"Thou shield of that faith which in Spain we revere,
Thou scourge of each foeman who dares to draw near,
Whom the Son of that God who the elements tames
Called child of the thunder, immortal Saint James."
--_Hymn to Santiago_, in George Borrow's translation.
Fatigues of the journey and discomforts of our lodging melted from
memory like shadows of the night when we found ourselves, on the
morning of July twenty-fourth, before that rich, dark mass of fretted
granite, a majestic church standing solitary in the midst of spreading
_plazas_. These are surrounded by stately buildings, the
archiepiscopal palace with its memories of Gelmirez, the royal
hospital founded by Ferdinand and Isabella for the succor of weary
pilgrims, ancient colleges with sculptured facades, marvellous old
convents whose holy fathers were long since driven out by royal decree
into hungry, homesick exile, and the columned city hall with its
frontal relief of the battle of Clavijo and its crowning statue of St.
James. The great, paved squares, the magnificent stairways and deeply
recessed portals were aglow with all Galicia. Peasants in gala dress,
bright as tropic birds, stood in deferential groups about the
pilgrims, for there were actual pilgrims on the scene, men and women
whose broad hats and round capes were sewn over with scallop-shells,
and whose long staffs showed little gourds fastened to the upper end.
They wore rosaries and crucifixes in profusion, and their habit was
spangled with all manner of charms and amulets, especially the tinsel
medals with their favorite device of St. James riding down the Moors.
We bought at one of the stalls set up before the doors for sale of
holy wares a memento of the famous old jet-work, a tiny black hand,
warranted, if hung about the neck, to cure disorders of the eyes. We
fell to chatting with a pilgrim who was shod in genuine sandal shoon.
A large gourd was tied to his belt, the rim of his hat was turned up
at one side and caught there with a rosy-tinted shell, and his long,
black ringlets fell loose upon his shoulders, framing a romantic Duerer
face. He talked with us in German, saying that he was of Wittemberg,
and once a Lutheran, but had been converted to the true faith on a
previous visit to Spain. Since then he had footed his penitential way
to Jerusalem and other distant shrines. As his simple speech ran on,
we seemed to see the mountains round about Santiago crossed by those
converging streams of mediaeval pilgrims, all dropping on their knees
at the first glimpse of the cathedral towers. With that sight the
fainting were refreshed, the lame ran, and jubilant songs of praise to
Santiago rolled out in many languages upon the air.
"Primus ex apostolis,
Martir Jerusolinus,
Jacobus egregio,
Sacer est martirio."
In those Ages of Faith all the gates of the city were choked with the
incoming tide, the hostels and cure-houses overflowed, and the broad
_plazas_ about the cathedral were filled with dense throngs of
pilgrims, massed nation by nation, flying their national colors,
singing their national hymns to the strangely blended music of their
national instruments, and watching for the acolyte who summoned them,
company by company, into the august presence-chamber of St. James. His
shrine they approached only in posture of lowliest reverence. Even
now, at the end of the nineteenth century, our first glance, as we
entered the lofty, dim, and incense-perfumed nave, fell on a
woman-pilgrim dragging herself painfully on her knees up the aisle
toward the High Altar, and often falling prostrate to kiss the
pavement with groans and tears.
Mediaeval pilgrims, when they had thus won their way to the entrance of
the _Capilla Mayor_, and there received three light blows from a
priestly rod in token of chastisement, were granted the due
indulgences and, in turn, laid their offerings before the great white
altar. Still there sits, in a niche above, the thirteenth-century
image of St. James, a colossal figure wrought of red granite, with
stiffly flowing vestments of elaborately figured gilt. His left hand
grasps a silver staff, with gilded gourd atop, and his right, whose
index finger points downward to the burial vault, holds a scroll
inscribed, "Hic est corpus divi Jacobi Apostoli ac Hispaniarum
Patroni." Once he wore a broad-brimmed hat all of pure gold, but this
was melted down by Marshal Ney in the French invasion. At that time
the sacred vessels were heaped like market produce into great
ox-carts, until the cathedral had been plundered of ten hundredweight
of treasure. It was "the end of the pilgrimage" to climb the steps
behind this statue and kiss its resplendent silver cape, studded with
cockle-shells and besprinkled with gems. But the pilgrims of the past
had much more to see and worship,--the jewelled crown of the Apostle
set upon the altar, his very hat and staff, the very axe that beheaded
him, and other relics to which the attention of the modern tourist, at
least, is not invited. Yet even we were conducted to the Romanesque
crypt beneath the High Altar, where stands another altar of red
marble, decorated by a relief of two peacocks drinking from a cup.
This altar is surmounted by a bronze pedestal, which bears the
sumptuous ark-shaped casket with its enshrined handfuls of dubious
dust.
Our latter-day pilgrims seemed well content with the measure of wealth
and sanctity which Moorish sack and English piracy, French invasion
and Carlist wars, had spared to the cathedral. In the matter of
general relics, nevertheless, Santiago suffers by comparison with the
neighbor cathedral of Oviedo, which proudly shows a silver-plated old
reliquary, believed by the devout to have been brought in the earliest
Christian times from Rome. This chest contains, in addition to the
usual pieces of the true cross and thorns from the crown, such
remarkable mementos as St. Peter's leathern wallet, crumbs left over
from the Feeding of the Five Thousand, bits of roast fish and
honeycomb from Emmaus, bread from the Last Supper, manna from the
wilderness, a portion of Moses' rod and the mantle of Elijah. Oviedo
possesses, too, that famous cross which the angels made for Alfonso
II, and one of the six water-jars of Cana. But the relic chapel of
Santiago makes up in quantity whatever it may lack in quality, holding
bones, garments, hair-tresses, and like memorials of a veritable army
of martyrs, even to what Ford disrespectfully calls "sundry parcels
of the eleven thousand Virgins." Special stress is laid on a Calvary
thorn which turns blood-red every Good Friday, and a drop, forever
fresh, of the Madonna's milk. If pilgrims are not satisfied with
these, they can walk out to Los Angeles, an adjacent village, whose
church was built by the angels. Eccentric architects they were in
choosing to connect their edifice with the cathedral of Santiago by an
underground beam of pure gold, formerly one of the rafters in God's
own house.
We had speech of several pilgrims that first morning. One was a
middle-aged, sun-browned, stubby little man, whom during the ensuing
week we saw again and again in the cathedral, but never begging, with
the most of the pilgrims, at the portals, nor taking his ease in the
cloisters,--a social promenade where the laity came to gossip and the
clergy to puff their cigarettes. This humble worshipper seemed to pass
all the days of the festival in enraptured adoration, on his knees now
before one shrine, now before another. We found him first facing the
supreme architectural feature of the cathedral, that sublime and yet
most lovely _Portico de la Gloria_. He was gazing up at its paradise
of sculptured saints and angels, whose plumes and flowing robes still
show traces of azure, rose, and gold, with an expression of naive
ecstasy. He told us that he came from Astorga, and had been nine days
on the way. He spent most of his time upon the road, he added,
visiting especially the shrines of the Virgin. "Greatly it pleases me
to worship God," he said, with sparkling eyes, and ran on eagerly, as
long as we would listen, about the riches and splendors of different
cathedrals, and especially the robes and jewels of the _Virgen del
Pilar_. He seemed in his devout affection to make her wealth his own.
One of the most touching effects of the scene was the childlike
simplicity with which the poor of Galicia, coming from such vile
hovels, felt themselves at home in the dwelling of their saint. Not
even their sins marred their sense of welcome. In the cloisters we
encountered an old woman in the pilgrim dress, her staff wound with
gay ribbons, limping from her long jaunt. She told us frankly that she
was "only a beggar" in her own village, and had come for the outing as
well as to please the priest, who, objecting to certain misdemeanors
which she had the discretion not to specify, had prescribed this
excursion as penance. She was a lively old soul, and was amusing
herself mightily with the Goya tapestries, and others, that adorned
the cloisters in honor of the time. "You have a book and can read,"
she said, "and you will understand it all, but what can I understand?
I can see that this is a queen, and she is very fine, and that those
are butchers who are killing a fat pig. But we who are poor may
understand little in this world except the love of God." Others of the
pilgrims were village folk of Portugal, and, taken all together, these
modern wearers of the shell were but a sorry handful as representing
those noble multitudes who came, in ages past, to bow before the
shrine. The fourteen doors of the cathedral then stood open night and
day, and the grotesque lions leaning out over the lintels could boast
that there was no tongue of Europe which their stone ears had not
heard. Three open doors suffice in the feast days now, but with the
new flood of faith that has set toward Lourdes, pilgrimages to
Santiago, as to other Latin shrines, are beginning to revive.
Mass was over at the late hour of our arrival, but nave and aisles,
transepts and cloisters, hummed with greetings of friends, laughter of
children, who sported unrebuked about those stately columns, and the
admiring exclamations of strangers. We were often accosted in Spanish
and in French and asked from what country we came, and if we "loved
the beautiful church of the Apostle." When we were occasionally
cornered, and driven in truthfulness to say that we were Yankees, our
more intelligent interlocutors looked us over with roguish scrutiny,
but increased rather than abated their courtesies. As for the
peasants, their geography is safely limited. Noticing that our Spanish
differed from theirs, they said we must be from Castile, or, at the
most, from Portugal. At all events we were strangers to Santiago, and
they merrily vied with one another in showing us about and giving us
much graphic information not to be found in guide-books.
Much of their lore appears to be of their own invention. The superb
_Puerta de la Gloria_, wrought by a then famous architect sent from
the king of Leon, but known to us to-day only as Master Mateo, was the
fruit of twenty years' labor. This triple porch, which runs across the
west end of the nave, being finally completed, Master Mateo seems to
have symbolized the dedication of his service to the Apostle in a
kneeling statue of himself, facing the east, with back to the richly
sculptured pillar of the chief portal. The head of this figure is worn
almost as round and expressionless as a stone ball by the caresses of
generations of childish hands. The little girls whom we watched that
morning as they patted and smoothed the much-enduring pate told us,
kissing the marble eyes, that this was a statue of St. Lucia, which it
certainly is not. In another moment these restless midgets were
assaulting, with fluent phrases of insult, the carven faces of certain
fantastic images which form the bases of the clustered columns. The
children derisively thrust their feet down the yawning throats, kicked
the grotesque ears and noses, and in general so maltreated their
Gothic victims that we were moved to remonstrate.
"But why should you abuse them? What are these creatures, to be
punished so?"
"_They are Jews_," hissed our little Christians with an emphasis that
threw new light on the Dreyfus _affaire_. But an instant more, and
these vivacious, capricious bits of Spanish womanhood were all
absorbed in aiding a blind old peasant who had groped her way to the
sacred Portico for its especial privilege of prayer. The central
shaft, dividing into two the chief of the three doorways, represents
the Tree of Jesse, the patriarchal figures half-enveloped in
exquisitely sculptured foliage. The chiselled capital shows the
Trinity, Dove and Son and Father, with adoring angels. Above sits a
benignant St. James, whose throne is guarded by lions, and over all,
in the central tympanum of the sublime doorway, is a colossal figure
of our Lord, uplifting His wounded hands. About Him are grouped the
four Evangelists, radiant with eternal youth, and eight angels bearing
the instruments of the Passion, the pillar of the scourging, whips,
the crown of thorns, the nails, the scroll, the sponge, the spear, the
cross. Other angels burn incense before Him, and the archivolt above
is wrought with an ecstatic multitude of elders, martyrs, and saints,
so vivid after all these centuries that one can almost hear the blithe
music of their harps. It is the Christ of Paradise, enthroned amid the
blest, to whom His presence gives fulness of joy forevermore. Above
the lesser doors on either side are figured Purgatory and Hell. The
fresh and glowing beauty, so piquant and yet so spiritual, the truly
celestial charm of this marvellous Portico which Street did not fear
to call "one of the greatest glories of Christian art," was never,
during this festal week, without its throng of reverent beholders, the
most waiting their turn, like our old blind peasant, to fit thumb and
finger into certain curious little hollows on the central shaft, and
thus offer prayer which was sure of answer. Minute after minute for
unbroken hours, the hands succeeded one another there,--old, knotted,
toilworn hands, the small, brown hands of children, jewelled hands of
delicate ladies, and often, as now, the groping hand of blindness,
with childish fingers helping it to find those mystical depressions in
the agate. Some of the bystanders told us that St. James had descended
from his seat above the capital, and laid his hand against the column,
leaving these traces, but more would have it that the Christ Himself
had come down by night from the great tympanum to place His wounded
hand upon the shaft. Street records that he observed several such
petitioners, after removing the hand, spit into the mouths of the
winged dragons that serve as base to the pillar; but that literally
dare-devil form of amen must now have gone out of fashion, for we did
not see it once.
[Illustration: THE TRAMPLER OF THE MOORS]
Toward noon we strolled out into the grand _plaza_ before the west
facade and found it a multitudinous jam of expectant merrymakers. Even
nuns were peeping down from a leaf-veiled balcony. We seemed to have
been precipitated out of the Middle Ages into an exaggerated Fourth of
July. All the city bells were pealing, rockets and Roman candles were
sputtering, and grotesque fire-balloons, let off from a parapet of
the cathedral, flourished bandy legs and "Sagasta noses" in the
resigned old faces of the carven images. And then, amid the
acclamations of all the small boys in the square, sallied forth the
Santiago giants. These wickerwork monsters, eight all told, are
supposed to represent worshippers from foreign lands. They go by
couples, two being conventional pilgrims with "cockle-shell and sandal
shoon"; two apparently Moors, with black complexions, feather crowns,
and much barbaric finery; two nondescripts, possibly the French of
feudal date; and two, the leaders and prime favorites, regular Punch
caricatures of modern English tourists. John Bull is a stout old
gentleman with gray side-whiskers, a vast expanse of broadcloth back,
and a single eye-glass secured by a lavender ribbon. The British
Matron, in a smart Dolly Varden frock, glares with a shocked
expression from under flaxen puffs and an ostrich-feathered hat. The
popular attitude of mind toward these absurdities is past all finding
out. Not the children alone, but the entire assemblage greeted them
with affectionate hilarity. The giants, propelled by men who walked
inside them and grinned out on the world from a slit in the enormous
waistbands, trundled about the square, followed by the antics of a
rival group of dwarfs from the city hall, and then made the round of
the principal streets, executing clumsy gambols before the public
buildings.
On the morning after, July twenty-fifth, the great day of the feast,
anniversary of the Apostle's martyrdom, these same overgrown dolls
played a prominent part in the solemn cathedral service. The Chapter
passed in stately progress to the archbishop's palace to fetch his
Eminence, and later to the ancient portals where the silver-workers
once displayed their wares, to greet the Royal Delegate. At their head
strutted this absurd array of giants. The High Mass was superb with
orchestral music and the most sumptuous robes of the vestiary. The
"King of Censers," the splendid _botafumeiro_ of fourteenth-century
date, made so large, six feet high, with the view of purifying the
cathedral air vitiated by the hordes of pilgrims who were wont to pass
the night sleeping and praying on the holy pavements, flashed its
majestic curves, a mighty fire bird, from roof to floor and from
transept to transept. It is swung from the ceiling by an ingenious
iron mechanism, and the leaping, roaring flames, as the huge censer
sweeps with ever augmenting speed from vault to vault, tracing its
path by a chain of perfumed wreaths, make the spectacle uniquely
beautiful. Knights of Santiago, their white raiment marked by crimson
sword and dagger, received from the Royal Delegate "a thousand crowns
of gold," the annual state donation, instituted by Rameiro, to the
patron saint. The Delegate, kneeling before the image of Santiago,
prayed fervently that the Apostle would accept this offering of the
regent, a queen no less devout than the famous mother of San Fernando,
and would raise up Alfonso XIII to be another Fernando, winning back
for Spain her ocean isles which the heretics had wrested away, even as
Fernando restored to Compostela the cathedral doors and bell which the
infidel Moors had stolen. His Eminence, who is said to have
accumulated a fortune during his previous archbishopric in Cuba, in
turn besought St. James to protect Catholic Spain against "those who
invoke no right save brute force, and adore no deity except the golden
calf." In most magnificent procession the silver casket was borne
around the nave among the kneeling multitudes. And then, to crown
these august ceremonies, forth trotted our friends, the giants, into
the open space before the _Capilla Mayor_. Here the six subordinate
boobies paused, grouping themselves in a ludicrous semicircle, while
pompous John Bull and his ever scandalized British Matron went up into
the Holy of Holies and danced, to the music of guitars and
tambourines, in front of the High Altar.
Every day of that festal week the cathedral services were attended by
devout throngs, yet there was something blithe and social, well-nigh
domestic, in the atmosphere of the scene even at the most impressive
moments. Kneeling groups of peasant women caught the sunshine on their
orange kerchiefs and scarlet-broidered shawls. Here a praying father
would gather his little boy, sobbing with weariness, up against his
breast; there a tired pilgrim woman slumbered in a corner, her broad
hat with its cockle-shells lying on her knees. Rows of kneeling
figures waited at the wooden confessionals which were thick set along
both aisles and ambulatory. Several times we saw a priest asleep in
the confessional, those who would pour out their hearts to him
kneeling on in humble patience, not venturing to arouse the holy
father. Young officers, leaning against the pillars, smiled upon a
school of Spanish girls, who, guarded by veiled nuns, knelt far along
the transept. Pilgrims, standing outside the door to gather alms, vied
with one another in stories of their travels and the marvels they had
seen.
But at night, walking in the illuminated _alameda_, where thousands of
Japanese lanterns and colored cups of flame made a fantastic
fairyland, or dancing their country dances, singing their country
songs, practising their country sports, and gazing with tireless
delight at the fireworks in the spacious _Plaza de Alfonso Doce_, the
worshippers gave themselves up to frankest merriment. Through the
days, indeed, there was never any lack of noisy jollity. From dawn to
dawn again cannon were booming, drums beating, bagpipes skirling,
tambourines clattering, songs and cries resounding through the
streets. Four patients in the hospital died the year before, we were
told, from the direct effects of this continuous uproar. But the
thunder height of the _fiesta_ is attained toward midnight on the
twenty-fourth, the "Eve of Santiago," when rockets and fire-balloons
are supplemented by such elaborate devices as the burning of
"capricious trees" and the destruction of a Moorish facade built for
the occasion out from the west front of the cathedral. At the first
ignition of the powder there come such terrific crashes and
reverberating detonations, such leaps and bursts of flame, that the
peasant host sways back and the children scream. An Arabic doorway
with ornate columns, flanked on either side by a wall of many arches
and surmounted by a blood-red cross, dazzles out into overwhelming
brilliancy, all in greens and purples, a glowing, scintillating, ever
changing vision. Soon it is lustrous white and then, in perishing,
sends up a swift succession of giant rockets. The facade itself is a
very Alhambra of fret and arabesque. This, too, with thunder bursts
reveals itself as a flame-colored, sky-colored, sea-colored miracle,
which pales to gleaming silver and, while we read above it the
resplendent words "The Patron of Spain," is blown to atoms as a symbol
of Santiago's victory over the Moors. This makes an ideal Spanish
holiday, but the cost, borne by the city, is heavy, there is distinct
and increasing injury to the cathedral fabric, and all this jubilee
for archaic victories over the Moslem seems to be mocked by the hard
facts of to-day.
The Santiago festivities, of which the half has not been told, closed
on Thursday afternoon, July twenty-seventh, with a procession through
the streets. We waited a weary while for it before the doors where the
old jet-workers used to set their booths, amusing ourselves meantime
by watching the house maids drawing water from the fountain in the
square below. These sturdy Galicians were armed with long tin tubes
which they dextrously applied to the spouting mouths of the fountain
griffins, so directing the stream into the straight, iron-bound pails.
Not far away the market women covered the flags with red and golden
fruit. A saucy beggar-wench, with the blackest eyes in Spain, demanded
alms, and when we had yielded up the usual toll of coppers, loudly
prayed to Santiago to pardon us for not having given her more on this
his holy festival. At last out sallied the band, followed by those
inevitable giants, and amid mad ringing of bells and fizzing of
invisible rockets, forth from the venerable portals issued standards,
crosses, tapers, priests in white and gold, and platformed effigies of
pilgrims, saints, and deities. Then came bishops, cardinals, and
archbishop, ranks of military bearing tapers, the alcalde and his
associates in the city government with antique escort of bedizened
mace-bearers, a sparkling statue of St. James on horseback busily
beheading his legions of Moors, a bodyguard of all the pilgrims in
attendance on his saintship, and finally the _Virgen del Pilar_, at
whose passing all the concourse fell upon their knees. Churches in the
line of march had their own images decked and ready, waiting in the
colonnaded porches to fall into the procession. The market women and
the maids at the fountain threw kisses to the Christ Child, leaning in
blue silk frock and white lace tucker against a cross of roses, but
the boys waved their caps for St. Michael, debonair that he was with
blowing crimson robe, real feather wings fluttering in the breeze, and
his gold foot set on the greenest of dragons.
The procession came home by way of the great west doors, opened only
this once in the round year. The setting sun, bringing out all the
carven beauty of that dark gray facade, glittered on the golden balls
and crosses that tip the noble towers, and on the golden staff of St.
James and the golden quill of St. John, where the two sons of thunder
stand colossal in their lofty niches. A baby, in yellow kerchief and
cherry skirt, toddling alone across the centre of the square, pointed
with adoring little hand at the mounted image of Santiago, which
halted at the foot of the grand stairway, his lifted sword a line of
golden light, while the deep-voiced choir chanted his old triumphal
hymn. John Bull and the British Matron, stationing themselves on
either side as a guard of honor, stared at him with insular contempt.
As the chant ceased, St. James chivalrously made way for the _Virgen
del Pilar_, a slender figure of pure gold poised on an azure
tabernacle, to mount the steps before him. The bells pealed out to
welcome her as she neared the portals, and an ear-splitting explosion
of a monster rocket, with a tempest-rain of sparks, announced the
instant of her entrance beneath the chiselled arch. Behind her went
the penitents, arduously climbing the long stone flights of that
quadruple stairway upon their knees. These, too, were but shadows of
those mediaeval penitents who of old staggered after this procession,
bowed under the weight of crosses, or scourging themselves until they
fainted in their own trail of blood. Yet it is still strange and
touching to see, long after the inner spaces of the cathedral are dim
with evening, those kneeling figures making their painful progress
about aisles and ambulatory, sobbing as they go, and falling forward
on their faces to kiss the pavement that is bruising them.
[Illustration: SANTIAGO CATHEDRAL]