IV

But we anticipate, as I should say if I were still a romantic novelist.

Many other trees in and about Granada were yellower than that one, and

the air hung dim with a thin haze as of Indian summer when we left our

hotel in eager haste to see the Alhambra such as travelers use when they

do not want some wonder of the world to escape them. Of course there was

really no need of haste, and we had to wait till our guide could borrow

a match to light the first of the cigarettes which he never ceased to

smoke. He was commended to us by the hall porter, who said he could

speak French, and so he could, to the extreme of constantly saying,

with a wave of his cigarette, “_N’est ce pas?”_ For the rest he helped

himself out willingly with my small Spanish. At the end he would have

delivered us over to a dealer in antiquities hard by the gate of the

palace if I had not prevented him, as it were, by main force; he did

not repine, but we were not sorry that he should be engaged for the next

day.

Our way to the gate, which was the famous Gate of Justice and was lovely

enough to be the Gate of Mercy, lay through the beautiful woods, mostly

elms, planted there by the English early in the last century. The birds

sang in their tops, and the waters warbled at their feet, and it was

somewhat thrillingly cold in their dense shade, so that we were glad to

get out of it, and into the sunshine where the old Moorish palace lay

basking and dreaming. At once let me confide to the impatient reader

that the whole Alhambra, by which he must understand a citadel, and

almost a city, since it could, if it never did, hold twenty thousand

people within its walls, is only historically and not artistically more

Moorish than the Alcazar at Seville. Far nobler and more beautiful

than its Arabic decorativeness in tinted stucco is the palace begun

by Charles V., after a design in the spirit of the supreme hour of the

Italian Renaissance. It is not a ruin in its long arrest, and one hears

with hopeful sympathy that the Spanish king means some day to complete

it. To be sure, the world is, perhaps, already full enough of royal

palaces, but since they return sooner or later to the people whose

pockets they come out of, one must be willing to have this palace

completed as the architect imagined it.

We were followed into the Moorish palace by the music of three blind

minstrels who began to tune their guitars as soon as they felt us: see

us they could not. Then presently we were in the famous Court of the

Lions, where a group of those beasts, at once archaic and puerile in

conception, sustained the basin of a fountain in the midst of a graveled

court arabesqued and honeycombed round with the wonted ornamentation of

the Moors.

The place was disappointing to the boy in me who had once passed so much

of his leisure there, and had made it all marble and gold. The floor

is not only gravel, and the lions are not only more like sheep, but the

environing architecture and decoration are of a faded prettiness which

cannot bear comparison with the fresh rougeing, equally Moorish, of the

Alcazar at Seville. Was this indeed the place where the Abencerrages

were brought in from supper one by one and beheaded into the fountain at

the behest of their royal host? Was it here that the haughty Don Juan de

Vera, coming to demand for the Catholic kings the arrears of tribute due

them from the Moor, “paused to regard its celebrated fountain” and “fell

into discourse with the Moorish courtiers on certain mysteries of the

Christian faith”? So Washington Irving says, and so I once believed,

with glowing heart and throbbing brow as I read how “this most Christian

knight and discreet ambassador restrained himself within the limits of

lofty gravity, leaning on the pommel of his sword and looking down with

ineffable scorn upon the weak casuists around him. The quick and subtle

Arabian witlings redoubled their light attacks on the stately Spaniard,

but when one of them, of the race of the Abencerrages dared to question,

with a sneer, the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin, the

Catholic knight could no longer restrain his ire. Elevating his voice of

a sudden, he told the infidel he lied, and raising his arm at the same

time he smote him on the head with his sheathed sword. In an instant

the Court of Lions glistened with the flash of arms,” insomuch that the

American lady whom we saw writing a letter beside a friend sketching

there must have been startled from her opening words, “I am sitting here

with my portfolio on my knees in the beautiful Court of the Lions,”

and if Muley Aben Hassan had not “overheard the tumult and forbade all

appeal to force, pronouncing the person of the ambassador sacred,” she

never could have gone on.

V

[Illustration: 28 THE COURT OF THE LIONS]

I did not doubt the fact when I read of it under the level boughs of the

beechen tree with J. W., sixty years ago, by the green woodland light

of the primeval forest which hemmed our village in, and since I am well

away from the Alhambra again I do not doubt it now. I doubt nothing that

Irving says of the Alhambra; he is the gentle genius of the place, and

I could almost wish that I had paid the ten pesetas extra which the

custodian demanded for showing his apartment in the palace. On the

ground the demand of two dollars seemed a gross extortion; yet it was

not too much for a devotion so rich as mine to have paid, and I advise

other travelers to buy themselves off from a vain regret by giving it.

If ever a memory merited the right to levy tribute on all comers to the

place it haunts, Washington Irving’s is that memory. His _Conquest of

Granada_ is still the history which one would wish to read; his _Tales

of the Alhambra_ embody fable and fact in just the right measure for the

heart’s desire in the presence of the monuments they verify or falsify.

They belong to that strange age of romance which is now so almost

pathetic and to which one cannot refuse his sympathy without sensible

loss. But for the eager make-believe of that time we should still have

to hoard up much rubbish which we can now leave aside, or accept without

bothering to assay for the few grains of gold in it. Washington Irving

had just the playful kindness which sufficed best to deal with the

accumulations of his age; if he does not forbid you to believe, he does

not oblige you to disbelieve, and he has always a tolerant civility

in his humor which comports best with the duty of taking leniently a

history impossible to take altogether seriously. Till the Spaniards

had put an end to the Moorish misrule, with its ruthless despotism and

bloody civil brawls, the Moors deserved to be conquered; it was not till

their power was broken forever that they became truly heroic in their

vain struggles and their unavailing sorrows. Then their pathetic

resignation to persecution and exile lent dignity even to their

ridiculous religion; but it was of the first and not the second period

that Irving had to treat.