Spanish Highways and Byways

All the adornment of the litter is of pure gold, and such wealth of jewels glinted from the Virgin's glorious raiment that a triple force of Civil Guards was detailed for her protection. Her ardent worshipper has denied her nothing. The very columns that uphold her canopy are exquisite in carving, and it is his yearly pride to see that her clouds of incense are the thickest, and her train of musicians the most extended, in all that glittering line.

The second cofradia exhibited but a single pageant, relying for effect upon the beauty of the sculpture. The Mater Dolorosa was bowed in her desolation at the foot of the Holy Rood, from which hung only the white folds of the winding-sheet.

But the third brotherhood had bethought themselves to introduce, between their austere Crucifixion and their shining image of Mary, another preposterous parade of Roman soldiers – flower-colored, plume-tossing, butterfly creatures far too bright, if not too good, "for human nature's daily food." One whiff from Cæsar's iron breast would have blown them away like soap bubbles.

The silversmiths trooped by in graver, more majestic state, their purple velvet habits girded with gold cords. Upon a gilded pedestal, wrought with high relief, was seen their Christ, bowed beneath a precious cross of tortoise-shell and silver. Our Lady of Expectation gleamed with gold and gems, and this haughty brotherhood received a full meed of applause.

Black from top to toe was the fifth procession. Their Jesus of the Via Dolorosa bent beneath a sombre cross of ebony embossed with gold, but the blithe young voices of the countless choir-boys, singing like birds before the dawn, ushered in a sun-bright image of Mary.

But something was amiss with the processional order. Where were the stately ranks of Montserrat? Alas and alas! Scarcely had this aristocratic cofradia gone a hundred paces from their chapel when, in the narrow street of Murillo, a leaning candle touched the lace skirt of the Virgin and instantly all the front of the litter was in flames. It was hardly a matter of minutes. From the balconies above were dashed down pailfuls and pitcherfuls of water. The Nazarenes, wrenching away the blue velvet mantle wondrously embroidered in gold with castles, lions, and fleurs de lis, succeeded in rescuing a ragged half of it, and the Civil Guards, drawing their swords and forming a circle about the smoking litter, saved the jewels from robbery. Perhaps the other paso, too, Christ of the Conversion of the Penitent Thief, had some protecting influence. But in all this ado about her finery, the poor Virgin's face, beloved for its winsome look, was completely burned away. In sorry plight Our Lady of Montserrat was hurried back to her chapel, and the swift rumor of the disaster sent a superstitious trouble through the city.

But more and more solemnly the taper-bearing troops of Nazarenes poured by with the culminating pictures of the Passion. These last three cofradias presented each a single pageant. An escort in dark purple conducted an impressive Descent from the Cross. The Virgin, her crowned head bowed in anguish, clasps the drooping body of Christ to her heart, while John and Mary Magdalene look on in hopeless sorrow. Figures in black and white came after, with their sixteenth-century carving, Christ of the Dying Breath, beneath the cross standing Our Lady of Tears. And last of all, in slow, sad movement, their white trains streaming like a line of light along the stone-paved way, passed the second brotherhood of San Lorenzo, bearing the Most Blessed Virgin in her Solitude. The gold of her mantle seemed one with the gold of the candle rays, and, for many a silent watcher, those gliding, gleaming, spiritlike forms will move forever down a shining path in memory. So closed the Holy Week processions.

"How sorry I am," said our host, with the Andalusian twinkle in his eye. "It is almost eleven o'clock. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please walk out to dinner?"

On Saturday morning we went early to the cathedral for the closing rite. The Sagrario was thronged. Some of the señoras had brought low folding chairs with them, others sat upon the floor, but most of that innumerable congregation knelt or stood. We were all facing the great purple veil which concealed the high altar, with Roldan's retablo of the Descent from the Cross. There was an hour or more of expectation, during which rosaries slipped through the fingers of many a veiled nun, and the soft murmur of prayer came from strong men as well as from pale-faced women. Suddenly, while a shock of thunder crashed from the organ, hidden ministrants sharply drew on hidden cords, the purple curtain parted in the midst, and the two folds rolled asunder, revealing the high altar, with its carving of the accomplished Passion. The organ poured forth jubilees of victory, all the bells of the cathedral pealed together, Gloria in Excelsis soared in choral chant, and amid the awe-stricken multitudes fallen to their knees, Su Majestad was borne in priestly procession from the tomb in the Royal Chapel to the candles and incense which awaited at the high altar that triumphal coming.

Easter Sunday was celebrated by a bull-fight.

VII

TRACES OF THE INQUISITION

"I live a life more great than I.The life I hope is life so high,I die because I cannot die."– Santa Teresa de Jesús.

All Spaniards venerate the name of Isabel la Católica, nor is the impressionable De Amicis the only foreigner who has trembled and wept at Granada before the enshrined memorials, jewel box, mirror, missal, and crown, of her royal womanhood. She is a precious figure in Spain's sunset revery – a saint beneath a conquering standard, a silken lady in a soldier's tent. Yet this peerless queen, merciful, magnanimous, devout, "the shield of the innocent," caring supremely for the glory of God and the good of her country, gave consent, albeit reluctant, to the establishment of the Inquisition, Christianity's chief scandal and Spain's most fatal blight. So ironic were the stars of Isabel.

The Inquisition, it is true, originated in Italy early in the thirteenth century and followed the flight of some of the Albigenses into Aragon, but its work in Spain had been comparatively slight and merciful until the "Catholic Kings," in the interests of religious reform, for the purification of the national faith, let its horrors loose. Wherever one moves in Spain the sickening breath of the auto de fe lingers in the air. In such a square, we read, was once a mighty bonfire of Jews; beneath our feet, we are told, is a mass of human bones and cinders. This sunshiny Seville, with her parks and patios, her palms and orange groves, a city seemingly fashioned only for love and song, had her army of nearly twoscore thousand martyrs, who, dressed in the hateful San Benitos, yellow coats painted with flames and devils, were burned to death here in our gay Plaza de la Constitución, then known as the Plaza de San Francisco, and in the Quemadero beyond the walls. As one mingles with some outdoor throng, all intent on pageant, dance, or other spectacle, one shudders to remember that just such dark, eager faces were ringed about the agonies of those heroic victims. For there are two sides to the Spanish Inquisition. If Spaniards were the inquisitors, Spaniards, too, were the dauntless sufferers. The sombre gaze of the torturer was met, as steel meets iron, by the unflinching eye of the tortured. But "the unimaginable touch of Time" transforms all tragedy to beauty, and red poppies, blowing on the grassy plain of the Quemadero, translate into poetry to-day that tale of blazing fagots.

Sometimes the victims were of foreign blood. Hakluyt has preserved the simple narratives of two English sailors, who were brought by their Spanish captors from the Indies as a sacrifice to the Holy House of Seville. One, a happy-go-lucky fellow, Miles Phillips, who had been too well acquainted in Mexico with the dungeons of the Inquisition, slipped over the ship's side at San Lúcar, made his way to shore, and boldly went to Seville, where he lived a hidden life as a silk-weaver, until he found his chance to steal away and board a Devon merchantman. The other, Job Hortop, added to his two years of Mexican imprisonment two more years in Seville. Then "they brought us out in procession, every one of us having a candle in his hand, and the coat with S. Andrew's cross on our backs; they brought us up on an high scaffold, that was set up in the place of S. Francis, which is in the chief street of Seville; there they set us down upon benches, every one in his degree, and against us on another scaffold sate all the Judges and the Clergy on their benches. The people wondered, and gazed on us, some pitying our case, others said, burn those heretics. When we had sat there two hours, we had a sermon made to us, after which one called Bresinia, secretary to the Inquisition, went up into the pulpit with the process, and called Robert Barret, ship-master, and John Gilbert, whom two Familiars of the Inquisition brought from the scaffold before the Judges, where the secretary read the sentence, which was that they should be burnt, and so they returned to the scaffold, and were burnt.

"Then I, Job Hortop, and John Bone, were called, and brought to the place, as before, when we heard our sentence, which was, that we should go to the Galleys, and there to row at the oar's end ten years, and then to be brought back to the Inquisition House, to have the coat with S. Andrew's cross put on our backs, and from thence to go to the everlasting prison remediless.

"I with the rest were sent to the Galleys, where we were chained four and four together… Hunger, thirst, cold, and stripes we lacked none, till our several times expired, and after the time of twelve years, for I served two years above my sentence, I was sent back to the Inquisition House in Seville, and there having put on the coat with S. Andrew's cross, I was sent to the everlasting prison remediless, where I wore the coat four years, and then upon great suit I had it taken off for fifty duckets, which Hernando de Soria, treasurer of the king's mint, lent me, whom I was to serve for it as a drudge seven years."

But this victim, too, escaped in a fly-boat at last, and on a certain Christmas Eve, about the time when people in London were beginning to like the comedies of a certain poor player, one Will Shakespeare, did Job Hortop, Powder-maker and Gunner, walk quietly, after twenty-three years of martyrdom, into the village of Redcliffe, where he had been a ruddy English boy with no dream of the day when he should be "prest forth" by Sir John Hawkins and compelled, sore against his will, to embark for the West Indian adventure.

Religious liberty now exists under the laws of Spain, although the administration of those laws leaves much to be desired. In three old conventual churches of Seville gather her three Protestant congregations. Beneath the pavements of two of these heretic strongholds old inquisitors sleep what uneasy sleep they may, while one of the Protestant pastors, formerly a Catholic priest, has quietly collected and stored in his church-study numerous mementos of the Holy Office. Here may be seen two of those rare copies of the 1602 revision of the Spanish Bible, by Cipriano de Valera, whom the Inquisition could burn only in effigy, since the translator, who had printed his book in Amsterdam, did not return to accompany the Familiars to the Quemadero. Here are old books with horrible woodcuts of the torments, and time-stained manuscripts, several bearing the seal and signatures of the "Catholic Kings," these last so ill written that it is hard to tell the name of Ferdinand from that of Isabella. Among these are royal commissions, or licenses, granted to individual inquisitors, records of autos de fe, and wills of rich inquisitors, the sources of whose wealth would hardly court a strict examination. Here, too, is the standard of the Holy Office, the very banner borne through Seville in those grim processions. Its white silk is saffroned now, but the strange seal of the Inquisition, a bleeding Christ upon the cross, is clearly blazoned in the centre, while the four corners show the seal of San Domingo.

The Inquisition prison, the dreaded Holy House of Seville, is used as a factory at present, and heresy no longer secures admission there; but I looked up at its grated windows, and then, with a secret shiver, down on the ground, where the Spanish pastor of antiquarian tastes was marking out with his cane the directions of the far-branching subterranean cells. We slipped into an outer court of the fabrica, where the two gentlemen, effectively aided by a couple of sturdy lads, pried up and flung back a sullen door in the pavement and invited me to grope my darkling way down some twenty crumbling steps, overgrown with a treacherous green mould. There was no refusing, in face of the cloud of witnesses whose groans these stones had heard, and I took a heart-breaking plunge into the honeycomb of chill, foul-smelling, horror-haunted dungeons, whose roofs let fall a constant drip of water and from whose black recesses I was the unwilling means of liberating a choice variety of insects.

"But even yet one cannot call one's self a Protestant in Spain, you know," said an English diplomat to us in another city of Andalusia. "It's not socially respectable. Spanish Protestants are the very scum of the earth – illiterate, dirty, boorish. You couldn't associate with them for a minute."

"But that Spanish pastor who called on us yesterday was entirely a gentleman," we remonstrated. "He has studied for seven years in Switzerland and Scotland, seems more open-minded and intelligent than most Spaniards we have met, and was so courteous and graceful in his bearing – not to mention the whiteness of his linen – and so entertaining in his talk, that the Spanish ladies in the room chorussed his praises, after he had bowed himself out, and declared him most delightful company."

The diplomat twirled his mustache and smiled, as only diplomats can. "And you owned up that he was a Protestant? And their faces darkened as if a storm-cloud had blown over from the Sierras?"

"Precisely so," we admitted, "and after that the best they could say for him was that they never would have thought it."

The diplomat claimed that he had made his point, while we protested that the incident only went to show how unreasonable was the prejudice of whose existence throughout Spain there can be no manner of doubt.

Perez Galdós, for instance, the most popular novelist of the day, stated to an American friend, who repeated it to us, that he frankly could not afford to introduce the figure of a Protestant into one of his stories. "It would not only kill that book," he said, "but it would hurt the sale of everything I have in the market and embarrass all my future undertakings. I should simply be risking the loss of my reading public." And yet Señor Galdós is the author of "Doña Perfecta," that artistic study of the conflict between new ideas and old in Spain. In this significant novel, a civil engineer, a man of thirty, whose scientific education in the large cities of Seville and Madrid has been supplemented by study in Germany and England, comes to one of those mediæval towns, or corpses of towns, that rise so spectre-like from the ash-colored plains of Old Castile. Crumbling walls and blackened towers jealously guard the life of ages since, that feudal life of high and low, pride of station, pride of animal prowess, pride of holiness, pride of idleness, pride of ignorance; the life of superstition, of family exclusiveness resulting in intermarriage to the point of insanity; of that fierce local bigotry, peculiarly Spanish, which dreads and hates all foreign intrusion. The streets, devoid of business activity, swarm with vigorous mendicants, who have no better shift, when times grow hard, than to deform the children who are born to them like kittens in their mud-walled hovels. The casino, where half the town smokes half its time away, hums with malicious gossip. The university languidly pursues the studies of Latin, scholastic divinity, Church history, and all that savors of the past. Under the gray vault of the cathedral women kneel before the image of the Christ Child, bringing Him a new pair of embroidered pantalets and entreating of His rosy simplicity what they would not dare ask from the "Ecce Homo"; or they kiss the satin-slippered feet of the miracle-working Virgin and vow her, if their prayer is granted, seven bright new swords of the finest Toledo workmanship to pierce her patient heart. The man of scientific training, fresh from the modern world, is brought into sharp collision with this dim old town. High principles and essential, spiritual Christianity count him for nothing; he is speedily denounced as no better than "a murderer, an atheist, or a Protestant," and his strong young life is actually beaten out by that blind, terrible force of Spanish fanaticism. So far the novelist can go; such a hero he dares paint; but not a Protestant.

The notions of Protestantism prevalent among the people, not the peasants only, but the gentry, are little short of ludicrous. A black-eyed lady of Cadiz was amazed at our assertion that Protestants prayed. A Madrid señorita asked us, in friendly confidence, if it were true that Protestants "denied Christ and spat on the Virgin." The popular identification of Protestantism with all that is impious and criminal we encountered as early as our second afternoon in Spain. We were visiting, in the picturesque fishing-hamlet of Pasajes, a gaunt Basque church, where the old dame who served as caretaker showed us a waxen image of a sleeping girl, said, not without probability, to have been brought from Rome. Beneath the figure is a burial stone, whose inscription would locate it in the Catacombs. When friends of ours were at Pasajes some three years before, the grandam's story ran that the image was the likeness of a Christian martyr, slain by her pagan father at Rome in the time of the Imperial persecutions; but the tale glibly recited to us was this: "Ay de mi! The poor young lady! Her father was a Protestant, and, of course, hated religion, and when his daughter, so beautiful, was on her way to her first communion, he hid behind a corner, with an axe, and of a sudden jumped out on her and struck her dead."

It is such prejudice that goes far toward justifying the maintenance by foreign societies of Protestant churches in Spain. They cannot stand alone, in face of all this hostility, and yet the country has need of them. No European nation can nowadays be shut in to any single channel of religious life, and doubtless, apart from all questions of creed, there are Spanish temperaments to which the simpler culto is more natural than the elaborate ritual of Rome; but, waiving discussion as to the relative gifts and graces of these two great divisions of Christ's fellowship, the new seems essential, not for itself alone, but as a stimulus and corrective to the old. Time may make it clear that a purified Roman Catholicism is better suited to the Latin races in general than plainer rites and less symbolic worship, but there are heavy counts against the Roman Catholic Church as it exists in Spain. The private lives of the clergy, as a class, have been so open to reproach that even the finger-games and nonsense songs of the little children, learned with their baby lispings, mock priestly immorality. The Church, steward of untold wealth, has endowed many charities, but the fundamental trust of knowledge it has most sluggishly and inadequately dispensed. Santiago de Compostela, for example, is a very nest of religious foundations. Thirty-six Christian fraternities are gathered there, yet we were told on good authority that not one peasant in a hundred of those within hearing of Santiago's fivescore and fourteen holy bells can read and write. In matters of State, the Church has utterly lost the allegiance of the progressive party and, to a large extent, the political confidence of the nation. As Spaniards study the history of their country, they realize more and more that her colossal mistakes and misfortunes have been due in large measure to Jesuit and Dominical policy – to the father confessor in the royal chamber, the inquisitor in shadow of the throne. With reference to the success of the Church in promoting spiritual life, a beautiful young nun, her eyes glistening like happy stars, assured us that there was more devotion in Catholic Spain than in all the rest of Christendom. A scientist of repute, his voice choking with grief and wrath, declared to us that the fetters of superstition had become hopelessly riveted, during these ages of Church control, on the Spanish mind. But call it what you will, devotion or superstition, and admitting, as the tourist must, that it is a most conspicuous and impressive feature of Spanish life, there are nevertheless thousands of Spaniards, especially the younger men, over whom it has lost sway. These are the indiferentes, many of whom might find, as some have found, in a fresh presentation of Christianity, the Godward impetus which they no longer gain from the Church of Rome.

The most cheerful indiferente I encountered in Spain was a whimsical old philosopher, well on his way to the nineties, yet so brisk and hardy as almost to vie with Borrow's Portuguese dame whose hair "was becoming gray" after a life of one hundred and ten years. His hair, indeed, is white, and extreme age has written its deforming marks on face and figure, yet he runs up the steepest stairs, reads the finest print, fills his days with a close succession of labors and amusements, and scoffs at religion as airily as if Death had passed him on the crowded way and would never turn back to look for him again.

At our first meeting he offered, with characteristic kindness, to come and read Spanish with me. As I had invaded Spain for the express purpose of studying the Spanish drama, I took a volume of Calderon from my trunk and hopefully awaited his visit. But it was a matter of several visits before I could open my Calderon. The jaunty old cavalier arrived, brimming over with chat and anecdote, and when at last I hinted at the reading, produced with pride from his inner coat pocket a little, paper-bound geografia that he had written himself for use in the Spanish schools, and proceeded to regale me with extracts from its pages. I looked severely at the little artist, whose eyes were dancing in a demure face, and endeavored to profit by this unexpected course of instruction. The author chuckled much over his sagacity in having arranged the subject-matter of his book in paragraphs and not by question and answer. In the latter case, he explained, the children would learn the answers without reading the questions, a process bound to result in geographical confusion. The little volume, as is the wont of school books in other lands, tended to give to its students a disproportionate idea of the importance of their own country. Spain and her colonies were treated in seventy pages, Great Britain and her colonies in three, France in four, while America, from Greenland to Patagonia, was handled as a single entity, one figure each, and those absurdly small, being set for "her population, army, and navy." The Confederación de los Estados Unidos was barely mentioned as one of the five "States" of North America.

But the only feature of his book for which the author felt called upon to apologize, was the catering to popular superstition, as in stating, for instance, that in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is adored the veritable body of St. James. He cast a quizzical glance at me in reading this, and then laughed himself purple in the face. "One has to say these things in this country," he gasped, still breathless from his mirth. "Drops of water must run with the stream. If only there were a shrine where people might be cured of being fools!"

Quick-witted as the old gentleman was, he presently detected a lack of geographical enthusiasm in his audience. His literary vanity smarted for a moment and then he fell to laughing, declaring that ladies always had a distaste for useful information. "That old wife of mine" could not abide arithmetic. He digressed into an explanation of the Roman notation, making it quite clear to us wherein IX differs from XI, and with antiquated courtliness of phrase, even for Spain, asked our gracious permission to cause himself the pain of departure.