As a contrast to this violent scene which was not so wholly violent
but that it was relieved by a boy teasing a cat with his cap in the
foreground, and the sweet singing of canaries in the windows of the
houses near, I may commend the Casa de los Venerables, ecclesiastics
somehow related to the cathedral and having their tranquil dwelling not
far from it. The street we took from the Duke of Alva’s palace was so
narrow and crooked that we scraped the walls in passing, and we should
never have got by one heavily laden donkey if he had not politely pushed
the side of his pannier into a doorway to make room for us. When we did
get to the Casa de los Venerables we found it mildly yellow-washed and
as beautifully serene and sweet as the house of venerable men should be.
Its distinction in a world of _patios_ was a _patio_ where the central
fountain was sunk half a story below the entrance floor, and encircled
by a stairway by which the humble neighbor folk freely descended to fill
their water jars. I suppose that gentle mansion has other merits, but
the fine staircase that ended under a baroque dome left us facing a
bolted door, so that we had to guess at those attractions, which I leave
the reader to imagine in turn.
I have kept the unique wonder of Seville waiting too long already for
my recognition, though in its eight hundred years it should have learned
patience enough for worse things. From its great antiquity alone, if
from nothing else, it is plain that the Giralda at Seville could not
have been studied from the tower of the Madison Square Garden in New
York, which the American will recall when he sees it. If the case must
be reversed and we must allow that the Madison Square tower was studied
from the Giralda, we must still recognize that it is no servile copy,
but in its frank imitation has a grace and beauty which achieves
originality. Still, the Giralda is always the Giralda, and, though there
had been no Saint-Gaudens to tip its summit with such a flying-footed
nymph as poises on our own tower, the figure of Faith which crowns it is
at least a good weather-vane, and from its office of turning gives the
mighty bell-tower its name. Long centuries before the tower was a belfry
it served the mosque, which the cathedral now replaces, as a minaret
for the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer, but it was then only
two-thirds as high. The Christian belfry which continues it is not in
offensive discord with the structure below; its other difference in form
and spirit achieves an impossible harmony. The Giralda, however, chiefly
works its enchantment by its color, but here I must leave the proof of
this to the picture postal which now everywhere takes the bread out
of the word-painter’s mouth. The time was when with a palette full
of tinted adjectives one might hope to do an unrivaled picture of the
Giralda; but that time is gone; and if the reader has not a colored
postal by him he should lose no time in going to Seville and seeing the
original. For the best view of it I must advise a certain beautifully
irregular small court in the neighborhood, with simple houses so low
that you can easily look up over their roofs and see the mighty bells of
the Giralda rioting far aloof, flinging themselves beyond the openings
of the belfry and deafeningly making believe to leap out into space. If
the traveler fails to find this court (for it seems now and then to be
taken in and put away), he need not despair of seeing the Giralda fitly.
He cannot see Seville at all without seeing it, and from every point,
far or near, he sees it grand and glorious.
[Illustration: 26 THE COURT OF FLAGS AND TOWER OF THE GIRALDA]
I remember it especially from beyond the Guadalquivir in the drive
we took through Triana to the village of Italica, where three Roman
emperors were born, as the guide-books will officiously hasten to tell,
and steal away your chance of treating your reader with any effect
of learned research. These emperors (I will not be stopped by any
guide-book from saying) were Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius; and Triana
is named for the first of them. Fortunately, we turned to the right
after crossing the bridge and so escaped the gipsy quarter, but we
paused through a long street so swarming with children that we wondered
to hear whole schoolrooms full of them humming and droning their lessons
as we made our way among the tenants. Fortunately, they played mostly in
the gutters, the larger looking after the smaller when their years
and riches were so few more, with that beautiful care which childhood
bestows on babyhood everywhere in Europe. To say that those Spanish
children were as tenderly watchful of these Spanish babies as English
children is to say everything. Now and then a mother cared for a babe as
only a mother can in an office which the pictures and images of the Most
Holy Virgin consecrate and endear in lands where the sterilized bottle
is unknown, but oftenest it was a little sister that held it in her arms
and crooned whatever was the Spanish of--
Rack back, baby, daddy shot a b’ar;
Rack back, baby, see it hangin’ thar.
For there are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our
backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and
hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic
joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a
hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles III., when he came
to the Spanish throne from Naples, full of beneficent projects and
ideals, bestowed upon his unwilling and ungrateful subjects. These roads
were made about the middle of the eighteenth century, and they have been
gathering dust ever since, so that the white powder now lies in the
one beyond Triana five or six inches deep. Along the sides occasional
shade-trees stifled, and beyond these gaunt, verdureless fields widened
away, though we were told that in the spring the fields were red with
flowers and green with young wheat. There were no market-gardens,
and the chief crop seemed brown pigs and black goats. In some of the
foregrounds, as well as the backgrounds, were olive orchards with
olives heaped under them and peasants still resting from their midday
breakfast. A mauve bell-shaped flower plentifully fringed the wayside;
our driver said it had no name, and later an old peasant said it was
“bad.”