It Comes
To Much The Same Effect In Both, And As I Knew It Already From The Notes
To Scott's
Poem of Don Roderick, which I had read sixty years before in
the loft of our log cabin (long before
The era of my unguided Spanish
studies), I found it better to go to bed after a day which had not been
without its pains as well as pleasures. I could recall the story well
enough for all purposes of the imagination as I found it in the fine
print of those notes, and if I could believe the reader did not know it
I would tell him now how this wretched Don Roderick betrayed the
daughter of Count Julian whom her father had intrusted to him here in
his capital of Toledo, when, with the rest of Spain, it had submitted to
his rule. That was in the eighth century when the hearts of kings were
more easily corrupted by power than perhaps in the twentieth; and it is
possible that there was a good deal of politics mixed up with Count
Julian's passion for revenge on the king, when he invited the Moors to
invade his native land and helped them overrun it. The conquest, let me
remind the reader, was also abetted by the Jews who had been flourishing
mightily under the Gothic anarchy, but whom Don Roderick had reduced to
a choice between exile or slavery when he came to full power. Every one
knows how in a few weeks the whole peninsula fell before the invaders.
Toledo fell after the battle of Guadalete, where even the Bishop of
Seville fought on their side, and Roderick was lastingly numbered among
the missing, and was no doubt killed, as nothing has since been heard of
him. It was not until nearly three hundred years afterward that the
Christians recovered the city. By this time they were no longer Arians,
but good Catholics; so good that Philip II. himself, one of the best of
Catholics (as I have told), is said to have removed the capital to
Madrid because he could not endure the still more scrupulous Catholicity
of the Toledan Bishop.
Nobody is obliged to believe this, but I should be sorry if any reader
of mine questioned the insurpassable antiquity of Toledo, as attested by
a cloud of chroniclers. Theophile Gautier notes that "the most moderate
place the epoch of its foundation before the Deluge," and he does not
see why they do not put the time "under the pre-Adamite kings, some
years before the creation of the world. Some attribute the honor of
laying its first stone to Jubal, others to the Greek; some to the Roman
consuls Tolmor and Brutus; some to the Jews who entered Spain with
Nebuchadnezzar, resting their theory on the etymology of Toledo, which
comes from Toledoth, a Hebrew word signifying generations, because the
Twelve Tribes had helped to build and people it."
III
Even if the whole of this was not accurate, it offered such an
embarrassing abundance to the choice that I am glad I knew little or
nothing of the antagonistic origins when I opened my window to the sunny
morning which smiled at the notion of the overnight tempest, and lighted
all the landscape on that side of the hotel.
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