When It Came In
Those Earlier Days To A Question Of Sides Between The Spaniards And The
Moors, As Washington Irving Invited My Boyhood To Take It In His
Chronicle Of The Conquest Of Granada, I Experienced On A Larger Scale My
Difficulty In The Case Of The Mexicans And Peruvians.
The case of these
had been reported to me in the school-readers, but here, now, was an
affair submitted to the mature judgment of a boy of twelve, and yet I
felt as helpless as I was at ten.
Will it be credited that at
seventy-four I am still often in doubt which side I should have had
win, though I used to fight on both? Since the matter was settled more
than four hundred years ago, I will not give the reasons for my divided
allegiance. They would hardly avail now to reverse the tragic fate of
the Moors, and if I try I cannot altogether wish to reverse it. Whatever
Spanish misrule has been since Islam was overthrown in Granada, it has
been the error of law, and the rule of Islam at the best had always been
the effect of personal will, the caprice of despots high and low, the
unstatuted sufferance of slaves, high and low. The gloomiest and
cruelest error of Inquisitional Spain was nobler, with its adoration of
ideal womanhood, than the Mohammedan state with its sensual dreams of
Paradise. I will not pretend (as I very well might, and as I perhaps
ought) that I thought of these things, all or any, as our train began to
slope rather more rapidly toward Granada, and to find its way under the
rising moon over the storied Vega.
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