If He Did Not Equip Me With The Useful Colloquial Phrases,
The Fault Was Mine; And The Misfortune Was Doubly
Mine when from my old
acquaintance with Italian (glib half-sister of the statelier Spanish)
the Italian phrases would thrust
Forward as the equivalent of the
English words I could not always think of. The truth is, then, that I
was not perfect in my Spanish after quite six weeks in Spain; and if in
the course of his travels with me the reader finds me flourishing
Spanish idioms in his face he may safely attribute them less to my
speaking than my reading knowledge: probably I never employed them in
conversation. That reading was itself without order or system, and I am
not sure but it had better been less than more. Yet who knows? The
days, or the nights of the days, in the eighteen-fifties went quickly,
as quickly as the years go now, and it would have all come to the
present pass whether that blind devotion to an alien literature had
cloistered my youth or not.
I do not know how, with the merciful make I am of, I should then have
cared so little, or else ignored so largely the cruelties I certainly
knew that the Spaniards had practised in the conquests of Mexico and
Peru. I knew of these things, and my heart was with the Incas and the
Aztecs, and yet somehow I could not punish the Spaniards for their
atrocious destruction of the only American civilizations. As nearly as I
can now say, I was of both sides, and wistful to reconcile them, though
I do not see now how it could have been done; and in my later hopes for
the softening of the human conditions I have found it hard to forgive
Pizarro for the overthrow of the most perfectly socialized state known
to history. I scarcely realized the base ingratitude of the Spanish
sovereigns to Columbus, and there were vast regions of history that I
had not penetrated till long afterward in pursuit of Spanish perfidy and
inhumanity, as in their monstrous misrule of Holland. When it came in
those earlier days to a question of sides between the Spaniards and the
Moors, as Washington Irving invited my boyhood to take it in his
chronicle of the conquest of Granada, I experienced on a larger scale my
difficulty in the case of the Mexicans and Peruvians. The case of these
had been reported to me in the school-readers, but here, now, was an
affair submitted to the mature judgment of a boy of twelve, and yet I
felt as helpless as I was at ten. Will it be credited that at
seventy-four I am still often in doubt which side I should have had
win, though I used to fight on both? Since the matter was settled more
than four hundred years ago, I will not give the reasons for my divided
allegiance. They would hardly avail now to reverse the tragic fate of
the Moors, and if I try I cannot altogether wish to reverse it. Whatever
Spanish misrule has been since Islam was overthrown in Granada, it has
been the error of law, and the rule of Islam at the best had always been
the effect of personal will, the caprice of despots high and low, the
unstatuted sufferance of slaves, high and low. The gloomiest and
cruelest error of Inquisitional Spain was nobler, with its adoration of
ideal womanhood, than the Mohammedan state with its sensual dreams of
Paradise. I will not pretend (as I very well might, and as I perhaps
ought) that I thought of these things, all or any, as our train began to
slope rather more rapidly toward Granada, and to find its way under the
rising moon over the storied Vega. I will as little pretend that my
attitude toward Spain was ever that of the impartial observer after I
crossed the border of that enchanted realm where we all have our
castles. I have thought it best to be open with the reader here at the
beginning, and I would not, if I could, deny him the pleasure of
doubting my word or disabling my judgment at any point he likes. In
return I shall only ask his patience when I strike too persistently the
chord of autobiography. That chord is part of the harmony between the
boy and the old man who made my Spanish journey together, and were
always accusing themselves, the first of dreaming and the last of
doddering: perhaps with equal justice. Is there really much difference
between the two?
II
It was fully a month before that first night in Granada that I arrived
in Spain after some sixty years' delay. During this period I had seen
almost every other interesting country in Europe. I had lived five or
six years in Italy; I had been several months in Germany; and a
fortnight in Holland; I had sojourned often in Paris; I had come and
gone a dozen times in England and lingered long each time; and yet I had
never once visited the land of my devotion. I had often wondered at
this, it was so wholly involuntary, and I had sometimes suffered from
the surprise of those who knew of my passion for Spain, and kept finding
out my dereliction, alleging the Sud-Express to Madrid as something that
left me without excuse. The very summer before last I got so far on the
way in London as to buy a Spanish phrase-book full of those inopportune
conversations with landlords, tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual
acquaintance or agreeable strangers. Yet I returned once more to
America with my desire, which was turning into a duty, unfulfilled; and
when once more I sailed for Europe in 1911 it was more with foreboding
of another failure than a prescience of fruition in my inveterate
longing. Even after that boldly decisive week of the professor in London
I had my doubts and my self-doubts.
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