Much as there is to hold one in the town, the bleak uplands outside have a desolate fascination that calls one out to them. There is an excursion to be made not far away to the Monastery of Miraflores, where Isabella built for her parents "the most perfectly glorious tomb in the world."
Personally I prefer the quieter art of a Mino da Fiesole to this work of Gil de Siloe, rich though it is. The tomb is white marble, octagonal in shape, with sixteen lions supporting it. The weak Juan II lies by the side of his queen, who is turned slightly from him to read in her Book of Hours, in a natural att.i.tude, as if she said pleasantly, "Now do be silent, I must read in peace for a few minutes." At Miraflores is a wooden statue of St. Bruno, with a keen and subtle face of the same ascetic type as that of the young monk we watched praying quite oblivious of the gaping tourists. It is of this statue that Philip IV remarked: "It does not speak, but only because he is a Carthusian monk."
The indifference to strangers in the mystic young penitent before the altar was our second meeting with a trait found in the average Spaniard. He does not care an iota what the stranger thinks of him. He is not like the Italian, inclined to put his best foot forward. He will not change his ways because they are criticised; you can admire or you can dislike, it makes little difference to him; and this quiet poise, in peasant as well as grandee, is not fatuous, for its root lies in an innate self-respect. He feels he is loyal to his G.o.d, to his King, and to himself,--what better standards can you have?
Avenues of trees lead out to another house of the Benedictine rule, a convent for nuns founded by the sister of Richard C[oe]ur de Lion. Many ladies of the royal line have retired to Las Huelgas, the nuns brought their dowries, and the mitered abbess held the rank of Princess-Palatine, with the power of capital punishment. The church has outside cloisters for the laity; the cloisters within the convent are never seen except on the rare occasions of a king"s visit, when all who are able crowd in at the moment he enters. We were standing before the chancel where so many knights had performed the vigil of the armor--among others Edward I of England was knighted here--when a nun entered the _coro_, and in her trailing white robes bowed toward the altar--rather it was the slow courtesy of a court lady. We shrank away with the feeling that we had intruded uninvited on a ceremony, that the days of the abbess, Princess-Palatine, were the reality and we, inquisitive guide-book tourists, the anacronism, a sensation not uncommon in Spain.
Burgos is the birthplace of the national hero, the Cid Campeador, "G.o.d"s scourge upon the Moor." This contemporary of William the Conqueror, whom the erudites of the eighteenth century tried in vain to prove a mythical character,[5] may be said to dominate Spanish literature. Spain"s epic, the "Romancero del Cid," has made its hero the historic Cid for all time, just as Shakespeare"s genius vitalized a Henry V. Don Roderick Diaz de Bivar was born under the castle hill of Burgos in 1026, some small monuments standing on the site of his _casa solar_. He was a champion of popular rights, generous, chivalrous, faithful ever to his wife Jimena, a true guerrilla warrior, like the men of his age, sometimes crafty and cruel. The Cid was every inch a man, as his fellow countrymen are eminently _varonil_, his hold on the heart of the people is secure. There are no poems in the world whose lines ring and clang more valiantly than the "Romancero." Here is untamed red blood and courage:
"With bucklers braced before their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, with lances pointing low, With stooping crests and heads bent down above the saddle-bow, All firm of hand and high of heart, they roll upon the foe.
And he that in a good hour was born, his clarion voice rings out, And clear above the clang of arms is heard his battle-shout, "Among them, gentlemen! Strike home for love of charity!
The Champion of Bivar is here--Ruy Diaz--I am he!"
Then bearing where Bermuez still maintains unequal fight Three hundred lances down they come, their pennons flickering white; Down go three hundred Moors to earth, a man to every blow; And when they wheel, three hundred more, as charging back they go.
It was a sight to see the lances rise and fall that day; The shivered shields and riven mail, to see how thick they lay; The pennons that went in snow-white came out a gory red; The horses running riderless, the riders lying dead; While Moors called on Mohammed, and "St. James" the Christians cry."[6]
Wandering minstrels sang these _chansons de gestes_ for centuries, till they were a very part of the nation. The wooing of Jimena is strong with the unconscious vigor of those times. The Cid had slain her father in combat:
"But when the fair Jimena came forth to plight her hand, Rodrigo gazing on her, his face could not command; He stood and blushed before her; then at the last said he, "I slew thy sire, Jimena, but not in villany: In no disguise I slew him, man against man I stood, There was some wrong between us, and I did shed his blood.
I slew a man, I owe a man; fair lady, by G.o.d"s grace, An honored husband thou shalt have in thy dead father"s place.""
And to the end the free-lance warrior proved a gallant husband. The ballad of their wedding feast was often in my mind in the silent streets of Burgos.
"Within his hall of Burgos the king prepares the feast, He makes his preparation for many a n.o.ble guest, It is a joyful city, it is a gallant day, "Tis the Campeador"s wedding, and who will bide away?
They have scattered olive branches and rushes on the street, And the ladies flung down garlands at the Campeador"s feet, With tapestry and broidery their balconies between, To do his bridal honor, their walls the burghers screen.
They lead the bulls before them all covered o"er with trappings, The little boys pursue them with hootings and with clappings, The fool with cap and bladder upon his a.s.s goes prancing Amid troops of captive maidens with bells and cymbals dancing."[7]
The old poet must have written with his eye straight on his subject; those eleventh century urchins baiting the bulls are startlingly realistic. When the Cid died, at Valencia, in 1099, still called on the maps Valencia del Cid, he was placed in full armor on his battle horse, Bavieca, and brought to San Pedro de Cardena, eight miles from Burgos.
Thither Jimena retired, and on her death was laid with her husband. The faithful horse, famous in the "Romancero" as Jimena herself, was buried under a tree of the convent near his master. For the Cid had left word, "When you bury Bavieca, dig deep. For shameful thing were it that he should be eaten by curs who hath trod down so much currish flesh of Moors." To-day Bavieca"s master does not lie in the quiet dignity of San Pedro. After various vicissitudes his remains are kept in a chest in the city hall of Burgos, not the most appropriate of sepulchers for a national hero.
On the last day of our stay in the old Gothic city, we climbed the hill from which it doubtless got its name, Burg, a fortified eminence. The castle where the Cid was married is a complete ruin, for when the French evacuated the fort in 1813 they blew it up. On every side stretched the level melancholy plain, and silhouetted against it was the elaborate stone lace-work of the Cathedral. For long I looked out on the remarkable landscape, so far from beautiful yet so thought arousing.
Little by little I was learning how a race can be ascetic to its inmost core yet express itself in grandiose architecture; exalted in soul yet the most realistic people in Europe; serious and dignified, yet childlike in their zest of life. Here was man in his unsubtle vigor, not so liberal that he had no creed left, not so polished that he had lost the power of first wonder and emotion. Life was lived here, not a.n.a.lyzed and missed.
VALLADOLID
"They have no song the sedges dry And still they sing, It is within my heart they sing as I pa.s.s by, Within my heart they touch a spring, They wake a sigh, There is but sound of sedges dry In me they sing."
GEORGE MEREDITH.
From Burgos to Valladolid the monotonous Castile plain continued, unbroken by any hill and hardly a tree. Yet evening on the level steppes has a charm of its own. Like sunset at sea, nature has a free sweep of canvas on which to paint her pageant; details eliminated, the essential remains. One carries away many such memories from the silent plateau, till little by little the affection of the grave Castilian for his home is understood.
On leaving Burgos there had occurred an amusing station scene. The man at the ticket office told us we could not start till the following day, as the train, on the point of arriving, was already full. So in discouragement we turned back to the distant hotel. Half way there a messenger from the station overtook us to say they had telegraphed ahead that there would be a few seats in the second cla.s.s. We returned in time to board the packed train, and since it was the express to Madrid the second cla.s.s carriages were excellent. As was the custom all over Spain, the hotel bus at Valladolid was waiting, and drove us immediately to the inn, where we had the usual bare but clean rooms, and the usual well-cooked generous dinner: if the trains were to pick us up as they chose, at any rate we were not going to starve or be eaten alive.
It is well to have the first view of Valladolid by night as we did, under an early moon, for in the daytime it is modern, flat, and unpicturesque, a sharp contrast to Burgos. The moonlight soon tempted us out to explore the town. In the Plaza Mayor all was animation, an unbroken promenade of people under the arcades before the gay shops, officers in bright uniforms, and ladies in Parisian hats; it might have been any provincial city in Europe. Apart from this active lung of the town, the quiet streets were so deserted that our footsteps roused a startling echo. We pa.s.sed under the huge fragment of the Cathedral, a nave only; the transepts stand roofless, and a new ruin is as depressing a thing as there is in life. The architect of the Escorial who designed this, Herrera, gave his name to the pseudo-cla.s.sic style, "art made tongue-tied by authority," that followed the Plateresque abuse of ornament, just as his in turn was succeeded by the fantastic prancing art of Churriguera, again a reaction. An example of this last, the University, stood in the square near the Cathedral, and even the kindly moonlight could not soften the overladen meaningless ma.s.s; the cold severe lines of Herrera were dignified and regrettable in comparison.
For me a Churrigueresque building is the ne plus ultra of bad taste in architecture, and Spain has a wealth of them. That man can raise a Santiago and a Leon, and some four hundred years later a San Isidro of Madrid, that the same race can carve a Portico de la Gloria and the Transparente of Toledo, show interesting possibilities of retrogression!
Alas! we thought, after the strong old Gothic of Burgos, is Valladolid going to be just barren like its Cathedral and chaotic like its University? We went on in the moonlight and came to a white gleaming plaza where a church of the thirteenth century stood isolated, Santa Maria la Antigua, with a beautiful Lombard tower, and also that feature peculiar to Romanesque art in Spain, an outside cloister for the laity.
This was decidedly better.
The next morning when we came to explore the town, though we found no Gothic, we had our first introduction to a phase of architecture which is confined to the Peninsula. It coincided with Isabella"s reign, and was a characteristic outburst of its new wealth and conquests, appropriately efflorescent and grandiose, though if carried one step beyond it would be decadent. This short period is called Plateresque, from _platero_, silversmith, for its elaborate surface decoration of scrolls, medallions, and heraldic ornament is sublimated smith"s work.
It occurred during the transition from Gothic to Renaissance, so it combined itself with either one or the other of these styles. It may be dull to give these pedagogical details and yet, as I hinted, if one is to understand Spain, one must have some smattering of architecture.
Valladolid is worth stopping to see on one"s entrance to Spain, if it were only for the clear-cut summary it gives of the different schools, always excepting Gothic. As it and Salamanca were the two places where the silversmith"s art flourished, so they are the two centers for the best Plateresque buildings. They happen to be, unfortunately, the two cities that suffered most from the French invasion. Their churches and colleges were pillaged and battered, and though in modern times they have been restored, the first touch of perfection, "the first fine careless rapture" can never be recaught.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FAcADE OF SAN GREGORIO, VALLADOLID]
Valladolid has three notable examples of Plateresque, San Pablo, San Gregorio, and the Colegio de Santa Cruz. If you have a weakness for the art of the builder this introduction to the rich and admirable expression of Spain at the zenith of her material power is an occasion.
There is an excitement in coming on something original which has not been hackneyed by photograph. Thus, when I first entered the square where San Pablo"s facade rises, I stood still in astonishment; I had never seen anything like this, and at first I could not tell if I liked it or not. Tier on tier soared the carved shields and crests, bizarre but nevertheless stately. Close by was the even stranger facade of San Gregorio, one vast crest with elaborate arabesques and statues. Being founded by the great primate of Toledo, Cardinal Ximenez, it was appropriate to meet here in the courtyard with some Mudejar work, Christian and Moorish elements combined. It was in this convent that the Dominican, Bartolome Las Casas, "Apostle of the Indians," spent the last twenty years of his energetic, troubled life, writing his history of the Colonies. He died at the advanced age of ninety-two, "A man who would have been remarkable in any age of the world," says Ticknor, "and who does not seem yet to have gathered in the full harvest of his honours."
The third of the Plateresque buildings, well within Renaissance lines this last, the College of the Holy Cross founded by Cardinal Mendoza, now contains a grammar school, a library of some thousand volumes open to the public, and the Museum of the city.
On no account should the _Museo_ be missed, for it holds a wonderful collection of wood carvings, an art which is to Spain what Italy"s frescoes are to her: these statues were gathered chiefly from convents sacked by the French. Valladolid was personally a.s.sociated with this national development, for most of the master-carvers lived at one time or another in the city. Spain"s best sculptor, Berruguete, worked for years for the monks of San Benito, the _retablo_ of whose church is now in detached statues in the museum. He had studied under Michael Angelo, and though he had a distinct personality of his own, he plainly showed Italian influence. His pupil, Esteban Jordan, lived here, also the exaggerated Juan de Juni, and a more famous master, Alonzo Cano, painter and architect too. Cano, who died a canon in Granada Cathedral, is said to have fled the town--his house is still pointed out--when accused of the murder of his wife, though later investigations have thrown doubt on the whole story. This irascible master, one of the warmest hearted of men underneath, taught drawing to the Don Baltasar Carlos whom Velasquez painted, and I fear the infante found him very cross at times. Velasquez and Cano were friends and must have talked over that charming little prince. Cano was indeed a character. When a corporation demurred at the price of a statue he had made for them he shattered the image with a blow; and on his death bed he could not bring himself to kiss an inartistic crucifix, saying, "Give me a plain cross that I may venerate _Jesucristo_ as he is pictured in my own mind."
The room of coa.r.s.ely-carved statues, formerly used in the Holy Week processions, should be pa.s.sed with a glance, but the collection of smaller works deserves long study. The most beautiful group I thought was the Baptism in the Jordan by a later carver, Gregorio Hernandez, of Galicia, who died in Valladolid in 1636. His art is not cla.s.sic, indeed most Spanish sculptors cared little for the ideal perfection of the human body, their strength lay in the individual portrait, not in rendering a type. Hernandez softened the crudity or the realist school to which he belonged by depicting n.o.bility of face and bearing. The scene of the Jordan is a panel with the two chief figures life-sized in full relief. The Baptist, his well-modeled limbs strong from life in the desert, leans forward to pour the river water on the head of his Lord, with an expression of such vivid rapture and awe that it holds you spellbound. There is little in art that can surpa.s.s this in emotional sincerity. The story of the Gospel is told to its fullest possibility.
What the sculptor felt in every fiber he has succeeded in making others feel, and though an expression so poignant may not be highest art, it justifies itself by its direct appeal to the human heart. It is told of Hernandez that he never undertook a work till he had first prayed. He has here also a statue of St. Teresa, spoiled by the heavy paint, and a bust of St. Anne, successfully colored. Even if you are prepared to find the wood carvings painted it frets you; it almost spoils the statues, but it was the custom and must be accepted. "_Es la costumbre_" is a closing argument in a country whose link with the past has never been rudely broken.
If her remarkable wood carvings come as a surprise, so will some of the practical developments of this small progressive city. The hospital that looks out on the leafy park of the Magdalena is run in approved modern fashion. A brisk young doctor who spoke English, having learned from a friend in the English College here, showed us over the wards with legitimate pride. They radiated from a big central rotunda; on both sides of each ward were large windows and at the end of each a pretty altar. There were five hundred public beds, and private rooms were to be had for the sum of two dollars a week! The greeting between doctor and patients was a pleasant thing to see,--he chatted and joked with the children, and, as we left, stopped at the door to lift with real kindness an ill man who had just arrived in a gayly-painted country cart. The newcomer was a gentle-faced Castilian, whose sons had brought him in from the plains; as the stalwart boys carried the trembling old man I thought of another touching hospital scene. Perhaps Rab and his friends came to my mind because bounding round us on our visit to the hospital was a beautiful Scotch collie. "Laddie" was an unfamiliar sight on a Spanish street; he belonged to the English College and is a great pet of the seminarians.
In Valladolid are two foreign inst.i.tutions: the Scotch college, founded by a Colonel Semple in 1627; and the English, which continues the foundation of St. Albans, and has relics of its name-saint of the third century. It was endowed in Spain by Sir Francis Englefield, who retired here after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Some forty English students are educated for the priesthood and return on their ordination for work in their native land. Naturally the great hour of this college was during the religious persecutions under Elizabeth, when it was death to be a priest in England. Twenty-seven from this one small group were executed. Their portraits hang along the cloisters: Cadwallader, Stark, Bell, Walpole, Weston, Sutheron,--each of the heroic band started from these quiet halls to meet a martyr"s death.
Controversy is out of date, I hope, to-day. But there is such a thing as fair-mindedness, and a visit to Spain at every step shows she has not had her share of it from English-speaking peoples. With every chapter of our guide book railing at the Inquisition, I could not help feeling that these martyred Englishmen should not be so completely forgotten. Not that the _tu quoque_ argument excuses persecution on either side. But an age should be judged by its own ethics or true views of history are impossible. The New Englanders who, two hundred years later than Isabella"s inst.i.tution, hanged a few Quakers on Boston Common were none the less moral men; and General Robert E. Lee fighting for slavery in the nineteenth century is a man we have a right to admire. The mere fact of the Inquisition being founded by that magnanimous woman called by Bacon "an honor to her s.e.x and the cornerstone of the greatness of Spain" should tell us its motives were sincere. Her age had not yet learned the lesson, which we have acquired slowly, bit by bit through experience, that political or religious existence is possible with divided factions, not only possible but that a nation is more vigorous because of them. As Bishop Creighton wisely says: "The modern conception of free discussion and free thought is not so much the result of a firmer gasp of moral principles as it is the result of the discovery that uniformity is not necessary for the maintenance of political unity." Isabella"s age agreed that persecution was necessary to preserve Christianity. And since only Spain was in immediate contact with Islam, and centuries of crusade against the invading infidel had the natural result of making the Spaniard sternly orthodox, it was there that the Inquisition flourished.
It dragged on for over three centuries, and from 1481 to 1812, 35,000 people were burned,[8] these numbers being Richard Ford"s, to whom the Inquisition was as a red rag to a bull. The German scholar Schack acknowledges that all the Moors and heretics burned in Spain by the Holy Office do not equal the women witches burned alive in Germany during the seventeenth century alone. In France, in the one night of St.
Bartholomew, almost as many victims fell as during the whole three hundred years of the Inquisition. Of England the publishing of recent investigations makes it needless to speak; blood flowed in torrents there. Besides those well known ones who met death under Mary Tudor, the Catholic martyrdoms give such details as the "Scavenger"s Daughter,"
that cramping circle of iron; "Little Ease," where a prisoner, could not sit or stand or lie down; needles thrust under the nails; the rack-master of the Tower boasting he had made Alexander Briant longer by a foot than G.o.d had made him; the general custom of cutting down the victim from the gallows while still alive to tear out his heart and quarter him,--accounts that put the _Autos da Fe_ in the shade. In the annals of Spain is not a scene that equals the blood curdling horror of the martyrdom in Dorchester, England, of Hugh Green in the year 1642.[9]
Yet an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, if fanaticism or cruelty are mentioned, makes his inevitable trite reference to the Spanish Inquisition. It has been made the scape-goat of all religious persecution. Abuse has so fixed the idea that it was a barbarous machine controlled by contorted natures to whom bloodshed was a revelry that any effort to place it in a truer light is sure to be called retrogression.
I am far from attempting a defense of this painful aberration of the Christian mind, but what I hold is, if a student went to the records of Alcala and Simancas, open free to all, not to search out the hundred mistaken cases from the ten thousand proven ones, the method up to this, but, following the first law of intellectual work, investigation without preconceived bias, if he tried to understand this phase of man"s slow development _per errorem ad veritatem_, then the thin-lipped, gleaming-eyed, bloodthirsty Inquisitor of the popular fancy would be taken from the pillory where he has been pelted these centuries past, and his mistaken sincerity stand justified by the conditions of his time.
The records prove that the Holy Office was used seldom against scholars but against relapsed Mohammedans and Jews, false _beati_, sorcerers, and witches. "_Ningun hombre de merito cientifico fue quemado por la Inquisicion_," is the clear statement of one of the greatest of living scholars, Menendez y Pelayo, and he who would cross swords with that erudite champion must be sure indeed of his a.s.sertions. Not one Spanish thinker or statesman, such as Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More, the Carthusian priors, Houghton, Webster, and Laurence, the poet Robert Southwell, the scholarly Edmund Campion, and a host of others,[10]
graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, executed for their faith during the hundred and fifty years of religious persecution in England, not one man of like standing was put to death in Spain. Had he been, some righteous hater of the "ferocious Inquisitors," would ere this have produced his name and works. Archbishop Talavera was accused but was finally justified; if the poet Luis de Leon was imprisoned, he was set free on examination. It was not his own countrymen but Calvin in Geneva, who had the Spanish scholar, the Unitarian, Miguel Servet burned alive, and it was the mild Melanchthon who wrote to the reformer saying: "The Church owes thee grat.i.tude. I maintain that the tribunal has acted in accordance with justice in having put to death a blasphemer." In Germany at that period the civil courts inflicted capital punishment on sorcery, blasphemy, and church robbery; had the same law held in Spain the number of the Inquisition executions would be appreciably lowered. Lord Bacon, who was a just and humane man, mentions as a matter of course that in his time the English civil courts used torture: the Peninsula was not ahead of its time in this respect.
As for that debated subject the effect on the Spanish character of the _Santo Oficio_, prejudices have built up so twisted a labyrinth that the best way out for one who would keep his level-headed balance is to hold fast to the thread of internal evidence. Unconscious of writing history for the future, hence his una.s.sailable veracity, Cervantes tells in detail of the life in court and tavern, in the town and on the desolate highways after the Inquisition had flourished for more than a century.
Does he portray a degraded race, finger on lips whispering, "Hush, or you will be overheard"? If the Spaniard was ground down in fear and deceit why is it that to-day, of all the peoples of the continent, he is the most independent in character? It has been said that a burgher of Amsterdam does not differ more from a Neapolitan, than a Basque from an Andalusian, yet in this trait of st.u.r.dy independence all Spaniards are alike; the historian Ticknor wrote during his stay in Spain, "The lower cla.s.s is, I think, the finest _material_ I have met in Europe to make a great and generous people." If under the Inquisition "every intellectual impulse was repressed,"[11] how dared theologians and philosophers, such as Vives, Isla, and Feijoo boldly attack with their pens superst.i.tions and degenerated religious customs? Is the poetry of Juan de la Cruz, Luis de Leon and the prose of Teresa, the work of souls who feared to adore their G.o.d freely? And is it not undeniable that the two golden centuries of Spanish art and literature flourished under this bugbear horror, this "_coco de ninos y espantajo de bobos_," as Menendez y Pelayo calls it?
Used chiefly against Judaism and Islamism, occasionally the Inquisition became the tool of a tyrannic king for private vengeance. Indeed, there are some historians such as von Ranke, Lenormant, de Maistre, who hold it to have been more a royal than an ecclesiastic instrument, fostered by the Hapsburgs to augment their autocratic rule.[12] Certainly all confiscated property went to the Crown.
Man"s slow development _per errorem ad veritatem_, slow indeed one may say, in the face of certain realities of our own time. Happily the generations of cant and holier-than-thou are pa.s.sing, and we are looking history more honestly in the face. It is dawning on us that religious persecution in 1492 is no more frightful than slavery in 1860 or an Opium War in 1843.
Modern Spain realizes the wrong of persecution, the farce of a religion of love using the sword, as thoroughly as does every other civilized country. Outside the church of St. Philip Neri in Cadiz is a tablet proudly commemorating the abolition of the Inquisition within its walls in 1812.
To return to less nettlesome themes. The little English College, so interesting a memorial of past history, a forgotten haven of refuge in Old Spain, must be a peaceful memory to look back on by priests whose later lives are spent in Birmingham or London slums. The pleasant sitting-room of each inmate, the recreation hall with its theater, the library, with the latest English books jostling old Spanish tomes,--all spoke of contented full days. We turned the parchment leaves where the college records for its three hundred years in Spain have been kept, where each student is mentioned, from the troubled first days down to the group of ten who had arrived from England a week before our visit, among them a young Reginald Vaughan, nephew of the Cardinal.
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, alvaro de Luna, beheaded in the big square; that here Juan"s n.o.ble 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 a.s.sert 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 a.s.sociated with the saddest hours of two supreme men.
No. 7 Calle de Cristobal Colon 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 pa.s.sers-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 n.o.ble, 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 cla.s.ses which is still a reality in Spain. Born at Alcala, 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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 dest.i.tute, 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 aprendio 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.