Romantic legends of Spain

His loyal friends, after raising what money they could for the children, gathered together and published in three small volumes the most characteristic of Becquer’s writings, – a series of lyrical poems,2 the letters From My Cell,3 some legends and tales of unequal merit;4 and a few miscellaneous articles on architecture, literature and the like.

The Rimas almost immediately established Becquer’s fame. He is counted to-day among the chief lyrists of the nineteenth century. These poignant snatches of song pass, in theme, from life to love and from love to death. So far as they give, or purport to give, a history of the poet’s heart, they tell of passion at first requited, then of estrangement and despair. It is supposed that a certain Julia Espín y Guillén, later the wife of Don Benigno Quiroga Ballesteros, a living Spaniard of distinction, figures to some extent in the Rimas. The house of her father, director of the orchestra in the Teatro Reál, was a resort of young musicians, artists and men of letters, and here Becquer, during his earlier years in Madrid, was a frequent guest. There seems little doubt that his youthful devotion was given, though in silence, to this disdainful brunette, but the poems likewise tell of a love “of gold and snow.” There is a green-eyed maiden, too, whom he essays to comfort for this peculiarity, – though, indeed, eyes of jewel green, strangely fascinating, are not rare in Spain. He may have had her in mind in writing his legend of The Emerald Eyes. And one of the most beautiful lyrics follows out the slight thread of story in Three Dates, representing the poet as gazing night after night up from that ancient Toledo square, with its glorified rubbish-heap, to the ogive windows of the convent where the nun who had so thrilled his imagination was immured. Over the spirit of Becquer, to whom the immaterial was ever more real than the material, no one actual woman held lasting sway. He tells the truth of the matter in his eleventh lyric:

I am black and comely; my lips are glowing;I am passion; my heart is hot;The rapture of life in my veins is flowing.For me thou callest? – I call thee not.Pale is my forehead and gold my tresses;Endless comforts are locked in me,Treasure of hearthside tendernesses.’Tis I whom thou seekest? – Nay, not thee.I am a dream, afar, forbidden.Vague as the mist on the mountain-brow,A bodiless glory, haunting, hidden;I cannot love thee. – Oh, come! come thou!

Becquer himself was wont to ascribe the premature death of poets, that breaking of the harp while yet the golden chords have yielded but their least of melodies, to a restless fulness of life, the imprisoned vapor that bursts the vessel. This appears with pathetic emphasis in the Introduction that he wrote, not long before his death, for a projected volume of tales and fantasies. He felt that he must rid his fevered brain of their importunity, but he had begun to give expression to only one, The Woman of Stone, when death broke the magic pen. The story remains a fragment,5 not passing beyond its opening pages of rich artistic description, nor can its course be clearly conjectured even though in The Kiss, and in the closing passages of his Literary Letters to a Woman, his imagination hovers about the theme. He left, like Hawthorne, many tantalizing titles that suggest the greatness of our loss. That drama on “The Brothers of Sorrow,” that poem on the discovery of America, those Andalusian novels on “The Last Minstrel,” “To Live or Not to Live,” those Toledo legends on “The Foundress of Convents,” “El Cristo de la Vega,” “The Angel Musicians,” those fantasies on “Light and Snow,” “The Diana of the Indies,” “The Life of the Dead,” – these are but a few of the conceptions that teemed in his mind but found no outlet to the world. It seemed to his friends, who knew the man and had listened to his marvellous talk, that the scanty handful of tales they could collect from newspapers here and there made so inadequate a showing as almost to misrepresent his powers. Yet however thwarted and wronged by circumstance this harvest of his imagination may be, it deserves attention if only for its finer and less obvious qualities. Becquer charges himself with a melancholy temperament, and seldom, in fact, do we find in these pages the blither humor playing in The Set of Emeralds; but the occasional morbidness of his tone is due rather, it would seem, to illness and its consequent despondency than to any native quality of his thought. He deals too much in the horrible for modern taste, but he cannot claim, like Baudelaire, to have “invented a new shudder.” Tales grounded in folk-lore are bound to contain elements of superstitious terror, and the affinity of these legends in that respect is rather with German balladry and the earlier romanticism in general than with the genius of Poe. Becquer’s truer kinship is with Hawthorne, whose outer faculty of close and minute observation is his as well as the inner preoccupation with mystery and symbol. All the senses of this young Spaniard seem to have been of the finest, his exquisite hearing entering into these tales as effectively as his keen sight; but he is most himself in presence of the dim, the fugitive, the impalpable. His mind was essentially mystical. His religion was not without its human side. In brooding on the inequalities of the mortal lot, he finds comfort in the reflection: “God, though invisible, yet holds a hand outreached to lift a little the burden that presses on the poor.” But faith in him was of the very fibre of imagination. He even lent a certain sympathetic credence to the mediæval legends of the Church, at least when the spell of Toledo was upon him. “Outside the place that guards their memory,” he says, “far from the precincts which still preserve their traces, and where we seem yet to breathe the atmosphere of the ages that gave them being, traditions lose their poetic mystery, their inexplicable hold upon the soul. At a distance we question, we analyze, we doubt; but there faith, like a secret revelation, illuminates the spirit, and we believe.” In a letter from Veruela to a lady of his acquaintance, a letter relating a brief but lovely legend6 of an appearance of the Virgin, he asserts: “Only the hand of faith can touch the delicate flowers of tradition.” “God,” he elsewhere says, “is the glowing, eternal centre of all beauty.”

The writer of these tales described himself thus: “I have a special predilection for all that which cannot be vulgarized by the touch and the judgment of the indifferent multitude. If I were to paint landscapes, I would paint them without figures. I like the fleeting ideas that slip away without leaving a trace on the understandings of practical folk, like a drop of water over a marble shelf. In the cities I visit, I seek the narrow, lonely streets; in the edifices I examine, the dusky nooks and corners of the inner courts, where grass springs up, and moisture enriches with its patches of greenish color the parched tint of the wall; in the women who impress me, the hint of mystery that I think I see shining with wavering light in the depths of their eyes, like the glimmer of a lamp that burns unknown and unsuspected in the sanctuary of their hearts; even in the blossoms of a shrub, I believe there is for me something more potent and exciting in the one that hides beneath the leaves and there, concealed, fills the air with fragrance, unprofaned by human gaze. In all this I find a certain unsullied purity of feelings and of things.”

Becquer goes on to admit that this “pronounced inclination sometimes degenerates into extravagances.”

FOREWORD

IN dim corners of my mind there sleep, hidden away and naked, the freakish children of my imagination, waiting in silence for art to clothe them with language that it may present them in decency upon the stage of the world.

My Muse, as fruitful as the marriage-bed of poverty, and like those parents who bring to birth more children than they have means to rear, is ever conceiving and bearing in the mystic sanctuary of the intelligence, peopling it with innumerable creations, to which not my utmost effort nor all the years that are left to me of life, will be sufficient to give form.

And here within me I sometimes feel them, all unclad and shapeless as they are, huddled and twisted together in confusion indescribable, stirring and living with a dim, strange life, similar to that of those myriad germs which seethe and quiver in eternal generation within the secret places of the earth, without winning strength enough to reach the surface and transform themselves, at the kiss of the sun, into flowers and fruits.

They go with me, destined to die with me, leaving no more trace than is left by a midnight dream which the morning cannot recall. On certain occasions and in face of this terrible idea, there rises in them the instinct of life, and trooping in formidable though silent multitudes they seek tumultuously a way of escape from amid the shadows of their dwelling-place forth to the light. But alas! between the world of idea and the world of form yawns an abyss which only the word can bridge, and the word, timid and slothful, refuses to aid their efforts. Mute, dim and powerless, after the unavailing struggle they fall back into their old passivity. So fall, inert, into the hollows by the wayside, when the wind ceases, the yellow leaves which the autumn storm blew up.

These seditions on the part of the rebel sons of my imagination explain some of my attacks of fever; they are the cause, unrecognized by science, of my excitements and depressions. And thus, although in ill estate, have I lived till now, walking among the indifferent throngs of men with this silent tempest in my head. Thus have I lived till now, but all things reach an end, and to these must be put their period.

Sleeplessness and fantasy go on begetting and producing with monstrous fecundity. Their creations, crowded already like the feeble plants of a conservatory, strive one with another for the expanding of their unreal existences, fighting for the drops of memory as for the scanty moisture of a sterile land. It is needful to open a channel for the deep waters, which, daily fed from a living spring, will at last break down the dike.

Go forth, then! Go forth and live with the only life I can give you. My intellect shall supply you with nutriment enough to make you palpable; I will clothe you, though in rags, so that you need not blush for nakedness. I would like to fashion for each one of you a marvellous stuff woven of exquisite phrases, in which you could fold yourselves with pride, as in mantles of purple. I would like to engrave the form that must contain you as the golden vase which holds a precious ointment is engraved. But this may not be.

And yet, I need to rest. I need, just as the body through whose swollen veins the life-blood surges with phlethoric force, is bled, to clear my brain, inadequate to the lodging of so many grotesqueries.

Then gather here, like the misty trail that marks the passing of an unknown comet, like atoms dispersed in an embryonic world which Death fans through the air, until the Creator shall have spoken the fiat lux that divides light from darkness.

I would not that in my sleepless nights you still should pass before my eyes in weird procession, begging me with gestures and contortions to draw you out from the limbo in which you lead these phantom, thin existences into the life of reality. I would not that at the breaking of this harp already old and cracked the unknown notes which it contained should perish with the instrument. I would interest myself a little in the world which lies without me, free at last to withdraw my eyes from this other world that I carry within my head. Common sense, which is the barrier of dreamland, is beginning to give way, and the people of the different camps mingle and grow confused. It costs me an effort to know which things I have dreamed and which have actually happened. My affections are divided between real persons and phantasms of the imagination. My memory shifts from one category to the other the names of women who have died and the dates of days that have passed, with days and women that have existed only in my mind. I must put an end to this by flinging you all forth from my brain once and forever.

If to die is to sleep, I would sleep in peace in the night of death, without your coming to be my nightmare, cursing me for having doomed you to nothingness before you had been born. Go, then, to the world at whose touch you came into being, and linger there, as the echo which life’s joys and griefs, hopes and struggles, found in one soul that passed across the earth.

Perchance very soon must I pack my portmanteau for the great journey. At any moment the spirit may free herself from the material that she may rise to purer air. I would not, when this moment comes, take with me, as the trivial baggage of a mountebank, the treasure of tinsel and tatters that my Fancy has been heaping up in the rubbish chambers of the brain.

ROMANTIC LEGENDS OF SPAIN

MASTER PÉREZ THE ORGANIST

IN Seville, in the very portico of Santa Inés, and while, on Christmas Eve, I was waiting for the Midnight Mass to begin, I heard this tradition from a lay-sister of the convent.

As was natural, after hearing it, I waited impatiently for the ceremony to commence, eager to be present at a miracle.

Nothing could be less miraculous, however, than the organ of Santa Inés, and nothing more vulgar than the insipid motets with which that night the organist regaled us.

On going out from the mass, I could not resist asking the lay-sister mischievously:

“How does it happen that the organ of Master Pérez is so unmusical at present?”

“Why!” replied the old woman. “Because it isn’t his.”

“Not his? What has become of it?”

“It fell to pieces from sheer old age, a number of years ago.”

“And the soul of the organist?”

“It has not appeared again since the new organ was set up in place of his own.”

If anyone of my readers, after perusing this history, should be moved to ask the same question, now he knows why the notable miracle has not continued into our own time.

I

“Do you see that man with the scarlet cloak and the white plume in his hat, – the one who seems to wear on his waistcoat all the gold of the galleons of the Indies, – that man, I mean, just stepping down from his litter to give his hand to the lady there, who, now that she is out of hers, is coming our way, preceded by four pages with torches? Well, that is the Marquis of Moscoso, suitor to the widowed Countess of Villapineda. They say that before setting his eyes upon this lady, he had asked in marriage the daughter of a man of large fortune, but the girl’s father, of whom the rumor goes that he is a bit of a miser, – but hush! Speaking of the devil – do you see that man coming on foot under the arch of San Felipe, all muffled up in a dark cloak and attended by a single servant carrying a lantern? Now he is in front of the outer shrine.

“Do you notice, as his cloak falls back while he salutes the image, the embroidered cross that sparkles on his breast?

“If it were not for this noble decoration, one would take him for a shop-keeper from Culebras street. Well, that is the father in question. See how the people make way for him and lift their hats.

“Everybody in Seville knows him on account of his immense fortune. That one man has more golden ducats in his chests than our lord King Philip maintains soldiers, and with his merchantmen he could form a squadron equal to that of the Grand Turk —

“Look, look at that group of stately cavaliers! Those are the four and twenty knights. Aha, aha! There goes that precious Fleming, too, whom, they say, the gentlemen of the green cross have not challenged for heresy yet, thanks to his influence with the magnates of Madrid. All he comes to church for is to hear the music. But if Master Pérez does not draw from him with his organ tears as big as fists, then sure it is that his soul isn’t under his doublet, but sizzles in the Devil’s frying-pan. Alack, neighbor! Trouble, trouble! I fear there is going to be a fight. I shall take refuge in the church; for, from what I see, there will be hereabouts more blows than Pater Nosters. Look, look! The Duke of Alcalá’s people are coming round the corner of San Pedro’s square, and I think I spy the Duke of Medinasidonia’s men in Dueñas alley. Didn’t I tell you?

“Now they have caught sight of each other, now the two parties stop short, without breaking their order, the groups of bystanders dissolve, the police, who on these occasions get pounded by both sides, slip away, even the prefect, staff of office and all, seeks the shelter of the portico, – and yet they say that there is law to be had.

“For the poor —

“There, there! already shields are shining through the dark. Our Lord Jesus of All Power deliver us! Now the blows are beginning. Neighbor, neighbor! this way – before they close the doors. But hush! What is this? Hardly have they begun when they leave off. What light is that? Blazing torches! A litter! It’s His Reverence the Bishop.

“The most holy Virgin of Protection, on whom this very instant I was calling in my heart, brings him to my aid. Ah! But nobody knows what I owe to that Blessed Lady, – how richly she pays me back for the little candles that I burn to her every Saturday. – See him! How beautiful he is with his purple vestments and his red cardinal’s cap! God preserve him in his sacred chair as many centuries as I wish to live myself! If it were not for him, half Seville would have been burned up by this time with these quarrels of the dukes. See them, see them, the great hypocrites, how they both press close to the litter of the prelate to kiss his ring! How they drop behind and, mingling with his household attendants, follow in his train! Who would dream that those two who appear on such good terms, if within the half hour they should meet in a dark street – that is, the dukes themselves – God deliver me from thinking them cowards; good proof have they given of valor, warring more than once against the enemies of Our Lord; but the truth remains, that if they should seek each other – and seek with the wish to find – they would find each other, putting end once for all to these continuous scuffles, in which those who really do the fighting are their kinsmen, their friends and their servants.

“But come, neighbor, come into the church, before it is packed full. Some nights like this it is so crowded that there is not room left for a grain of wheat. The nuns have a prize in their organist. When has the convent ever been in such high favor as now? I can tell you that the other sisterhoods have made Master Pérez magnificent offers, but there is nothing strange about that, for the Lord Archbishop himself has offered him mountains of gold to entice him to the cathedral, – but he, not a bit of it! He would sooner give up his life than his beloved organ. You don’t know Master Pérez? True enough, you are a newcomer in this neighborhood. Well, he is a saint; poor, but the most charitable man alive. With no other relative than his daughter and no other friend than his organ, he devotes all his life to watching over the innocence of the one and patching up the registers of the other. Mind that the organ is old. But that counts for nothing, he is so handy in mending it and caring for it that its sound is a marvel. For he knows it so perfectly that only by touch, – for I am not sure that I have told you the poor gentleman is blind from his birth. And how patiently he bears his misfortune! When people ask him how much he would give to see, he replies: ‘Much, but not as much as you think, for I have hopes.’ ‘Hopes of seeing?’ ‘Yes, and very soon,’ he adds, smiling like an angel. ‘Already I number seventy-six years; however long my life may be, soon I shall see God.’

“Poor dear! And he will see Him, for he is humble as the stones of the street, which let all the world trample on them. He always says that he is only a poor convent organist, when the fact is he could give lessons in harmony to the very chapel master of the Cathedral, for he was, as it were, born to the art. His father held the same position before him; I did not know the father, but my mother – God rest her soul! – says that he always had the boy at the organ with him to blow the bellows. Then the lad developed such talent that, as was natural, he succeeded to the position on the death of his father. And what a touch is in his hands, God bless them! They deserve to be taken to Chicarreros street and there enchased in gold. He always plays well, always, but on a night like this he is a wonder. He has the greatest devotion for this ceremony of the Midnight Mass, and when the Host is elevated, precisely at twelve o’clock, which is the moment Our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world, the tones of his organ are the voices of angels.

“But, after all, why should I praise to you what you will hear to-night? It is enough to see that all the most distinguished people of Seville, even the Lord Archbishop himself, come to a humble convent to listen to him; and don’t suppose that it is only the learned people and those who are versed in music that appreciate his genius, but the very rabble of the streets. All these groups that you see arriving with pine-torches ablaze, chorusing popular songs, broken by rude outcries, to the accompaniment of timbrels, tambourines and rustic drums, these, contrary to their custom, which is to make disturbance in the churches, are still as the dead when Master Pérez lays his hands upon the organ, and when the Host is elevated, you can’t hear a fly; great tears roll down from the eyes of all, and at the end is heard a sound like an immense sigh, which is nothing else than the expulsion of the breath of the multitude, held in while the music lasts. But come, come! The bells have stopped ringing, and the mass is going to begin. Come inside.

“This night is Christmas Eve for all the world, but for nobody more than for us.”

So saying, the good woman who had been acting as cicerone for her neighbor pressed through the portico of the Convent of Santa Inés, and by dint of elbowing and pushing succeeded in getting inside the church, disappearing amid the multitude which thronged the inner spaces near the doors.

II

The church was illuminated with astonishing brilliancy. The flood of light which spread from the altars through all its compass sparkled on the rich jewels of the ladies who, kneeling on the velvet cushions placed before them by their pages and taking their prayer-books from the hands of their duennas, formed a brilliant circle around the choir-screen. Grouped just behind them, on foot, wrapped in bright-lined cloaks garnished with gold-lace, with studied carelessness letting glimpses of their red and green crosses be seen, in one hand the hat, whose plumes kissed the carpet, the other hand resting upon the polished hilt of a rapier or caressing the handle of an ornate dagger, the four and twenty knights, with a large proportion of the highest nobility of Seville, seemed to form a wall for the purpose of protecting their daughters and their wives from contact with the populace. This, swaying back and forth at the rear of the nave, with a murmur like that of a surging sea, broke out into a joyous acclaim, accompanied by the discordant sounds of the timbrels and tambourines, at the appearance of the archbishop, who, after seating himself, surrounded by his attendants, near the High Altar under a scarlet canopy, thrice blessed the assembled people.

It was time for the mass to begin.

There passed, nevertheless, several minutes without the appearance of the celebrant. The throng commenced to stir about impatiently; the knights exchanged low-toned words with one another, and the archbishop sent one of his attendants to the sacristy to inquire the cause of the delay.

“Master Pérez has been taken ill, very ill, and it will be impossible for him to come to the Midnight Mass.”

This was the word brought back by the attendant.

The news spread instantly through the multitude. It would be impossible to depict the dismay which it caused; suffice it to say that such a clamor began to arise in the church that the prefect sprang to his feet, and the police came in to enforce silence, mingling with the close-pressed, surging crowd.