[Illustration: 25 GARDENS OF THE ALCAZAR]
If I went again to Seville I should try to visit them--but, as it was,
we gave our second day to the Alcazar, which is merely the first in
the series of palaces and gardens once stretching from the flank of
the cathedral to the Tower of Gold beside the Guadalquivir. A rich
sufficiency is left in the actual Alcazar to suggest the splendor of the
series, and more than enough in the gardens to invite our fatigue, day
after day, to the sun and shade of its quiet paths and seats when we
came spent with the glories and the bustling piety of the cathedral. In
our first visit we had the guidance of a patriotic young Granadan whose
zeal for the Alhambra would not admit the Alcazar to any comparison,
but I myself still prefer it after seeing the Alhambra. It is as purely
Moorish as that and it is in better repair if not better taste. The
taste in fact is the same, and the Castilian kings consulted it as
eagerly as their Arabic predecessors in the talent of the Moslem
architects whom they had not yet begun to drive into exile. I am not
going to set up rival to the colored picture postals, which give
a better notion than I could give of the painted and gilded stucco
decoration, the ingenious geometrical designs on the walls, and the
cloying sweetness of the honeycombing in the vaulted roofs. Every one
will have his feeling about Moorish architecture; mine is that a little
goes a great way, and that it is too monotonous to compete with the
Gothic in variety, while it lacks the dignity of any form of the Greek
or the Renaissance. If the phrase did not insult the sex which the faith
of the Moslem insufferably insults, one might sum up one’s slight for it
in the word effeminate.
The Alcazar gardens are the best of the Alcazar. But I would not ignore
the homelike charm of the vast court by which you enter from the street
outside to the palace beyond. It is planted casually about with rather
shabby orange trees that children were playing under, and was decorated
with the week’s wash of the low, simple dwellings which may be hired
at a rental moderate even for Seville, where a handsome and commodious
house in a good quarter rents for sixty dollars a year. One of those
two-story cottages, as we should call them, in the ante-court of the
Alcazar had for the student of Spanish life the special advantage of
a lover close to a ground-floor window dropping tender nothings down
through the slats of the shutter to some maiden lurking within. The
nothings were so tender that you could not hear them drop, and, besides,
they were Spanish nothings, and it would not have served any purpose
for the stranger to listen for them. Once afterward we saw the national
courtship going on at another casement, but that was at night, and
here the precious first sight of it was offered at ten o’clock in the
morning. Nobody seemed to mind the lover stationed outside the shutter
with which the iron bars forbade him the closest contact; and it is
only fair to say that he minded nobody; he was there when we went in
and there when we came out, and it appears that when it is a question
of love-making time is no more an object in Spain than in the United
States. The scene would have been better by moonlight, but you cannot
always have it moonlight, and the sun did very well; at least, the lover
did not seem to miss the moon.
He was only an incident, and I hope the most romantic reader will let me
revert from him to the Alcazar gardens. We were always reverting to them
on any pretext or occasion, and we mostly had them to ourselves in the
gentle afternoons when we strayed or sat about at will in them. The
first day we were somewhat molested by the instruction of our patriotic
Granadan guide, who had a whopper-jaw and grayish blue eyes, but
coal-black hair for all his other blondness. He smoked incessant
cigarettes, and he showed us especially the pavilion of Charles the
Fifth, whom, after that use of all English-speaking Spanish guides,
he called Charley Fift. It appeared that the great emperor used this
pavilion for purposes of meditation; but he could not always have
meditated there, though the frame of a brazier standing in the center
intimated that it was tempered for reflection. The first day we found
a small bird in possession, flying from one bit of the carved wooden
ceiling to another, and then, taking our presence in dudgeon, out into
the sun. Another day there was a nursery-girl there with a baby that
cried; on another, still more distractingly, a fashionable young
French bride who went kodaking round while her husband talked with an
archaeological official, evidently Spanish. In his own time, Charley
probably had the place more to himself, though even then his thoughts
could not have been altogether cheerful, whether he recalled what he had
vainly done to keep out of Spain and yet to take the worst of Spain with
him into the Netherlands, where he tried to plant the Inquisition among
his Flemings; he was already much soured with a world that had cloyed
him, and was perhaps considering even then how he might make his escape
from it to the cloister.