They Are Painted The Color Of Life, And They Advance
Colossally, Royal-Robed And Mail-Clad, As If Marching To Some Proud
Music, And Would Tread You Down If You Did Not Stand Aside.
It is
perhaps not art, but it is magnificent; nothing less stupendously
Spanish would have sufficed; and I felt that the magnanimity which had
yielded Spain this swelling opportunity had made America her equal in
it.
We went to the cathedral the first morning after our arrival in Seville,
because we did not know how soon we might go away, and then we went
every morning or every afternoon of our fortnight there. Habitually we
entered by that Gate of Pardon which in former times had opened the
sanctuary to any wickedness short of heresy; but, as our need of refuge
was not pressing, we wearied of the Gate of Pardon, with its beautiful
Saracenic arch converted to Christianity by the Renaissance bas-relief
obliterating the texts from the Koran. We tried to form the habit of
going in by other gates, but the Gate of Pardon finally prevailed; there
was always a gantlet of cabmen to be run beside it, which brought our
sins home to us. It led into the badly paved Court of Oranges, where the
trees seem planted haphazard and where there used also to be fountains.
Gate and court are remnants of the mosque, patterned upon that of
Cordova by one of the proud Moorish kings of Seville, and burned by the
Normans when they took and sacked his city. His mosque had displaced the
early Christian basilica of San Vicente, which the still earlier temple
to Venus Salambo had become. Then, after the mosque was rebuilt, the
good San Fernando in his turn equipped it with a Gothic choir and
chapels and turned it into the cathedral, which was worn out with pious
uses when the present edifice was founded, in their _folie des
grandeurs,_ by those glorious madmen in the first year of the fifteenth
century.
IV
Little of this learning troubled me in my visits to the cathedral, or
even the fact that, next to St. Peter's, it was the largest church in
the world. It was sufficient to itself by mere force of architectural
presence, without the help of incidents or measurements. It was a city
in itself, with a community of priests and sacristans dwelling in it,
and a floating population of sightseers and worshipers always passing
through it. The first morning we had submitted to make the round of the
chapels, patiently paying to have each of them unlocked and wearily
wondering at their wonders, but only sympathizing really with the stern
cleric who showed the ceremonial vestments and jewels of the cathedral,
and whose bitter face expressed, or seemed to express, abhorrence of our
whole trivial tourist tribe. After that morning we took our curiosity
into our own keeping and looked at nothing that did not interest us, and
we were interested most in those fellow-beings who kept coming and going
all day long.
Chiefly, of course, they were women. In Catholic countries women have
either more sins to be forgiven than the men, or else they are sorrier
for them; and here, whether there was service or not, they were dropped
everywhere in veiled and motionless prayer. In Seville the law of the
mantilla is rigorously enforced. If a woman drives, she may wear a hat;
but if she walks, she must wear a mantilla under pain of being pointed
at by the finger of scorn. If she is a young girl she may wear colors
with it (a cheerful blue seems the favorite), but by far the greater
number came to the cathedral in complete black. Those somber figures
which clustered before chapel, or singly dotted the pavement everywhere,
flitted in and out like shadows in the perpetual twilight. For far the
greater number, their coming to the church was almost their sole escape
into the world. They sometimes met friends, and after a moment, or an
hour, of prayer they could cheer their hearts with neighborly gossip.
But for the greater part they appeared and disappeared silently and
swiftly, and left the spectator to helpless conjecture of their history.
Many of them would have first met their husbands in the cathedral when
they prayed, or when they began to look around to see who was looking at
them. It might have been their trysting-place, safeguarding them in
their lovers' meetings, and after marriage it had become their social
world, when their husbands left them for the clubs or the cafes. They
could not go at night, of course, except to some special function, but
they could come by day as often as they liked. I do not suppose that the
worshipers I saw habitually united love or friendship with their
devotions in the cathedral, but some certainly joined business with
devotion; at a high function one day an American girl felt herself
sharply nudged in the side, and when she turned she found the palm of
her kneeling neighbor stretched toward her. They must all have had their
parish churches besides the cathedral, and a devotee might make the day
a social whirl by visiting one shrine after another. But I do not think
that many do. The Spanish women are of a domestic genus, and are
expected to keep at home by the men who expect to keep abroad.
I do not know just how it is in the parish churches; they must each have
its special rite, which draws and holds the frequenter; but the
cathedral constantly offers a drama of irresistible appeal. We
non-Catholics can feel this even at the distance to which our
Protestantism has remanded us, and at your first visit to the Seville
cathedral during mass you cannot help a moment of recreant regret when
you wish that a part in the mystery enacting was your birthright. The
esthetic emotion is not denied you; the organ-tide that floods the place
bears you on it, too; the priests perform their rites before the altar
for you; they come and go, they bow and kneel, for you; the censer
swings and smokes for you; the little wicked-eyed choir-boys and
mischievous-looking acolytes suppress their natures in your behalf as
much as if you were a believer, or perhaps more.
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