would go thither I must say, resist the temptation. Unfortunately, the
spirit of religiosity, which is to religion what sentimentality is to
sentiment, has taken possession of her burial place. If you do go to
Alba, however, make it a day's excursion from Salamanca. The evening
was over before we reached the town, and we drove in darkness from the
station, bumping over the ruts of an awful road. Railway and villages
seem often at enmity in Spain; though we had passed directly by the
gleaming lights of Alba, we ran on some miles further before stopping in
its station, hence the necessity of a drive of several kilometers back
to the town. The inn was most primitive, being merely the poor house of
a country woman, our waiter at table her ten-year old son dressed in
corduroys. A friendly pig met us in the front hall, coming out from the
kitchen to look at the unaccustomed foreigners; nevertheless, the house
was clean and the landlady got out fragrant linen for the bedrooms. On
our admiring a picture of their great patroness, the kindly woman, after
dusting it, presented it with the customary polite phrase of "this your
picture," which was no mere formality, since the next morning when she
found it secretly restored to its former place, she rushed out to thrust
it again on us as we were stepping into the diligence. This generous
landlady, our grave little garçon, the night watchman the _sereno_,
calling the hours, a daybreak view from the plaza of the vivid green
meadows along the river, these are the pleasant reminiscences of Alba.
Opposite the inn stood the church where the saint is buried, but
willingly would I blot out its memory. An excitable monk was our guide.
He turned on the electric light with a spectacular air, as if that, not
the great relic, was the boast of the church; he showed the saint's
silver tomb, her heart hung round with votive gifts, archbishop's rings
and diamond coronets, then he led us to the revolving door of the
convent, whence personal mementoes were passed us for inspection.
Lowering the lights, he bade us look through a grating at the back of
the church, and suddenly the electricity was turned on in an interior
room, and there on the cot lay the image of a Carmelite nun asleep. The
whole thing was in the worst possible taste, on a level with the bad
Churrigueresque architecture of the same period. A spot worthy of silent
pilgrimage, where one of God's greatest saints breathed her last prayer,
"Cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies," this solemn cell of
her death-bed has been turned to a vulgar show. How Teresa's intelligent
simplicity would sweep aside such ill-judged honors! In silent protest
at the tawdriness surrounding them, lie the patrons of this Alba
foundation, Don Francisco Velasquez and his wife Doña Teresa,
distinguished, superb effigies in stone, _hidalgo como el Rey_. Doña
Teresa, in the delightful way of Spanish ladies on tombs, is reading
tranquilly in her book of devotions.
With this example before us of the pass to which religious extravagance
can be carried, it may be time to touch on a tendency in Spain that is a
distress to the northern Catholic who is less childlike in his inward
life. Of course, since there is every kind of temperament, there must be
every kind of taste; perhaps I am too much guided by personal likes or
dislikes. However, I feel that those who crave the appropriate and
simple will agree with me that making allowance for an emotional people,
a coquettish shepherdess under a glass case on a church altar, (such as
I saw in Cadiz,) is misunderstood religion. One of Spain's wisest sons,
the philosopher Vives, agitated against the dressing of statues, and the
Council of Trent later prohibited the bad usage. Why is not their advice
followed? I do not mean to criticise the little country shrines whose
inartistic decoration is often most heart-moving; in a remote village
certain things are touching which elsewhere are displeasing. It should
be the effort of the Spanish clergy to discourage the extreme devotion
to special altars and statues. Artificial and roccoco in sentiment and
expression, it is a menace to religion in the Peninsula. Spain has the
vital Christian faith, she is unspoiled by the tinsel, beneath the
symbol is a soul; but, if she insists on clinging to what the modern
mind finds ugly and insincere, she may lose many to whom the inner
religion of a St. Teresa would appeal. People seldom will see both sides
justly; to rid themselves of an irritating detail, some will throw away
the whole. There are not a few whose antipathy to religion has been
caused by this blind clinging to the non-essential: the novelist Pérez
Galdós, I should say was such a case. Though his stories prove that he
has never grasped what interior religion means, has never gone to the
fountain head and drank of the pure, mystic waters, but has tasted only
the contaminated streams of the valley, yet it cannot be denied that
some of the religiosity he depicts is a phase that exists only too
truly. The evil is the result of ignorance, not of malice. For this
reason it would die a natural death were the Spanish clergy given a
wholly rounded education. I do not refer here to the learned canons or
monastic orders, but to the parochial clergy. Spain watches her neighbor
France too closely, let her look further afield and she will lose her
fear that education and skepticism go hand in hand; in England and
America the priesthood is with the advancing tide, not against it:
knowledge never yet harmed religion, but ignorance cripples her. Science
should have no silly terrors for priests whose church is the greatest
proof of evolution through the ages, advancing relentlessly so that
what is worth retaining of man's increasing knowledge finds its
inevitable place in her body, but advancing slowly, (impatient abuse
cannot hurry her magnificent conservatism); a complete organism, a
living entity ever changing, yet ever the same.[21] We can hardly expect
the clergy of a land where tradition is a sacred thing, to be in the
vanguard of modern thought, but they at least should not forget their
own noted men of learning. Ximenez, Luis de León, Feijóo, Isla, Suárez,
Balmes,--the names come crowding--all of them churchmen, who, the more
they knew, the deeper grew their faith.
After this vexatious visit to Alba de Tormes, it was with trepidation
that I came to Avila, there to find Teresa's vigorous, truly-spiritual
personality the living presence of the proud, high-minded little
Castilian city. And a happy coincidence the night of our arrival gave
proof that her generous enthusiasm, her unresting love of souls, were
not things of the past. Having spent the day at the Escorial, at ten in
the evening we took the express to Avila. In the carriage _Reservado
para Señoras_, we found ourselves with three religious of the
Sacred-Heart; a touch of home for me were their familiar fluted caps,
buttoned capes, and silver crosses. The few hours of the journey fled
all too swiftly in delightful talk; like nuns the world over, they were
gay and happy as children, with the serene youth of the convent life in
their faces. One of them was so distinguished a woman that it was a
fascination to look at her.
These fragile nuns were to travel through the cold night--and a raw
November gale was blowing over the uplands of Castile--to take a steamer
at Bordeaux, for they were pioneers, on their way to found a house in a
distant part of South America, where education was backward. Three weeks
of winter sea, then some tropical days on horseback, before they reached
their desolate new home! Truly the heroic spirit of St. Teresa is alive
to-day, and fair sisters of the seraphim still walk among us.
EVENING IN AVILA
Around about the town stand eighty gray stone towers,
That make a fitter crown, a hardier show than flowers
For what is high and brave--the tawny Castile plain--
So patient and so grave, incarnate soul of Spain.
You have made sweet the ways of penury and care
With dawn and sunset praise and white still hours of prayer,
Old town of mystic saint! Secure you ask: Does peace,
Or restless seeking plaint come with your wealth's increase?
An answering sound of bells across the upland goes,
To each field-toiler tells a message of repose,
And mounting to the sky's slow-darkening, tranquil dome
The heart-calm echoes rise of peasants lingering home.
MADRID AND THE ESCORIAL
"They who wrought wonders by the Nile of old,
Bequeathing their immortal part to us,
Cast their own spirit first into the mould,
And were themselves the rock they fashioned thus."
GEORGE SANTAYANA.
These two spots, products of men of small idea and nature, are happily
so close together that they can fall under the same abuse. Coming from
the north, to stop at the Escorial either from Avila with its grand
walls of the eighty towers, or from the crag-set castle of Segovia, is
such an abrupt transition from heroic times to the doctrinaire centuries
that followed them that it is but too easy to be unfair to Philip II's
huge pile. A better way is to go out to it from Madrid; then, somewhat
accustomed to cold commonplace, the Escorial gives less of a jar.
We descended to it from Segovia. Knowing Herrera's lifeless
architecture--"a syllogism in stone" it has wittily been called--on that
side I did not expect much, but accounts of the setting of the Escorial,
of its grand solitary position in the mountains, made me hope for some
kind of effect. People see things in such different ways. I could
discover no grandeur whatever in the position of the rectangular
ashy-colored building. The lower slopes of the Guadarramas rise behind
it, but at a little distance, and the town comes between it and the
sierras. It was not solitary, it was not imposing. At close range, after
we had walked up the leafy avenue from the station, even the appearance
of unity was lost, and it seemed nothing but a big block of good town
houses like many that fill the square between four city streets. Window
after window, alike inadequately small and unadorned; just like any
monotonous line of town houses. We stood aghast at the pretentious,
ineffectual mass which they call the eighth wonder of Spain. For us
to-day there is little wonder in spending fifty millions in one lifetime
to put up myriads of doors, stair-cases, and courtyards, to use two
thousand pounds of iron to make the door-keys; we are accustomed to the
feat. The pity is that every tourist in Spain comes here, and one in a
thousand goes to Poblet or León, those other pantheons that are proper
burial places for sturdy old kings. I am not sure that the Hapsburgs in
Spain merit anything worthier than an Escorial.
At first we thought it might be the side which we approached that gave
so poor an effect, so we proceeded to encircle the building; on all
four sides passing by window after window we saw not one inch of stone
carved worthily, and to our astonishment we found it faced the
mountains. Fancy a blank, rocky wall, a quarter of a mile away and fancy
such a stupidity as choosing this to open on, instead of the wide
horizon of the opposite side. Does this not give the key to the
Escorial? It and its builder had no imagination. Since we were here we
had to see it all, so we let ourselves be guided hither and thither,
through courtyard after courtyard, down one dull corridor after another,
in and out of rooms where little interested,--a dreary waste of a place.
In the picture gallery overlooking the gardens we got our first
introduction to that eccentric genius, El Greco, at his worst here, with
sick color and elongated figures; we thought him quite mad.
Nevertheless, the picture gallery was a respite; it was good to meet
again Tintoret's rich visions of Venice, the full superb shoulders of
his women, the gold brown of the robes. Ranged in cases there were also
some embroidered vestments that were noticeable.
The church of the Escorial is so coldly formal and pretentious that it
lay like a load on our spirits. There is something frightening in the
way man unconsciously expresses his own nature in the material work of
his hand; he may think himself very big, unless he really is he is
certain to betray himself, if he paints or writes or builds. This
correct, somber church exactly represents the religious ideal of a
Philip II. Heaven, so close to one under the soul-feeding Romanesque
vault of Santiago, in Seville or Toledo's Gothic aspiration, is very far
away under this limited dome; the propriety here is that of a bigot, who
would see heresy in the soar of Gothic, and backwardness in the bare
solemnity of Romanesque.
We were shown the usual tourist-sights, the seat in the choir where
Philip sat when news was brought of the Battle of Lepanto, which broke
another inroad of the Mohammedan on Europe; also the life-size marble
crucifix (spoiled by too long an upper lip) which Benvenuto Cellini
made, and which was carried on men's backs from Barcelona to Madrid.
Statues of Philip and his father, with the ladies of their households,
kneel on either side of the altar, rich bronze-gilt work, but hardly in
character with a church. Then we descended to that acme of dreariness
and morbid misanthropy, the sunken chamber where are buried the royal
family of Spain since Charles V; one somber coffin rose above another in
the dark place. And art can make death so beautiful, art like the tombs
at Miraflores and Avila! Happy beings to have escaped this dreadful hole
of burial, we exclaimed. Could only a century separate Isabella in her
Castle of Segovia, or in the white marble peace of her sepulcher at
Granada, from her descendants' costly ideal of a palace and a mausoleum?
As we stood shivering with the formality and melancholy of it all, with
sympathy for the present happy young King and Queen who must lie here
some day, a little touch of sentiment took away some of the oppression.
We saw on the tomb of Alfonso XII a fresh wreath of chrysanthemums.
Then, feeling that any more subterranean darkness was insupportable, we
hurried up the steep staircase from the Pantheon, through the
heavy-bound church, and out in the courtyard--dreary enough,
too!--breathed the fresh air with relief.
In the library of the Escorial was the first place where I had seen the
gilt edges of books, not their leather backs, presented to the reader, a
rich, strange effect which later in the Seraglio at Stamboul I noticed
again. We stopped long to examine the portraits that stand between the
book-cases. Philip II was pale-eyed, anæmic and white-visaged, with
drooping, hypochondrical corners to his mouth. And I had pictured him
scowling and black and forceful! The Escorial should have told me that
not a forceful personality could have built it but rather a stubborn
ability and dogged patience, a narrow consistency, all in character with
his pale eyes. The swift degeneration of the Hapsburg line is easily to
be read in these portraits. Charles V (in Spain Charles I), keen of face
and energetic, has a great-great-grandson, Charles II, last of the line,
so rickety and idiotic that no caricature of used-up royal blood could
go further.
Weary of sight-seeing where so little roused the imagination, we
descended to the gardens, stiffly restrained too, but pleasant to loiter
in. So close was the monotonous mass of gray stone above us, one did not
have to look at it, but could gaze out on the wide view toward Madrid.
Then at sunset we went back to the church for an evening service, that
hour of prayer, restful and beautiful all over Spain. The Pater Noster
was recited, a litany was chanted, a meditation was read slowly with
pauses while the people listened with bowed heads and closed eyes. Then
followed the primitive, centuries-old Latin hymns, the glory of the
church, in which is incorporated for all time the piercing piety of the
Middle Ages. I too closed my eyes to shut out the formal church, and for
some forgetful moments I could dream that those quavering voices of old
and young, so simple, so sincere, were in some unspoiled mountain
village, perhaps in that most soul-satisfying temple of all the world,
the Lower Church of St. Francis:--Assisi and the Escorial,--the human
mind is capable of wide deviations, from the religion of humble love to
this haughty contortion of it.
The most fatal effect of the Escorial was to fix the capital in Madrid,
a spot, as Ford observed, that had been passed over in contempt by
Iberian, Roman, Goth, and Moor. Up to the building of the Escorial the
choice of a capital had wavered, at times, in Valladolid, in Toledo, or
in Seville. Philip's mountain palace caused to be the chief city one of
the worst situated towns in Spain, on a waterless river, with no
commercial prospects, roasting in summer, swept by icy winds the rest of
the year. It too, like the Escorial, lacks all soul for the traveler.
Not a church worth looking at, all of them seventeenth and eighteenth
century abominations with fat cupids, prancing angels, and posing,
self-glorifying saints, not a cathedral in the capital of a country
which has the largest number and most heart-satisfying cathedrals of the
world.
I daresay if one lived in Madrid and had a full active or social life
one might like it; there must be some cause for the proverb "From Madrid
to heaven, and in heaven a peep-hole to look down on Madrid." As a city
it can never be anything but second-rate; the new residential part near
the parks is like the good districts of any average town. The famous
Puerta del Sol is filled at every hour of the day and night with such a
rabble of loafers and vociferating peddlers that it takes courage to
push one's way through. As the Court was absent we missed seeing the
brilliant morning hour of guard mounting before the Royal Palace.
Occasionally some local sight would remind us we still were in Spain,
the original and untamed. Ladies in mantillas would pass on their way to
the late Mass at midday, a brougham drawn by handsome mules would go by,
or, if it were a holiday, a few girls of the people wore embroidered
shawls. But taken as a whole, for the sightseer Madrid is just a
weariness of the spirit.
Except, of course, the pictures, and I must add, the Armory. We hurried
off to the Prado, up the steps past the bust of the vigorous saturnine
Goya, along the far-stretching hall, with hardly a glance for the white
monks of Zubaran, or El Greco's strange canvases, till midway, we turned
to the left into the large hall that holds the Velasquez masterpieces.
It is a sensation in one's life, this first meeting with Velasquez at
the height of his powers. The wonderful Doria Pope in Rome, the few
pictures in London and Vienna whet the appetite for the supreme feast in
Madrid. It is an unprecedented collection of one master that no glow of
enthusiasm can exaggerate. Canvas follows canvas, all the work of
secure, triumphant genius, with brush handling so free that it seems
impossible he painted more than two hundred years ago. Don Carlos stands
dangling a glove in an absolutely natural moment of nonchalance, Philip
IV and the pompous Duke of Olivares ride their proud steeds out of
magnificent skies, the gallant little Don Baltasar Carlos dashes at us
on his pot-bellied pony, or stands a baby hunter in the Guadarramas.
Velasquez painted him later, a grave, dignified lad of about fourteen,
always with a fearless, straight look, and he also painted his piquant
Bourbon mother, Philip IV's first wife; his second a wooden-faced
Austrian, mother of the doll-like, big-skirted infantas. Had Don
Baltasar Carlos lived, surely the race had not ended in a Charles II.
You walk about the Velasquez room bewildered, sorry for the copyists who
have set up their easels before work that tells so unflinchingly each
slip of a talent what it is to be a master. Portraits and genre studies;
the lovely bent neck of the weaving girl, the breathing livingness of
the Maids of Honor, the displeasing dwarfs,--each canvas is an achieved
success.
At the end of the hall hangs what swiftly became my favorite of all
pictures seen, the "Surrender of Breda," called "Las Lanzas," from the
soldiers' spears ranged against the sky. It is a canvas about the size
of the "Night Watch" in Amsterdam. The two armies fill the background
under a sky that is a glorious harmony of cold blue and rose. In the
foreground the Fleming, Justin of Nassau, advances to surrender the keys
of Breda to its conqueror, the Marquis Spínola, general of the Spanish
forces, though by birth a Genoese. Spínola has dismounted, and bends to
meet his enemy, vanquished now, hence in his knightly creed, his friend.
With a subtle, delicate shrinking he has placed his hand on his
opponent's shoulder, and in his face is an expression of such high
chivalry, of such generous effacement of self, of all that is best in
man of courtesy and noble-mindedness, that the tears spring to the eyes.
You return to it again and again and come away refreshed and ennobled.
Only a man loyal himself to the core could render such an emotion, only
a technical genius of the first rank could fix so fleeting an instant;
this truly is thinking in paint, and it places Velasquez side by side
with Leonardo da Vinci as a master of the intellect. I think it is very
pleasant to learn that Velasquez knew the General he has immortalized,
and you feel he must have known, too, the superb Spanish hidalgos who
stand in the group behind the Marquis. On his first trip to Italy, the
painter sailed in the same vessel to Genoa with Spínola, and probably
sketched him then. I like to imagine the meeting of two such spirits of
chivalry.
[Illustration: ISABELLA OF PORTUGAL, BY TITIAN. PRADO GALLERY, MADRID]
Were the Prado only Velasquez and the Spanish artists, it would be
among the first of galleries, but it is astonishingly rich in Italian
masters as well. It has the best equestrian portrait in the world,
Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg, a picture to be studied long and
often. The Emperor has risen from illness, he has had to be lifted upon
his horse, but he has pluckily girded himself to take command. The
Venetian red of his plumes and scarf is splendid. Titian has another of
the Emperor, standing with his Irish hound, near it a gem of woman
portraiture, Charles' lovely wife, Isabella of Portugal. It seems a
strange irony for such an exquisite creature to have been the mother of
a Philip II. Philip was fortunate in his daughters, too, demure, formal
little maidens, who stand with the sedate propriety of Spanish infantas,
and in his sisters, whose long, aristocratic faces Antonio Moro has left
us. Charles V sent Moro to England to paint Queen Mary for her young
bridegroom, and here she sits in her rich crimson leather chair, erect
and stiff and insignificant, her auburn hair and homely face not one to
charm her future husband still in his twenties, she not far from the
fatal forty. A deeply pathetic portrait this. Good woman she was
personally, despite having been made the scape-goat for a system, yet
one can read in the pinched shrewdness of her mouth that she lacked her
grandmother's height of brain, nor was she capable of her mother's
dignity of sorrow, whose grand insulted womanhood Shakespeare has
rendered so magnificently.[22] There are many other notable portraits in
the Prado; a stately matron and her three sons by Parmigianino; a rich
pigment of color, Rembrandt's wife; Raphael's Cardinal,--the acute,
keen, Italian face so different from the Spanish type; a striking Count
de Berg by Van Dyke. Mantegna has a small canvas, the "Tránsito de la
Virgen," with the apostles gathered round the couch, a graphic glimpse
through the window behind of Mantua. Mantegna put thought into his work,
and he compels thought from others; this "Tránsito" drew me to it in the
same browsing study as that small triptych in the Uffizi.
Then upstairs are more Italians. The facile Veronese has here, curiously
enough, a really impressive scene, Christ and the Centurion. There are
many Rubens, and some peaceful Claude Lorraine sunsets and sunrises,
offering the needed siesta of quiet in a full collection. And downstairs
in the basement are the primitives, Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memling,
mystical enough to refresh the soul of a Huysmans. The gilded
backgrounds of these celestial annunciations, these interiors of so
intense and breathless a reverence, have always seemed to me a pure
symbol of the uncomplicated perfection of their faith, the unquestioning
mental background of the age.