They Were In Doubt About Going Further In A
Country Which Had Inveigled Them From Gibraltar As Far As Its
Capital.
They advised with us about Burgos, of all places, and when we said the
hotels in Burgos were very
Cold, they answered, Well they had thought
so; and the husband asked, Spain was a pretty good place to cut out,
wasn't it? The wife expected that they would find some one in Egypt who
spoke English; she had expected they would speak French in Spain, but
had been disappointed. They had left their warm things at Gibraltar and
were almost frozen already. They were as good and sweet and nice as they
could be, and we were truly sorry to part with them and leave them to
what seemed to be a mistake which they were not to blame for.
I wish that all Europeans and all Europeanized Americans knew how to
value such incorruptible con-nationals, who would, I was sure, carry
into the deepest dark of Egypt and over the whole earth undimmed the
light of our American single-heartedness. I would have given something
to know from just which kind country town and companionable commonwealth
of our Union they had come, but I would not have given much, for I knew
that they could have come from almost any. In their modest satisfaction
with our own order of things, our language, our climate, our weather,
they would not rashly condemn those of other lands, but would give them
a fair chance; and, if when they got home again, they would have to
report unfavorably of the Old World to the Board of Trade or the Woman's
Club, it would not be without intelligent reservations, even generous
reservations. They would know much more than they knew before they came
abroad, and if they had not seen Europe distinctly, but in a glass
darkly, still they would have seen it and would be the wiser and none
the worse for it. They would still be of their shrewd, pure American
ideals, and would judge their recollections as they judged their
experiences by them; and I wish we were all as confirmed in our fealty
to those ideals.
They were not, clearly enough, of that yet older fashion of Americans
who used to go through European galleries buying copies of the
masterpieces which the local painters were everywhere making. With this
pair the various postal-card reproductions must have long superseded the
desire or the knowledge of copies, and I doubt if many Americans of any
sort now support that honored tradition. Who, then, does support it? The
galleries of the Prado seem as full of copyists as they could have been
fifty years ago, and many of them were making very good copies. _I_ wish
I could say they were working as diligently as copyists used to work,
but copyists are now subject to frequent interruptions, not from the
tourists but from one another. They used to be all men, mostly grown
gray in their pursuit, but now they are both men and women, and younger
and the women are sometimes very pretty. In the Prado one saw several
pairs of such youth conversing together, forgetful of everything around
them, and on terms so very like flirtatious that they could not well be
distinguished from them. They were terms that other Spanish girls could
enjoy only with a wooden lattice and an iron grille between them and the
_novios_ outside their windows; and no tourist of the least heart could
help rejoicing with them. In the case of one who stood with her little
figure slanted and her little head tilted, looking up into the charmed
eyes of a tall _rubio,_ the tourist could not help rejoicing with the
young man too.
The day after our day in the Prado we found ourselves in the Museum of
Modern Art through the kind offices of our mistaken cabman when we were
looking for the Archaeological Museum. But we were not sorry, for some
of the new or newer pictures and sculptures were well worth seeing,
though we should never have tried for them. The force of the masters
which the ideals of the past held in restraint here raged in unbridled
excess: but if I like that force so much, why do I say excess? The new
or newer Spanish art likes an immense canvas, say as large as the side
of a barn, and it chooses mostly a tragical Spanish history in which it
riots with a young sense of power brave to see. There were a dozen of
those mighty dramas which I would have liked to bring away with me if I
had only had a town hall big enough to put them into after I got them
home. There were sculptures as masterful and as mighty as the pictures,
but among the paintings there was one that seemed to subdue all the
infuriate actions to the calm of its awful repose. This was Gisbert's
"Execution of Torrejos and his Companions," who were shot at Malaga in
1830 for a rising in favor of constitutional government. One does not,
if one is as wise as I, attempt to depict pictures, and I leave this
most heroic, most pathetic, most heart-breaking, most consoling
masterpiece for my reader to go and see for himself; it is almost worth
going as far as Madrid to see. Never in any picture do I remember the
like of those sad, brave, severe faces of the men standing up there to
be shot, where already their friends lay dead at their feet. A tumbled
top-hat in the foreground had an effect awfuller than a tumbled head
would have had.
VIII
Besides this and those other histories there were energetic portraits
and vigorous landscapes in the Modern Museum, where if we had not been
bent so on visiting the Archaeological Museum, we would willingly have
spent the whole morning. But we were determined to see the Peruvian and
Mexican antiquities which we believed must be treasured up in it; and
that we might not fail of finding it, I gave one of the custodians a
special peseta to take us out on the balcony and show us exactly how to
get to it.
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