IV

Little of this learning troubled me in my visits to the cathedral, or

even the fact that, next to St. Peter’s, it was the largest church in

the world. It was sufficient to itself by mere force of architectural

presence, without the help of incidents or measurements. It was a city

in itself, with a community of priests and sacristans dwelling in it,

and a floating population of sightseers and worshipers always passing

through it. The first morning we had submitted to make the round of

the chapels, patiently paying to have each of them unlocked and wearily

wondering at their wonders, but only sympathizing really with the stern

cleric who showed the ceremonial vestments and jewels of the cathedral,

and whose bitter face expressed, or seemed to express, abhorrence of our

whole trivial tourist tribe. After that morning we took our curiosity

into our own keeping and looked at nothing that did not interest us, and

we were interested most in those fellow-beings who kept coming and going

all day long.

[Illustration: 22 IN ATTITUDES OF SILENT DEVOTION]

Chiefly, of course, they were women. In Catholic countries women have

either more sins to be forgiven than the men, or else they are sorrier

for them; and here, whether there was service or not, they were dropped

everywhere in veiled and motionless prayer. In Seville the law of the

mantilla is rigorously enforced. If a woman drives, she may wear a hat;

but if she walks, she must wear a mantilla under pain of being pointed

at by the finger of scorn. If she is a young girl she may wear colors

with it (a cheerful blue seems the favorite), but by far the greater

number came to the cathedral in complete black. Those somber figures

which clustered before chapel, or singly dotted the pavement everywhere,

flitted in and out like shadows in the perpetual twilight. For far the

greater number, their coming to the church was almost their sole escape

into the world. They sometimes met friends, and after a moment, or an

hour, of prayer they could cheer their hearts with neighborly gossip.

But for the greater part they appeared and disappeared silently and

swiftly, and left the spectator to helpless conjecture of their history.

Many of them would have first met their husbands in the cathedral when

they prayed, or when they began to look around to see who was looking

at them. It might have been their trysting-place, safeguarding them in

their lovers’ meetings, and after marriage it had become their social

world, when their husbands left them for the clubs or the cafes. They

could not go at night, of course, except to some special function, but

they could come by day as often as they liked. I do not suppose that

the worshipers I saw habitually united love or friendship with their

devotions in the cathedral, but some certainly joined business with

devotion; at a high function one day an American girl felt herself

sharply nudged in the side, and when she turned she found the palm of

her kneeling neighbor stretched toward her. They must all have had their

parish churches besides the cathedral, and a devotee might make the day

a social whirl by visiting one shrine after another. But I do not

think that many do. The Spanish women are of a domestic genus, and are

expected to keep at home by the men who expect to keep abroad.

I do not know just how it is in the parish churches; they must each

have its special rite, which draws and holds the frequenter; but

the cathedral constantly offers a drama of irresistible appeal.

We non-Catholics can feel this even at the distance to which our

Protestantism has remanded us, and at your first visit to the Seville

cathedral during mass you cannot help a moment of recreant regret when

you wish that a part in the mystery enacting was your birthright. The

esthetic emotion is not denied you; the organ-tide that floods the place

bears you on it, too; the priests perform their rites before the altar

for you; they come and go, they bow and kneel, for you; the censer

swings and smokes for you; the little wicked-eyed choir-boys and

mischievous-looking acolytes suppress their natures in your behalf as

much as if you were a believer, or perhaps more. The whole unstinted

hospitality of the service is there for you, as well as for the children

of the house, and the heart must be rude and the soul ungrateful that

would refuse it. For my part, I accepted it as far as I knew how,

and when I left the worshipers on their knees and went tiptoeing from

picture to picture and chapel to chapel, it was with shame for the

unscrupulous sacristan showing me about, and I felt that he, if not I,

ought to be put out and not allowed back till the function was over. I

call him sacristan at a venture; but there were several kinds of guides

in the cathedral, some in the livery of the place and some in civil

dress, willing to supplement our hotel interpreter, or lying in wait for

us when we came alone. I wish now I had taken them all, but at the time

they tired me, and I denied them.

Though not a day passed but we saw it, I am not able to say what the

cathedral was like. The choir was planted in the heart of it, as it

might be a celestial refuge in that forest of mighty pillars, as great

in girth as the giant redwoods of California, and climbing to a Gothic

firmament horizoned round as with sunset light from near a hundred

painted windows. The chapels on each side, the most beautiful in Spain,

abound in riches of art and pious memorials, with chief among them the

Royal Chapel, in the prow, as it were, of the ship which the cathedral

has been likened to, keeping the bones not only of the sainted hero,

King Fernando, but also, among others, the bones of Peter the Cruel, and

of his unwedded love, Maria de Padilla, far too good for Peter in life,

if not quite worthy of San Fernando in death. You can see the saint’s

body on certain dates four times a year, when, as your Baedeker will

tell you, “the troops of the garrison march past and lower their colors”

outside the cathedral. We were there on none of these dates, and, far

more regretably, not on the day of Corpus Christi, when those boys whose

effigies in sculptured and painted wood we had seen in the museum at

Valladolid pace in their mystic dance before the people at the opposite

portal of the cathedral. But I appoint any reader, so minded, to go and

witness the rite some springtime for me. There is no hurry, for it is

destined to endure through the device practised in defeating the pope

who proposed to abolish it. He ordained that it should continue only

as long as the boys’ actual costumes lasted; but by renewing these

carefully wherever they began to wear out, they have become practically

imperishable.

If we missed this attraction of the cathedral, we had the high good

fortune to witness another ceremony peculiar to it, but perhaps less

popularly acceptable. The building had often suffered from earthquakes,

and on the awful day, _dies irae,_ of the great Lisbon earthquake,

during mass and at the moment of the elevation of the Host, when the

worshipers were on their knees, there came such a mighty shock in

sympathy with the far-off cataclysm that the people started to their

feet and ran out of the cathedral. If the priests ran after them, as

soon as the apparent danger was past they led the return of their flock

and resumed the interrupted rite. It was, of course, by a miracle that

the temple was spared, and when it was realized how scarcely Seville

had escaped the fate of Lisbon it was natural that the event should

be dramatized in a perpetual observance. Every year now, on the 1st of

November, the clergy leave the cathedral at a chosen moment of the mass,

with much more stateliness than in the original event, and lead the

people out of one portal, to return with them by another for the

conclusion of the ceremonial.

[Illustration: 23 THE CATHEDRAL AND TOWER OF THE GIRALDA]

We waited long for the climax, but at last we almost missed it through

the overeagerness of the guide I had chosen out of many that petitioned.

He was so politely, so forbearingly insistent in his offer to see that

we were vigilantly cared for, that I must have had a heart harder than

Peter the Cruel’s to have denied him, and he planted us at the most

favorable point for the function in the High Chapel, with instructions

which portal to hurry to when the movement began, and took his peseta

and went his way. Then, while we confidingly waited, he came rushing

back and with a great sweep of his hat wafted us to the door which he

had said the procession would go out by, but which he seemed to have

learned it would come in by, and we were saved from what had almost been

his fatal error. I forgave him the more gladly because I could rejoice

in his returning to repair his error, although he had collected his

money; and with a heart full of pride in his verification of my

theory of the faithful Spanish nature, I gave myself to the shining

gorgeousness of the procession that advanced chanting in the blaze of

the Sevillian sun. There was every rank of clergy, from the archbishop

down, in robes of ceremonial, but I am unable honestly to declare the

admiration for their splendor which I would have willingly felt. The

ages of faith in which those vestments were designed were apparently

not the ages of taste; yet it was the shape of the vestments and not the

color which troubled the eye of unfaith, if not of taste. The archbishop

in crimson silk, with his train borne by two acolytes, the canons in

their purple, the dean in his gold-embroidered robes, and the priests

and choristers in their black robes and white surplices richly satisfied

it; and if some of the clerics were a little frayed and some of the

acolytes were spotted with the droppings of the candles, these were

details which one remembered afterward and that did not matter at the

time.

When the procession was housed again, we went off and forgot it in the

gardens of the Alcazar. But I must not begin yet on the gardens of the

Alcazar. We went to them every day, as we did to the cathedral, but we

did not see them until our second morning in Seville. We gave what was

left from the first morning in the cathedral to a random exploration of

the streets and places of the city. There was, no doubt, everywhere some

touch of the bravery of our square of San Fernando, where the public

windows were hung with crimson tapestries and brocades in honor of St.

Raphael; but his holiday did not make itself molestively felt in the

city’s business or pleasure. Where we could drive we drove, and where we

must we walked, and we walked of course through the famous Calle de las

Sierpes, because no one drives there. As a rule no woman walks there,

and naturally there were many women walking there, under the eyes of

the popular cafes and aristocratic clubs which principally abound in Las

Sierpes, for it is also the street of the principal shops, though it is

not very long and is narrower than many other streets of Seville. It has

its name from so commonplace an origin as the sign over a tavern door,

with some snakes painted on it; but if the example of sinuosity had been

set it by prehistoric serpents, there were scores of other streets which

have bettered its instruction. There were streets that crooked away

everywhere, not going anywhere, and breaking from time to time into

irregular angular spaces with a church or a convent or a nobleman’s

house looking into them.