IV

Upon the whole I am not sure that I was more edified by the cathedral of

Toledo, though I am afraid to own it, and must make haste to say that it

is a cathedral surpassing in some things any other cathedral in Spain.

Chiefly it surpasses them in the glory of that stupendous _retablo_

which fills one whole end of the vast fane, and mounting from floor to

roof, tells the Christian story with an ineffable fullness of dramatic

detail, up to the tragic climax of the crucifixion, the _Calvario,_ at

the summit. Every fact of it fixes itself the more ineffaceably in the

consciousness because of that cunningly studied increase in the stature

of the actors, who always appear life-size in spite of their lift from

level to level above the spectator. But what is the use, what _is_ the

use? Am I to abandon the young and younger wisdom with which I have

refrained in so many books from attempting the portrayal of any Italian,

any English church, and fall into the folly, now that I am old, of

trying to say again in words what one of the greatest of Spanish

churches says in form, in color? Let me rather turn from that vainest

endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing which endear the memory

of monuments and make the experience of them endurable. The beautiful

choir, with its walls pierced in gigantic filigree, might have been art

or not, as one chose, but the three young girls who smiled and whispered

with the young man near it were nature, which there could be no two

minds about. They were pathetically privileged there to a moment of

the free interplay of youthful interests and emotions which the Spanish

convention forbids less in the churches than anywhere else.

The Spanish religion is, in fact, kind to the young in many ways, and

on our way to the cathedral we had paused at a shrine of the Virgin in

appreciation of her friendly offices to poor girls wanting husbands;

they have only to drop a pin inside the grating before her and draw a

husband, tall for a large pin and short for a little one; or if they can

make their offering in coin, their chances of marrying money are

good. The Virgin is always ready to befriend her devotees, and in the

cathedral near that beautiful choir screen she has a shrine above the

stone where she alighted when she brought a chasuble to St. Ildefonso

(she owed him something for his maintenance of her Immaculate Conception

long before it was imagined a dogma) and left the print of her foot

in the pavement. The fact is attested by the very simple yet absolute

inscription:

Quando la Reina del Cielo

Puso los pies en el suelo,

En esta piedra los puso,

or as my English will have it:

When the Queen of Heaven put

Upon the earth her foot,

She put it on this stone

and left it indelible there, so that now if you thrust your finger

through the grille and touch the place you get off three hundred years

of purgatory: not much in the count of eternity, but still something.

We saw a woman and a priest touching it as we stood by and going away

enviably comforted; but we were there as connoisseurs, not as votaries;

and we were trying to be conscious solely of the surpassing grandeur

and beauty of the cathedral. Here as elsewhere in Spain the passionate

desire of the race to realize a fact in art expresses itself gloriously

or grotesquely according to the occasion. The rear of the chorus is one

vast riot of rococo sculpture, representing I do not know what mystical

event; but down through the midst of the livingly studied performance

a mighty angel comes plunging, with his fine legs following his torso

through the air, like those of a diver taking a header into the water.

Nothing less than the sublime touch of those legs would have satisfied

the instinct from which and for which the artist worked; they gave

reality to the affair in every part.

I wish I could give reality to every part of that most noble, that most

lovably beautiful temple. We had only a poor half-hour for it, and we

could not do more than flutter the pages of the epic it was and

catch here and there a word, a phrase: a word writ in architecture or

sculpture, a phrase richly expressed in gold and silver and precious

marble, or painted in the dyes of the dawns and sunsets which used to

lend themselves so much more willingly to the arts than they seem to do

now. From our note-books I find that this cathedral of Toledo appeared

more wonderful to one of us than the cathedral of Burgos; but who knows?

It might have been that the day was warmer and brighter and had not yet

shivered and saddened to the cold rain it ended in. At any rate the vast

church filled itself more and more with the solemn glow in which we left

it steeped when we went out and took our dreamway through the narrow,

winding, wandering streets that seemed to lure us where they would. One

of them climbed with us to the Alcazar, which is no longer any great

thing to see in itself, but which opens a hospitable space within its

court for a prospect of so much of the world around Toledo, the world of

yellow river and red fields and blue mountains, and white-clouded azure

sky, that we might well have mistaken it for the whole earth. In itself,

as I say, the Alcazar is no great thing for where it is, but if we had

here in New York an Alcazar that remembered historically back through

French, English, Arabic, Gothic. Roman, and Carthaginian occupations to

the inarticulate Iberian past we should come, I suppose, from far and

near to visit it. Now, however, after gasping at its outlook, we left

it hopelessly, and lost ourselves, except for our kindly guide, in the

crooked little stony lanes, with the sun hot on our backs and the shade

cool in our faces. There were Moorish bits and suggestions in the

white walls and the low flat roofs of the houses, but these were not so

jealous of their privacy as such houses were once meant to be. Through

the gate of one we were led into a garden of simple flowers belted with

a world-old parapet, over which we could look at a stretch of the Gothic

wall of King Wamba’s time, before the miserable Roderick won and lost

his kingdom. A pomegranate tree, red with fruit, overhung us, and

from the borders of marigolds and zinnias and German clover the gray

garden-wife gathered a nosegay for us. She said she was three _duros_

and a half old, as who should say three dollars and a half, and she had

a grim amusement in so translating her seventy years.

V

It was hard by her cottage that we saw our first mosque, which had

begun by being a Gothic church, but had lost itself in paynim hands for

centuries, in spite of the lamp always kept burning in it. Then one day

the Cid came riding by, and his horse, at sight of a white stone in the

street pavement, knelt down and would not budge till men came and dug

through the wall of the mosque and disclosed this indefatigable lamp in

the church. We expressed our doubt of the man’s knowing so unerringly

that the horse meant them to dig through the mosque. “If you can believe

the rest I think you can believe that,” our guide argued.

[Illustration: 15 AN ANCIENT CORNER OF THE CITY]

He was like so many taciturn Spaniards, not inconversable, and we had

a pleasure in his unobtrusive intelligence which I should be sorry

to exaggerate. He supplied us with such statistics of his city as we

brought away with us, and as I think the reader may join me in trusting,

and in regretting that I did not ask more. Still it is something to have

learned that in Toledo now each family lives English fashion in a house

of its own, while in the other continental cities it mostly dwells in

a flat. This is because the population has fallen from two hundred

thousand to twenty thousand, and the houses have not shared its

decay, but remain habitable for numbers immensely beyond those of the

households. In the summer the family inhabits the first floor which

the _patio_ and the subterranean damp from the rains keep cool; in the

winter it retreats to the upper chambers which the sun is supposed to

warm, and which are at any rate dry even on cloudy days. The rents would

be thought low in New York: three dollars a month get a fair house in

Toledo; but wages are low, too; three dollars a month for a manservant

and a dollar and a half for a maid. If the Toledans from high to low are

extravagant in anything it is dress, but dress for the outside, not the

inside, which does not show, as our guide satirically explained. They

scrimp themselves in food and they pay the penalty in lessened vitality;

there is not so much fever as one might think; but there is a great

deal of consumption; and as we could not help seeing everywhere in the

streets there were many blind, who seemed oftenest to have suffered from

smallpox. The beggars were not so well dressed as the other classes, but

I saw no such delirious patchwork as at Burgos. On the other hand, there

were no idle people who were fashionably dressed; no men or women who

looked great-world.

Perhaps if the afternoon had kept the sunny promise of the forenoon they

might have been driving in the Paseo, a promenade which Toledo has like

every Spanish city; but it rained and we did not stop at the Paseo which

looked so pleasant.

The city, as so many have told and as I hope the reader will imagine, is

a network of winding and crooked lanes, which the books say are Moorish,

but which are medieval like those of every old city. They nowhere lend

themselves to walking for pleasure, and the houses do not open their

_patios_ to the passer with Andalusian expansiveness; they are in fact

of a quite Oriental reserve. I remember no dwellings of the grade,

quite, of hovels; but neither do there seem to be many palaces

or palatial houses in my hurried impression. Whatever it may be

industrially or ecclesiastically, Toledo is now socially provincial and

tending to extinction. It is so near Madrid that if I myself were living

in Toledo I would want to live in Madrid, and only return for brief

sojourns to mourn my want of a serious object in life; at Toledo it must

be easy to cherish such an object.

Industrially, of course, one associates it with the manufacture of the

famous Toledo blades, which it is said are made as wonderful as ever,

and I had a dim idea of getting a large one for decorative use in a New

York flat. But the foundry is a mile out of town, and I only got so far

as to look at the artists who engrave the smaller sort in shops open to

the public eye; and my purpose dwindled to the purchase of a little pair

of scissors, much as a high resolve for the famous marchpane of Toledo

ended in a piece of that pastry about twice the size of a silver dollar.

Not all of the twenty thousand people of Toledo could be engaged in

these specialties, and I owe myself to blame for not asking more about

the local industries; but it is not too late for the reader, whom

I could do no greater favor than sending him there, to repair my

deficiency. In self-defense I urge my knowledge of a military school

in the Alcazar, where and in the street leading up to it we saw some

companies of the comely and kindly-looking cadets. I know also that

there are public night schools where those so minded may study the arts

and letters, as our guide was doing in certain directions. Now that

there are no longer any Jews in Toledo, and the Arabs to whom they

betrayed the Gothic capital have all been Christians or exiles for many

centuries, we felt that we represented the whole alien element of the

place; there seemed to be at least no other visitors of our lineage or

language.