Happily The Portal Was In The Keeping Of One Of Those Authorized Beggars
Who Guard The Gates Of Heaven Everywhere In That Kind Country, And He
Welcomed Us So Eagerly From The Wet That I Could Not Do Less Than Give
Him A Big Dog At Once.
In a moment of confusion I turned about, and
taking him for another beggar, I gave him another big
Dog; and when we
came out of the church he had put off his cap and arranged so complete a
disguise with the red handkerchief bravely tied round his head, that my
innocence was again abused, and once more a big dog passed between us.
But if the merit of the church might only be partially attributed to
him, he was worth the whole three. The merit of the church was
incalculable, for it was meant to be the sepulcher of the Catholic
Kings, who were eventually more fitly buried in the cathedral at
Granada, in the heart of their great conquest; and it is a most
beautiful church, of a mingled Saracenic plateresque Gothic, as the
guide-books remind me, and extravagantly baroque as I myself found it. I
personally recall also a sense of chill obscurity and of an airy gallery
wandering far aloof in the upper gloom, which remains overhead with me
still, and the yet fainter sense of the balconies crowning like capitals
the two pillars fronting the high altar. I am now sorry for our haste,
but one has not so much time for enjoying such churches in their
presence as for regretting them in their absence. One should live near
them, and visit them daily, if one would feel their beauty in its
recondite details; to have come three thousand miles for three minutes
of them is no way of making that beauty part of one's being, and I will
not pretend that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain is
that I had a living heartache from the sight of that space on the fagade
of this church which is overhung with the chains of the Christian
captives rescued from slavery among the Moors by the Catholic Kings in
their conquest of Granada. They were not only the memorials of the most
sorrowful fact, but they represented the misery of a thousand years of
warfare in which the prisoners on either side suffered in chains for
being Moslems or being Christians. The manacles and the fetters on the
church front are merely decorative to the glance, but to the eye that
reads deeper, how structural in their tale of man's inhumanity to man!
How heavily they had hung on weary limbs! How pitilessly they had eaten
through bleeding ulcers to the bone! Yet they were very, very
decorative, as the flowers are that bloom on battle-fields.
Even with only a few minutes of a scant quarter-hour to spare, I would
not have any one miss seeing the cloister, from which the Catholic Kings
used to enter the church by the gallery to those balcony capitals, but
which the common American must now see by going outside the church. The
cloister is turned to the uses of an industrial school, as we were glad
to realize because our guide, whom we liked so much, was a night student
there. It remains as beautiful and reverend as if it were of no secular
use, full of gentle sculptures, with a garden in the middle, raised
above the pavement with a border of thin tiles, and flower-pots standing
on their coping, all in the shadow of tall trees, overhanging a deep
secret-keeping well. From this place, where you will be partly sheltered
from the rain, your next profitable sally through the storm will be to
Santa Maria la Blanca, once the synagogue of the richest Jews of Toledo,
but now turned church in spite of its high authorization as a place of
Hebrew worship. It was permitted them to build it because they declared
they were of that tribe of Israel which, when Caiaphas, the High Priest,
sent round to the different tribes for their vote whether Jesus should
live or die, alone voted that He should live. Their response, as
Theophile Gautier reports from the chronicles, is preserved in the
Vatican with a Latin version of the Hebrew text. The fable, if it is a
fable, has its pathos; and I for one can only lament the religious zeal
to which the preaching of a fanatical monk roused the Christian
neighborhood in the fifteenth century, to such excess that these kind
Jews were afterward forbidden their worship in the place. It is a very
clean-looking, cold-looking white monument of the Catholic faith, with a
_retablo_ attributed to Berruguete, and much plateresque Gothic detail
mingled with Byzantine ornament, and Moorish arabesquing and the famous
stucco honeycombing which we were destined at Seville and Granada to
find almost sickeningly sweet. Where the Rabbis read the law from their
pulpit the high altar stands, and the pious populace has for three
hundred years pushed the Jews from the surrounding streets, where they
had so humbled their dwellings to the lowliest lest they should rouse
the jealousy of their sleepless enemies.
VII
When we had visited this church there remained only the house of the
painter known as El Greco, for whom we had formed such a distaste,
because of the long features of the faces in his pictures, that our
guide could hardly persuade us his house was worth seeing. Now I am glad
he prevailed with us, for we have since come to find a peculiar charm in
these long features and the characteristic coloring of El Greco's
pictures. The little house full of memorials and the little garden full
of flowers, which ought to have been all forget-me-nots, were entirely
delightful. As every one but I knew, and even I now know, he was born a
Greek with the name of Theotocopuli, and studied tinder Titian till he
found his account in a manner of his own, making long noses and long
chins and high narrow foreheads in ashen gray, and at last went mad in
the excess of his manner.
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