When The Procession Was Housed Again, We Went Off And Forgot It In The
Gardens Of The Alcazar.
But I must not begin yet on the gardens of the
Alcazar.
We went to them every day, as we did to the cathedral, but we
did not see them until our second morning in Seville. We gave what was
left from the first morning in the cathedral to a random exploration of
the streets and places of the city. There was, no doubt, everywhere some
touch of the bravery of our square of San Fernando, where the public
windows were hung with crimson tapestries and brocades in honor of St.
Raphael; but his holiday did not make itself molestively felt in the
city's business or pleasure. Where we could drive we drove, and where we
must we walked, and we walked of course through the famous Calle de las
Sierpes, because no one drives there. As a rule no woman walks there,
and naturally there were many women walking there, under the eyes of the
popular cafes and aristocratic clubs which principally abound in Las
Sierpes, for it is also the street of the principal shops, though it is
not very long and is narrower than many other streets of Seville. It has
its name from so commonplace an origin as the sign over a tavern door,
with some snakes painted on it; but if the example of sinuosity had been
set it by prehistoric serpents, there were scores of other streets which
have bettered its instruction. There were streets that crooked away
everywhere, not going anywhere, and breaking from time to time into
irregular angular spaces with a church or a convent or a nobleman's
house looking into them.
VI
The noblemen's houses often showed a severely simple facade to the
square or street, and hid their inner glories with what could have been
fancied a haughty reserve if it had not been for the frankness with
which they opened their _patios_ to the gaze of the stranger, who, when
he did not halt his carriage before them, could enjoy their hospitality
from a sidewalk sometimes eighteen inches wide. The passing tram-car
might grind him against the tall grilles which were the only barriers to
the _patios,_ but otherwise there would be nothing to spoil his
enjoyment of those marble floors and tiled walls and fountains potted
round with flowering plants. In summer he could have seen the family
life there; and people who are of such oriental seclusion otherwise will
sometimes even suffer the admiring traveler to come as well as look
within. But one who would not press their hospitality so far could
reward his forbearance by finding some of the _patios_ too new-looking,
with rather a glare from their tiles and marbles, their painted iron
pillars, and their glass roofs which the rain comes through in the
winter. The ladies sit and sew there, or talk, if they prefer, and
receive their friends, and turn night into day in the fashion of
climates where they are so easily convertible. The _patio_ is the place
of that peculiarly Spanish rite, the _tertulia,_ and the family nightly
meets its next of kin and then its nearer and farther friends there with
that Latin regularity which may also be monotony. One _patio_ is often
much like another, though none was perhaps of so much public interest as
the _patio_ of the lady who loved a bull-fighter and has made her
_patio_ a sort of shrine to him. The famous _espada_ perished in his
heroic calling, no worse if no better than those who saw him die, and
now his bust is in plain view, with a fit inscription recognizing his
worth and prowess, and with the heads of some of the bulls he slew.
Under that clement sky the elements do not waste the works of man as
elsewhere, and many of the houses of Seville are said to be such as the
Moors built there. We did not know them from the Christian houses; but
there are no longer any mosques, while in our wanderings we had the
pretty constant succession of the convents which, when they are still in
the keeping of their sisterhoods and brotherhoods, remain monuments of
the medieval piety of Spain; or, when they are suppressed and turned to
secular uses, attest the recurrence of her modern moods of revolution
and reform. It is to one of these that Seville owes the stately Alameda
de Hercules, a promenade covering the length and breadth of aforetime
convent gardens, which you reach from the Street of the Serpents by the
Street of the Love of God, and are then startled by the pagan presence
of two mighty columns lifting aloft the figures of Caesar and of the
titular demigod. Statues and pillars are alike antique, and give you a
moment of the Eternal City the more intense because the promenade is of
an unkempt and broken surface, like the Cow-field which the Roman Forum
used to be. Baedeker calls it shady, and I dare say it is shady, but I
do not remember the trees - only those glorious columns climbing the
summer sky of the Andalusian autumn, and proclaiming the imperishable
memory of the republic that conquered and the empire that ruled the
world, and have never loosed their hold upon it. We were rather newly
from the grass-grown ruin of a Roman town in Wales, and in this other
Iberian land we were always meeting the witnesses of the grandeur which
no change short of some universal sea change can wholly sweep from the
earth. Before it Goth and Arab shrink, with all their works, into the
local and provisional; Rome remains for all time imperial and universal.
To descend from this high-horsed reflection, as I must, I have to record
that there did not seem to be so many small boys in Seville as in the
Castillian capitals we had visited; in the very home of the bull-feast
we did not see one mimic _corrida_ given by the _torreros_ of the
future.
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