I wish now that I had known them well enough to ask them what they
candidly thought of the city of which I felt the witchery under the
dying day I have left celebrating for the moment in order to speak of
them. It seems to me at this distance of time and space that I did not
duly reflect that in places it was a city which smelled very badly and
was almost as dirty as New York in others, and very ill paved. The worst
places are in the older quarters, where the streets are very crooked and
very narrow, so narrow that the tram-car can barely scrape through them.
They are old enough to be streets belonging to the Moorish city, like
many streets in Cordova and Seville, but no fond inquiry of our guides
could identify this lane or that alley as of Moorish origin. There is
indeed a group of picturesque shops clearly faked to look Moorish, which
the lover of that period may pin his faith to, and for a moment I did
so, but upon second thought I unpinned it.
We visited this plated fragment of the old Moorish capital when
we descended from our hotel with a new guide to see the great, the
stupendous cathedral, where the Catholic kings lie triumphantly entombed
in the heart of their conquest. It is altogether unlike the other
Spanish cathedrals of my knowledge; for though the cathedral of
Valladolid is of Renaissance architecture in its austere simplicity,
it is somehow even less like that of Granada than the Gothic fanes of
Burgos or Toledo or Seville. All the detail at Granada is classicistic,
but the whole is often of Gothic effect, especially in the mass of
those clustered Corinthian columns that lift its domes aloof on their
prodigious bulk, huge as that of the grouped pillars in the York
Minster. The white of the marble walls, the gold of altars, the colors
of painted wooden sculpture form the tones of the place, subdued to one
bizarre richness which I may as well leave first as last to the reader’s
fancy; though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that
gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and the
music of stringed instruments and the shrill voices of choir-boys
pierced the spaces here and there, but no more filled them than the
immemorable plastic and pictorial facts: than a certain very lively
bishop kneeling on his tomb and looking like George Washington; or
than a St. Jerome in the Desert, outwrinkling age, with his lion curled
cozily up in his mantle; or than the colossal busts of Adam and Eve
and the praying figures of Ferdinand and Isabel, richly gilded in
the exquisite temple forming the high altar; or than the St. James on
horseback, with his horse’s hoof planted on the throat of a Moor; or
than the Blessed Virgins in jeweled crowns and stomachers and brocaded
skirts; or than that unsparing decapitation of John the Baptist bloodily
falling forward with his severed gullet thrusting at the spectator.
Nothing has ever been too terrible in life for Spanish art to represent;
it is as ruthlessly veracious as Russian literature; and of all the
painters and sculptors who have portrayed the story of Christianity as
a tale of torture and slaughter, the Spaniards seem to have studied it
closest from the fact; perhaps because for centuries the Inquisition
lavished the fact upon them.
The supreme interest of the cathedral is, of course, the Royal Chapel,
where in a sunken level Ferdinand and Isabel lie, with their poor mad
daughter Joan and her idolized unfaithful husband Philip the Fair, whose
body she bore about with her while she lived. The picture postal has
these monuments in its keeping and can show them better than my pen,
which falters also from the tremendous _retablo_ of the chapel dense
with the agonies of martyrdom and serene with the piety of the Catholic
Kings kneeling placidly amid the horrors. If the picture postal will not
supply these, or reproduce the many and many relics and memorials which
abound there and in the sacristy--jewels and vestments and banners and
draperies of the royal camp-altar--there is nothing for the reader but
to go himself and see. It is richly worth his while, and if he cannot
believe in a box which will be shown him as the box Isabel gave Columbus
her jewels in merely because he has been shown a reliquary as her
hand-glass, so much the worse for him. He will not then merit the
company of a small choir-boy who efficiently opens the iron gate to
the crypt and gives the custodian as good as he sends in back-talk and
defiantly pockets the coppers he has earned. Much less will he deserve
to witness the homely scene in an area outside of the Royal Chapel,
where many milch goats are assembled, and when a customer comes,
preferably a little girl with a tin cup, one of the mothers of the flock
is pinioned much against her will by a street boy volunteering for the
office, and her head held tight while the goatherdess milks the measure
full at the other end.