In the mean time we hired a beautiful Basque cabman with a red Basque
cap and high-hooked Basque nose to drive us about at something above
the legal rate and let us not leave any worthy thing in San Sebastian
unseen. He took us, naturally, to several churches, old and new, with
their Gothic and rococo interiors, which I still find glooming and
glinting among my evermore thickening impressions of like things. We got
from them the sense of that architectural and sculptural richness which
the interior of no Spanish church ever failed measurably to give; but
what their historical associations were I will not offer to say. The
associations of San Sebastian with the past are in all things vague, at
least for me. She was indeed taken from the French by the English under
Wellington during the Peninsular War, but of older, if not unhappier
farther-off days and battles longer ago her history as I know it seems
to know little. It knows of savage and merciless battles between the
partisans of Don Carlos and those of Queen Isabella so few decades since
as not to be the stuff of mere pathos yet, and I am not able to blink
the fact that my beloved Basques fought on the wrong side, when they
need not have fought at all. Why they were Carlists they could perhaps
no more say than I could. The monumental historic fact is that the
Basques have been where they are immeasurably beyond the memories of
other men; what the scope of their own memories is one could perhaps
confidently say only in Basque if one could say anything. Of course,
in the nature of things, the Phoenicians must have been there and the
Greeks, doubtless, if they ever got outside of the Pillars of Hercules;
the Romans, of course, must have settled and civilized and then
Christianized the province. It is next neighbor to that province of
Asturias in which alone the Arabs failed to conquer the Goths, and from
which Spain was to live and grow again and recover all her losses from
the Moors; but what the share of San Sebastian was in this heroic fate,
again I must leave the Basques to say. They would doubtless say it with
sufficient self-respect, for wherever we came in contact that day with
the Basque nature we could not help imagining in it a sense of racial
merit equaling that of the Welsh themselves, who are indeed another
branch of the same immemorial Iberian stock, if the Basques are
Iberians. Like the Welsh, they have the devout tradition that they
never were conquered, but yielded to circumstances when these became too
strong for them.
Among the ancient Spanish liberties which were restricted by the
consolidating monarchy from age to age, the Basque _fueros,_ or rights,
were the oldest; they lasted quite to our own day; and although it is
known to more ignorant men that these privileges (including immunity
from conscription) have now been abrogated, the custodian of the House
of Provincial Deputies, whom our driver took us to visit, was such a
glowing Basque patriot that he treated them as in full force. His pride
in the seat of the local government spared us no detail of the whole
electric-lighting system, or even the hose-bibs for guarding the edifice
against fire, let alone every picture and photograph on the wall of
every chamber of greater or less dignity, with every notable table and
chair. He certainly earned the peseta I gave him, but he would have done
far more for it if we had suffered him to take us up another flight
of stairs; and he followed us in our descent with bows and adieux that
ought to have left no doubt in our minds of the persistence of the
Basque _fueros._