Very Likely If I Ransacked My Memory I Might Find
Instances Of Their Abusing Those Advantages Over The Stranger Which
Providence Puts In The Reach Of The Native Everywhere; But On The Spur
Of The Moment, I Do Not Recall Any.
In Spain, where a woman earns three
dollars a month, as in America where she earns thirty, the poor seem to
abound in the comparative virtues which the rich demand in return for
the chances of Heaven which they abandon to them.
There were few of
those rendering us service there whom we would not willingly have
brought away with us; but very likely we should have found they had the
defects of their qualities.
When we definitely turned our backs on the potential poultry-farm
offered us at our hotel, we found ourselves in as good housing at
another, overlooking the length and breadth of the stately Plaza San
Fernando, with its parallelogram of tall palms, under a full moon
swimming in a cloudless heaven by night and by day. By day, of course,
we did not see it, but the sun was visibly there, rather blazing hot,
even in mid-October, and showing more distinctly than the moon the
beautiful tower of the Giralda from the waist up, and the shoulder of
the great cathedral, besides features of other noble, though less noble,
edifices. Our plaza was so full of romantic suggestion that I am rather
glad now I had no association with it. I am sure I could not have borne
at the time to know, as I have only now learned by recurring to my
Baedeker, that in the old Franciscan cloister once there had stood the
equestrian statue of the Comendador who dismounts and comes unbidden to
the supper of Don Giovanni in the opera. That was a statue which, seen
in my far youth, haunted my nightmares for many a year, and I am sure it
would have kept me from sleep in the conditions, now so perfect, of our
new housing if I had known, about it.
III
The plaza is named, of course, for King Fernando, who took Seville from
the Moors six hundred years ago, and was canonized for his conquests and
his virtues. But I must not enter so rashly upon the history of Seville,
or forget the arrears of personal impression which I have to bring up.
The very drive from the station was full of impressions, from the narrow
and crooked streets, the houses of yellow, blue, and pink stucco, the
flowered and fountained _patios_ glimpsed passingly, the half-lengths of
church-towers, and the fleeting facades of convents and palaces, all
lovely in the mild afternoon light. These impressions soon became
confluent, so that without the constant witness of our note-books I
should now find it impossible to separate them. If they could be
imparted to the reader in their complexity, that would doubtless be the
ideal, though he would not believe that their confused pattern was a
true reflex of Seville; so I recur to the record, which says that the
morning after our arrival we hurried to see the great and beautiful
cathedral. It had failed, in our approach the afternoon before, to
fulfil the promise of one of our half-dozen guide-books (I forget which
one) that it would seem to gather Seville about it as a hen gathers her
chickens, but its vastness grew upon us with every moment of our more
intimate acquaintance. Our acquaintance quickly ripened into the
affectionate friendship which became a tender regret when we looked our
last upon it; and vast as it was, it was never too large for our
embrace. I doubt if there was a moment in our fortnight's devotion when
we thought the doughty canons, its brave-spoken founders, "mad to have
undertaken it," as they said they expected people to think, or any
moment when we did not revere them for imagining a temple at once so
beautiful and so big.
Our first visit was redeemed from the commonplace of our duty-round of
the side-chapels by two things which I can remember without the help of
my notes. One, and the great one, was Murillo's "Vision of St. Anthony,"
in which the painter has most surpassed himself, and which not to have
seen, Gautier says, is not to have known the painter. It is so glorious
a masterpiece, with the Child joyously running down from the clustering
angels toward the kneeling saint in the nearest corner of the
foreground, that it was distinctly a moment before I realized that the
saint had once been cut out of his corner and sent into an incredible
exile in America, and then munificently restored to it, though the seam
in the canvas only too literally attested the incident. I could not well
say how this fact then enhanced the interest of the painting, and then
how it ceased from the consciousness, which it must always recur to with
any remembrance of it. If one could envy wealth its chance of doing a
deed of absolute good, here was the occasion, and I used it. I did envy
the mind, along with the money, to do that great thing. Another great
thing which still more swelled my American heart and made it glow with
patriotic pride was the monument to Columbus, which our suffering his
dust to be translated from Havana has made possible in Seville. There
may be other noble results of our war on Spain for the suzerainty of
Cuba and the conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, but there is
none which matches in moral beauty the chance it won us for this Grand
Consent. I suppose those effigies of the four Spanish realms of Castile,
Leon, Aragon, and Navarre, which bear the coffin of the discoverer in
stateliest processional on their shoulders, may be censured for being
too boldly superb, too almost swagger, but I will not be the one to
censure them.
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