Emilio Castelar said to me one day, "Toledo is the most remarkable city
in Spain.
You will find there three strata of glories, - Gothic, Arab,
and Castilian, - and an upper crust of beggars and silence."
I went there in the pleasantest time of the year, the first days of
June. The early harvest was in progress, and the sunny road ran through
golden fields which were enlivened by the reapers gathering in their
grain with shining sickles. The borders of the Tagus were so cool and
fresh that it was hard to believe one was in the arid land of Castile.
From Madrid to Aranjuez you meet the usual landscapes of dun hillocks
and pale-blue vegetation, such as are only seen in nature in Central
Spain, and only seen in art on the matchless canvas of Velazquez. But
from the time you cross the tawny flood of the Tagus just north of
Aranjuez, the valley is gladdened by its waters all the way to the
Primate City.
I am glad I am not writing a guide-book, and do not feel any
responsibility resting upon me of advising the gentle reader to stop at
Aranjuez or to go by on the other side. There is a most amiable and
praiseworthy class of travellers who feel a certain moral necessity
impelling them to visit every royal abode within their reach. They
always see precisely the same things, - some thousand of gilt chairs,
some faded tapestry and marvellous satin upholstery, a room in
porcelain, and a room in imitation of some other room somewhere else,
and a picture or two by that worthy and tedious young man, Raphael
Mengs. I knew I would see all these things at Aranjuez, and so contented
myself with admiring its pretty site, its stone-cornered brick facade,
its high-shouldered French roof, and its general air of the Place
Royale, from the outside. The gardens are very pleasant, and lonely
enough for the most philosophic stroller. A clever Spanish writer says
of them, "They are sombre as the thoughts of Philip II., mysterious and
gallant as the pleasures of Philip IV." To a revolutionary mind, it is a
certain pleasure to remember that this was the scene of the emeute
that drove Charles IV. from his throne, and the Prince of Peace from his
queen's boudoir. Ferdinand VII., the turbulent and restless Prince of
Asturias, reaped the immediate profit of his father's abdication; but
the two worthless creatures soon called in Napoleon to decide the
squabble, which he did in his leonine way by taking the crown away from
both of them and handing it over for safe-keeping to his lieutenant
brother Joseph. Honor among thieves! - a silly proverb, as one readily
sees if he falls into their hands, or reads the history of kings.
If Toledo had been built, by some caprice of enlightened power,
especially for a show city, it could not be finer in effect. In detail,
it is one vast museum. In ensemble, it stands majestic on its hills,
with its long lines of palaces and convents terraced around the rocky
slope, and on the height the soaring steeples of a swarm of churches
piercing the blue, and the huge cube of the Alcazar crowning the topmost
crest, and domineering the scene. The magnificent zigzag road which
leads up the steep hillside from the bridge of Alcantara gives an
indefinable impression, as of the lordly ramp of some fortress of
impossible extent.
This road is new, and in perfect condition. But do not imagine you can
judge the city by the approaches. When your carriage has mounted the
hill and passed the evening promenade of the To-ledans, the quaint
triangular Place, - I had nearly called it Square, - "waking laughter in
indolent reviewers," the Zocodover, you are lost in the dae-dalian
windings of the true streets of Toledo, where you can touch the walls on
either side, and where two carriages could no more pass each other than
two locomotives could salute and go by on the same track. This
interesting experiment, which is so common in our favored land, could
never be tried in Toledo, as I believe there is only one turnout in the
city, a minute omnibus with striped linen hangings at the sides, driven
by a young Castilian whose love of money is the root of much discussion
when you pay his bill. It is a most remarkable establishment. The horses
can cheerfully do their mile in fifteen or twenty minutes, but they make
more row about it than a high-pressure Mississippi steamer; and the
crazy little trap is noisier in proportion to its size than anything I
have ever seen, except perhaps an Indiana tree-toad. If you make an
excursion outside the walls, the omnibus, noise and all, is inevitable;
let it come. But inside the city you must walk; the slower the better,
for every door is a study.
It is hard to conceive that this was once a great capital with a
population of two hundred thousand souls. You can easily walk from one
end of the city to the other in less than half an hour, and the houses
that remain seem comfortably filled by eighteen thousand inhabitants.
But in this narrow space once swarmed that enormous and busy multitude.
The city was walled about by powerful stone ramparts, which yet stand in
all their massy perfection. So there could have been no suburbs. This
great aggregation of humanity lived and toiled on the crests and in the
wrinkles of the seven hills we see to-day. How important were the
industries of the earlier days we can guess from the single fact that
John of Padilla, when he rose in defence of municipal liberty in the
time of Charles V., drew in one day from the teeming workshops twenty
thousand fighting men. He met the usual fate of all Spanish patriots,
shameful and cruel death.
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