PART III

THE MISUNDERSTOOD WEST

Et si pur effecti quasi miraculosi vi trovasse, come ja vi sono, V. S. non l'imputi al scriptore, ma a la variatione et deità de la natura.

Antonio da Beatis, 1518.

It will have been noticed that the tourist was nothing if not unsympathetic. Yet nowhere does this stand out so sharply as in regard to the two countries farthest west. So far as the Spanish peninsula was concerned, a reason may be sought in the route usually chosen, a route which treated the peninsula as part of "European Europe" and implied seeing a little of it, seeing that little in a one-sided way, and mistaking it for an epitome of the whole.

Starting from the southwest corner of France, the most direct way was taken for the Escorial and Madrid, whence the return journey led past Barcelona to Montserrat and so over the Pyrenees again to the southeast corner of France. The objective, of course, was the capital and the court. And it was taken for granted, here as elsewhere, that the other chief objects of interest were the towns, which claimed an even greater proportion of attention than in other countries, inasmuch as the hardships of travel in Spain were more trying to a foreigner than those experienced elsewhere, and his mental energies were often, in consequence, the less free for observation in Spain as long as he kept on the move. Now it unfortunately happened that the seamy side of Spanish life thrust itself to the front in undue proportion in the towns. Moreover, the French districts which lay nearest to Spain were those whose characteristics contrasted most favourably as against those of the Spanish districts that lay nearest to France. The liveliness and gaiety of the Bayonnais, playing bowls all day on the carefully levelled, sanded court between his house and the street, was thrown into relief by the sternness of the Pyrenees and the poverty and gloom of the Vizcaino.

The injustice done by these first impressions was deepened by almost all that caught the attention on a journey like that just outlined, whatever the momentary point of view, whether historical, geographical, social, superficial, or political,—especially political.

The Spanish king was looked on as the most powerful Christian monarch of the time, in prestige, in financial resources, and as the head of an empire whose limits were the more impressive for being mathematicians' lines imagined in the midst of the Unexplored. It was natural, then, to consider his capital the centre of each, as well as of all, of his dominions, and as the Holy of Holies of European kingship; and this, too, at a date when monarchical ideals were so strong that a highly respectable middle-class man like William Camden could allude to Simon de Montfort, who figures in modern school-books as the ever-glorious founder of "representative" government, as—"our Catiline."[62] In addition, the annexation of Portugal in 1580, and its revolt in 1640, accentuate such ideas more in this period than in any other as the only one during which the whole peninsula was under one king.

Neither was this illusion of solidarity merely a traveller's mirage which those on the spot would rectify. Philip II's people loved to have it so; witness one of Sancho Panza's favourite proverbs: "Un rey, Una fe, Una ley"; and how was the tourist to know that the Spaniard did not appreciate his differentiation between ideals and facts? The voice of Sancho Panza is, of course, the voice of Castile, but then Castile has always the monopoly of forming foreign, and leading Spanish, opinion on things Spanish.

The choice of route, then, predetermined by the usual considerations, applicable only to other countries, failed to do justice to Spain. Yet it was accompanied by these special assumptions, as regards political supremacy, at the back of the tourist's mind, no evidence in favour of which was forthcoming; at least, no evidence of a kind which he came prepared to recognise as such. On the contrary, he could not avoid being struck by the insignificance of Spanish buildings, especially, curiously enough, at Madrid itself, where the houses were mostly of one story; a result of it being necessary to obtain a license from the King for anything higher, the conditions imposed by which license, such as that of housing ambassadors in the second story, would prove too burdensome. This particular impression was deepened in the latter half of the period by the linen window-panes, which made the interiors seem gloomy at a date when the use of glass in windows was spreading in the countries which the visitor had come from and had passed through. And so with many other matters, until one Dutchman who had travelled viâ Italy, after being taken to see a water-mill as something quite out of the common, makes the general deduction: "What is very common elsewhere, here often passes for miraculous."

Furthermore, as has been said, there were the historical illusions, too, which would be shaken. What Montaigne experienced at Venice took place on a larger scale in the minds of all who visited Spain. The deeper the previous study, the deeper the disappointment; but the latter was felt nevertheless by him in whom it was unconscious; and in both cases the recovery was slower than at Venice where all that was visible was so near. In fact, it is clear enough that with most a recovery never happened.

The histories they depended on were a variety of heroic fiction whose theory of causation consisted of immediate causes and God. National limitations only appeared, therefore, in so far as they had contributed to national achievements. But to the tourist these limitations, and even the qualities which were simply strange to him, stood out as defects, and the necessary minutiæ of daily life as the unworthy preoccupations of degenerate descendants; while the people, accordingly, whose ancestors were represented as having done nothing but conquer for centuries, showed up as ordinary human beings, muddling along in the way customary among one's own countrymen. Yet successes of Spanish diplomacy were so recent, and the supremacy of Spanish infantry so terribly obvious, that strangers could not account for all this disillusion by assuming degeneration to be the sole reason; while it was likewise too sudden for them to see in it nothing but an example of the falsification of proportions inherent in all knowledge drawn from books or other second-hand sources. Their attitude to Spain when they revised their journals was thus mystification rather than contempt or disgust, though both the latter are usually present.

This same unpreparedness to take a totally fresh point of view is even more marked in relation to religion. However greatly at odds the matter-of-fact foreigner and the matter-of-faith Castilian might be over details, both were equally unwilling to accept the illusions of to-morrow on that subject in place of the illusions of yesterday. The tendency to accept the face values of things theological was then as strong as to-day it is weak; but, with the possible exception of seventeenth-century Ireland, it was nowhere so strong as in Spain. The latter's place in Europe was bound up with leadership of the cause of Roman Catholicism; foreigners took this for granted, and the Spaniards unconsciously set a value on their creed apart from its relation to theological logic or religious experience—it had so long been the only rallying cry which could bring about a sinking of differences and achieve the temporary unity which was essential to success in war. But to the contemporary stranger, the varnish of the water of baptism was opaque, and the Celt, the Moor, the Pre-historic, the Outrageous-Pagan, and the all-pervading Jew, seemed all one thing, ultra-Holy-Roman. Another source of mystification—except to the Protestant, who knew exactly what it all meant and so went further astray than the rest, in the same direction.

Socially, the unintelligible contradictoriness was as great. Witness one whom a Burgos gentleman invited to dinner. The dining-room was that in which the hostess lay ill in bed with a fever; and he remembered afterwards that he had behaved with grossly bad manners inasmuch as he had taken off his hat at meal-time.

To go on to the means whereby geography also contributed to strain the sixteenth-century tourist's easily ruptured sympathy, there was the climate. The majority started in fear of the heat and suffered only from cold, expecting to find an Andalusian spring perpetually reigning at, say Burgos, instead of its "ten months of winter and two of hell" (or, to retain the pun, "diez mezes de invierno y dos de infierno"); whereas the visit to the South which was so rarely paid would have restored beliefs which had foundation enough. Besides, through this fear of the heat they traversed what they did traverse at the seasons when what fascination it possessed was least in evidence.

Among other conditions, the economic seem to have scandalised observers most. Perhaps the student will have noticed that whatever year during the last three hundred he may chance to be reading about in the history of Spain, the country will always at that moment have reached the last stage of economic exhaustion. Another quarter of a century or so, and, curiously enough, a lower stage will have been reached; yet another twenty-five years and one still lower; and so on until one would think the most hypothetical zero of bankruptcy must belong to a happier past and the population can consist of no more than a few emaciated grandees licking the rocks for sustenance. The natural attempt will be to go farther and farther back to trace the steps of the decline; and in time one will come upon these whose accounts are under consideration; but it will be without satisfaction. There is nothing for it but to go right back to the golden age. But in Guicciardini (1513) there is just the same tale, scarcity of inhabitants; poverty; mean aspects of daily life; stagnation in commerce owing entirely to Spanish aversion from work; industries under foreign control. It suggests that possibly the same phenomena have been in existence early and late, and that what earlier writers describe as an undeveloped country is the same as the "exhausted" one of later days; the difference, if this is the case, lying not in the conditions seen but in the extent of the stranger's expectations, moderate when the power of Spain had just become of international account; too high, later, when it was assumed that political power of long standing could not have grown up except in association with economic strength of equal greatness. To travellers of this period any unsoundness or "exhaustion" seemed the more incomprehensible in that Spain was by far the chief importer of bullion, the universal value of which they were accustomed to overrate.

Guicciardini, however, says nothing about the misbehaviour of Spanish women by which the next three or four generations of travellers are invariably shocked, with one exception, that of Lady Fanshawe, who saw much to admire in them and nothing to condemn, and had she seen what the men saw there is no doubt whatever her scorn would have been very pronounced. According to the men, neither the Italian fashion of the men restraining the women, nor the transalpine fashion of the women restraining themselves, was used in Spain. But it must be remembered that the male tourist tends to see the womenfolk of the country he visits nearer their worst than their best.

Too warm a welcome was not a fault into which the males fell. In Madrid a Protestant might feel safe, and in centres of international trade, such as Medina del Campo, free from insult; at Burgos there was even courtesy, and at Barcelona civility, although it went hand in hand with robbery. But for the most part, it was needful to be both callous and plucky. In particular, the traveller must take care to get his hair cut short at Vittoria at the latest. French and many Germans as well as English wore their hair long, and nothing laid them open to insult, and even injury, so much as that; if they were clean-shaven as well, it was taken as certain that they carried effeminacy to extremes; neither were they the last to hear of it. "Rogue" and "thief" were ordinary terms, even after a hair-cut, and when the queen was a German, one of her countrymen, a man who could be trusted not to give offence, had to buy a new hat at Toledo because the one he was wearing bore too many traces of cow-dung; at Seville he was stoned.

Yet considering the average elsewhere, the individual Spaniard stood to gain by comparison; one of the most prejudiced and illiterate of the tourists admits being treated with great courtesy, and there is a general agreement that the standard of honesty was remarkably high. It is amusing, too, to notice what disconcerting answers were sometimes received by the gentlemen from abroad who thought that the peasantry of a Roman Catholic and poverty-stricken country only needed to be questioned in order that the pitiable state of their mind should become apparent, even to themselves.

To one question, why extreme severity should be reserved for heretics, the reply was that heresy was the only crime which had not the excuse of giving pleasure; while another who was asked why a saint's day should be honoured so highly and Sunday practically ignored, pointed out that the saint's day came but once a year and Sunday every week. So, too, it came as a surprise to the Protestant to find Spanish nuns neither neurotic, depressed, nor prim, but bright and attractive, and their education "infinitely beyond all our English schools."[63]

Nevertheless, what with the above experiences, together with others which will be more in place farther on, it is not surprising if Spain was considered a country of especial danger and difficulties, where there was nothing to be learnt that had not better remain unlearnt, nor anything worth seeing.

The best guide, in answering this last objection, urges that the court at Madrid and the church of San Lorenzo at the Escorial are alone worth the journey, and names fifty-eight towns to complete the answer. It would be superfluous to enter into details; it is more difficult for us to doubt it than for them to believe it. But Seville must not be passed over altogether, the Seville of Cervantes' "Novelas Ejemplares," the Seville which was what Madrid pretended to be, the Spanish capital of Spanish Spain. Half the buildings that the modern visitor goes to see there were new in 1600, but the great sight, as great a sight as any in Europe both in itself and for its associations, was the arrival of the silver fleet from the "Indies."

Of the two chief places of pilgrimage, Montserrat, being on a main road from France and not far from Barcelona, is very frequently mentioned, but an account of a journey to Compostella is far rarer. Concerning the former, one account contains a particular of which there is perhaps no other record. The occupant of the highest of the almost inaccessible hermitages around the monastery, that of St. Jerome, in 1599, could bring the wild birds flocking round him when he called them, in such numbers that the writer, who had been throughout the peninsula, mentions the sight as the most wonderful in all Spain. Two ravens lived with the hermit in his cell.[64] As for Compostella, Andrew Boorde tells how he met nine men leaving Orleans on the way thither, and how he tried to dissuade them, saying he would rather go from England to Rome five times than once to Compostella, and that the government might well set in the stocks persons who proposed going thither without special leave, as being a waste of valuable lives. They persisted, and he accompanied them. Not one of the ten survived the journey except himself; and he was a doctor. Only one account preserves much detail of a stay at Compostella, that of a German soldier,[65] in 1581, who confessed to an Italian priest, nicknamed Linguarius for knowing Italian, Spanish, French, German, Latin and other languages; and saw all that a good pilgrim should see, including the two great bells whose sound was so terrific as to frighten lady pilgrims into miscarriages. At Santo Domingo de la Calzada on the road, according to a Pole,[66] there remained a curious survival of divination by birds. In the church porch white capons were reared in a copper-wire cage, to which the pilgrim used to offer bread on the end of his staff; if the bird refused the bread, it was held an omen that the pilgrim would die on the journey.

Among the other things that Spain had in common with "European Europe" may be mentioned the royal Zoos: one at Madrid, where a crocodile was to be seen, also the first rhinoceros that had been brought to Europe; the other at Valladolid, containing four lions, an eagle, four seals, and canary-birds. In water-works Aranjuez could hold its own against Italy, with its brazen statue of Priapus, casting forth water from every extremity, a cave with two dragons and many birds, the birds being made to sing by the movements of the water; with satyrs and savages, and artificial cypresses and white roses which soaked the visitor who touched them. Neither were the horribles kept out of sight: at Seville some one speaks of seeing a thief shot to death with arrows, and two other criminals beheaded with swords, the bodies being laid up against a church-wall to attract alms to pay for their burial.

The coupling of Ireland with Spain does not result from the mere chance of westernmost position, nor even from the political needs that they shared, or from the supposed kinship of the peoples. While other countries aroused curiosity and then gratified it, these two occasioned, successively, illusion, disillusion, mystification. Which often led to abuse, but not so often, as regards Ireland, by Englishmen, as is represented by experienced controversialists who well know the effect of sixteenth-century phrases torn from their context and set up on a background of journalese, where the flavour of the original spelling fixes their seeming harshness in the memory of those controversialists cater for.

There can be no more effective counterblast to this than a study of the books of the time recording journeys from everywhere to everywhere, for from these it will be evident that what the Englishmen say of Ireland and the Irish is more favourable than what contemporary foreigners usually say of the countries and nations that they visit; and also that where the English are unfavourable they are borne out by other foreigners. All adverse comment may be included under the charge of barbarism. Now Captain Cuellar, as unprejudiced a witness as could be required, being a Spaniard wrecked there from the Armada and a man who took everything as it came, invariably speaks of each Irishman as "el selvaje," which cannot be translated as anything but "the savage."

But here lies the fact which supplies the contrast between Spaniards and Irish, a contrast within the similarity which classed the two together, as countries seen by foreigners. The latter's disillusion was produced by the barbarism interwoven with the civilisation of Spain, but, in Ireland, by the civilisation co-existent with the known barbarism. It was a perpetual surprise to all visitors to find many of the individuals of a society that persisted in the crudest and rudest way of living, showing a force of intelligence and character, and in certain ways a refinement and a degree of education, which seemed to presuppose all the advantages that the best of European surroundings and training had to give.

Most are content just to note these and other contrasts; the sum of their opinion as regarded the people being: "If they be bad you shall nowhere meet with worse; if they be good you shall hardly find better."[67] Of experience of this, Captain Cuellar's narrative stands out as a quintessential example. It is equally handy for those who wish to prove the Irish the most charming, or the most abominable, nation that ever existed. He found them equally ready to strip him and to feed him, to wound and to heal, to betray and to shelter, to make him at home and to make him work. Compare with this the conclusions of an impartial Italian[68] seventy years earlier. The women he found very beautiful and white, but dirty; the people generally, very religious, yet do not consider stealing a sin. He was given to understand that Irish people looked down on such as were averse to share and share alike as regards the blessings of fortune, and certainly came across many on the road anxious to give effect to communistic theories; these he terms robbers.

Aliens of a philosophic turn of mind, after passing through the state of surprise, not so much, even, at their being this or that, as at their being content or able to continue to be both at once, turned to looking for reasons. The foreigner who brought to bear on this question as great an amount of knowledge, experience, and fair-mindedness as any was Sir John Davies, who, in his "Discovery," after referring to the Irishman's "contempt and scorn of all things necessary for the civil life of man," goes on, "for though the Irishry be a nation of great antiquity and wanted neither art nor valour and ... were lovers of music and poetry, and all kinds of learning, and possessed a land abounding with all things necessary; yet ... I dare say boldly that never any person did build any stone or brick house for his private habitation, but such as have lately obtained estates according to the course of the law of England. Neither did any of them in all this time plant any gardens or orchards, enclose or improve their lands, live together in settled villages or towns, nor make any provision for posterity; which being against all common sense and reason, must needs be imputed to those unreasonable customs which made their estates so uncertain and transitory in their possessions."

If Sir John Davies thought thus, it is not surprising that hastier foreigners who had less knowledge of the ancient Irish civilisation, thought so too. We have just seen how, with regard to Spain, a history made up of the imaginary glories of an imaginary past helped to give the foreigner so high an idea of the individuals of the nation that the reality came as a shock. Here in Ireland, in this matter as in others, was a similarity with a difference. However true it may be that the Irish suffered from a radical lack of adaptability to modern conditions, the defects of it were undoubtedly heightened in the eyes of strangers by the latter's ignorance of the conditions that the Irish could accept, the Brehon laws, for instance, and all that they imply, especially the check on their misuse by means of public opinion.

Two features, however, were almost invariably commended: Irish harping and Irish girls. And the latter were at no disadvantage among the foreigners, since even in the far west which Captain Cuellar visited, they spoke Latin fluently, although content with one garment, often with less. The only fault that could be found with them was that of growing older as years went on, for to see an old Irishwoman before breakfast was, says Moryson, enough to turn a man's stomach. The country, too, received unlimited praise, with one abatement here also: in respect of its wetness; greater then than now, it may be said with some certainty.[69] Lithgow, in particular, when he visited "this sequestrate and most auspicuous monarchy," in 1619, discovered there "more Rivers, Lakes, Brooks, Strands, Quagmires, Bogs, and Marshes than in all Christendom besides." In five months he ruined six horses and was himself more tired than any of them.

Great, however, were the fetiches, and they prevailed. The essentials of life, as they appeared to the Irishman, and as they appeared to most Europeans, differed so utterly, and the reasons underlying the differences were so unrealisable to each other, that Ireland remained comparatively unvisited on account of its lack of the kind of interest for which travellers felt themselves bound to look. So, at least, the balance of the evidence seems to show, but the evidence is as conflicting here as in relation to everything else to do with Ireland. While the Bollandist fathers affirm that fifteen hundred foreigners made the pilgrimage to St. Patrick's Purgatory during the "Counter-Reformation,"[70] the native contemporary Catholic, Phillip O'Sullivan, living at Madrid, had to go back beyond the memory of living man for the written account of such a pilgrimage with which he wished to preface his history of the struggle against England. Or again, the excellent knowledge the Irish leaders in this struggle received of foreign affairs presupposes a great deal of going to and fro; yet De Thou, in a letter dated 1605,[71] by which date he had been working at his history of his own times for many years and was well known as a man worth helping to correspondents all over Europe, writes that he has not hitherto come across any one who has personal knowledge of Ireland nor even any one who has talked with some one who has been there.

Neither are there nearly so many casual references to visitors as one chances on with regard to other countries. Two exceptions which suggest the likelihood of others are, however, to be found mentioned in the correspondence between the English Privy Council and the Deputy at Dublin.[72] In 1572 the latter announces the arrival of three German earls with one Mr. Rogers, their guide, adding, to Lord Burghley, "according to your directions, they shall travel as little way into the country as I can manage." This is explained by the second reference, seven years later, when three more Germans come across with letters of introduction from the Privy Council, who half suspect them, young though they are, of being spies. But after the close of this period, in 1666, we find a Frenchman[73] noting that the Provost of Trinity College "seemed astonished that out of mere curiosity I should come to see Ireland, which is a country so retired and almost unknown to foreign travellers."