Part 5
With up-to-date hospital and busy manufactures, Valladolid does not seem like an ancient capital of the Spanish court. We would read in our guide book that the miserable Juan II had his favorite of a lifetime, Álvaro de Luna, beheaded in the big square; that here Juan's noble daughter married Ferdinand of Aragon; and that, seated on a throne in the Plaza Mayor, Charles V pardoned the remaining Comuneros, the rebels who had dared assert the federal principle against his centralization of government, Spain's last outcry before she sank under the blighting tyranny of her Hapsburg and Bourbon rulers. Such past happenings were interesting, but they would have the same meaning if read of in London or Boston. However, there were two memories of Valladolid that were vivid enough to haunt one as one walked about its hum-drum streets: they are associated with the saddest hours of two supreme men.
No. 7 Calle de Cristóbal Colón is the insignificant house where Isabella's High Admiral died in 1506, in obscurity and neglect, his patroness dead, and Ferdinand ungrateful. A hundred years later, in another small house, now owned by the government, Cervantes lived in poverty. Unknown and undivined he walked these streets, looking at the passers-by with his wise, tolerant eyes. Fresh, perhaps, from writing the monologue on the Golden Age, delivered by the Don over a few brown acorns of inspiration, Cervantes in threadbare cape went to his humble scrivener's work, the golden time of justice and kindness existing only in his own gallant heart. It was in Valladolid that the ladies of his household, widowed sisters, niece, his daughter and wife, sewed to gain their daily bread, and as if penury were not enough, here they were thrown into prison because a young noble, wounded in a street brawl, was carried into their house to die.
Cervantes' life reads like one of the romantic tales he loves to digress with in his great novel, when grandee, barber and priest, court lady, Eastern damsel, and _labrador's_ daughter, gather round the inn table--the servants a natural part of the group--in the easy meeting of the classes which is still a reality in Spain. Born at Alcalá, Cervantes' first bent was toward literature, but having gone to Rome in the suite of a cardinal, in Italy he joined the army against the infidel. He fought at Lepanto, where his bravery drew on him the notice of Don John of Austria, that alluring young leader of whom one of his state council wrote, "Nature had endowed him with a cast of countenance so gay and pleasing that there was hardly anyone whose good-will and love he did not immediately win." It makes a pleasant picture, the visit of this high-spirited young hero to his wounded soldier in the hospital of Messina. Later, Cervantes fought at Naples, at Tunis, in Lombardy, making part of his century's stirring history, and all the while storing his mind with the culture of Italy. It was when returning to Spain that some Algerian pirates took him prisoner. His five years' captivity in Africa stand an unsurpassed exhibition of grandeur of character, proving that the highest gifts of mind and heart go together in perfect accord. Loaded with chains, twice brought to be hanged with a rope around his neck, his knightly spirit rose above all misery. There were twenty-five thousand wretched Christians then in bondage in Algiers. Cervantes waited on the sick, shared his food with the more destitute, encouraged the despairing,--a Christian in the fullest sense of the word is the testimony of a Fray Juan Gil, who, belonging to a brotherhood for the redemption of prisoners, worked for his release. In this harsh school "_donde aprendió a tener paciencia en las adversidades_"--the adversities that were to follow him all his life--was chastened to self-effacement and a sublime patience an ardent spirit that by nature chafed against wrong.
What wonder that the late flowering of this man's soul, the book written when past middle age, should be of chivalry all compact, a nobility of sentiment exposed half seriously, half in jest! What wonder that in the midst of laughter the voice breaks with tenderness for the lovable _caballero andante_! His Quixote is Cervantes' own unquenchable spirit. A bitter experience of life never deadened his faith in man nor dulled his heroic gayety. With exquisite humor he realized the alien aspect of such trust and love and faith in the disillusioning realities of life, so he veiled it all under the kindly cloak of a cracked-brained knight. The wandering adventures of a fool make the wisest, most human-hearted book ever written.
Toward the end of his slavery, when Cervantes passed into the hands of the viceroy of Algiers, Hassan Pasha, his force of character gained influence over the tyrant. But he asked too high a ransom for the captive's family to pay. The priest who had watched the young soldier on his deeds of mercy, worked indefatigably for his release. A letter was sent to Philip II to beg aid for a soldier of Lepanto. At length three hundred ducats were raised. Hassan Pasha asked a thousand. Already was Cervantes chained to the oar of a galley, bound for Constantinople, when at the last hour Father Gil, helped by some Christian merchants, succeeded in raising five hundred ducats, which ransom the Viceroy accepted.
At thirty-four years of age, Cervantes again stepped on Spanish soil. But the world was then much as it is now; years had passed since Lepanto,--he was forgotten. His patron Don John of Austria had died in Flanders two years before his release. He joined the army once more and fought in the expedition against the Azores; then seeing there was no chance of advancement, he returned to his first career, that of letters. His plays and poems had small success: a pathetic phrase in the scene where the _cura_ burns Quixote's books and comes on an epic by one, Cervantes, "better versed in poverty and misfortunes than in verses," has deeper meaning when his checkered career is known.
Twenty-five years of obscurity and abject poverty succeeded each other, his lot so lowly it is hard to trace his steps. Whole years remain a blank. The brave heart never flagged, no bitterness tinged his kindly tolerance. This Castilian hidalgo of ripe culture earned his bread in the humblest ways. 1588 found him in Seville as commissary victualer for the Great Armada. Tradition says he visited La Mancha, the desert he was to immortalize, to collect tithes for a priory of St. John, and that the villagers in anger cast him into prison, where he conceived the idea of his novel. This child of his wit he hints to us was born in a jail. The sad years in Valladolid followed, and there in 1605, at fifty-eight years of age, he published the first part of "Don Quixote."
Its success was immediate. The grace of the style, the inimitable humor, and the underflowing current of mellow wisdom, made it from the start, what Sainte-Beuve called it, "the book of humanity." However, its publication did not much better Cervantes' fortunes. He retired to Madrid, where he lived on a small pension from the Archbishop of Toledo. A French noble visiting Spain asked for the famous author, and was told, "He who had made all the world rich was poor and infirm though a soldier and a gentleman."
In 1613 appeared his "Novelas Exemplares," a remarkable collection of tales which gave Scott the idea of the Waverley novels. The second part of "Don Quixote," equal to the first in vigor and charm, appeared when Cervantes was sixty; "his foot already in the stirrup," he gives us in a preface, the moving description of himself. In the latter part of his life, according to a custom of the time, he became a tertiary of the Franciscan Order, and on his death in 1616 they buried him humbly in the convent of nuns in Madrid, where his daughter was a religious. Ill fortune still pursued him, for to-day there is no trace of his last resting-place.
It is with thoughts of this heroic life--this man lovable as his own Don, with a gentle stammer in his speech, and the kindly wise look in his eyes, his left hand maimed from Lepanto, his shoulders bowed and his chestnut hair turned to silver by the ceaseless calamities of life--it is with such memories one looks down from the high-road on the small house where he wrote his masterpiece. Columbus on his deathbed, and Cervantes in poverty writing "Quixote"--two such associations make a visit to Valladolid memorable.
OVIEDO IN THE ASTURIAS
"It is perfectly ridiculous to pretend that, because they dress the Madonna and saints in rich robes, the Spaniards are ignorant that a statue is but a symbol. They sing their faith, we whisper ours, but the words have the same meaning, and the same thought is in the mind ... Draw a bias line enclosing the Basque provinces,--Navarre, Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, and you have there old religious Spain as she appears in history, with a vivid and practical faith, an irreproachable clergy, a piety of the heart reflected in the manners."--RENÉ BAZIN.
We left Valladolid toward evening, in order to stop over a night in Palencia, before going north to Asturias. The cathedral of Palencia is well worth the pause, even though the visit may be limited to a night in the Continental Inn and a hasty daybreak visit to the church; the small cities of central Spain are of so individual a character that each stamps itself separately and indelibly on the memory.
The dawn was just breaking on a raw, rainy morning when we walked through the silent streets of the town. In spite of the early hour, near each of the water fountains stood a long row of antique-shaped jars, some of red clay, some like old silver. For each housewife places her jar in line, and when the drinking water is turned on, each fills her crock in turn, according as it was put in the row. At the biblical wells of Palestine the Syrian women to-day use ugly, square Rockefeller oil cans, but happily conservative Spain is not partial to innovations. It was on this early morning walk that I first noticed the white palm leaves, some six feet in length, fastened to the balconies or above a window. One finds them all over the country. They are from the palm forests of Elche in the south, and each Easter new ones are blessed and hung out on the houses, some say to guard against lightning. Later, in Madrid, we saw one decorating the King's palace.
The Cathedral of Palencia is of the same tawny yellow as the plains about it. The east end is early Gothic, the western part of a later, weaker period. Like Salisbury it has the uncommon feature of two sets of transepts; the clearstory is carried round the church, unbroken by rose windows at the west or transept ends. The interior in the dim light of a rainy October morning was picturesque past description. There are times when the chances of travel bring one to a spot at just its perfect hour. Thus we saw this church in a moment of such exquisite half light and quietude that its memory is a possession for life. Behind the High Altar rose an isolated chapel, set detached in the midst of the ambulatory, and through its iron _rejas_ were seen the blurred glimmer of candles, the veiled kneeling figures of the people, an aged white-haired priest at the Altar; high upon the wall the coffin of the ancient Queen Urraca. The effect was indescribable,--austere, ascetic, yet with a passionate glamour essentially Spanish. A masterpiece could an artist make of this detached chapel, lighted for divine service each day at dawn with such unconscious naturalness.
Architects may say that Spanish cathedrals are exaggerated and overloaded, that they lack the restraint and purity of line of Chartres, Amiens, and the Isle de France churches which are the world's best Gothic. All this may well be true, yet Spain can smile securely at criticism. She has a soul in her places of worship, a soaring exaltation of the imagination that imparts the assurance of a living faith. Firmly and ardently she believes in Jesus Christ, her Redeemer, and with all her lofty intensity she prostrates herself in worship.
We wandered round the dusky aisles, deciphering tombs, some of whose effigies held their arms raised in prayer,--only a Spaniard could endure to look even at such a tiring attitude! But the time for loitering was limited. The transept clock, a knight, a Moor, and a lion, sounded the warning we must heed if we were to catch the early train for the North. The thoughtful innkeeper had saved us some precious minutes by sending the hotel omnibus to wait outside the Cathedral, and we rattled--in its literal sense--to the distant station. The city was at last fully awake, and each water jar had now an owner; one by one they followed each other at the pump, with pleasant greetings and chatter.
Then again stretched the tawny plains. The fields of León were tractless wastes of mud from the rain of the past weeks. Seen from the car window, each village on the truncated mountain was the exact copy of its neighbor, the same monotonous note of color in adobe wall and denuded steppe. It was in vain to look for some distinction to mark one group of mud houses, called Paredes de Nava, birthplace of Spain's best sculptor Berruguete, from a similar mud-emblocked place called Cisneros, feudal home of Cardinal Ximenez's family; the imagination had to supply the difference.
Every one must come prepared for Spanish trains to go at a leisurely pace--about fifteen miles an hour is the average of the express route. From Palencia to Oviedo was a twelve-hour trip, and the distance covered was a hundred and sixty miles. Of course one crossed the Cantabrian mountains, the continuation of the Pyrenees along the northern coast, and they are no slight barrier since they sometimes rise to a height of 8,000 feet.
We passed the city of León toward noon, when there came a respite from the dull treeless plain, for, beyond the town stretched a thinly-wooded district which gave the first reminder since leaving the Basque valleys that the season still was autumn. After central Spain, the bleak hills that now began seemed positively beautiful,--so many pleasures are relative.
Slowly the train climbed the mountain wall that from earliest times has protected the Asturian principality from the invader. Near the summit, emerging from a tunnel several miles long, we looked out over a glorious panorama, the beauty not being relative this time, but as truly magnificent as some of Switzerland's show views. The storm had covered the peaks with freshest snow, the sky was a frosty dark blue, mountain rose behind mountain for miles, the white road was flung a sinuous ribbon round the folds of the hills; below lay fertile valleys of greenest grass with greenest trees and happy nestling farms. The secure mountain wall gave the Asturian courage to build a home wherever his whim chose. He was not forced like the Castilian by centuries of Moorish inroads to herd in a compact town.
As the puffing train waited for breathing space on the crest of the pass, a group of peasants boarded it. They wore the white wooden clogs of the province that differ from ordinary clogs by having stilts, a couple of inches high, to lift them above the mud; and they brought with them, on a sledge, as wheels are of no use up these steep hills, an antique curiosity of a trunk. We began to hope that old costumes and customs still held in this isolated corner of the world, though the engineering of the road in the descent was disturbingly up-to-date,--a series of loops, cuts, and sharp turns; sometimes three parallel lines of rail over which we were to pass lay one below the other, sometimes directly across the valley we saw our trail; a distance of twenty-six miles is covered where a crow would fly seven.
The principality of Asturias has given its name to the heir apparent of the Spanish crown since the 14th century, when a daughter of the Duke of Lancaster married the Spanish king's eldest son, and her father claimed for her a title equal to that of Prince of Wales to the English throne. The connection by marriage between Spain and England has been a frequent one. It began in the 12th century, when Henry II's daughter married Alfonso VIII of Castile; later the Plantagenet Edward I had for wife a Spanish infanta. From the two daughters of Pedro the Cruel, who married into the English royal family, on one side descended Henry VIII, from the other, by a marriage back again in Spain, sprang Isabella the Catholic. After the ill-fated union of Isabella's daughter with Henry VIII and that of Mary Tudor and Philip II, connection by marriage between Spain and England ceased for centuries. To-day, as all the world knows, the young queen of Spain, Doña Victoria, with the same blonde hair as Isabella, is an Englishwoman, and a rosy little prince bears the title of these distant mountains.
It is a fitting title for the heir to the throne, since this province is the cradle of Spanish nationality, and never was vassal to Roman or Moor. The people are a mixture of the aboriginal Iberians and the Visigoths who were here finally merged in one people and here reconstructed the Spanish monarchy. So proud is an Asturian of his origin that he thinks, like the Basques, that his mere birth confers nobility; every native of the province is an hidalgo. Did not the Asturian lady, the duenna of the Duchess, remark to Don Quixote that her husband was _hidalgo como el Rey porque era montañés_?
When in 711 the last of the Gothic kings, Roderick, was defeated by the Moors who had lately crossed from Africa, a remnant of the Christian army took refuge in these northern mountains. At Cavadonga, an historic defeat was inflicted on the Moslem army in 718, by Pelayo, Spain's first king, chosen leader because he was the bravest of the people. The Moorish chronicle, too close to the struggle to see its vital issues, speaks of "one Belay, a contemptible barbarian who roused the people of Asturish."
Without Cavadonga the face of Europe had been changed. Had not the Mussulmans from Africa met this repulse, they had pushed on beyond the Pyrenees before the Franks were strong enough to withstand them. Often rose this thought when reading the sentimental regrets for the Moors in Spain found in guide books and histories. Had Spain not warred for eight hundred years against the invader, had she not endured with such Spartan courage the insecurity of life and property caused by ceaseless forays from the south, European civilization had been put back for centuries. Like most virile nations, she has the defect of her qualities, and when the final victory was hers she went too far. But this should not blind us to the nobility of the _Reconquista_.
Within reach of Cavadonga, sacred to every Spaniard as the cradle of his race and religion, I could not help asking the cause of the ceaseless regret for the Moor. A lover of the picturesque, like Washington Irving, has a right to gloss over the days of the Alhambra, but it seems strange for serious history to hold up the Mohammedan in Spain as a model of cleanliness, industry, and tolerance in contrast to the Christian, in face of the centuries of piracy by sea, the barbarity of African prisons where thousands of Spaniards languished in chains, and also--a thought that often came to me when walking through the filthy, narrow streets in Moslem countries--if the Moor in Spain is to be so regretted, why are not the northern cities of Africa models for modern Christians to emulate? The Moor came from them, and many of his race left Spain to return to them. I would not belittle the Arab civilization in the Peninsula, for under the Ommiade dynasty, Cordova reached a distinguished height of culture, but what I object to is the partisan spirit that places Moors on one side to be praised and extenuated, and Spanish Christians on the other to be condemned. Facts are so distorted that many think the re-conquest of Andalusia meant the substitution of backward ignorance for an enlightened rule, whereas the Moors themselves, long before the coming of their northern conquerors, had destroyed their own higher civilization. The flower of their culture (always an exotic, for Islamism as hitherto interpreted is incapable of strengthening it) was withered before Alfonzo VI and the Cid had set foot further south than Toledo.
Under the Ommiade caliphs, for about five generations, life probably resembled the golden picture drawn for us as typical of Moorish sway. A few able rulers disguised the fact that the government was never anything else but a despotism. This _siglo de oro_ was well over by 1030. Some barbarous warrior tribes, from Africa, the Almoravides, swept away the feeble remains of Ommiade rule, to be in their turn routed by other African invaders, the fanatic Almohades. These last persecuted Averroës as holding views too liberal for a true Mohammedan, and the scholar died in misery and exile, just as in the same century the remarkable Spanish-Jew, Maimonides, was accused of teaching atheism by his fellow Israelites. Rejected by his own people, the fame of Averroës came later through his study by European Schoolmen. His teachings, like most of what is of value in Arab learning, was of Greek origin, and had reached him by way of Persia, which never wholly conformed to the set tenets of Islam. Why do the anti-Spanish historians never mention that in the same era in which Averroës, the philosopher, was persecuted by his fellow-believers, a college of translators under the patronage of the Archbishop Raimundo of Toledo, from 1130 to 1150, put into Latin the most scientific works of the Moors?