I.

As the train took its time and ours in mounting the uplands toward

Granada on the soft, but not too soft, evening of November 6, 1911,

the air that came to me through the open window breathed as if from an

autumnal night of the middle eighteen-fifties in a little village of

northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, for the first time, the city

where so great a part of my life was then passed, and in this magical

air the two epochs were blent in reciprocal association. The question of

my present identity was a thing indifferent and apart; it did not matter

who or where or when I was. Youth and age were at one with each other:

the boy abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to

dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would

give him shelter.

In that dignified and deliberate Spanish train I was a man of

seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada

from her conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in

the little room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter than

the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the

vanished kingdom of the Moors. The little room which had structurally

ceased fifty years before from the house that ceased to be home even

longer ago had returned to the world with me in it, and fitted perfectly

into the first-class railway compartment which my luxury had provided

for it. From its window I saw through the car window the olive groves

and white cottages of the Spanish peasants, and the American apple

orchards and meadows stretching to the primeval woods that walled the

drowsing village round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my book,

the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio

village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of

Granada, and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of

seventy-four.

I do not say the experience was so explicit as all this; no experience

so mystical could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to

me in it was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader’s

company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be honest

with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish things which

was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that, however

unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so that I

never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact whenever

the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with

my infatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so

inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my journey must be more

or less autobiographical; and though I should decently endeavor to keep

my past out of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and should not

always succeed.

Just when this passion began in me I should not be able to say; but

probably it was with my first reading of _Don Quixote_ in the later

eighteen-forties. I would then have been ten or twelve years old; and,

of course, I read that incomparable romance, not only greatest, but sole

of its kind, in English. The purpose of some time reading it in Spanish

and then the purpose of some time writing the author’s life grew in me

with my growing years so strongly that, though I have never yet done

either and probably never shall, I should not despair of doing both if

I lived to be a hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had early

chanced upon a Spanish grammar, and I had begun those inquiries in it

which were based upon a total ignorance of English accidence. I do not

remember how I felt my way from it to such reading of the language

as has endeared Spanish literature to me. It embraced something of

everything: literary and political history, drama, poetry, fiction;

but it never condescended to the exigencies of common parlance. These

exigencies did not exist for me in my dreams of seeing Spain which were

not really expectations. It was not until half a century later, when my

longing became a hope and then a purpose, that I foreboded the need of

practicable Spanish. Then I invoked the help of a young professor, who

came to me for an hour each day of a week in London and let me try to

talk with him; but even then I accumulated so little practicable Spanish

that my first hour, almost my first moment in Spain, exhausted my store.

My professor was from Barcelona, but he beautifully lisped his _c’s_

and _z’s_ like any old Castilian, when he might have hissed them in the

accent of his native Catalan; and there is no telling how much I might

have profited by his instruction if he had not been such a charming

intelligence that I liked to talk with him of literature and philosophy

and politics rather than the weather, or the cost of things, or the

question of how long the train stopped and when it would start, or the

dishes at table, or clothes at the tailor’s, or the forms of greeting

and parting. If he did not equip me with the useful colloquial phrases,

the fault was mine; and the misfortune was doubly mine when from my old

acquaintance with Italian (glib half-sister of the statelier Spanish)

the Italian phrases would thrust forward as the equivalent of the

English words I could not always think of. The truth is, then, that I

was not perfect in my Spanish after quite six weeks in Spain; and if

in the course of his travels with me the reader finds me flourishing

Spanish idioms in his face he may safely attribute them less to my

speaking than my reading knowledge: probably I never employed them in

conversation. That reading was itself without order or system, and I am

not sure but it had better been less than more. Yet who knows? The days,

or the nights of the days, in the eighteen-fifties went quickly, as

quickly as the years go now, and it would have all come to the present

pass whether that blind devotion to an alien literature had cloistered

my youth or not.

I do not know how, with the merciful make I am of, I should then have

cared so little, or else ignored so largely the cruelties I certainly

knew that the Spaniards had practised in the conquests of Mexico and

Peru. I knew of these things, and my heart was with the Incas and the

Aztecs, and yet somehow I could not punish the Spaniards for their

atrocious destruction of the only American civilizations. As nearly as I

can now say, I was of both sides, and wistful to reconcile them, though

I do not see now how it could have been done; and in my later hopes for

the softening of the human conditions I have found it hard to forgive

Pizarro for the overthrow of the most perfectly socialized state known

to history. I scarcely realized the base ingratitude of the Spanish

sovereigns to Columbus, and there were vast regions of history that I

had not penetrated till long afterward in pursuit of Spanish perfidy and

inhumanity, as in their monstrous misrule of Holland. When it came in

those earlier days to a question of sides between the Spaniards and

the Moors, as Washington Irving invited my boyhood to take it in his

chronicle of the conquest of Granada, I experienced on a larger scale my

difficulty in the case of the Mexicans and Peruvians. The case of these

had been reported to me in the school-readers, but here, now, was an

affair submitted to the mature judgment of a boy of twelve, and yet

I felt as helpless as I was at ten. Will it be credited that at

seventy-four I am still often in doubt which side I should have had win,

though I used to fight on both? Since the matter was settled more than

four hundred years ago, I will not give the reasons for my divided

allegiance. They would hardly avail now to reverse the tragic fate of

the Moors, and if I try I cannot altogether wish to reverse it. Whatever

Spanish misrule has been since Islam was overthrown in Granada, it has

been the error of law, and the rule of Islam at the best had always been

the effect of personal will, the caprice of despots high and low,

the unstatuted sufferance of slaves, high and low. The gloomiest and

cruelest error of Inquisitional Spain was nobler, with its adoration of

ideal womanhood, than the Mohammedan state with its sensual dreams of

Paradise. I will not pretend (as I very well might, and as I perhaps

ought) that I thought of these things, all or any, as our train began to

slope rather more rapidly toward Granada, and to find its way under

the rising moon over the storied Vega. I will as little pretend that my

attitude toward Spain was ever that of the impartial observer after

I crossed the border of that enchanted realm where we all have our

castles. I have thought it best to be open with the reader here at

the beginning, and I would not, if I could, deny him the pleasure of

doubting my word or disabling my judgment at any point he likes. In

return I shall only ask his patience when I strike too persistently the

chord of autobiography. That chord is part of the harmony between the

boy and the old man who made my Spanish journey together, and were

always accusing themselves, the first of dreaming and the last of

doddering: perhaps with equal justice. Is there really much difference

between the two?