with the good fame of Ximenez. In the
principal court there is a fine medallion of the illustrious founder and
protector, as he delighted to be drawn, with a sword in one hand and a
crucifix in the other,--twin brother in genius and fortune of the
soldier-priest of France, the Cardinal-Duke Richelieu. On his gorgeous
sarcophagus you read the arrogant epitaph with which he revenged himself
for the littleness of kings and courtiers:--
"Praetextam junxi sacco, galeamque galero, Frater, dux, praesul,
cardineusque pater. Quin, virtute mea junctum est diadema cucullo, Dum
mihi regnanti patuit Gesperia."
By a happy chance our visit was made in a holiday time, and the students
were all away. It was better that there should be perfect solitude and
silence as we walked through the noble system of buildings and strove to
re-create the student world of Cervantes's time. The chronicle which
mentions the visit of Francis I. to Alcala, when a prisoner in Spain,
says he was received by eleven thousand students. This was only twenty
years before the birth of Cervantes. The world will never see again so
brilliant a throng of ingenuous youth as gathered together in the great
university towns in those years of vivid and impassioned greed for
letters that followed the revival of learning. The romance of Oxford or
Heidelberg or Harvard is tame compared with that electric life of a
new-born world that wrought and flourished in Padua, Paris, and Alcala.
Walking with my long-robed scholarly guide through the still, shadowy
courts, under Renaissance arches and Moorish roofs, hearing him talking
with enthusiasm of the glories of the past and never a word of the
events of the present, in his pure, strong, guttural Castilian, no
living thing in view but an occasional Franciscan gliding under the
graceful arcades, it was not difficult to imagine the scenes of the
intense young life which filled these noble halls in that fresh day of
aspiration and hope, when this Spanish sunlight fell on the marble and
the granite bright and sharp from the chisel of the builder, and the
great Ximenez looked proudly on his perfect work and saw that it was
good.
The twilight of superstition still hung heavily over Europe. But this
was nevertheless the breaking of dawn, the herald of the fuller day of
investigation and inquiry.
It was into this rosy morning of the modern world that Cervantes was
ushered in the season of the falling leaves of 1547. He was born to a
life of poverty and struggle and an immortality of fame. His own city
did not know him while he lived, and now is only known through him.
Pilgrims often come from over distant seas to breathe for one day the
air that filled his baby lungs, and to muse among the scenes that shaped
his earliest thoughts.
We strolled away from the university through the still lanes and squares
to the Calle Mayor, the only thoroughfare of the town that yet retains
some vestige of traffic. It is a fine, long street bordered by stone
arcades, within which are the shops, and without which in the pleasant
afternoon are the rosy and contemplative shopkeepers. It would seem a
pity to disturb their dreamy repose by offering to trade; and in justice
to Castilian taste and feeling I must say that nobody does it. Halfway
down the street a side alley runs to the right, called Calle de
Cervantes, and into this we turned to find the birthplace of the
romancer. On one side was a line of squalid, quaint, gabled houses, on
the other a long garden wall. We walked under the shadow of the latter
and stared at the house-fronts, looking for an inscription we had heard
of. We saw in sunny doorways mothers oiling into obedience the stiff
horse-tail hair of their daughters. By the grated windows we caught
glimpses of the black eyes and nut-brown cheeks of maidens at their
needles. But we saw nothing to show which of these mansions had been
honored by tradition as the residence of Roderick Cervantes.
A brisk and practical-looking man went past us.
I asked him where was the house of the poet. He smiled in a superior
sort of way, and pointed to the wall above my head: "There is no such
house. Some people think it once stood here, and they have placed that
stone in the garden-wall to mark the spot. I believe what I see. It is
all child's play anyhow, whether true or false. There is better work to
be done now than to honor Cervantes. He fought for a bigot king, and
died in a monk's hood."
"You think lightly of a glory of Castile."
"If we could forget all the glories of Castile it would be better for
us."
"Puede ser," I assented. "Many thanks. May your grace go with God!"
"Health and fraternity!" he answered, and moved away with a step full of
energy and dissent. He entered a door under an inscription, "Federal
Republican Club."
Go your ways, I thought, radical brother. You are not so courteous nor
so learned as the rector. But this Peninsula has need of men like you.
The ages of belief have done their work for good and ill. Let us have
some years of the spirit that denies, and asks for proofs. The power of
the monk is broken, but the work is not yet done. The convents have been
turned into barracks, which is no improvement. The ringing of spurs in
the streets of Alcala is no better than the rustling of the sandalled
friars. If this Republican party of yours cannot do something to free
Spain from the triple curse of crown, crozier, and sabre, then Spain is
in doleful case. They are at last divided, and the first two have been
sorely weakened in detail. The last should be the easiest work.
The scorn of my radical friend did not prevent my copying the modest
tablet on the wall:--
"Here was born Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote. By
his fame and his genius he belongs to the civilized world; by his cradle
to Alcala de Henares."
There is no doubt of the truth of the latter part of this inscription.
Eight Spanish towns have claimed to have given birth to Cervantes, thus
beating the blind Scian by one town; every one that can show on its
church records the baptism of a child so called has made its claim. Yet
Alcala, who spells his name wrong, calling him Carvantes, is certainly
in the right, as the names of his father, mother, brothers, and sisters
are also given in its records, and all doubt is now removed from the
matter by the discovery of Cervantes's manuscript statement of his
captivity in Algiers and his petition for employment in America, in both
of which he styles himself "Natural de Alcala de Henares."
Having examined the evidence, we considered ourselves justly entitled to
all the usual emotions in visiting the church of the parish, Santa Maria
la Mayor. It was evening, and from a dozen belfries in the neighborhood
came the soft dreamy chime of silver-throated bells. In the little
square in front of the church a few families sat in silence on the
massive stone benches. A few beggars hurried by, too intent upon getting
home to supper to beg. A rural and a twilight repose lay on everything.
Only in the air, rosy with the level light, flew out and greeted each
other those musical voices of the bells rich with the memories of all
the days of Alcala. The church was not open, but we followed a sacristan
in, and he seemed too feeble-minded to forbid. It is a pretty church,
not large nor imposing, with a look of cosy comfort about it. Through
the darkness the high altar loomed before us, dimly lighted by a few
candles where the sacristans were setting up the properties for the
grand mass of the morrow,--Our Lady of the Snows. There was much talk
and hot discussion as to the placing of the boards and the draperies,
and the image of Our Lady seemed unmoved by words unsuited to her
presence. We know that every vibration of air makes its own impression
on the world of matter. So that the curses of the sacristans at their
work, the prayers of penitents at the altar, the wailing of breaking
hearts bowed on the pavement through many years, are all recorded
mysteriously, in these rocky walls. This church is the illegible history
of the parish. But of all its ringing of bells, and swinging of censers,
and droning of psalms, and putting on and off of goodly raiment, the
only show that consecrates it for the world's pilgrimage is that humble
procession that came on the 9th day of October, in the year of Grace
1547, to baptize Roderick Cervantes's youngest child. There could not be
an humbler christening. Juan Pardo--John Gray--was the sponsor, and the
witnesses were "Baltazar Vazquez, the sacristan, and I who baptized him
and signed with my name," says Mr. Bachelor Serrano, who never dreamed
he was stumbling into fame when he touched that pink face with the holy
water and called the child Miguel. It is my profound conviction that
Juan Pardo brought the baby himself to the church and took it home
again, screaming wrathfully; Neighbor' Pardo feeling a little sheepish
and mentally resolving never to do another good-natured action as long
as he lived.
As for the neophyte, he could not be blamed for screaming and kicking
against the new existence he was entering, if the instinct of genius
gave him any hint of it. Between the font of St. Mary's and the bier at
St. Ildefonso's there was scarcely an hour of joy waiting him in his
long life, except that which comes from noble and earnest work.
His youth was passed in the shabby privation of a poor gentleman's
house; his early talents attracted the attention of my Lord Aquaviva,
the papal legate, who took him back to Rome in his service; but the
high-spirited youth soon left the inglorious ease of the cardinal's
house to enlist as a private soldier in the sea-war against the Turk. He
fought bravely at Lepanto, where he was three times wounded and his left
hand crippled. Going home for promotion, loaded with praise and kind
letters from the generous bastard, Don Juan of Austria, the true son of
the Emperor Charles and pretty Barbara Blumberg, he was captured with
his brother by the Moors, and passed five miserable years in slavery,
never for one instant submitting to his lot, but wearying his hostile
fate with constant struggles. He headed a dozen attempts at flight or
insurrection, and yet his thrifty owners would not kill him. They
thought a man who bore letters from a prince, and who continued cock of
his walk through years of servitude, would one day bring a round ransom.
At last the tardy day of his redemption came, but not from the
cold-hearted tyrant he had so nobly served. The matter was presented to
him by Cervantes's comrades, but he would do nothing. So that Don
Roderick sold his estate and his sisters sacrificed their dowry to buy
the freedom of the captive brothers.
They came back to Spain still young enough to be fond of glory, and
simple-hearted enough to believe in the justice of the great. They
immediately joined the army and served in the war with Portugal. The
elder brother made his way and got some little promotion, but Miguel got
married and discharged, and wrote verses and plays, and took a small
office in Seville, and moved with the Court to Valladolid; and kept his
accounts badly, and was too honest to steal, and so got into jail, and
grew every year poorer and wittier and better; he was a public
amanuensis, a business agent, a sub-tax-gatherer,--anything to keep his
lean larder garnished with scant ammunition against the wolf hunger. In
these few lines you have the pitiful story of the life of the greatest
of Spaniards, up to his return to Madrid in 1606, when he was nearly
sixty years old.
From this point his history becomes clearer and more connected up to the
time of his death. He lived in the new-built suburb, erected on the site
of the gardens of the Duke of Lerma, first minister and favorite of
Philip III. It was a quarter much affected by artists and men of
letters, and equally so by ecclesiastics. The names of the streets
indicate the traditions of piety and art that still hallow the
neighborhood. Jesus Street leads you into the street of Lope de Vega.
Quevedo and Saint Augustine run side by side. In the same neighborhood
are the streets called Cervantes, Saint Mary, and Saint Joseph, and just
round the corner are the Magdalen and the Love-of-God. The actors and
artists of that day were pious and devout madcaps. They did not abound
in morality, but they had of religion enough and to spare. Many of them
were members of religious orders, and it is this fact which has procured
us such accurate records of their history. All the events in the daily
life of the religious establishments were carefully recorded, and the
manuscript archives of the convents and brotherhoods of that period are
rich in materials for the biographer.