The Canal Is The Notion Of The Young King Of Spain, And The
Work On It Goes Forward Night And Day.
The electric lights were shedding
their blinding glare on the deafening clatter of the excavating
machinery, and it was
An unworthy relief to escape from the intense
modernity of the scene to that medieval retreat nearer the city where
the _aficionados_ night-long watch the bulls coming up from their
pastures for the fight or the feast, whichever you choose to call it, of
the morrow. These amateurs, whom it would be rude to call sports, lurk
in the wayside cafe over their cups of chocolate and wait till in that
darkest hour before dawn, with irregular trampling and deep bellowing,
these hapless heroes of the arena pass on to their doom. It is a great
thing for the _aficionados_ who may imagine in that bellowing the the
gladiator's hail of _Morituri salutant._ At any rate, it is very chic;
it gives a man standing in Seville, which disputes with Madrid the
primacy in bull-feasting. If the national capital has bull-feasting
every Sunday of the year, all the famous _torreros_ come from Andalusia,
with the bulls, their brave antagonists, and in the great provincial
capital there are bull-feasts of insurpassable, if not incomparable,
splendor.
Before our pleasant drive ended we passed, as we had already passed
several times, the scene of the famous Feria of Seville, the cattle show
which draws tens of thousands to the city every springtime for business
and pleasure, but mostly pleasure. The Feria focuses in its greatest
intensity at one of the entrances to the Delicias, where the street is
then so dense with every sort of vehicle that people can cross it only
by the branching viaduct, which rises in two several ascents from each
footway, intersecting at top and delivering their endless multitudes on
the opposite sidewalk. Along the street are gay pavilions and cottages
where the nobility live through the Feria with their families and
welcome the public to the sight of their revelry through the open doors
and windows. Then, if ever, the stranger may see the dancing, and hear
the singing and playing which all the other year in Seville disappoints
him of.
VIII
On the eve of All Saints, after we had driven over the worst road in the
world outside of Spain or America, we arrived at the entrance of the
cemetery where Baedeker had mysteriously said "some sort of fair was
held." Then we perceived that we were present at the preparations for
celebrating one of the most affecting events of the Spanish year. This
was the visit of kindred and friends bringing tokens of remembrance and
affection to the dead. The whole long, rough way we had passed them on
foot, and at the cemetery gate we found them arriving in public cabs, as
well as in private carriages, with the dignity and gravity of
smooth-shaven footmen and coachmen. In Spain these functionaries look
their office more solemnly even than in England and affect you as
peculiarly correct and eighteenth-century. But apart from their looks
the occasion seemed more a festivity than a solemnity. The people bore
flowers, mostly artificial, as well as lanterns, and within the cemetery
they were furbishing up the monuments with every appliance according to
the material, scrubbing the marble, whitewashing the stucco, and
repainting the galvanized iron. The lanterns were made to match the
monuments and fences architecturally, and the mourners were attaching
them with a gentle satisfaction in their fitness; I suppose they were to
be lighted at dark and to burn through the night. There were men among
the mourners, but most of them were women and children; some were
weeping, like a father leading his two little ones, and an old woman
grieving for her dead with tears. But what prevailed was a community of
quiet resignation, almost to the sort of cheerfulness which bereavement
sometimes knows. The scene was tenderly affecting, but it had a
tremendous touch of tragic setting in the long, straight avenue of black
cypresses which slimly climbed the upward slope from the entrance to the
farther bound of the cemetery. Otherwise there was only the patience of
entire faith in this annually recurring visit of the living to the dead:
the fixed belief that these should rise from the places where they lay.
and they who survived them for yet a little more of time should join
them from whatever end of the earth in the morning of the Last Day.
All along I have been shirking what any right-minded traveler would feel
almost his duty, but I now own that there is a museum in Seville, the
Museo Provincial, which was of course once a convent and is now a
gallery, with the best, but not the very best, Murillos in it, not to
speak of the best Zurburans. I will not speak at all of those pictures,
because I could in no wise say what they were, or were like, and because
I would not have the reader come to them with any opinions of mine which
he might bring away with him in the belief that they were his own. Let
him not fail to go to the museum, however; he will be the poorer beyond
calculation if he does not; but he will be a beggar if he does not go to
the Hospital de la Caridad, where in the church he will find six
Murillos out-Murilloing any others excepting always the incomparable
"Vision of St. Anthony" in the cathedral. We did not think of those six
Murillos when we went to the hospital; we knew nothing of the peculiar
beauty and dignity of the church; but we came because we wished to see
what the repentance of a man could do for others after a youth spent in
wicked riot. The gentle, pensive little Mother who received us carefully
said at once that the hospital was not for the sick, but only for the
superannuated and the poor and friendless who came to pass a night or an
indefinite time in it, according to the pressure of their need; and
after showing us the rich little church, she led us through long, clean
corridors where old men lay in their white beds or sat beside them
eating their breakfasts, very savory-looking, out of ample white bowls.
Some of them saluted us, but the others we excused because they were so
preoccupied.
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