Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  With misgiving, lost in a sense of our helplessness, we tried to think that the avenue under us was then quieting down with the waning day; and certainly it was not so noisy as the plaza, which, resounded with the whips and quips of the cabmen, and gave no signs of quiescence. Otherwise the annex was very pleasant, and we took the rooms shown us, hoping the best and fearing the worst. Our fears were wiser than our hopes, but we did not know this, and we went as gaily as we could for tea in the patio of our hotel, where a fountain typically trickled amidst its water-plants and a noiseless Englishman at his separate table almost restored our lost faith in a world not wholly racket. A young Spaniard and two young Spanish girls helped out the illusion with their gentle movements and their muted gutturals, and we looked forward to dinner with fond expectation. To tell the truth, the dinner, when we came back to it, was not very good, or at least not very winning, and the next night it was no better, though the head waiter had then, made us so much favor with himself as to promise us a side-table for the rest of our stay. He was a very friendly head waiter, and the dining-room was a long glare of the encaustic tiling which all Seville seems lined with, and of every Moorish motive in the decoration. Besides, there was a young Scotch girl, very interestingly pale and delicate of face, at one of the tables, and at another a Spanish girl with the most wonderful fire-red hair, and there were several miracles of the beautiful obesity which abounds in Spain.

  When we returned to the annex it did seem, for the short time we kept our windows shut, that the manager had spoken true, and we promised ourselves a tranquil night, which, after our two nights in Cordova, we needed if we did not merit. But we had counted without the spread of popular education in Spain. Under our windows, just across the way, there proved to be a school of the “Royal Society of Friends of their Country,” as the Spanish inscription in its front proclaimed; and at dusk its pupils, children and young people of both sexes, began clamoring for knowledge at its doors. About ten o’clock they burst from them again with joyous exultation in their acquirements; then, shortly after, every manner of vehicle began to pass, especially heavy market wagons overladen and drawn by horses swarming with bells. Their succession left scarcely a moment of the night unstunned; but if ever a moment seemed to be escaping, there was a maniacal bell in a church near by that clashed out: “Hello! Here’s a bit of silence; let’s knock it on the head!”

  We went promptly the next day to the gentle old manager and told him that he had been deceived in thinking he had given us rooms on a quiet street, and appealed to his invention for something, for anything, different. His invention had probably never been put to such stress before, and he showed us an excess of impossible apartments, which we subjected to a consideration worthy of the greatest promise in them. Our search ended in a suite of rooms on the top floor, where we could have the range of a flat roof outside if we wanted; but as the private family living next door kept hens, led by a lordly turkey, on their roof, we were sorrowfully forced to forego our peculiar advantage. Peculiar we then thought it, though we learned afterward that poultry-farming was not uncommon on the flat roofs of Seville, and there is now no telling how we might have prospered if we had taken those rooms and stocked our roof with Plymouth Rocks and Wyandottes. At the moment, however, we thought it would not do, and we could only offer our excuses to the manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but not whose patience, and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem and regret.

  Our own grief was sincerer in leaving behind us the enthusiastic chambermaid of the annex who had greeted us with glad service, and was so hopeful that when she said our doors should be made to latch and lock in the morning, it was as if they latched and locked already. Her zeal made the hot water she brought for the baths really hot, “Caliente, caliente,” and her voice would have quieted the street under our windows if music could have soothed it. At a friendly word she grew trustful, and told us how it was hard, hard for poor people in Seville; how she had three dollars a month and her husband four; and how they had to toil for it. When we could not help telling her, cruelly enough, what they singly and jointly earn in New York, she praised rather than coveted the happier chance impossible to them. They would like to go, but they could not go! She was gay with it all, and after we had left the hotel and come back for the shawl which had been forgotten, she ran for it, shouting with laughter, as if we must see it the great joke she did; and she took the reward offered with the self-respect never wanting to the Spanish poor. Very likely if I ransacked my memory I might find instances of their abusing those advantages over the stranger which Providence puts in the reach of the native everywhere; but on the spur of the moment, I do not recall any. In Spain, where a woman earns three dollars a month, as in America where she earns thirty, the poor seem to abound in the comparative virtues which the rich demand in return for the chances of Heaven which they abandon to them. There were few of those rendering us service there whom we would not willingly have brought away with us; but very likely we should have found they had the defects of their qualities.

  When we definitely turned our backs on the potential poultry-farm offered us at our hotel, we found ourselves in as good housing at another, overlooking the length and breadth of the stately Plaza San Fernando, with its parallelogram of tall palms, under a full moon swimming in a cloudless heaven by night and by day. By day, of course, we did not see it, but the sun was visibly there, rather blazing hot, even in mid-October, and showing more distinctly than the moon the beautiful tower of the Giralda from the waist up, and the shoulder of the great cathedral, besides features of other noble, though less noble, edifices. Our plaza was so full of romantic suggestion that I am rather glad now I had no association with it. I am sure I could not have borne at the time to know, as I have only now learned by recurring to my Baedeker, that in the old Franciscan cloister once there had stood the equestrian statue of the Comendador who dismounts and comes unbidden to the supper of Don Giovanni in the opera. That was a statue which, seen in my far youth, haunted my nightmares for many a year, and I am sure it would have kept me from sleep in the conditions, now so perfect, of our new housing if I had known, about it.

  III

  The plaza is named, of course, for King Fernando, who took Seville from the Moors six hundred years ago, and was canonized for his conquests and his virtues. But I must not enter so rashly upon the history of Seville, or forget the arrears of personal impression which I have to bring up. The very drive from the station was full of impressions, from the narrow and crooked streets, the houses of yellow, blue, and pink stucco, the flowered and fountained patios glimpsed passingly, the half-lengths of church-towers, and the fleeting facades of convents and palaces, all lovely in the mild afternoon light. These impressions soon became confluent, so that without the constant witness of our note-books I should now find it impossible to separate them. If they could be imparted to the reader in their complexity, that would doubtless be the ideal, though he would not believe that their confused pattern was a true reflex of Seville; so I recur to the record, which says that the morning after our arrival we hurried to see the great and beautiful cathedral. It had failed, in our approach the afternoon before, to fulfil the promise of one of our half-dozen guide-books (I forget which one) that it would seem to gather Seville about it as a hen gathers her chickens, but its vastness grew upon us with every moment of our more intimate acquaintance. Our acquaintance quickly ripened into the affectionate friendship which became a tender regret when we looked our last upon it; and vast as it was, it was never too large for our embrace. I doubt if there was a moment in our fortnight’s devotion when we thought the doughty canons, its brave-spoken founders, “mad to have undertaken it,” as they said they expected people to think, or any moment when we did not revere them for imagining a temple at once so beautiful and so big.

  Our first visit was redeemed from the commonplace of our duty-round of the side-chapels by two things which I can remember without the help of my notes. One, and the great
one, was Murillo’s “Vision of St. Anthony,” in which the painter has most surpassed himself, and which not to have seen, Gautier says, is not to have known the painter. It is so glorious a masterpiece, with the Child joyously running down from the clustering angels toward the kneeling saint in the nearest corner of the foreground, that it was distinctly a moment before I realized that the saint had once been cut out of his corner and sent into an incredible exile in America, and then munificently restored to it, though the seam in the canvas only too literally attested the incident. I could not well say how this fact then enhanced the interest of the painting, and then how it ceased from the consciousness, which it must always recur to with any remembrance of it. If one could envy wealth its chance of doing a deed of absolute good, here was the occasion, and I used it. I did envy the mind, along with the money, to do that great thing. Another great thing which still more swelled my American heart and made it glow with patriotic pride was the monument to Columbus, which our suffering his dust to be translated from Havana has made possible in Seville. There may be other noble results of our war on Spain for the suzerainty of Cuba and the conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, but there is none which matches in moral beauty the chance it won us for this Grand Consent. I suppose those effigies of the four Spanish realms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Navarre, which bear the coffin of the discoverer in stateliest processional on their shoulders, may be censured for being too boldly superb, too almost swagger, but I will not be the one to censure them. They are painted the color of life, and they advance colossally, royal-robed and mail-clad, as if marching to some proud music, and would tread you down if you did not stand aside. It is perhaps not art, but it is magnificent; nothing less stupendously Spanish would have sufficed; and I felt that the magnanimity which had yielded Spain this swelling opportunity had made America her equal in it.

  We went to the cathedral the first morning after our arrival in Seville, because we did not know how soon we might go away, and then we went every morning or every afternoon of our fortnight there. Habitually we entered by that Gate of Pardon which in former times had opened the sanctuary to any wickedness short of heresy; but, as our need of refuge was not pressing, we wearied of the Gate of Pardon, with its beautiful Saracenic arch converted to Christianity by the Renaissance bas-relief obliterating the texts from the Koran. We tried to form the habit of going in by other gates, but the Gate of Pardon finally prevailed; there was always a gantlet of cabmen to be run beside it, which brought our sins home to us. It led into the badly paved Court of Oranges, where the trees seem planted haphazard and where there used also to be fountains. Gate and court are remnants of the mosque, patterned upon that of Cordova by one of the proud Moorish kings of Seville, and burned by the Normans when they took and sacked his city. His mosque had displaced the early Christian basilica of San Vicente, which the still earlier temple to Venus Salambo had become. Then, after the mosque was rebuilt, the good San Fernando in his turn equipped it with a Gothic choir and chapels and turned it into the cathedral, which was worn out with pious uses when the present edifice was founded, in their folie des grandeurs, by those glorious madmen in the first year of the fifteenth century.

  IV

  Little of this learning troubled me in my visits to the cathedral, or even the fact that, next to St. Peter’s, it was the largest church in the world. It was sufficient to itself by mere force of architectural presence, without the help of incidents or measurements. It was a city in itself, with a community of priests and sacristans dwelling in it, and a floating population of sightseers and worshipers always passing through it. The first morning we had submitted to make the round of the chapels, patiently paying to have each of them unlocked and wearily wondering at their wonders, but only sympathizing really with the stern cleric who showed the ceremonial vestments and jewels of the cathedral, and whose bitter face expressed, or seemed to express, abhorrence of our whole trivial tourist tribe. After that morning we took our curiosity into our own keeping and looked at nothing that did not interest us, and we were interested most in those fellow-beings who kept coming and going all day long.

  Chiefly, of course, they were women. In Catholic countries women have either more sins to be forgiven than the men, or else they are sorrier for them; and here, whether there was service or not, they were dropped everywhere in veiled and motionless prayer. In Seville the law of the mantilla is rigorously enforced. If a woman drives, she may wear a hat; but if she walks, she must wear a mantilla under pain of being pointed at by the finger of scorn. If she is a young girl she may wear colors with it (a cheerful blue seems the favorite), but by far the greater number came to the cathedral in complete black. Those somber figures which clustered before chapel, or singly dotted the pavement everywhere, flitted in and out like shadows in the perpetual twilight. For far the greater number, their coming to the church was almost their sole escape into the world. They sometimes met friends, and after a moment, or an hour, of prayer they could cheer their hearts with neighborly gossip. But for the greater part they appeared and disappeared silently and swiftly, and left the spectator to helpless conjecture of their history. Many of them would have first met their husbands in the cathedral when they prayed, or when they began to look around to see who was looking at them. It might have been their trysting-place, safeguarding them in their lovers’ meetings, and after marriage it had become their social world, when their husbands left them for the clubs or the cafes. They could not go at night, of course, except to some special function, but they could come by day as often as they liked. I do not suppose that the worshipers I saw habitually united love or friendship with their devotions in the cathedral, but some certainly joined business with devotion; at a high function one day an American girl felt herself sharply nudged in the side, and when she turned she found the palm of her kneeling neighbor stretched toward her. They must all have had their parish churches besides the cathedral, and a devotee might make the day a social whirl by visiting one shrine after another. But I do not think that many do. The Spanish women are of a domestic genus, and are expected to keep at home by the men who expect to keep abroad.

  I do not know just how it is in the parish churches; they must each have its special rite, which draws and holds the frequenter; but the cathedral constantly offers a drama of irresistible appeal. We non-Catholics can feel this even at the distance to which our Protestantism has remanded us, and at your first visit to the Seville cathedral during mass you cannot help a moment of recreant regret when you wish that a part in the mystery enacting was your birthright. The esthetic emotion is not denied you; the organ-tide that floods the place bears you on it, too; the priests perform their rites before the altar for you; they come and go, they bow and kneel, for you; the censer swings and smokes for you; the little wicked-eyed choir-boys and mischievous-looking acolytes suppress their natures in your behalf as much as if you were a believer, or perhaps more. The whole unstinted hospitality of the service is there for you, as well as for the children of the house, and the heart must be rude and the soul ungrateful that would refuse it. For my part, I accepted it as far as I knew how, and when I left the worshipers on their knees and went tiptoeing from picture to picture and chapel to chapel, it was with shame for the unscrupulous sacristan showing me about, and I felt that he, if not I, ought to be put out and not allowed back till the function was over. I call him sacristan at a venture; but there were several kinds of guides in the cathedral, some in the livery of the place and some in civil dress, willing to supplement our hotel interpreter, or lying in wait for us when we came alone. I wish now I had taken them all, but at the time they tired me, and I denied them.

  Though not a day passed but we saw it, I am not able to say what the cathedral was like. The choir was planted in the heart of it, as it might be a celestial refuge in that forest of mighty pillars, as great in girth as the giant redwoods of California, and climbing to a Gothic firmament horizoned round as with sunset light from near a hundred painted windows. The
chapels on each side, the most beautiful in Spain, abound in riches of art and pious memorials, with chief among them the Royal Chapel, in the prow, as it were, of the ship which the cathedral has been likened to, keeping the bones not only of the sainted hero, King Fernando, but also, among others, the bones of Peter the Cruel, and of his unwedded love, Maria de Padilla, far too good for Peter in life, if not quite worthy of San Fernando in death. You can see the saint’s body on certain dates four times a year, when, as your Baedeker will tell you, “the troops of the garrison march past and lower their colors” outside the cathedral. We were there on none of these dates, and, far more regretably, not on the day of Corpus Christi, when those boys whose effigies in sculptured and painted wood we had seen in the museum at Valladolid pace in their mystic dance before the people at the opposite portal of the cathedral. But I appoint any reader, so minded, to go and witness the rite some springtime for me. There is no hurry, for it is destined to endure through the device practised in defeating the pope who proposed to abolish it. He ordained that it should continue only as long as the boys’ actual costumes lasted; but by renewing these carefully wherever they began to wear out, they have become practically imperishable.