the viceroy of Algiers, Hassan Pasha, his force of character gained
influence over the tyrant. But he asked too high a ransom for the
captive's family to pay. The priest who had watched the young soldier on
his deeds of mercy, worked indefatigably for his release. A letter was
sent to Philip II to beg aid for a soldier of Lepanto. At length three
hundred ducats were raised. Hassan Pasha asked a thousand. Already was
Cervantes chained to the oar of a galley, bound for Constantinople, when
at the last hour Father Gil, helped by some Christian merchants,
succeeded in raising five hundred ducats, which ransom the Viceroy
accepted.
At thirty-four years of age, Cervantes again stepped on Spanish soil.
But the world was then much as it is now; years had passed since
Lepanto,--he was forgotten. His patron Don John of Austria had died in
Flanders two years before his release. He joined the army once more and
fought in the expedition against the Azores; then seeing there was no
chance of advancement, he returned to his first career, that of letters.
His plays and poems had small success: a pathetic phrase in the scene
where the _cura_ burns Quixote's books and comes on an epic by one,
Cervantes, "better versed in poverty and misfortunes than in verses,"
has deeper meaning when his checkered career is known.
Twenty-five years of obscurity and abject poverty succeeded each other,
his lot so lowly it is hard to trace his steps. Whole years remain a
blank. The brave heart never flagged, no bitterness tinged his kindly
tolerance. This Castilian hidalgo of ripe culture earned his bread in
the humblest ways. 1588 found him in Seville as commissary victualer for
the Great Armada. Tradition says he visited La Mancha, the desert he was
to immortalize, to collect tithes for a priory of St. John, and that the
villagers in anger cast him into prison, where he conceived the idea of
his novel. This child of his wit he hints to us was born in a jail. The
sad years in Valladolid followed, and there in 1605, at fifty-eight
years of age, he published the first part of "Don Quixote."
Its success was immediate. The grace of the style, the inimitable humor,
and the underflowing current of mellow wisdom, made it from the start,
what Sainte-Beuve called it, "the book of humanity." However, its
publication did not much better Cervantes' fortunes. He retired to
Madrid, where he lived on a small pension from the Archbishop of Toledo.
A French noble visiting Spain asked for the famous author, and was told,
"He who had made all the world rich was poor and infirm though a soldier
and a gentleman."
In 1613 appeared his "Novelas Exemplares," a remarkable collection of
tales which gave Scott the idea of the Waverley novels. The second part
of "Don Quixote," equal to the first in vigor and charm, appeared when
Cervantes was sixty; "his foot already in the stirrup," he gives us in a
preface, the moving description of himself. In the latter part of his
life, according to a custom of the time, he became a tertiary of the
Franciscan Order, and on his death in 1616 they buried him humbly in the
convent of nuns in Madrid, where his daughter was a religious. Ill
fortune still pursued him, for to-day there is no trace of his last
resting-place.
It is with thoughts of this heroic life--this man lovable as his own
Don, with a gentle stammer in his speech, and the kindly wise look in
his eyes, his left hand maimed from Lepanto, his shoulders bowed and his
chestnut hair turned to silver by the ceaseless calamities of life--it
is with such memories one looks down from the high-road on the small
house where he wrote his masterpiece. Columbus on his deathbed, and
Cervantes in poverty writing "Quixote"--two such associations make a
visit to Valladolid memorable.
OVIEDO IN THE ASTURIAS
"It is perfectly ridiculous to pretend that, because they dress the
Madonna and saints in rich robes, the Spaniards are ignorant that a
statue is but a symbol. They sing their faith, we whisper ours, but
the words have the same meaning, and the same thought is in the
mind ... Draw a bias line enclosing the Basque provinces,--Navarre,
Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, and you have there old religious Spain
as she appears in history, with a vivid and practical faith, an
irreproachable clergy, a piety of the heart reflected in the
manners."--RENÉ BAZIN.
We left Valladolid toward evening, in order to stop over a night in
Palencia, before going north to Asturias. The cathedral of Palencia is
well worth the pause, even though the visit may be limited to a night in
the Continental Inn and a hasty daybreak visit to the church; the small
cities of central Spain are of so individual a character that each
stamps itself separately and indelibly on the memory.
The dawn was just breaking on a raw, rainy morning when we walked
through the silent streets of the town. In spite of the early hour, near
each of the water fountains stood a long row of antique-shaped jars,
some of red clay, some like old silver. For each housewife places her
jar in line, and when the drinking water is turned on, each fills her
crock in turn, according as it was put in the row. At the biblical wells
of Palestine the Syrian women to-day use ugly, square Rockefeller oil
cans, but happily conservative Spain is not partial to innovations. It
was on this early morning walk that I first noticed the white palm
leaves, some six feet in length, fastened to the balconies or above a
window. One finds them all over the country. They are from the palm
forests of Elche in the south, and each Easter new ones are blessed and
hung out on the houses, some say to guard against lightning. Later, in
Madrid, we saw one decorating the King's palace.
The Cathedral of Palencia is of the same tawny yellow as the plains
about it. The east end is early Gothic, the western part of a later,
weaker period. Like Salisbury it has the uncommon feature of two sets of
transepts; the clearstory is carried round the church, unbroken by rose
windows at the west or transept ends. The interior in the dim light of a
rainy October morning was picturesque past description. There are times
when the chances of travel bring one to a spot at just its perfect hour.
Thus we saw this church in a moment of such exquisite half light and
quietude that its memory is a possession for life. Behind the High Altar
rose an isolated chapel, set detached in the midst of the ambulatory,
and through its iron _rejas_ were seen the blurred glimmer of candles,
the veiled kneeling figures of the people, an aged white-haired priest
at the Altar; high upon the wall the coffin of the ancient Queen Urraca.
The effect was indescribable,--austere, ascetic, yet with a passionate
glamour essentially Spanish. A masterpiece could an artist make of this
detached chapel, lighted for divine service each day at dawn with such
unconscious naturalness.
Architects may say that Spanish cathedrals are exaggerated and
overloaded, that they lack the restraint and purity of line of Chartres,
Amiens, and the Isle de France churches which are the world's best
Gothic. All this may well be true, yet Spain can smile securely at
criticism. She has a soul in her places of worship, a soaring exaltation
of the imagination that imparts the assurance of a living faith. Firmly
and ardently she believes in Jesus Christ, her Redeemer, and with all
her lofty intensity she prostrates herself in worship.
We wandered round the dusky aisles, deciphering tombs, some of whose
effigies held their arms raised in prayer,--only a Spaniard could endure
to look even at such a tiring attitude! But the time for loitering was
limited. The transept clock, a knight, a Moor, and a lion, sounded the
warning we must heed if we were to catch the early train for the North.
The thoughtful innkeeper had saved us some precious minutes by sending
the hotel omnibus to wait outside the Cathedral, and we rattled--in its
literal sense--to the distant station. The city was at last fully awake,
and each water jar had now an owner; one by one they followed each other
at the pump, with pleasant greetings and chatter.
Then again stretched the tawny plains. The fields of León were tractless
wastes of mud from the rain of the past weeks. Seen from the car window,
each village on the truncated mountain was the exact copy of its
neighbor, the same monotonous note of color in adobe wall and denuded
steppe. It was in vain to look for some distinction to mark one group of
mud houses, called Paredes de Nava, birthplace of Spain's best sculptor
Berruguete, from a similar mud-emblocked place called Cisneros, feudal
home of Cardinal Ximenez's family; the imagination had to supply the
difference.
Every one must come prepared for Spanish trains to go at a leisurely
pace--about fifteen miles an hour is the average of the express route.
From Palencia to Oviedo was a twelve-hour trip, and the distance covered
was a hundred and sixty miles. Of course one crossed the Cantabrian
mountains, the continuation of the Pyrenees along the northern coast,
and they are no slight barrier since they sometimes rise to a height of
8,000 feet.
We passed the city of León toward noon, when there came a respite from
the dull treeless plain, for, beyond the town stretched a thinly-wooded
district which gave the first reminder since leaving the Basque valleys
that the season still was autumn. After central Spain, the bleak hills
that now began seemed positively beautiful,--so many pleasures are
relative.
Slowly the train climbed the mountain wall that from earliest times has
protected the Asturian principality from the invader. Near the summit,
emerging from a tunnel several miles long, we looked out over a glorious
panorama, the beauty not being relative this time, but as truly
magnificent as some of Switzerland's show views. The storm had covered
the peaks with freshest snow, the sky was a frosty dark blue, mountain
rose behind mountain for miles, the white road was flung a sinuous
ribbon round the folds of the hills; below lay fertile valleys of
greenest grass with greenest trees and happy nestling farms. The secure
mountain wall gave the Asturian courage to build a home wherever his
whim chose. He was not forced like the Castilian by centuries of Moorish
inroads to herd in a compact town.
As the puffing train waited for breathing space on the crest of the
pass, a group of peasants boarded it. They wore the white wooden clogs
of the province that differ from ordinary clogs by having stilts, a
couple of inches high, to lift them above the mud; and they brought with
them, on a sledge, as wheels are of no use up these steep hills, an
antique curiosity of a trunk. We began to hope that old costumes and
customs still held in this isolated corner of the world, though the
engineering of the road in the descent was disturbingly up-to-date,--a
series of loops, cuts, and sharp turns; sometimes three parallel lines
of rail over which we were to pass lay one below the other, sometimes
directly across the valley we saw our trail; a distance of twenty-six
miles is covered where a crow would fly seven.
The principality of Asturias has given its name to the heir apparent of
the Spanish crown since the 14th century, when a daughter of the Duke of
Lancaster married the Spanish king's eldest son, and her father claimed
for her a title equal to that of Prince of Wales to the English throne.
The connection by marriage between Spain and England has been a frequent
one. It began in the 12th century, when Henry II's daughter married
Alfonso VIII of Castile; later the Plantagenet Edward I had for wife a
Spanish infanta. From the two daughters of Pedro the Cruel, who married
into the English royal family, on one side descended Henry VIII, from
the other, by a marriage back again in Spain, sprang Isabella the
Catholic. After the ill-fated union of Isabella's daughter with Henry
VIII and that of Mary Tudor and Philip II, connection by marriage
between Spain and England ceased for centuries. To-day, as all the world
knows, the young queen of Spain, Doña Victoria, with the same blonde
hair as Isabella, is an Englishwoman, and a rosy little prince bears the
title of these distant mountains.
It is a fitting title for the heir to the throne, since this province is
the cradle of Spanish nationality, and never was vassal to Roman or
Moor. The people are a mixture of the aboriginal Iberians and the
Visigoths who were here finally merged in one people and here
reconstructed the Spanish monarchy. So proud is an Asturian of his
origin that he thinks, like the Basques, that his mere birth confers
nobility; every native of the province is an hidalgo. Did not the
Asturian lady, the duenna of the Duchess, remark to Don Quixote that her
husband was _hidalgo como el Rey porque era montañés_?
When in 711 the last of the Gothic kings, Roderick, was defeated by the
Moors who had lately crossed from Africa, a remnant of the Christian
army took refuge in these northern mountains. At Cavadonga, an historic
defeat was inflicted on the Moslem army in 718, by Pelayo, Spain's
first king, chosen leader because he was the bravest of the people. The
Moorish chronicle, too close to the struggle to see its vital issues,
speaks of "one Belay, a contemptible barbarian who roused the people of
Asturish."
Without Cavadonga the face of Europe had been changed. Had not the
Mussulmans from Africa met this repulse, they had pushed on beyond the
Pyrenees before the Franks were strong enough to withstand them. Often
rose this thought when reading the sentimental regrets for the Moors in
Spain found in guide books and histories. Had Spain not warred for eight
hundred years against the invader, had she not endured with such Spartan
courage the insecurity of life and property caused by ceaseless forays
from the south, European civilization had been put back for centuries.
Like most virile nations, she has the defect of her qualities, and when
the final victory was hers she went too far. But this should not blind
us to the nobility of the _Reconquista_.
Within reach of Cavadonga, sacred to every Spaniard as the cradle of his
race and religion, I could not help asking the cause of the ceaseless
regret for the Moor. A lover of the picturesque, like Washington Irving,
has a right to gloss over the days of the Alhambra, but it seems strange
for serious history to hold up the Mohammedan in Spain as a model of
cleanliness, industry, and tolerance in contrast to the Christian, in
face of the centuries of piracy by sea, the barbarity of African prisons
where thousands of Spaniards languished in chains, and also--a thought
that often came to me when walking through the filthy, narrow streets in
Moslem countries--if the Moor in Spain is to be so regretted, why are
not the northern cities of Africa models for modern Christians to
emulate? The Moor came from them, and many of his race left Spain to
return to them. I would not belittle the Arab civilization in the
Peninsula, for under the Ommiade dynasty, Cordova reached a
distinguished height of culture, but what I object to is the partisan
spirit that places Moors on one side to be praised and extenuated, and
Spanish Christians on the other to be condemned. Facts are so distorted
that many think the re-conquest of Andalusia meant the substitution of
backward ignorance for an enlightened rule, whereas the Moors
themselves, long before the coming of their northern conquerors, had
destroyed their own higher civilization. The flower of their culture
(always an exotic, for Islamism as hitherto interpreted is incapable of
strengthening it) was withered before Alfonzo VI and the Cid had set
foot further south than Toledo.
Under the Ommiade caliphs, for about five generations, life probably
resembled the golden picture drawn for us as typical of Moorish sway. A
few able rulers disguised the fact that the government was never
anything else but a despotism. This _siglo de oro_ was well over by
1030. Some barbarous warrior tribes, from Africa, the Almoravides, swept
away the feeble remains of Ommiade rule, to be in their turn routed by
other African invaders, the fanatic Almohades. These last persecuted
Averroës as holding views too liberal for a true Mohammedan, and the
scholar died in misery and exile, just as in the same century the
remarkable Spanish-Jew, Maimonides, was accused of teaching atheism by
his fellow Israelites. Rejected by his own people, the fame of Averroës
came later through his study by European Schoolmen. His teachings, like
most of what is of value in Arab learning, was of Greek origin, and had
reached him by way of Persia, which never wholly conformed to the set
tenets of Islam. Why do the anti-Spanish historians never mention that
in the same era in which Averroës, the philosopher, was persecuted by
his fellow-believers, a college of translators under the patronage of
the Archbishop Raimundo of Toledo, from 1130 to 1150, put into Latin the
most scientific works of the Moors?
Mohammedan civilization in Spain, from decay within, was completely
disintegrated by 1275. The caliphs of Granada led the lives of weak
voluptuaries, artistic but decadent; no rose-colored romancing can veil
their essential decline. Isabella's court, traveling with its
university, with the learned Peter Martyr instructing the young nobles
in Renaissance lore, so that a son of the Duke of Alva, and a cousin of
the King are to be found among the lecturers of Salamanca, presents a
noble contrast. When the _Reconquista_ was achieved, and after three
thousand seven hundred battles, the Spaniard was again master in his own
land, grievous mistakes were made, until finally, in 1609, in a panic of
fear that the corsairs of Africa were uniting with their co-religionists
along the Spanish coasts, the Moriscos were expelled. Spain inflicted
this blow on herself at an ill moment, since already from the enormous
emigration to the New World, her crying need was population. But this
act of bad government whereby she threw away over half a million of her
inhabitants (always remember, however, far more Moorish blood remained
than was lost, for nine centuries of occupation had well infiltered it
through the southern provinces) did not drive out the intellectual and
moral backbone of the land as we are given to understand. The Moors of
Isabella's day were not the liberal-minded, cultivated people they had
been under the Ommiade caliphs four centuries earlier, and the
persecuted Moriscos of Philip III's time were far lower in standing.
Also it cannot be questioned that Valencia, the province that expelled
them, whose rich soil to-day supports a crowded population, quickly
filled up, and soon showed with its irrigation the same industry that
seemed peculiar to the Moors. It was central Spain, eminently "old
Christian," that when its people flocked as adventurers to America,
could offer neither fertile soil nor inviting climate to lure new
settlers. The quotations usually cited to prove that Valencia was
irremediably devastated by the Expulsion are taken from men who wrote
within a few years of the disaster; it would be an easy matter,
following the same sophistry to quote aspects of our South a generation
ago that could make the Civil War appear an irremediable blight.
Seeking for the cause of the tendency to overrate the Moor at the
expense of his hereditary enemy, it seems to me it is to be traced to
that period of rancor, the Invincible Armada, when religious and
political passions ran so high that it was forgotten that the hated
Spaniard was before all else a Christian, and on his heroic struggle for
the Cross had hung the civilization of Europe.
The capital of the Asturian province is Oviedo. Alfonso II, the eighth
king that followed Pelayo, made it his chief city, but in spite of its
antiquity it is a disappointing town. I had pictured an unspoiled bit
of the past, locked in as it is by mountains whose valleys reach to the
city gates, with curiously-named saints still serving as titulars, with
the oldest remains of Christian architecture in the Peninsula. But the
reality is a smug, commonplace, successful little city of slight local
color. The mansions are Renaissance, not mediæval; if you stumble on an
ancient street it soon brings you to a straight new boulevard. Children
in English clothes and ladies dressed like Parisians walk in the park
facing a line of pretentious apartment houses. I asked in the shops for
pictures of the _Cámera Santa_. They could only give me postcards of the
model prison and the model insane asylum. Sleepy little Palencia, with
its rows of classic water jars waiting--time no consideration--till the
water was turned on in the fountains, it seemed hardly possible we had
left it only that morning. The remote old world may be found in central
Spain, but as this is the land of anomalies, the mountain provinces of
the north are busy to-day with mines and commerce. It remains but a
question of time for Bilbao, Santander, Gijón, Coruña, and Vigo, the
northern harbors, to become commercial centers. They are awake at last
and keen to enter the struggle.
This industrial tendency is what we agree in calling progress, and Spain
has been censured for her backwardness in entering the world's
competition, so it is not justifiable to regret the unambitious past.
But who can be consistent in the home of _el ingenioso hidalgo_! From
the moment of entering Spain till we left I leaned now to one side, now
to the other, glad and proud one day to see her new industries, a model
hospital or asylum, and scoffing the next, at a hideous new boulevard
that had relieved a congested district. This land of racy types and
vigorous humanity may be doomed to have factory chimneys belching smoke,
to have lawless mobs of socialists and pitiful slums in cities where now
is frugal poverty, where a beggar lives contentedly next door to a
prince, because he feels the prince recognizes him as his fellow
countryman and fellow Christian: progress and wealth are bought with a
price. Oviedo, just entering the competition, and fast sweeping away its
picturesque past, made me glad to be in time to see something of the old
ways of Spain.
The lion of the city, the Cathedral, adds to this inconsistent feeling
of disappointment. It is the only cathedral of the twenty and more we
were to see that has removed the choir from the nave and placed pews
down the center of the church. At Burgos the heavy blocking mass of the
_coro_ in the nave had startled and bewildered me, but soon I grew so
accustomed to this Spanish usage that a church without it seemed
incomplete. Oviedo has modernized its side chapels, recklessly sweeping
away carvings and sarcophagi. It thought the tombs of Pelayo's
successors, the early kings, were cluttering rubbish, so a good plain
stone, easy to decipher, has been put up in place of the ancient
memorials!