Every Fact Of It Fixes Itself The More Ineffaceably In The
Consciousness Because Of That Cunningly Studied Increase In The Stature
Of The Actors, Who Always Appear Life-Size In Spite Of Their Lift From
Level To Level Above The Spectator.
But what is the use, what _is_ the
use?
Am I to abandon the young and younger wisdom with which I have
refrained in so many books from attempting the portrayal of any Italian,
any English church, and fall into the folly, now that I am old, of
trying to say again in words what one of the greatest of Spanish
churches says in form, in color? Let me rather turn from that vainest
endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing which endear the memory of
monuments and make the experience of them endurable. The beautiful
choir, with its walls pierced in gigantic filigree, might have been art
or not, as one chose, but the three young girls who smiled and whispered
with the young man near it were nature, which there could be no two
minds about. They were pathetically privileged there to a moment of the
free interplay of youthful interests and emotions which the Spanish
convention forbids less in the churches than anywhere else.
The Spanish religion is, in fact, kind to the young in many ways, and on
our way to the cathedral we had paused at a shrine of the Virgin in
appreciation of her friendly offices to poor girls wanting husbands;
they have only to drop a pin inside the grating before her and draw a
husband, tall for a large pin and short for a little one; or if they can
make their offering in coin, their chances of marrying money are good.
The Virgin is always ready to befriend her devotees, and in the
cathedral near that beautiful choir screen she has a shrine above the
stone where she alighted when she brought a chasuble to St. Ildefonso
(she owed him something for his maintenance of her Immaculate Conception
long before it was imagined a dogma) and left the print of her foot in
the pavement. The fact is attested by the very simple yet absolute
inscription:
Quando la Reina del Cielo
Puso los pies en el suelo,
En esta piedra los puso,
or as my English will have it:
When the Queen of Heaven put
Upon the earth her foot,
She put it on this stone
and left it indelible there, so that now if you thrust your finger
through the grille and touch the place you get off three hundred years
of purgatory: not much in the count of eternity, but still something.
We saw a woman and a priest touching it as we stood by and going away
enviably comforted; but we were there as connoisseurs, not as votaries;
and we were trying to be conscious solely of the surpassing grandeur and
beauty of the cathedral. Here as elsewhere in Spain the passionate
desire of the race to realize a fact in art expresses itself gloriously
or grotesquely according to the occasion. The rear of the chorus is one
vast riot of rococo sculpture, representing I do not know what mystical
event; but down through the midst of the livingly studied performance a
mighty angel comes plunging, with his fine legs following his torso
through the air, like those of a diver taking a header into the water.
Nothing less than the sublime touch of those legs would have satisfied
the instinct from which and for which the artist worked; they gave
reality to the affair in every part.
I wish I could give reality to every part of that most noble, that most
lovably beautiful temple. We had only a poor half-hour for it, and we
could not do more than flutter the pages of the epic it was and catch
here and there a word, a phrase: a word writ in architecture or
sculpture, a phrase richly expressed in gold and silver and precious
marble, or painted in the dyes of the dawns and sunsets which used to
lend themselves so much more willingly to the arts than they seem to do
now. From our note-books I find that this cathedral of Toledo appeared
more wonderful to one of us than the cathedral of Burgos; but who knows?
It might have been that the day was warmer and brighter and had not yet
shivered and saddened to the cold rain it ended in. At any rate the vast
church filled itself more and more with the solemn glow in which we left
it steeped when we went out and took our dreamway through the narrow,
winding, wandering streets that seemed to lure us where they would. One
of them climbed with us to the Alcazar, which is no longer any great
thing to see in itself, but which opens a hospitable space within its
court for a prospect of so much of the world around Toledo, the world of
yellow river and red fields and blue mountains, and white-clouded azure
sky, that we might well have mistaken it for the whole earth. In itself,
as I say, the Alcazar is no great thing for where it is, but if we had
here in New York an Alcazar that remembered historically back through
French, English, Arabic, Gothic. Roman, and Carthaginian occupations to
the inarticulate Iberian past we should come, I suppose, from far and
near to visit it. Now, however, after gasping at its outlook, we left it
hopelessly, and lost ourselves, except for our kindly guide, in the
crooked little stony lanes, with the sun hot on our backs and the shade
cool in our faces. There were Moorish bits and suggestions in the white
walls and the low flat roofs of the houses, but these were not so
jealous of their privacy as such houses were once meant to be. Through
the gate of one we were led into a garden of simple flowers belted with
a world-old parapet, over which we could look at a stretch of the Gothic
wall of King Wamba's time, before the miserable Roderick won and lost
his kingdom.
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