By St. John’s Day, however, the sun flashes its rays too fiercely, and it is in late spring or early autumn that the voyage is most enjoyable. A land journey can give no idea of the loveliness of these coasts, and towns such as Alicante and Almería lose much of their beauty if deprived of their background of mountains, which can only be seen fully out at sea. The sea and sky are unfailingly beautiful, and the life of the ports, full of colour and movement, never loses its interest. Almería, fallen from its ancient greatness, is yet active in its “purple-shadowed bay,”[89] and exports every year two million barrels, a hundred million pounds, of grapes, chiefly to America and England. Torrevieja, further north, is a small town or village of some seven thousand inhabitants, at which steamers touch to take in a cargo of salt, but which the tourist, on his way from Elche to Murcia, rarely turns aside to visit. It has a thoroughly African look, with its flat-roofed, grey-white houses on a bare, level strip of sandy coast, with no trees except palms, that stand conspicuous like trees of the desert; the sand in places is thinly covered with grass, of lightest, almost yellow, green. To the left, seen from the sea, is a long line of gleaming salt, drawn from the sea-water by evaporation under the summer sun, and now ready to be exported. Beyond the line of salt is a distant range of bare mountains, faintly purple. The town has one or two small towers, four factory chimneys, and half a dozen round mills, with arms as slender as the cranes on the loading steamers in the harbour. A continual rosary of barges, yellow, white, green, or black, carries the salt across the bay. The heavy load weighs the barge to the water’s edge, and the glistening white salt seems to float on the blue surface. In the barge, at either end, go as many as twenty or even thirty men, some sitting rowing, others facing them and standing to row, and others punting with their poles of immense length that taper away at the top to the slight girth of a fishing rod. The shirts of the men, mauve, pink, white, red, or purple, their light blue or black coats, red sashes, trousers of velvet or velvet corduroy of many shades, from bright yellow to dark brown, the long shining yellow punt poles, and the white pyramids of salt on the sea of sapphire, combine to form a strange and beautiful sight. The empty barges return high in the water, with little mounds of salt left along their ledges. At midday the houses seem to faint and grow indistinct, the mountains fade to a hardly perceptible outline, only the salt reflects the sun in every facet of its countless grains, and glitters whiter than snow. In the sunset the lines resume their sharpness, and the mountains are grey or blue-grey or intense leaden blue or purple, according to their distances. The Murcian sky is famous for its clear serenity, and the sunsets and sunrises are of surpassing fairness. Alicante, too, which is nearer to Murcia than to Valencia, has a wonderful sky and a wonderful sea, and here, too, the “sunrise is a glorious birth.” “Alicante aux clochers mêle les minarets,” says Victor Hugo in one of the poems of “Les Orientales,” and from the sea Alicante has an Oriental look, with its lines of palms, stories of flat roofs, and bare background of hills and mountains. But it is at evening that Alicante is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The lights shine softly through the four lines of palm-trees along the Paseo de los Mártires, and are reflected across the water; in the harbour the last radiance of evening sets the tracery of masts and cranes and rigging in clear relief. To the west the sea is already dark, almost wine-coloured, the οἲνψ of the Greeks, but in the east it is a most exquisite blue, a blue that seems to be a transparent surface of turquoise covering a layer of white chalk. The eastern horizon is faintly purple, and against it the sails of a fleet of fishing-boats are whiter than at any other time, and gleam long after the sun has set. Later the sea catches for an instant the faint purple of the sky, the sky loses its colour, and finally a mistiness of softest grey merges them together, so that one may no longer distinguish where the sky ceases or the sea begins. On the rocks of the coast the waves at night break, filled with phosphorus, in a luminous spray, “like light dissolved in star showers thrown.” The low line of pale lights along El Grao, Valencia’s harbour, if approached at night, has a look, from some distance at sea, of such a phosphorus wave. By day the harbour is seen to be a forest of masts, and far away the towers of Valencia, round the tall Miguelete, appear as numerous, and in the distance almost as slender as the masts of the harbour: “les clochers de ses trois cents églises.” Along the coast of the Huerta, especially to the south of Valencia, glisten a number of snow-white pyramids, that seem at first to be more salt, having the exact look of the mounds that lie along the bay of Cadiz. They are the whitewashed, triangular fronts of the peasants’ thatched cottages or barracas, standing in the fertile plain, “Spain’s Orchard.”
One of the most lovely and original sights along the whole coast is that of the high range of bare, treeless mountains south of Cartagena, falling sheer into the sea, a delicate purple above the light blue water. There is not the merest rim of coast, in fact the sea flows round the mountains’ flanks, and they continue far out from the land, their tops occasionally appearing as small islands.
But especially will the traveller who has the happy chance to find himself at dawn of a cloudless day in a boat an hour west of Almería—especially then will he be ready to repeat the lines:
A slight gleam in the east warns the moon that its reign of quiet light is to finish, and begins the long prelude of day. Above a dark line of sea a faint orange creeps into the sky, deepening to orange-purple, and soon fringing off in pale yellow, saffron, and daffodil. Then, later, above this, widens a space of clearest green, and at last the body of the sky changes from grey to a light blue. In the west all is still grey, as with a soft woof of hanging mists. The sails of a boat going out to sea are white in the first glow of dawn, and the gently swelling sea eastwards reflects the light in level gleams of gold, like smooth, burnished meadows of buttercups. Then the sun rises, red-orange, on a cloudless sea line, the sea becomes light blue, and along the rest of the horizon lie spaces of pearl and opal, while in the east a dim, silver moon fades slowly. The scene is of such enchanting loveliness, like the birth of a new world, that if the Sierra Nevada chances to be for the most part hidden in a long cloud of mist, the traveller scarcely notices one or two peaks that seem to be floating snow-white clouds. Then the mist of cloud melts away, and, one by one, the snow summits appear, till the whole immense range stands bare, looking incredibly high in a heaven of clear, faint green. It is a sight to make men hold their breath. The ship, night’s shadows scarce driven from her deck, passes slowly, almost noiselessly through the water as if she, too, understood that here is some enchanted country. The view of the Sierra Nevada from Granada, lovely as it is, gives no hint of a sight so incomparable as this. The range is of such vast length, the snow is so deep and soft. Long, almost level lines, huge, abrupt crags, gently sloping gullies, smooth, pyramid-shaped peaks, shelves and pinnacles, crevices and ledges, are all entirely wrapped in deep, much-sunned snow, without a break. Each look, after turning for a moment to the grey western horizon or the waving, crystalline surface of blue sea, brings a new wonder and a fresh surprise; so marvellous is the radiance of white appearing in the full glow from the east, and such is the infinite clearness and subtlety of the outlines on a sky varying from blue-grey to transparent green. The long massive range, seen from some distance out at sea, gives the impression of a height of twenty thousand feet, whereas from Granada it is difficult to realize that the highest peak is over eleven thousand. Below the snow-line, a high range of bare grey-purple mountains seems to sink into the sea, though there is, in fact, a line of level coast. Far or near no tree is to be seen; a white lighthouse stands on the coast, and on the silken blue sea gleams an occasional white sail or the flash of a seagull’s wing. As the sun rises higher the softly folding mountains beneath the Sierra Nevada grow more purple above the sea, and the shadows of their dimpling hollows blacken. Above, the wide, smooth spaces and the deep ravines present their broad surplice of glistening white to the sun without a shadow. It is all unimaginably lovely, with a breathless purity of things primeval—
This and other hours of delight during a coasting voyage in the Spanish Mediterranean are not soon forgotten, and, though they cannot be translated into words—
The voyage may be prolonged on the south coast, and, from the time when, on his left, Tarifa lies along the sea, like a line of melting snow under smoothly moulded hills of green, and, on the right, Tangiers shows its white houses indistinctly beneath the bare, grey mountains of Africa, to the time when at Port Bou he bids farewell to the Catalan coast and to Spain, the traveller will not have a dull or unenjoyable moment; if only the gods send him propitious, cloudless days—
IT was a cloudless day of November. The Cathedral of Valencia stood grey against a sky of soft blue. In the Plaza de la Constitución the sun shone on the central fountain and marked in dark lines the shadows of the houses and the Cathedral. From the great “Door of the Apostles” came a smell of incense as people went out and in. Surmounted by its large rose-window, the doorway has a worn and ancient air, and the plants growing here and there in the wall add to its look of venerable splendour. Some of the apostles stand there headless, some without arms, some mere trunks of stone. Above, the tall Miguelete tower rises conspicuous here, as it is conspicuous far and wide across the Valencian plain. A few priests passed, a few carts drawn by long strings of mules, a newspaper-seller cried the Heraldo de Madrid, and some peasants in black or blue-grey groups talked together, leaning on their sticks. Shortly after eleven a long, green sofa was set up on the pavement immediately in front of the Cathedral door, and a narrow space round it was enclosed with an iron railing. Sofa and railing, carried across the street in sections, bore the inscription Tribunal de las Aguas. For it was Thursday, the meeting-day of the tribunal which judges disputes arising from the irrigation of the Huerta.
To the peasant of the Valencian Huerta loss of water for his land means starvation, and the hours at which each is allowed to draw off water from the narrow channels that cross his land are carefully regulated. If one takes water out of his turn the fields of another must suffer, and the case must be brought before the judges sitting in weekly council. Against their sentence there is no protest or appeal; it is absolutely final, and though there must be cases of injustice, the peasants are very proud of their tribunal. There is no writing—the cases are not even recorded—the matter is decided on the spot and in the open air between man and man; there are no clerks or advocates; no table, ink, or papers to confuse the simple;[90] no fees or anxious delays, and the judges, moreover, chosen by and from the peasants themselves, thoroughly understand the questions brought before them. It is a strange sight, the sitting of this all-powerful institution, centuries old, in the Plaza de la Constitución, in the twentieth century. There is a dignified simplicity about it, a lack of display which is imposing. The peasants have a conscious pride in being able to arrange their own affairs without interference of the men of learning, just as they are ready to settle their more private quarrels without recourse to the law. The man who has been stabbed in a quarrel will conceal the name of his assailant from the police, always reserving for himself the pleasure of taking vengeance later on. The character of the peasants of the Huerta is indeed a mixture of haughtiness and cunning, of simplicity and shrewdness, and the word that best describes them is the Spanish socarronería—a certain malicious humour.[91] Living isolated in the vast open plain, they form a community apart, and resent external interference. Their tribunal is entirely primitive and rustic; in all its years of city life it has adopted none of the city’s ways, and has not even the shelter of a roof.
In the present instance there was but a single question to be settled, and the proceedings lasted less than five minutes, passing all but unnoticed. At about a quarter to twelve the judges, five in number, and dressed in black as ordinary peasants, walked slowly into the enclosure and occupied their places on the official sofa, taking off their black felt hats. The full body of the judges is seven, chosen from different districts to represent the principal canals of irrigation. Another peasant, officer of the tribunal (on his cap is written A. de T. Aguas, the alguacil, that is, of the Tribunal of Waters), standing at the small gate in the railing, formally declared the tribunal open: S’obri el tribunal are the consecrated words. He then introduced the plaintiff and defendant, who stood bareheaded and without their sticks at half a yard’s distance from the judges. After each had stated his case—and any interruption is rigorously fined—one of the judges at once passed sentence. The verdict was against the old man, and he turned without a word to leave the enclosure. His wife, however, without the railing, though he put his finger to his lips to silence her, was not to be overawed, and in a shrill torrent of words reproached the judges as they filed solemnly into the Plaza. The Tribunal de las Aguas was closed; the judges dispersed to their silent fields, to meet again in the rattle and clamour of the crowded city on the following Thursday. Every Thursday throughout the year the plain green sofa and circular railing are brought out in sections, and the judges make their appearance in the Plaza. They do not always enter the enclosure, for sometimes there is no dispute pending, or the disputants have come to an agreement in the Plaza without recourse to the tribunal, and when the clock strikes twelve, railing and sofa are carried back. The judges help to bring about a settlement, and this perhaps explains that their official verdicts are given instantaneously, with no pause for thought or consultation; they have no doubt heard every detail of the case and come to a decision beforehand.
Readers of Don Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’ gloomy but delightful novel, “La Barraca,” will remember the scene at the “Door of the Apostles” when Batiste, unable to check his indignation at the unjust charge brought against him, is fined for his excited interruptions and fined too for the misdeed which he had not committed. But as a rule the scene is a quiet and almost a solemn one. The tribunal has the sanctity of years; the peasant respects an institution which was the same in his father’s time and in his grandfather’s, and in that of his ancestors five centuries ago. The judges who before and after are simple peasants, are, for the moment invested with the power of settling matters of vital importance; for disregarding the sentence of the tribunal they may deprive a man entirely of his right of water, and so render him and his family penniless. They represent the whole Huerta, embodying alike its independent spirit and its conservative traditions. A few minutes after the judges have risen, and sometimes before the Cathedral clock has struck twelve, sofa and railing have disappeared, and it is hard to realize that the time-honoured Judging of the Waters, so primitive and impressive, has actually been held in this city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, and in this paved square where now there are but few wayfarers, and the central fountain flows and trickles in silence.
IT is in spring, from March to May, that Seville is chiefly visited; the warm air and hot sun, the orange-trees in flower, the great religious festivals, the famous bull-fights, attract a host of foreigners, and the city has an animation unwonted even in the gay and lively capital of Andalucía. In winter Seville has a quieter, but perhaps not less potent charm. Winter often brings with it a succession of cool clear days, when the sky is of a serene, almost transparent blue, with golden sunsets. The white lines of flat-roofed houses seen against the blue of the evening sky have the soft light and colouring of opals, while the distant hills of the horizon are faintly purple. On these still days the motionless river reflects the lines of leafless silver birch and yellow tamarisks in all the tracery of their slender branches. A few yards further from the bank on either side thousands of dark orange-trees are hung with gleaming fruit, circling the city with a fringe of lamps. Above and through the trees, now bare and grey, of the Paseo de las Delicias show the various greens of the tall eucalyptus-trees and palms, the orange-trees and cypresses of the Santelmo gardens. On the quay lie immense mounds of oranges ready to be packed: the hot sun fills the air with their scent, children make flying attacks and retire precipitately with an orange apiece, while an occasional beggar also receives his dole from the apparently inexhaustible store. In the ever-crowded Calle de las Sierpes small open stalls display fresh violets and magnificent carnations and roses, and in some gardens one may see roses and geraniums in flower. In the lovely gardens of the Alcázar the sun draws a deliciously mingled scent from the box-hedges, myrtles and oranges.
Occasionally—still in unclouded weather—the wind is cold and piercing and all go muffled to the eyes, the men in their capas, the women with long shawls. In the Patio de los Naranjos, beneath the trees laden with oranges, the wind sweeps across the pavement of rough bricks, intergrown with grass and the duller green of mosses, and rattles the fallen leaves in lines and circles. Far above, the great Giralda tower stands pink and creamy grey in the clear winter sky. By the Gate of Pardon, in a corner of hot sun and sheltered from the wind, a few beggars sit warming themselves and watching with Oriental patience and immobility. The streets are mostly too narrow to let in the sun, but in the plazas and any open space men are seen basking in sunshine, tomando el sol. Along the bridge that leads to the suburb of Triana the seats on both sides are crowded. Triana, better than Seville, corresponds to Cervantes’ description of a city where adventures are to be met at every street corner, and Triana supplies an army of loiterers whose life’s mission in winter is to “take the sun.”
On the eve of high festivals in winter, such as the Epiphany, it is already growing dark when services are held, and the vast Cathedral is faintly lit with hundreds of candles and dim hanging lamps, though the last daylight still lingers awhile in the deep reds and purples, green, orange, and every colour of the windows overhead. There is no procession of the Three Kings through the city; at Alcoy, in the province of Valencia, the Three Kings come riding, laden with presents, into the town from beyond the grey mountains that surround it, and half the population goes out to meet them, but Seville is too “civilized” for this.
Even in Seville not all the winter days are cloudless and serene. On some of them the sky is a uniform grey, and the rain falls unceasingly till the centre of the narrower, unevenly cobbled streets, raised at either side and without a pavement, becomes a running stream. But when the Andalusian sun reappears, the houses have an added freshness in their glowing white, or in their coats of faint green or red, yellow or purple (though even these usually have a line of white along the roof), and in the air is a feeling of spring. There is an ancient Andalusian song that makes March say to January—
(With the three days that are left me and three lent me by my friend April, I will put your sheep in such a plight that you will remember me.) This is the Cumbrian:—
But the rigour of the days that follow in Cumberland has no place or parallel in the low-lying districts of Andalucía:—
At Seville a few weeks after the Day of the Kings winter is really over: in February the sky has an intenser blue, and with the longer sunshine the warmth increases. The spring days follow in their matchless splendour, till finally the sun’s fiery heat drives all who can leave the city to the cooler refuge of the sea or the hills.
IN winter Seville’s sky is sometimes for weeks entirely cloudless. Day after day opens and dies peacefully away like a perfect flower; or, if a strong cold wind drives across the day, it still blows in a heaven of limitless clear blue. But in early spring the sky is often veiled in a floating canopy of grey, or one may watch the white masses of clouds thin and melt on the blue. And the blue is no longer fixed, distant, and serene; even when apparently clear it has a vague movement of dissolving mists, an intangible white softness interlacing it. It is this quality of the sky, harmonizing so well with the soft lines and delicate colours of the city, that gives to Seville in spring its unfailing charm. Especially is that charm felt in the hour when men’s cigarettes begin to glow and dot the streets with tiny fire-flies, distinct as the white flowers worn by the women in their hair. The deep-red carnations and dark violets of the open flower-stalls fade into shadow; the light greens, lilacs, yellows, browns, and blues of the houses take a greyer tinge. The last sunshine throws its thinner radiance along the white lines of flat roofs that stand out in many levels and angles on the blue or blue-and-white sky, and the effect is of pearls and opals, not the flash of polished opals, but, as it were, blue veins of opal in white chalk. The west is filled with a level radiance of pure gold, and presently the eastern sky also changes from blue to a faint golden grey. One by one the hanging street lamps begin to shed their soft glow of white light, and overhead the first stars shine faintly and vanish and reappear. The bells of goats and the mellower note of cowbells are heard as they go their evening round to be milked, driven by a boy astride his donkey, or by an old man with faded-pink umbrella; or a donkey passes laden with oranges, the fruit’s gold gleaming through the twilight afterglow from between the netting of the panniers. A breath of country air invades the city; the day’s work is ended, and perhaps from some church or convent you may hear “a distant bell that seems to mourn the dying of the day”:
The swift Southern twilight soon dies, but this short hour more than any other embodies the magic of a Seville spring. For Seville at other times is “a city full of stirs, a tumultuous city, a joyous city.” It wakes to a discordant music of many street cries. All kinds of wares are hawked shrilly, with loud shouts, or slow, dirge-like chants. Later in the day come the more melodious cries of “Oranges! Water! Violets! Carnations!—¡Qué buenas naranjas! Agua, quien quiere agua! Violetas! Claveles!” But to the flat brick-paved housetops, surrounded with walls of different height, from three to twenty feet, all whitewashed to their level tops, these sounds of the street come faintly. The rattle of wheels over the cobbles is deadened, the bells of slowly driven cows and goats chime distantly; sometimes one hears the intricate whistle of the knife-grinder, or a barrel-organ plays an interminable dance to the clacking of castañets, that fascinates by its ceaseless repetition. But the sounds are vague and muffled, without harshness or stridency, and here reigns more uninterrupted quiet than in the cool marble patios below, with the frequent goings out and in through the door’s iron reja. On the walls or in the line of shade beneath them stand rows of plants—roses, geraniums, heliotrope, and especially carnations. From here the street sellers fill their open stalls and baskets with the huge carnations of spring, the smaller early carnations coming chiefly from Málaga. And the carnations never look more beautiful than seen, dark red or pink or yellow, against these walls of glistening white; one is fain to call them by their German or “soft Spanish name”—Nelken, claveles. The sun rising lights up the housetops so that they gleam like snow between the dark spaces of bronze or green or blue glazed tiles, slender-springing towers, and infrequent roofs, covered thickly in spring with grass, like small fields. Or on a night of moon the city has a phantom look of whited sepulchres, and if no moon looks round her with delight when the heavens are bare, there is an uninterrupted view of stars in the whole sky, as from a ship’s deck. At midday, when the sun is all fire and narrows the lines of shadow to mere rims of black, one may not look for more than an instant across the glaring radiance of white. In the morning there is an exquisite freshness. Little smoke rises from the houses—only an occasional tiny wraith of grey—but, beyond, a dense line goes up from the Cartuja factory of azulejos, and hangs black-purple on the blue sky—the morning sky streaked with waving outdrawn wisps of white mist-like cloud. There is a flapping of pigeons’ wings as they flutter from wall to wall, and the twittering of innumerable sparrows. The hours are marked by the crystal striking of many clocks that are heard only dim and intermittently from below in the street traffic. But it is at evening that the housetop has an almost magical charm, when the sun has set in a sky of delicate gold, and in the east long thin lines of white and faint purple cloud lie across a sky of lightest blue. Then the flowers along the wall give out all their scent. Swallows whirl and swerve far overhead or lightly skim the hundred levels of whitewashed turret and wall. The claveles fade slowly in the growing dusk; the wide, uneven plain of glowing walls gradually becomes indistinct and blurred; finally the sky, too, is moulded to a perfect symmetry of grey, and perhaps an immense orange-coloured moon climbs slowly above the city. Seville is lovely in winter, when the sky is a cold, serene blue, and night by night the stars glint and glitter; lovely in spring, when everywhere, in roof and patio and garden, is a triumph of green, when the oranges still hang on the orange-trees in flower—like yellow crocuses peering from the snow—and the corn is already high in the olives beyond the river; lovely in summer, when the greens are parched and shrivelled, and a hot wind blows heavily across the fainting housetops, or in nights of sultry stillness the intense glow from many a lighted patio falls across the velvet darkness of the narrow streets. Lovely at all times, but never more lovely than in the temperate days of spring, when a hundred bells are ringing for the Feast of Resurrection, and the flowers from countless roofs are gathered for the fête; when, in scenes of fairy magic, the slow pasos move with their myriad candles burning through the twilight, along the crowded streets and plazas to the Cathedral, while still peacefully above its Court of Oranges the tall Giralda looks across the city that hems it in, to the wide dehesas of Andalucía, to the green fields and olive-covered hills beyond the gently flowing Guadalquivir, and to the distant line of the Sierra Morena.
NOT one perhaps in a hundred of those who visit Seville and Granada sees more than a glimpse of the beautiful country and curious villages of Andalucía; yet there is much pleasure and interest to be had from a journey through all this region. In February an early start with the sun will enable the traveller on horseback or on foot to accomplish a fair day’s journey, since the sun has not yet begun to burn and force him to rest for some six central hours of the day, as later in the year. And the outlines on every side are exquisitely clear, the sky usually cloudless, and streams flow where later there will be but dry channels. In parts the fields and roadside spaces are blue and purple with dwarf-irises (the peasants call them simply lirios, lilies), and the almond-trees are in flower; and at no time of the year is there a greater and more delightful contrast between spring in the valley and winter on the hills. Near Seville the immense plains stretch interminably to the faint mountains, brown and dull-green pastures of heather and dwarf-palm, flecked with silver-white streaks of water; herds of cattle, glossy black with white horns, pigs, horses, and great flocks of sheep graze there. Or the country is gently undulating like Sussex downs, but with softlier-moulded outlines and a horizon of faint blue mountains, in February exquisitely distinct in faintness. A village often entirely covers one of the small hills, not a house venturing forward to form an outskirt, but all clustered and compact. Steep, perfectly straight streets of sharp narrow cobbles, without side pavements, run up to the church at the top through rows of low, whitewashed houses, of a single storey and of a dazzling whiteness. At evening the labourers come in from the far distant fields in a continuous line, on foot or on mules and donkeys, and children go out to meet them and are given a ride back into the village. Sometimes their return is of several kilomètres, over deep earthy or stony paths, and, with their gleaming mattocks (pioches, azadones) over their shoulders, they are now to be seen clearly outlined on the evening sky, and now are lost from view in one of the many hollows of the hills. Far and near there is no tree, “neither bush nor shrub to bear off any weather at all,” and the winds seem to have sifted and moulded the hills into softly folding mounds and hollows. In February the winds still blow occasionally with icy breath, and you will meet men on crimson and magenta-tasselled mules and donkeys, closely wrapped in old-fashioned capas of brown, only their eyes visible. On the road there are few travellers—charcoal-burners coming down with troops of laden donkeys from the hills, or a slow cart drawn by a string of mules, the driver lazily asleep, and the reins appearing from between the soles of his sandals,[92] or a troop of gipsies, or orange sellers with the panniers of their mules brimmed with oranges, now selling at six reales, a little over a shilling, the hundred. Sometimes the country is all grey-pinched and icy, and but a little further (as near snow-white Arcos de la Frontera) are great hedges of shrubs and aloes and brambles and cactus, with a sound of bees, and hovering white and yellow butterflies, and wide spaces of tall branched flowers of asphodel and grey scented rosemary. Or in a corner of windswept hills you may find a sheltered huerta with thick hedge of tall black cypresses; the oranges crowd the trees with gold, and the almond-trees shed across the dusty road a thick carpet of broken flowers, pink and white. To Grazalema leads only a steep and narrow foot-path after one has left the road not far from Algodonales (pronounced by the peasants in a torrent of vowels Aooae) and crossed the river Guadalete. In the valley the oranges gleam in myriads, and the hills immediately above are coloured with a continuous spray of almond-trees in flower, entirely covering their sides, and sometimes crowning them in triumph. And far above, over woods of cork and evergreen oak from which rise frail blue lines of smoke from charcoal-burners’ fires, appear two or three peaks of snow clear against a pale blue sky. The path goes up along hedges of brambles through asphodels and hundreds of trailing periwinkles, with stepping-stones and flowing streams; here and there a snow-white olive-oil mill with sentinel cypresses. And, below, the pale snow-fed Guadalete flows swiftly over white stones through groves of oranges. From a distance Grazalema gives the fanciful idea of broken shells on a stony shore, with its houses of white and pink and brown, many of them overhanging and seeming to grow out of steep rocks. From the village a path leads through corkwoods, the stripped trunks of the trees a deep maroon colour, to Ronda on its sheer hill. From Antequera to Málaga by road is some fifty kilomètres, and here, too, are wonderful contrasts and sudden change from winter to summer. In the unsheltered plains round Bobadilla the almond-trees show no sign of flower, and the grey mountains above the stern frowning towers of Antequera are ice-bound. Turning the pass, appears a magnificent view of six or seven serrated hill-ranges to the line of sea beyond hidden Málaga—on the left a fantastically jagged range, sprinkled in parts with snow; on the right a long line of snow-mountains that ends in a bare range rising purple from the sea. And the ice soon grows thin and vanishes, giving place to irises, tiny jonquils, and periwinkles, and descending half-way down the mountain side, to Villanueva, the almond-trees have already lost half their blossoms, grass and white dusty road and dark new-ploughed soil are thickly strewn with their petals, and the fields of broad beans are in scented black and white flower. Along the coast full summer reigns, the balconies are heavy with trailing flowers, the sea is deepest blue, and the wind blows half-sultrily across the fields of beans and the faded-green leaves of sugar-cane, with their scent of hay. Sometimes the road is lined with poplars, and ox-carts go laden with grass and trefoil and leaves from the sugar-canes. Elsewhere the road winds inland through grey rocky hills and woods of strong-scented pines, with glimpses of blue sea; or passes high above cliffs, the sea swelling dull green immediately below or foaming round dark rocks. From Motril or some other point one may go up to Granada, the Sierra Nevada appearing and altering continually; and thoughts of the Alhambra and other names of magic shorten the road, though it has many a beautiful view and village, such as Pino to the left on the mountain side, with its white houses and deep red-brown roofs. But of the many fair districts of Andalucía perhaps the most delightful in scenery is that lying between the Guadalquivir and La Mancha, a region of brushwood and mountain. The road from Marmolejo runs up through hills covered with shrubs of every shade of green, from grey-blue to shrill yellow, many of them scented, lentiscus, escalonia, adelfa, cistus, rosemary, and a hundred more; even in February the mid-day sun scents the whole air with them. Near the village of Cardeña, some thirty miles from Marmolejo, a ruin is supposed to be that of the inn where many scenes of “Don Quixote” occurred, but only a few stones remain. Leaving the village in early morning in frost and ice in order to go down to Montoro on the Guadalquivir, the road at first is wild, bordered by oak-trees, with flocks of sheep, a few patches of corn, many magpies, the plaining of birds and the occasional whirr of a partridge. Yet even here in a few hollows are vines and almond-trees, and spaces of scented plants and wild yellow jonquils, with white or brown or yellow butterflies, a humming of bees and rustling of lizards. The road now cuts through hills of scented shrubs, so various and ordered with such careful harmony as could be rivalled by no garden planted by man. On either side are range and range of hills shrub-covered, dull green, brown and blue, brown where the shrubs have been cut for firing. To the right is a wide deep gorge with tiny river far below, and glimpses of blue distances and valleys of more hills. To the left more hills, and across a blue distance of hill valleys the Sierra de Jaen with its beautiful pyramid-shaped peak of deepest snow, and far to the right of it the two more pointed peaks of Granada’s Sierra Nevada, marvellously clear in distance. Between them and the Sierra de Jaen runs the snow-sprinkled range above the village of Los Villares de Jaen. In the transparent might of even a February noon the more distant and the higher of the near hills are purple, and the great snow-mountains below the snow-line grow faint and grey. Montoro is a beautiful quaint town rising above the Guadalquivir in seven or eight storeys of houses of red stone and whitewash. The tall church-tower, also of red stone, stands massively above the town, and precipitously steep and cobbled streets lead up to it. Houses look sheer down from windows, balconies, and gardens to the river far below, which flows over a weir above and below the town, so that there is a perpetual sound of rushing water. From Montoro one may follow the Guadalquivir, now a majestic river, through its olive groves to the famous bridge of Alcolea, and the low white line beneath bare hills and wooded mountains which is Córdoba, seen from the East. Everywhere on the roads and in the inns of Andalucía the peasants are courteous, pleasant, intelligent, picturesque; always ready to give any service in their power, often immensely ignorant. They will ask if “Ingalaterra” is not Spain’s border-country and confuse it with Gibraltar, or if the Queen was a Christian before her marriage. For the most part they cannot read or write;[93] yet they converse willingly on the most various subjects, especially on politics and religion, the mayor and the priest. Here a woman complains: “Nine children I had, and the nine are dead; it’s better so in these times of misery”; there a peasant describes the snowy Sierra in the month of August, how it glows whiter than lilies across the plain—más blanca, que una azucena; or tells how beautiful is the country in later spring when the quinces, apples, and pomegranates are in flower, que es un paraiso—a very paradise. As they sit round the candela, in the cold evenings of early spring, talk flows on into the night, always pleasant and courteous, as of one gran señor to another.
THERE is not a literature in Europe more individual than that of Spain. It has been influenced greatly at various times by other countries, especially Italy and France, but in its many masterpieces it has a flavour of the soil, a local colouring that is all its own. Even when Spanish authors have borrowed most freely they have usually succeeded in casting their own individuality over their “honourable kind of thieving.” Who has a more individual genius than Juan Ruiz, the merry Archpriest of Hita? Yet it has been shown that his debt to French, Latin, and other authors is very considerable. In this form of borrowing—practised by Shakespeare—which is not a direct imitation but a loan of bricks to make them marble, there is in fact a high originality. The phrase in which the merits of the Marqués de Santillana have been summed up might be applied to the whole of Spanish literature: when it ceases to imitate it is inimitable. Santillana’s mountain songs—his serranillas are scented as it were with the thyme of the Castilian hills, whereas his sonnets in the Italian manner are colourless and artificial.
Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly speaks of “that forcible realistic touch, that alert vision, that intense impression of the thing seen and accurately observed which give to Spanish literature its peculiar stamp of authenticity.” The clear atmosphere of Spain, in which distant mountains seem to be close at hand, is also the atmosphere of Spanish literature. The Spaniard may have little subtlety of insight or critical judgment, but he has a directness of vision that has manifested itself in bigotry, brutality, and cynical satire, as well as in keen humour, straight-forwardness, and dignity of character. The realism which has produced the terrible Christs of the Cathedrals, with their long human hair and life-like wounds, or the polychrome statues of Spanish carvers, with a presentation of pain on the human face in all and more than all its horror—this realism may be due either to a hatred of all that is false and factitious or to a lack of sensibility, an inability to sympathize without a harsh shock, a thrill of terrified awe. What would the Greeks have said to these tortured features, these agonizing brows and flowing wounds? It is as false art to perpetuate in wood or stone the agony of a few culminating moments as it is to picture a face laughing or yawning, from whose perpetually open mouth we will soon turn with a laugh or a yawn. This realism has found a less harsh expression in Spanish literature, as in the sane and brilliant art of Velázquez. The brutality occasionally makes itself felt, as in some of Quevedo’s bitter writings, but most often the spirit is nobler and more human. In the twelfth-century “Poema del Cid” all the figures stand out in wonderful clearness, from the Cid himself to the nine years’ old child at Burgos, who tells the Cid that they dare not open their doors to him for fear of the King’s edict. And the events of the poem are brought to pass before our eyes with a joyful zest and rapidity and a stamp of truth that are worthy of Homer. We see the Cid ride with a hundred chosen knights across the Bridge of Alcántara and up Toledo’s narrow streets. We see him knocking at the gate of San Pedro de Cardeña to bid farewell to his wife Doña Jimena, and the abbot, who was saying Mass for the return of dawn, running out with lights and torches to welcome “him who was born in happy hour.” We see him again in battle as the pennants rise and fall, we hear “the sword’s griding screech” and the trampling of the horses at which the earth trembles. In “Celestina,” the long prose drama of the end of the fifteenth century, we have the same truth to life, though in very different scenes. Here it is not knights and battles, but common people of the street—the old hag Celestina, or Calisto’s servants—that are drawn with a master hand.
“Celestina” gives some inkling of the picaresque novels to come, of which the flower and cream is “Lazarillo de Tormes” (1554 is the date of our earliest edition), to be followed by “Guzmán de Alfarache,” “El Buscón,” and a long posterity in Spain, France, and England. This is no tale of true love like the “Celestina,” but of gnawing hunger and of the ingenious efforts of Lazarillo to procure himself bread. His successive masters, the blind beggar, the miserly priest, the penniless Castilian gentleman, the rascally seller of Papal bulls, are sketched in the autobiography of their servant Lazarillo, with the keen eye of famine, and are unforgettable, as is Lazarillo himself, whose name has become the common name in Spain for a blind man’s guide, just as Victor Hugo’s immortal Gavroche gave his name to the Paris gamin. It is, in fact, a masterpiece of seven short chapters, lively in every sentence, of a direct and biting humour, perhaps the most graphic story ever penned. A few terse phrases throw a scene or a character into amazingly high relief, and the picture is as fresh and living to-day as when it first appeared three and a half centuries ago. No other country and no other language could have produced a piece of realism so cynically bare, so completely charming. It has the caustic pithiness of Spanish proverbs, the bitter flavour of harsh Iberia. It belongs to life rather than to literature, but life portrayed with the restraint and force of a consummate art. It was early translated into English as “The Marvelus Dedes and the Lyf of Lazaro de Tormes.” The authorship of “Lazarillo” has been ascribed to this man and to that, and there has been great argument about it and about, without the least degree of certainty. The name of Hurtado de Mendoza is frequently to be found upon the title-page. Born in 1503, he was alive when the novel appeared; he was an author; he could write in trenchant, nay, in scurrilous style, as his letters concerning the Pope show—he calls him an old rascal, vellaco; but these are hardly conclusive proofs. Whoever the author, the work still reigns supreme, though many may have thought with Ginés de Pasamonte in “Don Quixote” that it would be an evil moment for “Lazarillo” when their memoirs appeared. Half a century after “Lazarillo” the same faithfulness to picaresque reality, with a broader outlook and a more universal sympathy, is to be found in the “Novelas Ejemplares” of Cervantes. Rinconete and Cortadillo, the eponymous heroes of one of his best-known stories, are closely related to Lazarillo; they are in fact the Lazarillos of the South of Spain. On the realism of “Don Quixote” it is unnecessary to lay stress. Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, referring to its immediate triumph, says: “To contemporary readers the charm of ‘Don Quixote’ lay in its amalgamation of imaginative and realistic elements, in its accumulated episodes, in its infinite sympathy and its persuasive humour. There was no question, then, as to whether ‘Don Quixote’ was a well of symbolic doctrine. The canvas was crowded with types familiar to every one who had eyes to see his companions on the dusty highways of Spain. The wenches who served Don Quixote with stockfish and black bread; the lad Andrés, flayed in the grove of oaks by Juan Haldudo the Rich of Quintanar; the goatherds seated round the fire on which the pot of salted goat was simmering; the three lively needle-makers from the Colt of Córdoba; the midnight procession escorting the dead body from Baeza to Segovia, and chanting dirges on the road; the dozen galley-slaves tramping on, strung together like beads on an iron chain; all these are observed and presented with masterly precision of detail.”[94]
In spite of Censors and Inquisitors Spanish literature was free and outspoken, for it portrayed life as it was. If it shows devotion to Church and King it is because these were deeply-rooted national convictions. But the priests sometimes meet with less respect. The Cid threatens to make of the Pope’s vestments trappings for his horse, and we have seen that Hurtado de Mendoza, the King of Spain’s ambassador in Rome, speaks of his Holiness in terms that call to mind Benvenuto Cellini’s passionate outbursts. We have seen, too, the unflattered portraits of priest and pardon-seller in “Lazarillo de Tormes.” Cervantes, who “respects and adores the Church as a Catholic and faithful Christian,” does not fail to thrust fun at the fat alforjas, the well-provisioned saddle-bags of the señores clérigos, “who rarely allow themselves to fare ill,” and he deals more sternly with the household priests who “govern princes’ houses, and, not being of princely birth themselves, are unable to guide the conduct of those who are,” and who “in trying to teach those they govern to be narrow and limited make them miserable.” He gives us the picture of the false pilgrims who travel through the length and breadth of Spain, “and there is not a village in which they do not receive meat and drink and at least a real in money, and at the end of their journey they leave the country with a treasure of over a hundred ducats,” and he even allows himself to wonder why Ginés de Pasamonte’s clever monkey has not been arraigned before the gentlemen of the Inquisition.
There are in Spanish literature occasional signs of a distorted imagination, a restless longing to materialize the invisible, which is not a fanciful dreaming, but rather a kind of super-realism, a strained and persistent effort to attain a tangible perfection—the spirit which in some Spanish buildings has added ornament to ornament till the result is a rich magnificence in an infinity of details but hideousness as a whole. One form of this we have in such works as Quevedo’s “Sueños,” another, the Churrigueresque, in the later style of Góngora. On the other hand, we have the great Spanish mystics in their sincerity, reflected in the exquisite simplicity of their style, one of the noblest glories of the literature of their country. Yet they, too, as has often been pointed out, were pre-eminently practical; Luis de León, for instance, energetic head of the Augustinian Order; Santa Teresa, the wise, untiring administrator. Their writings have the fiery transparency of Pascal, and all the clear and vivid precision of military writers of many countries, in whose case, as in that of so large a number of Spaniards, “the lance has not blunted the pen.”[95] The mystics rise to noble heights of sublimity, but the virtue of their writing is that it is to the point, with no vague rhetoric; and no advocate could surpass the lucidity with which Luis de León conducted his own defence before the Inquisition.
Perhaps the weakest side of Spanish literature is its deficiency in critical insight. Few, indeed, are the Spanish authors of whom it might be said, as Ticknor said long ago of Luis de León, that there is scarcely a line of their poetry that is not exquisite. Espronceda’s undeniable genius, for instance, shatters itself on that unwieldy fragment “El Diablo Mundo.” Excessive facility of composition has been the stumbling-block of the authors as it has been the stumbling-block of the orators of Spain. Hardly a speaker in the Spanish Cortes is ever at a loss for words to give expression to his ideas or to conceal the lack of them. Each, as Don Adriano de Armado in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” is one