Part 7
A step beyond the horse fair brought us to massive Roman walls with frequent semi-circular towers; León's name comes from Augustus' 7th Legion who fortified it against the highlanders of the north. Built into the walls is the remarkable church of San Isidoro encrusted with later work, but with the strong Romanesque lines still prominent. The pilgrims who flocked from Europe to Santiago Compostella in the Middle Ages were partly the means of bringing this style into Spain; thus San Isidoro is of Burgundian origin, just as Santiago Cathedral resembles Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, and the Catalan churches show Lombard features. Though the Spaniard adapted the style to his own character, adding the original feature of outside cloisters for the laity, its importation nipped in the bud a just beginning national architecture, whose loss cannot but be regretted. San Isidoro has a privilege seldom given, the Blessed Sacrament being exposed every day of the year, and always before its lighted altar one sees veiled figures kneeling. It served as the pantheon for the kings who followed Ordoño II--twelfth in descent from Pelayo--who removed his capital from Oviedo here, and the ancient burial chamber still has ceilings painted in the stiff Byzantine manner with obscure color, hard lines, and lack of perspective, probably the oldest paintings in Spain. The "Romancero" tells how Jimena, the gallant, golden-haired wife of the Cid, came here after the birth of her child to attend Mass. She wore the velvet robes given her by the king on the day of her marriage, a richly jeweled hair-net, gift of the Infanta Urraca, her rival; around her neck painted medals of San Lázaro and San Pedro, _santos de su devoción_, and so beautiful was she that the sun stood still in his course to see her better. At the church door the king met her and escorted her in honor, for was not her husband away fighting the infidel for his monarch? There is so true a ring to the old ballads that Jimena lives a real personage.
"_Oviedo la sacra, Toledo la rica, Sevilla la grande, Salamanca la fuerte, León la bella_" runs an old verse on Spanish Cathedrals. And the Cathedral of León merits its name. It is harmoniously beautiful, pure French-Gothic, graceful and elegant, classic if the word is permissible for the unrestrained individualism of Gothic art. Built in one age without intermission, in 1303 the Bishop announced that no further contributions were needed, and the centuries since have left the church untouched. Here no cold Herrera portal usurps some lovely pointed work and Churrigueresque extravagancies are not prominent: the late restorations have followed the first plans.
Always excepting the _Pórtico de la Gloria_ in Santiago, the west doorways of León Cathedrals stand for the best in Spanish sculpture. The statue of the _Virgen Blanca_ in the center is famous. Around her the saints and apostles are grouped in appealing attitudes;--out of proportion though they may be as to hands and feet, their sincerity covers all flaws: here, a homely face with care-worn wrinkles of goodness; there, one beaming in satisfaction to be standing in such a chosen band. The lunette over the central door is delightful. On one side, in Heaven, a clerk plays the organ, while a boy blows the bellows, and groups stand chatting near, for a Spaniard's idea of bliss, in those days also, took the form of ease and desultory talk. Hell, on the opposite side, not to be outdone, has two urchins blowing bellows as well, not to make music but to quicken a fiery caldron into which devils are thrusting the sinners. The enjoyment of the old sculptor in his Heaven and Hell was too keen to be confined in the lunette and he has spread himself over the curving of the arches; in spite of time and retouching these three doorways show exquisite detail chiseling.
"About their shoulders sparrows had built nests And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch, Now on a miter poising, now a crown, Irreverently happy."
Within León Cathedral all is quiet and solemn, a true beauty of holiness. There is no clutter of side chapels in the nave but a sheer sweep of windows filled with the jeweled glass of Flemish masters.[14] These windows come as a surprise in a land where churches are guarded from the sun, and often the open triforium and clearstory, as at Avila, are walled up later to darken the interior. The chancel and choir are worth detail study. The _coro_ seats have panels carved with single figures,--saints with their emblems, warriors with raised visors, placid-faced nuns, thoughtful bishops, gallant pages with their crossed feet gracefully poised,--all of a noble type, with high brow and aquiline nose. Spain has comparatively nothing to show in the way of frescoes, she had no early Masaccio, no Giotto, no Filippo Lippi, to paint the costumes and features of his generation, but wood carvings are her substitute; in them, and in her unrivaled tombs can be read the contemporary history of warrior, bishop, and page. The _retablo_ of the High Altar is of the same simple elegance as the rest of the church. The usual towering one of carved scenes would have been singularly out of place, it is appropriate for the big dark interior of Seville Cathedral, but here are grace and restraint instead of grandeur and mystery, and most suitable are the ancient paintings of varying sizes, gathered from scattered churches and framed together. Radiating round the chancel are chapels that give to the exterior view of the apse a truly French-Gothic air, flying buttresses supporting the cap of the _capilla mayor_.
Romanesque, Gothic, and Plateresque are each well represented in León City. In the last style is the noticeable convent of San Marcos that stands isolated outside the town beside the swift blue-green river. The Knights of Santiago built a resting-place on their pilgrimage route back in the 12th century, but the present building is of Isabella's day, and the architect has given free rein to his silversmith's arabesques and medallions, and scattered pilgrim shells all over the façade of the church. We tried to get into the Museum, now in the convent, as it contains some good wood carvings, but an aged beggar at the door explained "_Mañana_," the easy "to-morrow," as prevalent in León as in Andalusia,--then rising to the occasion as only an Italian or Spanish beggar can, he swept open his toga-draped cape, smiling as he pointed to the entrance door: "To-morrow, after your morning chocolate, it will be open for you."
It was sunset as we turned away. The long mass of San Marcos stood boldly against the red glow of the sky. The horizon was outlined by the blue mountains of Asturias. With our imagination filled with the old days when pilgrims flocked here from England, from the forests of Germany, from the Po and the Danube, suddenly over the ancient bridge rode a troop of cavaliers on prancing steeds, in cloaks and plumed hats. The kindly blessed illusion hid the fact that our pilgrim-knights were sturdy peasants in the national _capa_, riding their long-haired horses back from the city fair.
"Sin el vivo calor, sin el fecundo Rayo de la ilusión consoladora ¿Que fuera de la vida y del mundo?"
asks one of Spain's poets of the 19th century, Núñez de Arce, and in his native country it takes but little effort of the imagination to repeople the solemn churches, the narrow city streets, or the treeless plain with the romantic figures of the past.
The following day at dawn, after a miserable night in rooms like icy death, a true pilgrim night of endurance, we took the train for the west. As we entered the railway carriage _Reservado para Señoras_ a sleepy railway-guard stumbled out of the further door; all through the journey in the north, we roused these cozily-ensconced railway-officials, for so rare are ladies alone on this route, that the conductors have fallen into the habit of sleeping in the carriage reserved for them. When our tickets were collected we were given many a severe look for daring to upset a _cosa de España_.
On the way from León to Astorga, little over thirty miles, the realization of the old pilgrim route is vivid. Before reaching Astorga comes the paladin's bridge,[15] of Órbigo, where in the reign of Isabella's father ten _caballeros andantes_ challenged every passing pilgrim to a bout of arms; if a lady came without a cavalier to fight for her, she forfeited her glove, if any knight declined to fight he lost his sword and spur. The age of knight errantry which Cervantes has haloed with a deathless charm, breathes in this historic Pass of Honour. The leader, Suero de Quiñones, came of the great Guzmán family, to which St. Dominic belonged, and of which the Empress Eugénie was a scion. To show his captivity to his lady, every Thursday he wore an iron chain round his neck, but when victor in this tourney, it was removed with solemnity by the heralds. Suero's sword is to be seen to-day in the Madrid Armory where in an hour more of Spain's real history is learned than in years of reading.
The Roman walls of Astorga, seen from the railway present an imposing appearance: here, as at León and Lugo, the frequent half-circular towers do not rise above the crest of the walls. Astorga must have looked just like this when the pilgrims rode by to the shrine of St. James. A closer inspection spoils the illusion however, for the proud city that once ranked as a grandee of Spain is to-day a very tattered and worn hidalgo, and there is a sad air of desolation about its plaza and crumbling walls. Whether or not it was because our ramble was by early morning before the inhabitants were astir, at any rate I brought away a picture of a depopulated town. There were but a few silent worshipers under the clustered piers of the late-Gothic Cathedral, whose reddish tower is the important feature of the distant view. What had tempted us to pause a night in Astorga was the wood-carved _retablo_ by Becerra in the Cathedral, but we found it by no means equal to the work of the carvers in Valladolid. Becerra had studied under Vasari in Rome, and the influence is shown too plainly. There is a curious weather cock on the church, a wooden statue called Pedro Mata, dressed in the costume of a singular tribe that lives in some thirty villages near by. The origin of the Maragatos is involved in mystery; some say they are the descendants of Moors taken in battle, some of Goths who sided with the Moors. During all these centuries they have kept separate from the people about them, like gypsies they marry only with themselves. They should not be confounded with _gitanos_, however, for the Maragatos are honest and industrious; they are the carriers of the countryside, with the privilege of taking precedence on the road. Here and there in Spain one stumbles on a strange, isolated relic of the past such as this. Astorga was still sleeping, in the literal as well as figurative sense, when we left; a walk on top of the walls looking out over the León plain, a regret that we could not sketch the artistic church of San Julián, with its faded green door and crumbling portal, and we turned south. On the train I discovered that a five franc piece given me in change by the innkeeper, was nothing but a bit of silver-washed brass advertising the cakes of one Casimiro in Salamanca, and I, seeing the king's effigy, had thought it a genuine Spanish dollar,--it is easy to be caught napping in León.
Zamora is not many miles from Astorga and like the other sleepy towns of the province, it too seems to feel it has a right to a long pause in obscurity after its heroic centuries of Moorish warfare. The great hour of the city was the time of the Cid; the "Romancero" should be in one's pocket here. One of its stirring incidents is the death of King Ferdinand I, in 1065, and its sequel of battles and sieges. The king lies on his deathbed, holding a candle, great prelates at his head and his four sons on his right hand. With the fatal propensity of Spanish rulers to bequeath discord, he divides his kingdom among his sons; to Don Sancho, Castile; León to Alfonso; the Basque provinces to García; the fourth son already was of enough importance, "_Arzobispo de Toledo, Maestre de Santiago, Abad en Zaragoza, de las Españas, Primado_." The king's daughter Urraca, she who had given the Cid's wife, Jimena, her jeweled hair-net, now complains bitterly that she is left out of the inheritance, so her dying father gives her the fortress-city of Zamora, "_muy preciada, fuerte es á maravilla_," and "who takes it from you let my curse fall on him." In spite of which threat her wicked brother Sancho, besieges the city,--a Spanish proverb for patience runs: "_No se ganó Zamora en una hora._" With Sancho comes his chief warrior Roderick Díaz de Bivar, given the title of Cid Campeador, Lord Champion, by the Moorish envoys who here met him. The Cid had wellnigh fought an entrance into the city when the intrepid Urraca ascends a tower--to-day called the Afuera Tower--and delivers her famous scolding.
"¡Afuera! Afuera! Rodrigo, El sóberbio Castellano!"
"Out! Out! Rodrigo, proud Castilian! Remember the past! When you were knighted before the altar of Santiago, and my father, your sponsor, gave you your armor, my mother gave you your steed, and I laced on your spurs! For I thought to be your bride, but you, proud Castilian, set aside a king's daughter to wed that of a mere Count!" And the ballad tells how the Cid, hearing her upbraiding with emotion, retired with his men.
The only present attraction of the decayed town is its Cathedral, set high above the Duero on the edge of the bluff along which Zamora stretches. It was built by the Cid's confessor, Bishop Gerónimo, the dome above the transept crossing being an original feature which the bishop was to elaborate later in the old Cathedral of Salamanca; as Trinity Church, Boston, is copied from this last, Zamora has a special interest for the visitor from New England. We had a four hours' pause there, ample time to see the city. It was raining so dismally that my fellow traveler decided not to face a certain drenching, as the long-drawn-out town had to be traversed before reaching the Cathedral. In an unfortunate moment I started out alone for what I supposed would be a leisurely exploring of a venerable city. Fleeing in distress would better describe the reality, for every hooting boy and girl in Zamora followed at my heels. Whether it was a white ulster or an automobile veil tied over my hat as the wind was high, or just the unaccustomed figure of a stranger in those narrow streets, an excited crowd pursued me the whole length of the town. In front, walking backward, open-mouthed, went a dozen urchins, and behind came a long brigade I hardly dared look back on, it so increased with every step. Men hastened to their shop doors to wonder at the crowd, and the passers-by stood still in astonishment; a feeling of horror came over me at such publicity. In vain I fled into churches in the hope of escaping the relentless little pests; when I emerged they greeted me with howls of pleasure. I angrily shook my umbrella at them, but that only added to the glorious excitement. Here and there a kind woman came to the bothered stranger's help, and scattered the crowd. The children merely scampered down side streets to meet me again in still greater numbers at the next corner. It is easy to laugh now that it is over, but at the time there is small amusement in fleeing through a foreign city pursued by forty hooting youngsters, to have them press round you in a stifling circle when you pause to look in your book, to have them gaze long and seriously at you, then burst into uncontrollable laughter so that in desperation you begin to feel if you have two noses or six eyes. We had decided that in most of the unfrequented towns of Spain, the children were a nuisance; in Zamora they were positive vampires. A visitor in the future had best wear black, a black veil on the head, a black prayer-book in the hand, as if on the way to church, then resembling other people, the children may let her pass. But a white ulster and a red guide book are magic pipes of Hamelin to lure every idle child in Zamora. In spite of wind and rain, and a lengthy disappearance within the Cathedral, it was only on reëntering the station, several hours after they had first seized on their prey, that the unsolicited escort left me, and even then they hung round the door till the shriek of the engine told them the escaped lunatic who had given them so splendid an afternoon's entertainment was out of reach.
GALICIA
"Blessed the natures shored on every side With landmarks of hereditary thought! Thrice happy they that wander not lifelong Beyond near succour of the household faith, The guarded fold that shelters, not confines! Their steps find patience in familiar paths Printed with hope by loved feet gone before Of parent, child or lover, glorified By simple magic of dividing Time."
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago,--perhaps this claims too much for the Spanish pilgrimage shrine? It would not in the Middle Ages, when the Christians of all Europe flocked there to pray beside the tomb of St. James the Elder, the patron of Spain invoked in the battle cry of her chivalry for a thousand years, "_¡Santiago y cierra España!_"--"St. James and close Spain!" A Latin certificate used to be given to every pilgrim, and it was kept among family records, for there were properties that could only be inherited if one had gone to Santiago Compostella. To-day Spaniards are the only devotees, though as I write I see that a band of English pilgrims with the Archbishop of Westminster at its head is visiting the far-off corner of Galicia. Though few travelers turn out of their way there, it is one of the most characteristic spots to be seen in Spain, a solemn old granite city, with arcaded streets and vast half-empty caravansaries darkened with humidity and age.
It takes over fifteen hours to go from León to Santiago, but the journey is a beautiful one, with mountains and fertile valleys, and rivers such as the Sill and that gem of the province, the Miño. At Monforte the railway branches, one line goes to Túy and Santiago, and the other turns up to Lugo and Coruña. We took this last, tempted by accounts of Lugo.
It is indeed a unique little city, walled around without a break by Roman battlements forty feet high, on the top of which is the fashionable promenade of the town. With its walls and the view from them, it closely resembles Lucca. Lugo was a surprise in various ways. It had a hotel, the "Fernán Núñez," so up-to-date that it boasted a tiled bathroom with hot water and a shower bath. Not only the comfortable inn but the streets of the town were a model of propriety. As always, our steps turned first to the Cathedral, spoiled outside, as is unfortunately the way in Spain, by those two disastrous centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, but within being of the lovely transition period, Romanesque as it merged into Gothic, with the arches just slightly pointed. The irrepressible Churriguera has worked himself into the inside of the church too; his canopy over the High Altar is abominable, though it would take more than that to detract from the simple solemnity of such a church. Lugo is one of the holiest spots in the Peninsula, like San Isidoro in León, it claims the privilege of perpetual exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, only more privileged than León, exposed night as well as day. So proud is the province of this ancient custom that the Host is represented on the shield of Galicia.
No matter at what hour you enter the Cathedral, there are worshipers; two priests always kneel before the tabernacle, and they never kneel alone. The scenes of humble piety drew me back to the church again and again with compelling attraction. To me a Spaniard praying unconsciously before the altar is unequaled by any act of worship I have witnessed; not even the touching Russian pilgrims in Jerusalem kissing the pavement in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, nor the Arab at sunset kneeling alone in the desert, can impress more powerfully. It seemed as if this tranquil shrine of Lugo spread an influence of uplifting thought through the whole contented little town; in the quiet afternoon a withered grandmother knelt with her hands on the head of a little tot of six who repeated the prayers that fell from the old lips, or three young women of the upper class sought a retired corner of the church to repeat together their daily chaplet; now in a side chapel, a peasant thinking herself unobserved, in a glow of devotion, encircled the altar on her knees.
On leaving the west door of the Cathedral, we ascended the inclined path that leads to the promenade on top of the walls. It was sunset, an exquisite hour to look out on the well-wooded countryside, through which meandered the trout-filled Miño. In the distance were mountains. No wonder the Romans, who ferreted out most of the choice spots of Europe, used to come to this city for the thermal baths. The handsome modern Lugonians strolled around the ramparts, pausing to chat here and there in the semicircles made by the numerous towers of the wall. Now a white-haired matron draped in the national mantilla, loitered leisurely by, with some of the higher ecclesiastics of the Cathedral; now a mother and two grave, pretty daughters passed, watched discreetly by the young beaux. Evidently far-off little Lugo, tucked away in the unknown northwestern corner of Spain, had a social life that sufficed for itself, with no envy of Madrid and San Sebastián. The local contentment found everywhere in the country struck me as admirable. Will "progress" unsettle it? We could have stayed a month in Lugo. To fish in the Miño, to ramble over the fertile country, to feel about one peaceful, contented human beings, would make a summer there a happy experience.
When we went on to Coruña, a commercial town that, like seaports the world over, has a rough populace, we were glad to have first seen Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán's loved province at pretty Lugo. In travel there must always be, I suppose, some places that one slights; one knows if one stayed long enough they might show a pleasanter side. We treated Coruña in this way. Sir John Moore, buried at midnight during the Peninsula War, was our association with the town before going there, and for all we saw of it Sir John will remain the chief association of the future. We only saw the flat, commercial district that skirts the bay, not the headland where the old town lies. Slatternly beggars pestered us, bold, bare-legged girls stood mocking at the unaccustomed sight of foreign women traveling; it was with relief we took the diligence that started at noon for Santiago.