GRANADA.
WHEN we came down this evening from the Generaliffe, we found a curious
group in the vestibule of the inn where we were lodged, and a picture of
troubadour and gypsy life in Spain was before us suddenly. A dwarf, so
stout and short as to be a monster in his appearance, and two or three
girls to sing and play with a rude tambourine, made hideous dancing. The
landlord and landlord’s wife, the two daughters of the landlord and
their husbands,—two lazy fellows who helped one another do nothing all
day long,—were seated around, enjoying the scene. The short fellow was
short mainly in his legs, which, indeed, were not much longer than his
neck; and the antics he cut up were grotesque and ludicrous in the
extreme. But who could refrain from joining in the dance to the music,
rude as it was? The landlord’s daughters could not, and with a little
coaxing the dandy husbands were brought upon the floor; other young
people, hearing the fun, dropped in, the frolic became general, and we
were treated to an impromptu Spanish fandango, of which I do not propose
to be the reporter. It was not amusing merely, but interesting also to
observe the phase of lower life among these people, and to see how
easily they could find entertainment without going out of doors to get
it. The ugly dwarf went through the company, cap in hand, gathered a few
pence, and with his little troupe hobbled off to try his luck at some
other place. They told me that he lives in the mountains, many leagues
away from Granada, but comes down to town, during the season of company,
to exhibit himself. And in this, too, he is not unlike the degraded in
other parts of the world, who are always willing to make a living by
their deformities, if they can get a chance.
[Illustration: THE ALHAMBRA (FROM THE GENERALIFFE).]
The gypsies held a horse fair in Granada to-day. We found them in great
numbers, from distant parts of the country. It was a new scene and phase
of life. Gypsies are seen in England, in America, in Germany, in Italy,
indeed there is hardly a country unvexed by gypsies. Wandering over the
world, having no continuing city or abiding place, like the frogs of the
land from which they get their name, they find their way into king’s
houses and everybody’s house,—lying, cheating, stealing, peddling, and
meddling, a nuisance and a curse. But the gypsies of Spain are a race by
themselves, and not the ancestors nor the children of the gypsies of the
other lands I have named. They have indeed a language with many words in
common, and their habits are similar all the world over, but these
gypsies of Spain are a race by themselves. Where they came from, and who
they are, it is hard to say. They are usually spoken of as from Egypt,
and being once called Egyptians, then gyptians,—the name easily runs
into gypsies in the English tongue. But they are called _gitanos_ in
Spanish, and the race has no relations with the wandering tribes or
families that roam throughout Europe and the Western World.
They are, as a people,—at least they seemed to me,—larger and stouter
than the Spanish; and by no means so well-favored. Dark complexions,
black eyes, long straight black hair, high cheek-bones, and short noses,
they resemble North American Indians more than any European race. They
are not cleanly in their persons, nor their dwellings; their roaming
habits lead them to eat and sleep anywhere, with their dogs and donkeys;
they dwell in caves if no better houses are at their command, and the
hill behind the city, which we see from the towers of the Alhambra, is
pierced with holes that lead into the chambers where they make their
homes. They have also one quarter of the town where they have dwellings,
but the walls of a city are not agreeable to the freedom of their wills,
and they prefer the hills and the country.
They have no _moral_ principle. There is but one virtue known among
them, and that is so rare in Spain, and so remarkable among such a
people, that it must be set down to their credit at the very start. The
women are chaste, and that to a degree that perhaps no other people in
the world can claim. It is the one feature of their character that
redeems them from the curse of utter and hopeless vagabondism, and,
standing out as it does like an ivory tower in the midst of a waste of
moral ruin, its beauty is the more lovely and its existence the more
wonderful. I cannot say what I would of the care with which mothers
guard their daughters from contamination with their own race and the
outside world; and I cannot add another word in their praise. They live
by fraud. Known to the world as swindlers and liars and thieves, they
are nevertheless tolerated, and perhaps because feared; their ill-will
being dreaded, and their friendship supposed to be conciliated by
complying with their demands.
They get power over people in the same way that _spiritualists_ do: by
appealing to that latent superstition which lurks in almost every human
bosom, and is much stronger in some than others, and is often strongest
in those who would be the least suspected of such a weakness. Thus the
women of this gypsy race are fortune-tellers. The young women of Spain,
like the young women of every country that I have seen, have some
curiosity and credulity, upon which a shrewd impostor will easily play
and extort money as the reward of her trickery. To these young women
lovers are promised, and when the pride or the passion of the young is
tickled with the promise, the prophet is not very sharply questioned or
judged. One very common trick performed by the gypsy women in Spain has
been reproduced in our country and in England again and again, and will
be repeated as long as rogues can find fools to be duped. As love is the
ruling passion of the young, avarice is of older people, and to make a
heap of money out of a handful is the great desire of the soul. The
gypsy woman promises a lady to teach her how to make a trunkful of gold
out of a few hundred dollars. The lady is to take all her gold, and to
get as much as she can, and tie it up in a white handkerchief in the
presence of the gypsy, then to keep it carefully by her side, night and
day, for three days, then the gypsy is to return and they are to deposit
it in a trunk over which the gypsy is to say her form of words, and then
the trunk is to be carefully locked and guarded for three weeks, and
when opened is to be found _filled_ with gold. The gypsy, returning
after three days’ absence, comes with a bundle of rubbish tied up in a
white handkerchief concealed under her mantle, and easily substitutes it
for the one which the lady has watched for three days, and after the
other is well locked up she disappears, to be heard of no more in that
quarter. A trick so stupid and silly one would hardly believe could be
practised once; but it is played every year, upon many victims, in all
countries. Last summer a spiritualist woman in Paris assured a gentleman
that large treasures were buried in the grounds about his house, and he
spent thousands and thousands in tearing up his place to find it. The
woman got the most of the money spent, and he is hunting yet. But these
gypsies are not mere fortune-tellers, they are traders and tinkers; they
deal in horse-flesh particularly, and are a striking illustration of the
curious fact that trading horses, buying and selling horses, all the
world over, has some affinities with trickery. Why it is, perhaps, the
attention of psychologists has not been sufficiently long directed to
the subject to say; but gypsies and jockeys are usually reckoned as
belonging to the same class, and nobody is expected to trust either.
Bensaken went with us among these strange people, and as he understood
their language, he made our visit among them exceedingly entertaining,
and the facts that we gathered from him and them of their haunts and
habits are perhaps as reliable as those which Borrow and others have
furnished. I could not learn that they have any religious system. They
believe in one God, but they have more to do with the devil, whether
they believe in him or not. They have no faith in anybody. Why should
they, or rather how could they? Intending to keep faith with nobody, and
living only to deceive, they cannot be expected to believe. If they are
not lineal descendants of Ishmael, they are like the Arabs, a nomadic
race, and their hands are against every man, and every man’s against
them.
I fell to musing over the change that three or four hundred years had
made in the state of things on this famous spot. For we are within the
grounds of the Alhambra. And the time was when the splendor of Oriental
courts was shining here in its brightest array, and the luxury of kings
and queens was spread about these seats that are now the scene of this
low revelry and mirth. The vanity of earth is impressed upon me by this
miserable show. The fashion of this world passeth away. And, indeed, the
lesson of the Alhambra is the strangest, saddest lesson that ruins
teach. Its walls, its towers, its turrets, its gates, in their decay, as
they yet linger on the heights overlooking the city and the plain, seem
to say, We are witnesses to-day that the glory of kings is fleeting as
the dew of the morning:
“The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples—”
have dissolved; and the wreck behind is the monument of a departed race,
an extinct dynasty, a better, wiser, nobler race by far than that which
now inhabits the land. For when the Moors went out of Spain, they
carried with them arts, science, enterprise, energy, strength, and
taste. They left a people in possession ignorant, proud, bigoted, and
indolent: a people that now, in the midst of an advancing age, is making
no advance; a people who carry earth in baskets instead of wheelbarrows,
and wood on donkeys instead of using carts!
Two things astonished me in Spain: the one, that the pictures in her
galleries were so great and good, and the other that her cathedrals so
far excel the rest of European temples in the grandeur of their
architecture. Poor as Spain is now, we must not forget that it was once
the most powerful of kingdoms, and the mistress of a world of its own.
And the arts and sciences once flourished here as they did in the
brightest days of Grecian and Roman glory. The paintings that are
gathered in Madrid are probably as valuable in the eyes of the artistic
world as those of any other gallery; and there are half a dozen
cathedrals in Spain that are not equalled by the same number in all the
rest of the Continent. One who visited them will not be apt to forget
the florid beauty of the one at Burgos, the massive grandeur of that in
Toledo, the thousand columns that sustain the arches on which rests the
roof of the converted mosque at Cordova, or, the most majestic of them
all, the vast and solemn pile that stands in Seville; nor will he
readily lose the impressions made upon his soul by the cathedral at
Granada, into which we are now entering, as we are about to take leave
of the Alhambra, and go to the north of Europe.
It was the design of the founders of this temple to make it the most
splendid in the world; and this weak and unworthy ambition has doubtless
given to us many noble monuments of genius and labor which a less
exciting motive might have failed to produce. We are met with a notice,
on entering, that we are not to converse during service; and it is a
caution that might well be put up in the Protestant as well as Catholic
places of worship. Five naves are divided with massive pillars; the
pavement is marble, and very beautiful; the interior 425 feet long and
250 feet wide, with chapels on the sides, on which private wealth has
been lavished with a profusion that seems absolutely incredible; one of
them was built by an archbishop, whose wealth was so great that he
imitated the royal manner of living, and preferred to be like his Master
a king, rather than like his Master a servant.
Charles V. called upon the artists of the world to come and embellish
this house, and to assist him in building the sepulchres of his father
and mother, and the kings of Spain. The chapel royal is the most
impressive mausoleum in the whole kingdom; for here, in full view, are
the tombs, and upon them the images, in marble, of Ferdinand and
Isabella, and beneath these monuments repose the ashes of those
illustrious monarchs whose names are so indissolubly linked with the
history of our own distant land. By them lie the relics also of Philip
and his wife, who was called Crazy Jane. There are no more elaborate
sepulchral monuments than these. Four statues of learned divines and
twelve apostles surround the royal tombs, as if keeping eternal guard
over the inevitable dust. The statues of the royal dead are said to be
good likenesses, and I hope they are, for these people had so much care
and trouble in life, it is certainly pleasant to see them looking so
quiet in their stone beds. Even Crazy Jane, the wife of Philip, is as
calm and peaceful, in the effigy that lies at our feet, as if she never
had been in the habit of carrying the corpse of her husband about with
her from place to place, refusing to have it buried, and insisting on
the pleasure of embracing it whenever she took a notion for so cold a
comfort.
Isabella, the fair patron of Columbus, desired to be brought here and
buried; and here she lies, one of the noblest women that ever sat upon a
throne: a wonderful contrast with the late Isabella who came from Madrid
to Granada, a few years ago, descended into the vaults, and caused mass
to be performed for the souls of the departed; which souls are quite as
well off without any masses as hers will be with many. Her visit was
made here in 1862, and Ferdinand and Isabella took possession of the
city in 1492, nearly four hundred years between the visits of the two
Isabellas; and there is as great contrast between the characters of the
two women as there is between the condition of the country under the
reign of the one and the other.
A very obliging priest led us from chapel to chapel, and pointed out to
us the several distinguishing marks of antiquity and sacredness that
make the cathedral a joy to the believer, and one of the most—in many
respects the most—sacred in Spain. He was not unmindful of a trifling
fee when we parted, and one cannot but be amused with the solemn gravity
with which this office of guide to the holies is performed by the
priests, who doubtless have the mixed motive of displaying the charms of
their sacred places, and of getting the little money that grateful
travellers leave in their hands. It is best to have their services, for
they answer a hundred questions that without them would be unanswered,
and their weary life seems to be lightened by the brief companionship of
strangers.
In the evening we set off from Granada by diligence, leaving the place
in the same style that marked our entrance. A crowd gathered at the
office to witness our departure. A woman at the window put down her
money to buy a ticket to take a seat with us. Before she had received
the ticket, a couple of officers of justice rushed in and seized her.
They stripped off her bonnet and her luxurious head of hair: they tore
off her mantilla, and, shocking to relate, her loosely-flowing dress
fell at her feet, in the midst of the derisive shouts of an admiring
multitude; and, thus stripped, she remained a well-dressed man! He had
helped himself freely to the money in the shop where he was employed,
got together all he could borrow and steal of others, and, in the
disguise of a woman, was about to abscond to parts unknown! Probably he
was going to that happy land far, far away, which is still believed by
them to be the paradise of thieves. His career was suddenly arrested.
The crowd followed hooting at his heels as the officers led him off to
prison; the horn of the postilion rang out its call on the evening air,
the dozen horses and mules at last consented to pull together, and we
plunged out of Granada.