other sights of Santiago. On the plaza before the west end of the
Cathedral stands the dignified Hospital Real, founded by Isabella and
Ferdinand as a pilgrim inn. Two of the four patios are quaintly carved,
and probably amuse the convalescents of the modern hospital lodged now
in the building. It was a joy to find so many of Isabella's good deeds
still bearing fruit. The nuns took us down to the big kitchen,
white-tiled and spotless, where we saw the four hundred fresh eggs that
arrive daily from the country; the tidy patients on the verandas showed
clearly that no one suffered privations here. As we were leaving, the
old chaplain of the institution ran after us to beg us to return to see
something of which he was evidently vastly proud. When he ushered us
into a tiled bathing room and turned on the water that dashed up and
down and round about from every kind of new contrivance, he looked at us
with a self-complacency that was adorable, as if he said: "There, you
water-loving English, we're just as fond of it as you!" The excellently
managed institution reminds one that this province produced Doña
Concepción Arenal, sociologist and political economist, and withal a
most tender-hearted Christian, whose books on prison organization and
reform have been widely translated, and are quoted as authorities by the
leading criminologists of Europe. For thirty years this admirable woman
was inspector of prisons. She died at Vigo in 1893, and Spain has since
erected statues in her honor.
In Galicia, as in Catalonia, there has been a revival of dialect
literature. The Gallego tongue was the first in the Peninsula to reach
literary culture, and in the Middle Ages two ideal troubadours wrote in
it. Had not Alfonso _el Sabio_ written chiefly in Castilian, thereby
fixing that as the leading tongue, as Dante did the Tuscan in Italy, it
is probable that the dialect of Galicia had prevailed. Portuguese and
Gallego were the same language up to the fifteenth century, hence it is
that the great critic Menéndez y Pelayo always includes Portuguese
writers in his studies of Spanish literature.
Galicia is fortunate in having an able living exponent, the Señora
Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose novels are full of the charmed melancholy of
the province. The Gallego is derided in other parts of Spain, his name
is synonymous with boor, for he is judged by the clumsy _mozo_ who seeks
work in the south. "The more unfortunate a country the greater is the
love of its sons for it. Greece, Poland, Hungary, Ireland, prove this,
and the nostalgia is strongest in those of Celtic origin. Ask the rude
Gallegos of South America what is their ambition--'To return to the
_terriña_ and there die' is the answer."
In a collection of essays "De mi Tierra," Madam Pardo Bazán has told of
the learned Benedictine, Padre Feijóo, the Bacon of Spain, whose caustic
pen did away with so many of the superstitions of his age. It may be a
bit pedantic for me to give biographies in these slight sketches, but it
seems as if a truer idea of the race is conveyed in such lives than
could be given in any other way. This native of Galicia, Padre Feijóo,
had few equals in the Europe of his time in liberality of view. He was
born of hidalgo parents near Orense, where his _casa solar_ stands,
still lived in by a Feijóo of to-day. He entered the Benedictine Order
and in their cloisters passed most of his long life of eighty years, for
half a century living in their Oviedo house. His unflagging industry,
his clear intellect, and simple uprightness, won the admiration of all
who knew him. "After fifteen years' intimate acquaintance with Feijóo,"
wrote a scientist of the day, "never have I met, inside religion or out,
a man more sincere, more candid, more declared enemy of fraud and
deceit." Not till he was fifty did Feijóo commence to write. In 1731
appeared the beginning of his "Teatro Crítico," essays that have been
called the first step of Spanish journalism, written as they eminently
were to communicate ideas to others. He had the passion to know why, a
never-tiring love of investigation. Adopting the Baconian experimental
method, he attacked the superstitions and pseudo-miracles around him.
_¡Ay! de mí Inquisición_! Were you asleep that you did not clap this
independent thinker into your capacious dungeons? So strong was Feijóo's
influence that Benedict XIV curtailed the number of feast days on his
mere suggestion.
This learned Benedictine monk was ahead of his age in many ideas. Are
the stars not inhabited? he asked. Before Washington, he maintained that
the Machiavellian theory of government, intrigue and diplomacy, which
was then universally accepted in Europe, was inferior to friendly
loyalty and honor. He preached compassion to animals generations before
the age of our modern, humanitarian theories. With the painful
remembrance of the diligence ride in Galicia, I was glad to find one of
her sons advocating this. Feijóo stands out more prominently because of
the intellectual desert around him. "The eighteenth century was an
erudite, negative, fatigued." The Bourbons brought formality and
sterility to spontaneous Spain. A dry soulless learning killed the
creative power, and in every branch, art, music, and literature, the
artificial rococo flourished. The two exceptions of vitality were Feijóo
and the painter Goya. Had Padre Feijóo lived in our age, he might have
been that great man hailed by De Maistre: "Attendez que l'affinité
naturelle de la science et de la religion les ait réunies l'une et
l'autre dans la tête d'un homme de génie! Celui-là sera fameux et mettra
fin au dix-huitième siècle qui dure encore." How much longer are we to
wait for him,--this great man!
If the only harrowing scene of the tour in Spain is to be associated
with Galicia, so is one of the happiest, a day of such kindly chivalry
that we felt the spirit of Isabella's time still endured. It was the
chance of railway travel that introduced a modern knight to us. The
journey back to Castile from Galicia is a most trying one. Some day
perhaps an enterprising ocean line will put in at Vigo and run an
express directly across country to Madrid; we were too early for such
ease. From Santiago we had to take an afternoon train to Pontevedra, and
there spend the night. At 5 A.M. (oh, those unforgettable, dark, cold
railway stations of Spain!) we again took the train. It was dawn before
Redondela was reached, and exquisite as a dream seemed the _rías_, the
fiords of Galicia, with wooded mountains sloping to their shores. It is
not hard to prophesy that this will be a great summer resort of the
future.
At Redondela we changed trains, getting into the express for Monforte,
the only other occupant of the carriage being an elderly man, blue-eyed,
very tall and erect, with the air of distinction so frequently found
among Don Quixote's countrymen. We had noticed him the night before in
the Pontevedra hotel, and had thought him an Englishman, till in
offering some service about our luggage he spoke in Spanish. As we were
to spend fifteen hours in the same railway carriage, we soon entered
into conversation. He came from Madrid each summer with a family of sons
and daughters to spend some months in a castle among the mountains of
Galicia. Evidently he was a lover of sport and of country life, for as
we ran alongside the Miño River, with Portugal just across on the
opposite bank, for hours he sat gazing out in enjoyment, and drew each
beautiful thing to our notice. At noon we reached Monforte, where we had
dinner in the station buffet. When we called for our account, to our
astonishment the waiter told us it was settled already. We could not
understand what had been done, till the proprietor himself came to
explain. It seems it is a custom all over this generous land, for a man
when he is with a lady or has spoken to her, to pay for everything she
orders; tea, luncheon, even her shopping purchases. He does this with no
offensive ostentation, but so quietly that he often slips away unnoticed
and unthanked. Several travelers have since told me that they too met
this hospitality; it had at first embarrassed them, but as there was
not the slightest impertinence nor even the personal about it, as it was
merely an act of chivalrous respect, done with superb detachment, when
the confusion of being paid for by a stranger was over, they remembered
only the charming courtesy.
The attentions of our kind host, for he seemed to look on two strangers
in his land as his guests, did not stop at noontime, at tea he brought
us platefuls of hot chestnuts. He tried to while away the hours
pleasantly, playing games on paper in French and English; with all his
dignified gravity the Spaniard is not blasé. Our struggles to learn his
tongue rousing sympathy, it was from him we first heard of the pretty
high-flown phrases still in daily use, how you bid farewell with, _Beso
à V. la mano_ (I kiss your hand), or _A los pies de V._ (I am at your
feet); that the _Usted_, shortened to _V._, with which you address high
or low, is a corruption of "Your Majesty." Somehow there seems nothing
absurd in addressing a Spanish peasant as "Your Majesty." The love of
abbreviations is a curious trait in a people with such leisurely ways;
thus, a row of cabalistic letters ends a letter: _S. S. S. Q. B. S. M._,
which means that your correspondent kisses your hand--_su seguro
servidor que besa su mano_.
Then the interest which we evinced in the institutions and progress of
Spain made him put his cultivated intelligence at our service, and we
learned more in a day than in all the previous weeks. When I inquired
into the vexed religious question he was able to explain much. As a
rule, republicanism in Spain means avowed atheism and socialism; it has
been well said that the republicanism of all Latin countries turns to
social revolution. The socialists are a small, but well-organized band,
international in character since their movements are directed from
centers like Paris. They are chiefly in industrial cities such as
Barcelona, Valencia, and Bilbao, where secret societies of anarchists
abound, disguised as clubs for scientific study. The majority being of
the rabble, repudiating all authority, ("civilization, that is the
enemy!") their disorders would be called mob uprisings did they occur in
Chicago, but deceived by the term "republicanism," the journals of
England and America gave them too lenient a consideration. By no means
devout himself, he assured us that what we saw on every side was for the
most part very genuine religion, not sentiment with no result; for in
those places where observance had slackened there was a marked
difference in moral restraint, so potent a factor for morality was
religion still in Spain. That there were faults none denied, but he had
traveled enough to know the flaws of other countries too well to be
despairing of his own.
He wrote for us a card of introduction to the big hospital of Madrid; he
sought out a friend in another carriage, the son of the Admiral in
Ferrol, who was rather up in statistics. Had we seen the asylum near
Santiago where the insane are treated with such success that noted cures
had been obtained? Had we met the archæologist of the province, a canon
in the Cathedral? In short, from the questions and suggestions we
realized that the average tourist goes through this reserved country
half blind. Glad were we for this chance of insight. When in the dusk of
evening it came time to descend at Astorga, our stopping-place for the
night, and our fellow-traveler stood there shaking hands, with warm
friendliness in his blue eyes, we felt there was no more thoroughbred
specimen of manhood than a Spanish hidalgo.
SALAMANCA
"L'homme n'est produit que pour l'infini."
"Il y a des raisons qui passent notre raison."
"Se moquer de la philosophie c'est vraiment philosopher."
PASCAL.
Salamanca is in León province, and in comparison with the hour of its
prime, as it is to-day it too is very like a sleeping city. It is hard
to realize that this dull, small town was a _grandeza de España_,
ranking with Oxford, Paris, and Bologna, that once 10,000 students
flocked here from all over Europe, and every young Spaniard turned here
as naturally as a modern Englishman to Oxford or Cambridge; Cervantes'
"Novelas Exemplares" give the picture. To-day there are barely a
thousand students, chiefly from its own province; among the ten
universities of Spain the former leader takes a very lowly place.
Madrid, the continuation of Cardinal Ximenez' University of Alcalá, may
be called the modern Salamanca in intellectual leadership.
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1910, by Underwood & Underwood_
VIEW OF SALAMANCA FROM THE ROMAN BRIDGE]
In the Spanish Oxford one looks in vain for the numerous colleges of the
city on the Isis. Alas! Salamanca is half a ruin. The French, in the
Napoleonic invasion, destroyed the whole northwest quarter of the
town to make fortifications, undoing in a few brutal hours the work of
centuries of culture and piety. In his despatches of 1812 the Duke of
Wellington wrote: "The French among other acts of violence have
destroyed thirteen out of twenty convents and twenty out of the
twenty-five colleges which existed in this seat of learning." Twenty out
of twenty-five colleges! The thought of Oxford's tranquil, age-crowned
buildings makes one grasp the tragic wreck of the Spanish university;
never while in Salamanca could I forget the desolate tract to the west,
lying still a heap of ruins, untenanted save by wandering goats, those
nomad creatures that give the culminating note of squalor to deserted
districts.
Our train approached the city across the plains from Zamora, through
plantations of isolated trees and past droves of black sheep whose
guardian stood patiently under the rain. For some time in the distance
we saw the prominent church towers. Salamanca lay on the old Roman road,
the Via Lata, that connected Cadiz with the north, but the Roman
associations here are slight. As in Zamora, the Cid and his feats dwarf
other interests, so here it is the picturesque days of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries that fill the mind.
Go down to the Roman bridge over the Tormes and while away an hour
watching the passers-by, and the old times seem to live again. Below in
the river bed women wash and chatter from morning till night, spreading
the gayly-colored clothes, red, yellow, and purple, over the stones to
dry. If it is Sunday, into the city pour the hardy peasants for their
one day of rest from the ungrateful work of the fields: girls in pale
blue woolen stockings and smart, black pumps sit sideways behind their
cavaliers on the long-haired nags whose backs are often shaved into a
pattern; now out of the city jogs a brisk old woman on her donkey, laden
with a month's purchases, an unpainted rush-bottom chair topping the
pile; she nods to the strangers, _franceses_, she thinks, for a Spaniard
takes all foreigners for his neighbors over the frontier: now a cart
passes, whose shape and hue seem taken out of a romantic watercolor;
then a young peasant in wide-brimmed sombrero, leather gaiters, silver
buttons as big as dollars on his vest, clear-eyed and proud of carriage:
then, salt to the picture, rides a burly _cura_, sitting well back on
his tiny ass, a ridiculous figure were it not for his sublime
unconsciousness, his innate self-respect. Ever the unspoiled, the
vigorous, the untamed! Just so they came into Salamanca in the past when
students with swords and velvet capes walked the streets, and so I hope
they may do some hundred years from now, for such lives of frugal
contentment are unequaled. Localism and provinciality have been forced
on Spain by nature, and it is this very provincialism which is her charm
for the traveler. Fresh from a prosperous, new world, he may often long
for certain changes here, for more widely diffused education, for free
libraries, a more secure self-government; but such material prosperity
is bought with a price. Remember that not in the length or breadth of
this land are to be found the degraded human beings, vicious in soul and
brutalized in shape of skull and feature, such as exist by the thousands
in the slums of industrial countries. If the Spanish peasant must lose
his hardy independence, if his frugal contentment, his heroic patience
must pass with the old order of things (that lets a heap of ruins in the
heart of a city lie untouched during a hundred years!) I cannot help
wondering whether the price is not too high to pay. I am repeating
myself, but the words come to one each day--it is beyond human nature to
be consistent in Spain; she has the faculty, despite her glaring faults,
of battering down one's Philistine certainty of northern superiority.
The bridge, the plaza, and the cathedral; study your types there and you
begin to know the real Spaniard. Not soon shall I forget, at Mérida, in
wild Estremadura, as I loitered on the bridge, a countryman stepping
forward with the dignified, proud look of his class: "_¿Es más bonita
que París?_" he asked, the interrogatory note added only in courtesy, so
sure was he of my affirmative. Sleepy little Mérida, all a ruin, Knights
Templars' castle as well as Roman theater and aqueduct, to the fellow
_paisano_ of Pizarro and Cortés, was finer than Paris. It is glimpses
like this that make the prejudiced stranger judge the so-called
backwardness of the country in kinder fashion. Where else could one see
stately-moving cream-colored oxen pass unnoticed through the chief
thoroughfare of a capital, a common sight in the Puerta del Sol of
Madrid, where else will the customs officer of a big town stand to count
with a pointing finger the skipping sheep driven past him, as on the
Alcántara bridge at Toledo, where else will groups of goats be milked
from door to door in a great commercial city like Barcelona? Salamanca,
being the center of an agricultural district and off the express route,
presents daily, scenes from the Georgics.
Architecturally the old university city, despite her disasters, is of
first importance. She has two Cathedrals, the smaller more perfect one
of 1100, finding shelter by the side of its huge successor, to whom it
yielded its rights as metropolitan in 1560. The exterior of the new
Cathedral is over-rich and meaningless, it promises little for what it
holds within, where the lofty Gothic piers and arches have so impressive
an air of majesty that architectural flaws are forgotten. It proves how
much longer Gothic lasted in Spain than elsewhere in Europe. The
triforium here is replaced by an elaborately-carved balcony that runs
round the church, and high up are medallions colored with gold and
Eastern hues, an enamel-like decoration which has been beautifully and
sparingly used; the inner circle of the clearstory window and the round
windows of the west end, have jeweled chains of color that modern
churches could well imitate. As usual, the side chapels are full of
treasures, and the sacristy boasts the very crucifix the Cid carried in
battle. There is one bad defect: its apse has not the dim, mysterious
curve of a cathedral, the east end being square, like a cold secular
hall. Nestling under this gigantic pile is the loveliest thing in all
Salamanca, the _catedral vieja_, its title in the old Latin proverb
"fortis Salmantina." It is a small, Romanesque-transition church,
unused, but in good repair, left unchanged by a sensible bishop when the
services were removed to its more pretentious rival. The carvings of the
capitals are boldly massive, there is a noticeably good, painted
_retablo_, and among the numerous tombs--a Gregorovius could make a
fascinating volume of Spain's alabaster knights and bishops!--there is
one that is specially appealing. It is in a chapel opening off the
cloisters; a warrior in armor lies on his sarcophagus, beside him his
wife, with a child's innocence of face, dressed in the nun's robe worn
while her lord was fighting the Moors, with high pattens on her feet, a
dainty little Castilian gentlewoman, mother of the prelate whose stately
tomb fills the center of the chapel. The old Cathedral is so tucked in
among buildings, that only one view of the exterior can be got, from a
terrace leading from the south door of the later church, a view that a
New Englander will return to often with a homesick feeling, for just
such a scaly-tiled tower, window for window, line for line alike, rises
in Copley Square, Boston. This cupola shows Byzantine influences since
Spanish Romanesque was orientalized through Mediterranean trading.
Of all the memories of a journey in Spain the happiest are the hours
spent in her cathedrals, the starting out expectant, often with no map
or book, for there are frequent glimpses of the church towers to guide;
the first entering the noble structure which man's living enthusiasm
raised, the first passing from one chapel to another in astonishment at
the treasures they guard. Pierre Loti has a sketch on Burgos Cathedral,
seen once only on a late afternoon, just as the verger was closing it,
and he describes how unhappily he was affected by the lavish material
wealth. Pure artist that he is in his theory of seizing on a swift
impression, the test may be successful for Philae or for the Parthenon,
but it will not do for a Spanish cathedral, which is too complex, and
can well hide its soul from the hasty tourist. May M. Loti forgive me
for saying it, but certainly the way in which he saw Burgos differs
little from the lightning-flash method of the Yankee tourist he
despises. I think he must have had a cross indigestion that late
afternoon, or perhaps it was his Huguenot blood rising in protest.
Another of his countrymen, equally sensitive, "le délicat Joubert,"
gives a less on-the-surface judgment: "The pomp and magnificence with
which the Church is reproached are in truth the result and proof of her
incomparable excellence. From whence, let me ask, have come this power
of hers and these excessive riches except from the enchantment into
which she threw all the world? She had the talent of making herself
loved, and the talent of making men happy ... it is from thence she drew
her power."