Google This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world's books discoverable online. It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover. Marks, notations and other maiginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the publisher to a library and finally to you. Usage guidelines Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing tliis resource, we liave taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying. We also ask that you: + Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes. + Refrain fivm automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help. + Maintain attributionTht GoogXt "watermark" you see on each file is essential for in forming people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it. + Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liabili^ can be quite severe. About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http: //books .google .com/I •/< i- HARVARD COLLEGE LI BRARY Gift of Professor Edwin L. FRANCIS, '49 HARVARD UNIVERSITY a ^\ IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS All Rights Riservid — The SuMMbK Palalj IN THE \:S' AND NOR"Ml.i;N AFRICA viui. fitz(;f.rald ■1!M t'. J- \ ! !0^^ IN Cv>;. wl ]< A N D \i ; ^ ■, i V \ \^ 1 N ( i s 1 N T i i. i 1 .\ 1 li ■ \ {■ i. V :-. 1 : :■, I i I 1 / <., L R \ I, I) l.fiN liON Ni. .'. YORK ; K. 1', IM 1 I 1905 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS SKETCHES IN SPAIN AND NORTHERN AFRICA BY SYBIL FITZGERALD WITH 63 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR AND MANY DRAWINGS IN THE TEXT BY AUGUSTINE FITZGERALD LONDON ]. M. DENT & COMPANY NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. 1 90s iy MAY 2 9 crn^ r^'X^s-^ CONTENTS CHAP. I. IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN .... II. ANDALUSIA ... III. GRANADA IV. ORIGINS OF MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN V. THE MOORISH GARDENS OF SPAIN VI. ARABESQUE AND AZULEJO VII. WOMEN OF SPAIN AND THEIR TRADITIONS VIII. IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM IX. MOROCCO X. ALGERIA XI. TUNISIA XII. SANDS OF THE DESERT PAGE I 37 55 73 89 105 121 137 149 167 185 LIST OF COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS CINTRA — THE SUMMER PALACE OF THE KING OF PORTUGAL SUNSET AT TOLEDO TOLEDO — PUERTA DEL SOL . A STREET IN TOLEDO TOLEDO — A STREET SCENE . A PALM GROVE IN MURCIA RONDA — A SCENE IN THE PLAZA ON THE HIGH ROAD, RONDA SPANISH GIPSY DANCING THE TANGA THE COURT OF THE LIONS, THE ALHAMBRA GATEWAY IN THE GENERALIF^ GARDENS, GRANADA AN ARCADE IN THE GENERALIF^, GRANADA THE COURT OF THE MYRTLES, THE ALHAMBRA . HALL OF THE AMBASSADORS, THE ALHAMBRA IN CORDOVA CATHEDRAL WINDOVjr OF THE CAPTIVE's TOWER, THE ALHAMBRA THE CASTLE OF AMOUREL ON THE TAGUS, PORTUGAL TOWER OF SAN VINCENTE AT BELEM, LISBON IN THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE A GATE IN THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE FOUNTAIN IN THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE THE CANAL IN THE GARDEN OF THE GENERALIF^, GRANADA ARCHITECTURA VERDE, GENERALIF^ GARDENS, GRANADA IN THE GARDEN OF THE GENERALIF^, GRANADA COURT OF LINDARAXA, THE ALHAMBRA GATE OF THE TWO SISTERS, THE ALHAMBRA ENTRANCE TO THE BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE, ALGIERS COURTYARD OF THE BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE, ALGIERS THE ARCHEvicni, ALGIERS COURTYARD OF THE BARDO, ALGIERS A STREET IN ALMERIA vii Frontispiece PAGE Facing 3 6 » » n 9 i6 22 25 32 40 43 46 49 52 59 62 67 70 73 75 78 80 83 85 86 89 91 94 99 102 107 ViU LIST OF COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS PAGB ALGECIRAS A ROAD IN GIBRALTAR VIEW OF TANGIERS FROM THE BEACH GATE IN THE OLD TOWN WALL, TANGIERS . A MARABOUT NEAR TANGIERS .... ENTRANCE TO THE SULTAN*S PALACE, TANGIERS . THE GREAT MOSQUE, TANGIERS .... A STREET IN TANGIERS THE MINARET OF THE GREAT MOSQUE OF TANGIERS THE PRISON AT TANGIERS ..... TANGIERS FROM THE MARKET PLACE . IN THE JEWISH QUARTER, TANGIERS . COURTYARD AND FOUNTAIN OF THE GREAT MOSQUE, ALGIERS THE MEDERSA, ALGIERS VIEW OF ALGIERS FROM MUSTAPHA SUPERIEUR . ENTRANCE TO THE MOSQUE OF 8IDI, ABD-ER-RAHMAN VILLA DJENAN EL MUFTI, ALGIERS .... VILLA CAID MOHAMED, THE RESIDENCE OF MR HAY NEW TON, CONSUL-GENERAL AT ALGIERS A STREET IN TUNIS DOORWAY OF THE GREAT MOSQUE, TUNIS , MOSQUE DOMES AT TUNIS ENTRANCE TO THE MOSQUE OF SIDI OKBA, KAIROWAN THE MITHAB IN THE MOSQUE OF SIDI OKBA, KAIROWAN TOWN GATEWAY, KAIROWAN SUNSET AT KAIROWAN A STREET IN BISKRA .... THE MARKET PLACE, BISKRA THE HORSE OF THE BASH AGA, BISKRA THE DESERT NEAR BISKRA . A STREET IN BISKRA .... THE PALANQUIN OF THE BASH AGA, BISKRA BISKRA — AULAD-NAILS WOMEN MAKING HENNA WASH Facing "3 »j 1 20 w 130 » 135 9> 137 jj 139 » 140 » 142 »» 144 j> 144 » 146 » 148 » 151 »> 153 » «55 » 158 »> 163 yy 166 » 168 » '7J » 174 J> 177 » 178 »j 180 n 183 » 185 )) 187 » 190 » 192 99 195 n 198 » 200 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGB ON THE ROAD, TOLEDO 10 INTERIOR OF HOUSE WHERE CERVANTES SOJOURNED -14 A SHOP, TOLEDO 1 5 A DOORWAY, TOLEDO 1 6 GATEWAY, TOLEDO 1 7 TOWER OF S. MARTIN, VALENCIA 23 IN THE MARKET-PLACE, MURCIA 26 OLD FORTIFICATIONS, ALMERIA 3O A WINDOW IN THE ALHAMBRA, GRANADA 43 DESIGN FROM PAINTING OF CHARLES V.'s FLOTILLA ON THE WALLS OF THE TROCADOR, ALHAMBRA 45 DESIGN FROM THE WALLS OF THE TROCADOR, ALHAMBRA . . 49 SPANISH GIPSY GIRL 52 DOOR OF THE COURT OF THE ORANGERY, CORDOVA . . 59 MOSQUE OF SIDI OKBA, KAIROWAN 67 ON THE BRIDGE, CORDOVA 69 PLAN OF MAZE IN THE PAVILION OF CHARLES V., IN THE ALCAZAR GARDENS, SEVILLE 74 CATHEDRAL, SANTA CRUZ, BELEM, LISBON 79 DESIGN FROM WALLS OF THE ALHAMBRA 97 PAPYRUS IN THE COURT OF THE BARDO, ALGIERS . • .101 WINDOW AT VALENCIA 102 A GIRL OF SEVILLE IO9 CLOISTER, SAN JUAN LOS REYES, TOLEDO I18 OLD MOORISH WALLS, TARIFA 122 PORTICO OF A CHURCH AT RONDA 1 23 A NATIVE OF TANGIERS 1 39 ix X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGB A CITIZEN OF TANGIERS I4I A WOMAN OF TANGIERS I42 MOORISH LADY 1 45 SNAKE CHARMERS IN MOROCCO ... ... I48 SADDLING THE CAID*S HORSE, ALGERIA I5I A NATIVE lYPE, ALGERIA 1 56 ALGERIAN WOMAN 160 COSTUME OF ALGERIAN WOMEN 1 63 A NUBIAN WOMAN OF TUNIS 1 7O A RECEIVER OF CUSTOM DUTIES 17I MINARET OF SIDI OKBA, KAIROWAN 1 73 A MOSQUE AT KAIROWAN 1 75 A NATIVE GIRL OF KAIROWAN . . I76 MOORISH CASTLE .......... 181 COURTYARD OF THE BECH AGA*S HOUSE, BISKRA . 187 A GIANT PALM TREE NEAR SIDI OKBA 1 89 IN THE SAHARA 1 94 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS CHAPTER I Impressions of Spain ^^ Je ne sais pas de pays oCi la vie ait autant de saveur." — Barr^s. It is not as easy to enjoy Spain with idle pleasure as it is for the wanderer through Italy. Many a thought or question rises to disturb the surface curiosity in confronting for the first time this strange and, in its least hackneyed sense, romantic country. The legendic past, the rugged mystery of a dozen centuries ago, these may well be forgotten, and the field yet remain too vast. Coming for the first time into this once elastic land, meeting for the first time in their own streets the types which have changed so little since the great master painted and purchased for his melancholy king the glories of the Prado, the feeling of familiarity with an age which should have long disappeared seems out of place in our time. It is in us rather than in the scene of to-day, in the out-of-date legends and associations which still crowd about this land, for Madrid itself is the most modern town in the world and the Spanish people, in spite of Taine's verdict on the Spain of Madame d'Aulnoy's time, are the only people who, however profound or superficial their decline has been, have outlived the word decadence. Were it for this reason alone, the country's future ought to be assured. 2 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS but in witnessing Spain from the very midst of its strongly- marked types and illusive history, the words of Taine seem doubly true ; *' La racine des grands ivenimcnts est toujours un caractire de peuple et I'histoire se ramine k la psycologie.** It is from no false sentiment that Spain seems still peopled with the creations of poets, the romantic heroes of the stage ; with the chivalrous Cid, with Gil Bias, with Victor Hugo's idealism or Byron's wild imagination. More than in any other country has an imaginary type been built up in Spain through literature, and the Spaniards themselves were the first to encourage in their drama an exalted rather than realistic language, an inflated idealism and overstrained heroism which gave to their stage at once so characteristic and stilted an atmosphere. So, when the •* Michael Ange de la France " caught his magnificent inspiration from their school, he carried into his own imaginary creations something of the moral inflation popularised by the Spanish dramatists rather than of the genuine qualities of the people ; for the Spaniards, even of Louis XIV. 's time, when the Castilian language was a common accomplishment and everything Spanish was the rage in France, were still an unknown quantity, reserved and proud beings with farcical shadows. So from Corneille's day on, the Spaniard as he really is has never been typified by foreign genius, even during that period of the last century when all the literary life of France seemed stirred anew by the stimulation of a vanished Spanish age, and when every poet sought to breathe into his poetry its proud atmosphere mingled with something of the old troubadour romance softened by far-off recollection. His pride, his gloom, his profound reserve, his bombastic courage and love of splendour, conspire to make him in literature a hero of imagination, and the first visit to Spain must bring with it a certain disillusion though it cannot disappoint. Far from that ; nothing in Spain IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 3 ever disappoints. All stimulates to new ideas when the old associations clung to through traditions and glowing pages are lost. The Spanish belong to a race that, however fallen its place among nations, has always inspired genius — a vital secret of life that makes of its decay a mysterious agent in the workings of the mind. Much of this power of stirring the intellectual imagina- tion of other lands comes from Spain itself, however, rather than from the people. The Spaniard is exalted by the peculiar scenery of his country, a scenery profoundly stimulating and in which he is framed darkly against the sky " like the cedar, patient of heat and cold, nourished on little, lofty and dark, unbending and incorruptible." It is in the landscape that lies hidden the great soul of the past, for did it not seem too crude a paradox, one might almost declare that the Spanish people themselves had never been great in the true sense, in spite of the century during which their territory stretched from the new world to the Netherlands. Can greatness express itself through pure fanaticism, through crusades carried out so fanatically that at the end of a century and a half Spain fell prostrate at the feet of Europe?' And for what? For a religion that was surely gaining ground in their country and must inevitably have triumphed without the shedding of blood. That such a people in such a country should justify for long their so-called " decline," seems curiously absurd ; but until within our own time, if we sift apart Jewish and foreign influences, a profound indifference is found to the ideals that build up a fine nation by its own merits, or rather by its own pronounced tastes. The great men of Spain detach themselves with startling distinctness from their own race like stars from the night ; and the immense growth of the country in the sixteenth century was as the out- come of the sway of magnificent sovereigns, those most splendid ' Taine, 4 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS kings whom, it is said, are made by the most wretched nations. The savage determination with which the religious struggle was carried on showed less of growth and progress in the race than the first symptoms of that extraordinary fanaticism which the Moors had undoubtedly imparted to the people they had conquered. Power in Spain extended more largely through individual ambition than through patriotic unity, and it required a monarch as bigoted and as determined as was Mohamed, a fanatical centralisator of authority, a military prophet whose army was foreign and whose famous fleet largely Genoese, to invade countries and wear his successes like borrowed jewels in a hollow crown while his people starved and their coffers stood empty. However interested the individual, or corrupt the government, the people have always conspired with, rather than against it ; with the building up of Empire rather than the building up of internal Spain, and few in the past have had the courage to say — "Sir, no prince Shall ruin Spain, and least of all her own.'* Nevertheless the Spaniard of no age is likely to admit that his country's empire-building was the cause of its decline. Rather has he continued to say : " From the time that we adopted a French family and French principles we began to decay ; and it is in vain that purblind politicians seek the germs of our corrup- tion in America. Let us rather look to that country for re- generation ; there the Spaniard shoots up again ; there we perhaps may lay our bones at last." But even this last chance is gone, and unburdened now of her Colonies, governed at last by a patriotic sovereign, Spain can turn to her economic future with untrammelled hands, and — though the question is still an open one — may not find herself wanting. But this new life is but of yesterday ; a prosperous regency, a purified court, and an opened- IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 5 up country of some thirty years is insufficient to change the languid characteristics of so tired a race, and to cure ills that the dust of ages still hides. A coup-^tTml of Spain remains in all justice what it was fifty years ago, and as the character of this arid peninsula differs from that of the lands to the east of him, the Spaniard himself seems cut off from certain traits broadly common to the rest of Europe. The vast tracts of his sunburnt land sparsely populated and stretching with wild savagery from the fastnesses of the Pyrenees seems to have divided his nature from the social warmth of intercourse such as in other countries of Europe palpably transforms a land as the years pass, so that France^ Germany, or Italy of to-day would be scarcely re- cognisable to the eyes of a century ago. But since in the seventeenth century the Moriscos were finally expelled and the fertile land so long kept turned began to harden once more, the Spaniard has remained self-centred and unprogressive. There are many who firmly believe that Spain is but dormant and its energies still warm ; that it is still the land of possibilities and its people full of promise ; but this wave of latent life is only found in the North where the strong breezes of another country penetrate. Nothing can be imagined more self-centred within the gloom of pride and narrow interest than the Andalusians and even the Castilians of certain parts of Castile. They exhibit, in fact, all the characteristics of Northern Africa, of the stagnating life of the Moors, without the "blessing" of Islam. There seems to be in the southern Spaniard a hopeless tendency to procrastination, and this "thief of time" has set his seal fatally on Spain, exhausted by fruitless colonial enterprises and indisposed to learn lessons of any schoolmaster — even of that greatest teacher of all — War. Maiiana is responsible for a curious inattention to matters in hand, and even in the Spanish Cortes a cultivated and gifted orator will often entertain the House at length upon some subject singularly remote from the bill under 6 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS discussion. Perfect form, happy quotations from the classics, and all the academic jewels of rheforic, combine to give a polished solemnity to the debate, but of any connection between the speech and the question before the House there is none. Irrelevancy is one of the intellectual aspects of the race, the Andalusian in particular, and inability to see the obvious, an indisposition to grasp the matter in hand. After the terrible struggle of the Cross with the still brilliant Crescent, and the underlying duel between the solid home life, the monogamy and strength of family blood ties against polygamy and Oriental languor, it is curious to note in what spirit the success and splendour, the victorious glory in. which Spain then revelled, was interpreted. Unlike the Moors of Moorish greatness, the Spaniards showed no capacity for enjoying the fairer side of their success, the happy sunshine of culture which had so distinguished their African masters. On the contrary, a latent jealousy underlay their letters and art, impart- ing to them an otherwise unexplainable satire. The Spaniards of the North continued to carry on half unconsciously the eternal struggle of the Castilians against the " Moors" and the enchant- ment of Andalusia with the almost racial jealousy of the North for the South, from which all Castilian learning and culture had come. This total lack of the joyfulness of life, this racial gloom of spirit which still underlies the Spanish character and imparts itself to the most casual observer, has made of Spanish story since the fifteenth century a picture at once too magnificent and too terrible to attract the sympathies of the nineteenth. The gloom of history is ingrained in the people still, and from their great past they have brought none of the softness of Italian poetry, or the calm of philosophy, which veiled the corruption of the Renaissance and still casts such a halo over the land of Dante, Indeed, the contrast between these two wonderful countries is so remarkable that it must lie not only in the Toledo— ruERi IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 7 countries themselves and their histories, but in the capacity for the enjoyment of life in the people. Whereas in Italy we find alongside with intellectual prosperity a contagious warmth and sunshine, in Spain we see its great day overshadowed by that curious gloom which confronted the Moors from the first, but never contaminated them* Certain it is that until this gloom of Spain was coloured by a growing enthusiasm for the age of the Moors and of their arts, followed by the belief that the tide was turning, and if not greatness as a nation, at least decided enlightenment was at hand, it remained too stern in sentiment to attract for pleasure only. What it sprang from, this strange mental darkness, when and how the ** amiga de noche" poisoned the people's blood and made of their most splendid age one of unmeasured tristesscy are questions as elusive as is the psychology of the Moors themselves. As far back as the days of Titus Levi and of Strabo they were ** clothed in black," stoically silent, obstinate, unsociable and contemptuous of death. It was already, in fact, long ingrained in the race when the Arabs invaded Spain, and the words of the poet-king of Cordova bear witness to it with Oriental contempt : " For the poor Christians the gloomy monasteries ; for our- selves let us keep the gardens, the harem, the baths and assembly halls rich with jasper and glittering stucco formed of hyacinths and illuminated by ever-burning lamps. For them the obscure cloisters, for us the fountains of silver and shady orange trees. For them the privations of a fortress life, for us the tranquil and soft existence of our pleasant palaces and smiling haunts. For them intolerant tyranny, for us a mild monarchy ; for them the ignorant ambitions of the people, for us the arts ; for them abstinence and martyrdom ; but let us enjoy the delights of friendship and of love in the fertile fields of beautiful Andalusia." In these words lie the keynote to the Moorish and Andalusian characters, and we wonder how the Moors ever succeeded in 8 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS taking so firm a root in Spain if, as some think, there must ever be some common sympathy between a conquering and a con- quered people, to hold them together. We, too, of to-day, must turn to these Moorish spots, the alcazars, the old haunts, the gardens of Andalusia, in fact to wherever the Mohamedans lingered, if we would feel the artistic sunshine of Spain. It is not found in Gothic Spain, nor, so it seems to the writer, in the halo of art and letters and adventure of the Spanish Renaissance, which was centred in a few, a very few minds who bore the entire weight of the country's condensed genius, staggering under it as did Cervantes till he died, or as Velasquez did who compressed into a life robbed of a rightful score of years such an inexhaustible flow of power as might well crush the vitality from which it sprang. These two spirits of one age were as wells rather than fountains, within whose profound depths is reflected not the sunshine, but the vitality of a race in its rarest possibilities and most cynical gloom, for the first and last time. The Spaniards have never worked the joyous sunshine of their land, mentally or artistically. Their love of colour has the fire of warm and glowing blood about it rather than sunlight. Their painters make it glow from within, not from the heat of the sun. Goya's faces would blush in the dark as in full sun- light, and to-day Spain has shown that that font of *'s^ng vigoureux" is as warm as of old, and Zuloago still holds the secret of his country's colour and makes it glow upon the canvas where the sun itself would look pale. So, if we linger through Spain, it must be in a different spirit than when in Italy, land of flicker and shade ; searching not for beauty or the joyousness of beauty in their common sense as possessed by other fair countries, but for character which is Spain's own. It's individuality is so marked, the landscape and the people alike so fiercely contrasted to those of all other European lands. IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 9 that for a while the feeling of harmony is lost, yet in no other spot is that harmony between man and earth so wonderful as in Spain, and those Moors who found the secret of grafting their pleasure-loving tastes and homes upon so stern and proud a soil were in no ordinary degree adaptive. The first view of the scenery as seen from the north is as a vast stretch of desert, a sea of gold and purples reaching to the sky. ** Never," says Rusinol, **does Spain seem to me so vast as when seen from the * rapide ' from north to south." There are certain impressions from a country encountered for the first time which seem, as it were, to strike to the very depths of the human soul ; to take by storm and completely subjugate all its complex web of sympathies with nature and art, stirring at the same time dormant chords of some past consciousness. Perchance what has already passed into the general body of human culture has been inspired by the very skies and outlines of hills now beheld for the first time. Cervantes or De Vega may have had their share in attuning the mind for its first glimpse of Spanish country, or some dusky canvas of Velasquez or Murillo, or long-forgotten page of Calderon. Be this as it may, no stronger sensation of its kind can be found than in a first look out of the railway carriage upon the country as the Paris express rushes to Madrid. What an extraordinary contrast from the last look out the previous evening over the rolling meadows of France ! A vast plain with a limitless sweep, as of some African desert, glitters in the morning sun. Here and there veritable oases of rock pines mark a strange pattern on its boundless front, fantastic as the trees in some landscape of Burne- Jones*s canvas. In the vast and lonely country a group of peasants is silhouetted far away on a white road with the same distinctness as in Egypt. The borderland to the peninsula has been crossed in the night — the atmosphere of the true con- tinent of Europe left behind — and a single coup-dosil is sufficient lo IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS for the all-mastering force of the impression received. There is only one word for it — Spain, and the world behind melts away under the dazzling splendour of its hot African sky. Ever so vainly may we try in after wanderings through the length and breadth of Spain to analyse the causes of such distinct emotions, to search the mountains and plains that nature may give up her ultimate secret. But whether under the mouldering \ \ walls of Tarragona, or watching the cathedral spires of Segovia kindled with the last rays of the setting sun ; whether in the tortuous streets of Toledo or the echoing halls of the Alhambra ; whether in the vast Moorish pile of Cordova or in the giant Gothic ^ntasy of Burgos, the intimate charm of this strange and fascinating country is equally impalpable, equally elusive, and it is, perhaps, the more alluring for this very reason. Approach Toledo for the first time. Already an hour from Madrid, we have sunk back centuries as we pass arid treeless expanses, such as Dor£ dreamed of when he took in task the trail of the landscape of Cervantes. " Le paysage de Tolede et la rive sont parmi les choses les plus tristes du monde," yet its sad- ness has in it a wild vitality which robs it of the inertia of melancholy. The slowly crawling train deposits one within half- IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 1 1 an-hour's walk of the market-place. But a step from the tiny station and the existence of railway is an anomaly. Take a seat on the omnibus drawn by jingling mules and the whole modernity of life seems at an end — to fall down the abyss of time with the first crack of the muleteer's whip. This is not our time, our century. The mind slips back to a mediaeval setting as com- pletely as though it had never left it. It is as the Canterbury pilgrims that Toledo is approached, and another frontier has been passed, the frontier of time. Slowly ascending the dusty road, the charm of a wondrous town site grows more and more intense. ** Dans cet apre pays surchauifi, Tolfede apparalt comme une image de Texaltation dans la solitude, un cri dans le desert.'* ' The river below gleams serpentinely like a white ribbon through the plain, and entering beneath the gate of the bridge which spans the ravine, the portal of time is passed into the never- changing life of a spell-bound city. City of fable this, of royal legend and hidden treasures, of necromancers and haunts of occult science, of gems and crowns for brow of king and youth- ful princess, nameless and for ever unknown. Was it not of this old bridge, athwart which a wild sweet mountain air sweeps, that the exquisite song is sung, — " Vraiment la Reine eut pres d'elle, etc laidc, Quand vers le soir, Elle passait sur le Pont de Tolede En corset noir. Un chapelet du temps de Charlemagne Ornait son cou. . . . Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne Me rendra fou ! oui, me rcndra fou ! " Across this bridge, beneath which groups of washerwomen are clustered, splashing their soapsuds round the curves of the river, and over which as the day falls herds of goats and laden ' Barr^s. 12 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS donkeys pass lazily, flecked with the setting sun, how many heroes of romance have passed ; and of it how many ballads have been sung. Long after Toledo had fallen in the eleventh century, the native poets continued to voice their abuse of the Moorish knights, and praise of the Christian caballeros who had vanquished them. The spirit of all these ballads is the same, and the following is one of the oldest, dating from the fifteenth century, — " Within a tower is Scvilla, (loftiest tower of Toledo) Lovely is she as a vision, Love itself had never seen her. 'Twixt the parapets outleaning She saw the river banks of Tagus, The far fields all dark with branches Carpeted as though with flowers. And by a wide road far beneath her Saw a prancing knight come towards her, Armed with all the arms of knighthood, Riding on a piebald stallion. Leading seven captured Moors, And in chains Aberrajados. In his conqueror's wake he followed, — Dusky dog and Moor despised — Clothed with torn unknightly garments. On a steed worn out and limping. Yet in countenance appearing Dauntless warrior, though disguised. Loudly he blasphemed Mohamed In wild language and upbraiding. All his bitter anger voicing. ' Stop,* he cried, * O Christian mongrel. Who, ere prisoner you made me. Took my father yonder captive, And, as well you know, my comrades ; If thou'lt give me them in ransom. Then will I in gold redeem them ; IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 13 If thou still refuseth freedom, Die to-day, or be my captive.' On hearing this, then Paranzules From his rearing steed leapt lightly, Thrusting forth his shining lance blade. To the Moor it seemed to glitter. With such fury and such swiftness, Such thrust of lightning all unparried, That almost to the earth it felled him ; At the very first encounter Horse and Moor alike lay vanquished. Then on the Moor his foot he planted, And separated head from body. After this had been accomplished. Back into his saddle springing, The knight rode proudly to Toledo." ' Passing up the steep ascent, the Puerta del Sol is on the left, still in shadow, for the sun plays on it but lightly and for a brief while each day. Little is known of this splendid old gate which, together with the blocked-up Puerta Visagra, make two such landmarks in Toledo. They seem to belong to a transition style of Arab architecture of the eleventh century, rather than to the Arab-Byzantine, such as is seen in Cordova, Tarragona, and elsewhere. But in the Puerta Visagra, first built before 838, one sees various features older than in the Puerta del Sol, in which is already seen the arch with several lobes and the pointed arch found later in the Giralda of Seville in the twelfth century. It cannot have been completed later than the eleventh century, since Toledo fell in 1085' and in its present condition belongs only to the setting splendour of Moorish Toledo. The architectural formation of an old town must have a certain influence over its progress with the times. A fortress ' Translated from Collection de Romances CasuUanoi, Antteriorei al Slglo XVIL Duran. * G. de Prangey. 14 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS town like Toledo, built above sweeping pliuns and surrounded with river and walls, rarely follows rapidly in the course of civilisation, and must look on inertly while the busy cities below, which in warlike times were of so much less importance, speed . ,- ahead in progress. It would be difficult to imagine Toledo modern- ised. People visit it to- day as they would the toy towns of a Universal Exhibition, as we did the Vieux Paris of 1900, enjoying the sensation of age without its realism. The entire town of To- ledo is as an enduring monument in Spain, and the very people who in- habit it are monumental in their efforts to keep in touch with the old-time sleepiness which now per- IHTHIOI Of HOUBK WHBRB CeBVANTES 10JOJ.K1.D. VSACS iL EVCH the yOUHg military element which is soon to pass into it will have to con- cede to the spirit of the place, for the character of an old and decayed city is as hard to transform as the character of some old-fashioned mind. Like all Spanish towns, Toledo should be seen in the spring, when the cold interiors have been tempered by the radiant Spanish sunshine, when the almost universal poverty of the town has been thawed of its winter suffering, when every window is thrown open, and through every open window drifts the scent of flowers, of Neapolitan geraniums and roses. The flies are apt IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 15 to be trying, but the resignation with which the Toledans sup- port them is not the least among their old-fashioned qualities. "Ah," said a Spaniard to me with a smile of resigned pride, after he had slapped his oiled head countless times, "those flies, they cannot resist." It is in Toledo that the first impression of Spanish gloom is felt, underlying the ap- parently pleasant manner of the people. It is here, too, that is first felt that curiously slow and cling- ing stare with which the heavy eyes of men and women greet the stranger. It is at once repulsive and brutish, and utterly lack- ing in the vivacious curi- osity of the Italians or the impertinent impudence of other races. In a land so saturated with pride of - birth and monarchical in- stitutions, socialistic ten- dencies have developed almost entirely from religious fervour, which unites all men and makes them equal Even among the good-natured poor there is a kind of implanted famili- arity in their manner towards all the world which repels far more than it attracts. But one must learn as best one may to detect when the best intention prompts a gloomy aloofness or an unexpected ease, as for instance, when some old peasant will seat himself beside one on a wayside seat and. accompany his unsolicited conversation with digs of labour - hardened elbows, A Spartan smile is not lost in i6 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS Spun, where a disdainful word would rouse a very flame of fury. Spanish pride is hard to define. A Spaniard in London once remarked that if he asked his way in the streets, he was answered .■,. withakindof"prideof ' Jr. t^r^i'^'llll ^ '■ 4!j birthplace," as though '•- any question on such a sul^ect was worthy of the greatest attention. ; - It must indeed have /" •• struck him as strange. In Spun, on the con- trary, a query on the ,[ same subject rouses a ' ■' contempt for whoever confesses ignorance of anything Spanish, and . ' '( I know of no other 1 ■i (; nation that can so well '^'.\< interpret the old verb "'^' ~ ' "to pride." Let the " ■. . stranger who longs for A D«.w*.. ToL««. ^ responsive smile and alert intelligence turn to the children of Spain, who seem so full of that pathetic vivacity which leads to no goal ; let him get a child-guide who will point him out everything, good or bad, feir or foul, with lively impartiality, continually looking up at him with large dark eyes in which but the shadow of settled gloom has as yet penetrated. He need search for no better guide through the labyrinth of Toledo to all the Mghts of the city : to the Cloisters de los Reyes, white and flowering with harmonies of spring and discordant reliefs ; to the old Taller of the Moors, where duenna-like old women IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 17 sit and gossip in the afternoon during the desultory sale of milk and butter, while the hot sun works round the dusty stucco of the inner walls ; to the Casa de Mesa, on which the Moors in- scribed their exquisite lettering. He will guide as though he were the man, and his follower but a helpless child, through the casual goats, the pack- laden donkeys or per- sistent beggars, up side streets and secret alleys, naming with swift deci- sion everything at which the stranger may happen to glance. " Sefior, a dog ; " •' Sefior, it is a ~ cat" — or a trim ass, or - whatever it be, his alert- ness roused by the firm belief in his companion's ,, complete ignorance of everything under the ^~ sun. In the eager child v ■ it is a charm; in the g*thw*v, to«t». man a stupid insularity. Moorish Toledo is far more attractive than the Gothic. Indeed the Gothic world of Spain as a whole is curiously unin- spired, and often conveys the impression of a struggle against other influences, feebler but less clumsy. Nor are the interiors of Spanish churches sufficiently pure in harmony to throw off the destroying effects of overcharged ornaments and decoration, and we learn less of the Spaniard's philosophy of art by studying the interiors of his churches, than we do of the Italian's in his. Those of Spain and Naples alike are choked with details which refuse to be passed over, as though eager to emphasise the same curious lack of 1 8 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS sculpturesque spirit in the Spaniards as in the Neopolitans. " They contain draped statues, coloured saints in actual monastic garb, with yellow skins suitable to aesthetics, and bleeding hands and wounded sides characteristic of the martyred. Alongside of these, appear Madonnas in royal robes, i|i festive dresses and in bright silks, crowned with diadems, wearing precious necklaces, brilliant ribbons and magnificent laces ; and with rosy complexions, glitter- ing eyes and eyeballs formed of carbuncles. By this excess of literal imitation the artist gets no pleasure, but repugnance, often disgust and sometimes horror/ More than that, it tempts to crime, even in this fanatical country, and the jewelled hand of a Madonna was patiently kissed till her pearls had been dislodged from their fragile setting and borne away between the teeth of silently blasphemous lips, while the diamond tears of another were too carefully dried away ! In the Cathedral of Toledo, which rose to rival that of Burgos,, and in which one of the most costly altars of the Renaissance glitters in extravagant gilding and ornament, there are beautiful dim recesses, and the Mauresque chapel makes this interior singularly in keeping with the spot. Here, perhaps, wandering at hazard through the lofty isles, a sacristan will lead the way to that dim chapel where, with lighted candle and fumbling key, he will open the old enclosure which shuts away the San Francisco of Alonso Cano. See how the light thrust in flickers through the darkness on to the miraculous figure of the Saint, pale as death, with livid lips of agony and divine longing, till once more the door is closed, and only the ever-haunting remembrance remains, even when again in the sunshine of the narrow streets. * Tainc. A Palm Ghove (C CHAPTER II Andalusia C'est unc Afrique." — Maurice BarrIs. More than any living writer has Barris interpreted the psycho- logy of Andalusia. As though penetrated with the atmosphere of Southern Spain, past and present, he writes from within rather than as a spectator. There is an opinion that sympathy shown with, for instance, the gipsy race, indicates something of gipsy blood within one's own veins, as was the case, it is insinuated, with Bunyan, or Borrow, or Sir Richard Burton. The same might almost be said of the Spanish race, which is one of the hardest in the world to understand, and it is therefore doubly interesting that this writer should have struck so justly not only the familiar Romanesque sentiment of the South, but the very vibrating chords of Andalusian consciousness as well. Ah! if one could for a while be a Spaniard in the streets of Seville, look- ing out — not on the world — but on just those streets — from under the shade of the sombrero, from over the folds of the mantle ; if one could feel for even a moment the blood of the people which is as their language, and then, back in one's own skin, analyse all from within. But the contrasts of rac^ come surging up, the slow pulses of our progressive civilisation throb coldly against the passionate conservatism of Spanish humanism. Here within touch of it, there beyond its sympathies, at moments stirred and at others frozen, the North and the South seem to meet only to turn away. Listen to the guitar and the rebec, see those floating shawls that pass, meet those eyes that seem to »9 20 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS say whether they would or not, " Well, what of it, are we not all Moors here still ? " Meet the mysterious insolence of the dazzling gipsy eye, feel the hot sunshine and the beating shadows, the languor, the burning breath of day, the craving for the night. Listen, and see and feel, and yet know nothing — that is Andalusia. What contrast can be found within so small a compass as that between Cordova and Seville? Cordova seems to have wrapped herself within a veil and to stand sorrowfully apart, far from the sensuous atmosphere of gardens, of the courts of love and of pleasure. For only what was vigorous in the life and death of Moorish days has come down to us here ; its promise and ambition, its monuments, its honoured niche where stood the lamp in which the flame of learning was kept burning till Western nations, wondering at such magnificent light, bore it away to illumine their own path. Black as the shadows in a canvas by Ribera are those cast by that great past, and only strong light could have cast them. All here is strong shadow and echo — echo which seems to repeat with resignation the words of Renan upon the profundity of Arab science and learning and art — " La langue, rien que la langue . . " But the vast central vistas of columns in the great mosque are still instinct with far more force and virility than can be found in the graceful chambers of the Alcazar at Seville, or in the voluptuous courts of Granada. Even the massive fountain in the cathedral orangery has a certain sternness of its own, surrounded by brawny drawers of water, and echoing to their strident laughter. Such is Cordova, vital sepulchre for the life of to-day, and as though to emphasise still further the atmo- sphere of detachment between the past and the present, the contrast between life and death, we see in the small cemetery of the order of San Bruno an open grave, which always remains waiting for its burden. No sooner filled than the earth is turned ANDALUSIA 2 1 from another, and the monks view it daily with reflective melancholy, with that powerful fascination which Spaniards feel for the skeleton of life as well as for life itself. It is no doubt a trite remark that the impression of inertia which Andalusia reflects is no faithful mirror of Spain's pro- gressive energy to-day. Andalusia is not Spain — never has been — though for one century her great artistic cradle. For some obscure reason the inspiration of art is profoundly sus- ceptible of certain influences of nature over others, and will again and again bring forth seed in one spot, while other areas, no less beautiful, perhaps, remain barren of just that wording of the soul's speech. Overlapping the after morn of the Moorish expul- sion, as though to assert new life on the very spot where so many foreign arts had bloomed, the extraordinary artistic buoyancy of Spain began when Murillo, Velasquez, Herrera, his unsympathetic master in Seville ; Ribera in Valencia ; Cano in Granada, rose within a common firmament. Until the eighteenth century Andalusia was, in spite of her Oriental languor after the largest intellectual and physical massacre the world had ever seen, fuller of artistic vitality than Northern Spain where the great thinkers, the dramatists, theologians and historians all flourished ; and the South kept for itself the sunlit birthplaces of the old masters which have now become with time as their tombs, monumental for all ages and casting shadows in which men pause eagerly to breathe in the old inspiration 6f a great age. But no young force, like love amongst the ruins, dreams in the midst of Andalusia's heavy sleep. No, Andalusia is not Spain, for the strong life of the Spanish people has never belonged to it, and even the part they played in the gardens of the South during the most important period of their history remains totally obscure. If in Roman days Cordova was the birthplace of Lucan and the two Senecas, and not far oflF", in wild rugged Bilbilis, the bitterly sarcastic, life-loving Martial 22 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS first saw the light ; if Avicenna, Averroes and countless poets and students looked upon the scenery of the spot as their own ; if both ages, Roman and Moorish — the satirists of Roman days and the philosophers and enthusiastic translators of the Moorish Khalifates — were proud to drink their inspiration from a common well, the intellectual life of united Spain has never consented to flourish in their shadows. Cervantes, Calderon and De la Vega, with their "cataract pens," Quevado, Spain's greatest satirist whom, alas ! the gods loved not, all were of the North ; and to-day Echegarez, with his versatile and many talents, hails from Madrid, while from Catalonia, where life is as sturdy and go-ahead as anywhere else in the world, came the poets of the troubadour age, come the artists of to-day : Rusinol, poet and painter of deserted gardens ; Zuloago, with his bold handling of human passions ; Valera, with his fine analytical pen. No sooner had Moorish energy faded in the South, however, than the artistic genius of the Spanish people underwent a change, and gradually deserted the gardens of Andalusia. It drifted completely away from its first cradle and sought the shadow of the far more intellectual North. Goya, the bold link between the old and new schools — child of genius and caprice — belongs not to the delicious sunshine of Seville or Valencia ; and Fortuny, he, too, was born elsewhere among the strong and laborious people of Tarragona. With these two great names Spanish art changed its river course, perhaps for ever, and like a spark of fire illumined the appalling tristesse of Academic Madrid. So, Andalusia, in a modern sense you bloom apart from Spain though in its midst — bloom apart by right of exotic not intel- lectual interpretation of life, while Cordova, Seville and Granada are now no more than an extinguished halo, the abstract symbols of your story. Not yet does your prose show what you are, only your poetry tells what you have been. Valencia smiles at us with living gaiety, but Valencia is Jewish rather than Spanish. Seville M TllK PlAZXA. ANDALUSIA 23 sparkles with gaudy hues, with beautiful women, for " Certes, I'Espagnc est grande et les femmes d'Espagne sont belles,"' but Seville is Flamanco, not purely Spanish. Cadiz belongs to the sea no less than does Venice ; she detaches herself from the peninsula like a pearl that the waves refuse to give up. Ronda, where the king is seeking to re- vive the old spirit of noblesse with forgotten orders of chivalry, -"^ seems to stand out "" from the midst of j Andalusia as a breath from the Pyrenees, too keen and vital in its atmosphere not to separate itself from the languor of the plains around and the ener- vating loveli- _^ ^ nessof Alge- '///'-■ ,,. ^ ciras, where ' '•'-.'" / we pursue the phantom of Andalusia to the brink of the sea that divides it so narrowly from its mother earth of Africa. And that African spirit of Spain, where can it best be studied } Surely in the little ' A. dc Mussct. 24 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS town of Almeria, as spotlessly white and Oriental as Tangiers or Kairowan. Whether life really moves here or not I know not, but the very sunbeams of this happy spot seem stationary. See how they send their shafts through the closely-planted trees of the principal avenue, where the minute social life of the town passes to and fro a hundred times in the afternoon, like the hands of a clock that counts not the hours. And Murcia, with its palm groves, its old legendic stigma of history in its Puerta de la Mala Muger ? Ah, Murcia, it would be difficult to receive a more profound impression of natural fertility and human negligence, of Andalusian bloom and Andalusian inertia, than about this exquisite corner of Spain where the oranges lie shrivelling on the ground beneath the mingling shadows of their leaves and of magnificent palms, waiting with its infinite hidden wealth, its certain double crops a year which no year ever sees, for the ocean-spent rivers to spread, not like one but many Niles, athwart the land. That Andalusia will be again irrigated as in the time of the Moors, few now doubt. But the gift of water will come not only from the North, but from the influences which fortunately for Spain combine foreign energy as well as Spanish pride. Now that Carlism lies dead, there seems every chance of Spain becoming as centralised in Madrid as France is in Paris, or as Italy is not in Rome. Centralisa- tion is not so bad as some think if it be allowed to develop round a throne upon which an able though youthful king is seated. But the undercurrent of progress which is undoubtedly mani- festing itself all over Spain is hard to keep in view in Andalusia. The people are nof naturally progressive ; and schools and colleges and railways are no more indicative of internal energy than, let us say, in China. There is one feature, indeed, in common between Andalusia and the whole of Spain, and that is the lack of intellectual life of any kind among the Spanish women. Charm, beauty which is perfectly natural, for they rarely borrow any assistance from art, the most graceful manner, the most ; Road, Ronda, ANDALUSIA 25 delightful interpretation of home life ; these all exist, but little else. No outside interests, no ambition, an absolute indifference to art, literature, or even music in its higher sense. What other country in Europe can say with equal truth : " No women play any part in our story ; their names are not found among the names of those we honour with laurel wreaths or commemorate in any way among our artists, patriots, poets, musicians, novelists." Side by side with Spain and in the same hour Italy, too, lay prostrate, but the vigour of returning life penetrated the minds and souls of her men and women alike. Her women had no Eastern veil to throw off, but in Spain the dearth of female energy and scope has done much to hold back Spanish progress and to per- petuate an Oriental one-sidedness in her sociology which Western nations no longer recognise. Whether this be one among many reasons or not, the civilisation of the South of Spain, at least, seems on a low plane without any especial ideals, such as some believe stir the Spaniards of the North. Deny it who will, Flamanco Spain signifies more than merely all that is picturesque, untutored, gaudy, impertinent and in- different. Wherever the Flamanco shadow is cast, there progress in some form or other stands still, and whatever parallels are drawn between African soil and race with those of Andalusia, they are heightened by the existence of these nomads who offer the same barrier to progress as do the wandering Bedouins of the desert. Every effort made to expulse the gipsies from the country has failed. " Encouraged by the expulsion of the Moors in 1 609- 1 1, Dr Sancho de Moncada, a professor in the University of Toledo, addressed Philip III. in a discourse, published in 1 61 9, urging that monarch to drive out the Gipsies, but he failed." They seem destined to hold their own by all the most frivolous of arts, and to dance away stern decrees no less now than in the time of Charles V., when gipsy dances formed part of the marriage festivities at Toledo. " Yet the Gipsies have had their 26 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS great men, whilst their pure blood has leavened much dull clay and given fresh life to many an effete noble vein . . . while some of the most learned and famed of the priesthood in Spain have been, according to a Gipsy, of the Gipsies or at least of Gipsy blood." ' Nevertheless, no matter where it lingers, the Flamanco element lowers the moral and progressive standard of a country, and in Seville that element is very distinctly felt. " They are," says Bourgoing, " the shepherds of the Spanish stage, less insipid but also less innocent than ours. Their knavish tricks, their plots, their amorous intrigues of a piece mth their morals, are the subjects of several saynetes and tonadillai, and in this school more than one of the spectators is formed." The gipsy's view of life, his passion for display, for dance and song, for boastful and idle existence — these have become Spanish as well as Flamanco traits in the South. Whether the descendants of the great tribe of Jatts from the banks of the Indus first imparted these features to the Andalusians or not, whether those bands that first migrated ' Sir Richard Burton. ANDALUSIA 27 through Egypt and Morocco or across the Pyrenees into Spain, brought with them this hypnotic extravagance, none can now precise, but, to its detriment, parts of Andalusia seem to owe all the qualities that attract the outsider, artist, poet, or idler, to this unaspiring people. In what mysterious link between man and his environments are we to trace the undeniable influence which some cities seem to exert upon the dweller within their gates? Is it some law of nature imperfectly understood as yet by science, which a French writer of the day has discussed under the title of '* L*hypnotisme de la Foule " ? Is it a force impalpable, psychical of the mass that dominates the individual, opposing, moving and guiding with subtle, ever-constant force the native freedom of personality, forging, as it were, invisible chains that bind the mind of the citizen as well as his body to the avenues and mansions that overshadow his daily life. For within the walls of many an ancient town there are narrow streets and open piazzas for the soul also, and the shadows of mediaeval churches and palaces are lurking places for strange spirits of the mind and the will, as well as for the bodily members when wearied with the noonday heat. Or is it the ever-pervading panoply of art, the perfection of ex- pression of will, faith, ideals and aesthetic craving, that has crystallised the outward decking of an old town with such acute force of bygone energies that the receptive spirit falls unconsciously under its spell, and becomes to a certain extent within its walls the thrall of a past that is ever present, a past which tempers or impels the dynamic forces of modern life, and resolves the active free initiation of the individual into the dreamy exterior of past ideals realised, and imperious in their bond over all who may meet their message. Athene Promachos dominating the rooft of Athens, is the eternal symbol of the city of centuries. Cathedral spire and vaulted aisle are her shield and helmet, and the tor- tuous streets and by-ways are winding as the serpent at her side. 2 8 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS But who shall fathom the soul of the ancient city and compel this daughter of the gods to give up the secret of her unfathomable intellectual charm? That an old town has such a character, distinct, individual, personal, there can be no doubt to any mind endowed with sensibility of perception. That this charm can take possession of the faculties, can absorb and delight or sadden, can mould the character of youth or trouble the spirit of maturity, of this there also can be little doubt. A gifted writer of the day,* speaking of Bruges, has said, — ** Cette Bruges apparait presque humaine . . . un ascendant s'itablit d'elle sur ceux qui y sijournent. Elle ks fafonne selon ses sites et ses cloches,^' Such is the mighty force of the town of the past in which the visible monuments have worked a mystic bond with the inhabitants, so that all who dwell there must partake of the strange impalpable spirit of the place. How profoundly true this is of Seville, anyone who has lived for a time in the town will be ready to admit, but what a glittering many-sided character to analyse is this one, if we endow it with its proper personality, if we seek to unravel the glittering threads that make up its twisted medley of impressions. The labyrinth in the garden of the Alcazar is not more bewildering. In the shadow of the lofty minaret bell tower, one is dominated by the supreme power of the East meeting the West — the deep shades of the sombre Gothic interior are all a lower note of harmony — grim, stern and ghostly, but only a stone's throw from the banks of the glittering Guadalquivir, whose sands seem to tell of the tawny sands of the desert, and whose waves dance in the smiling open space that surrounds the golden tower. A poet of our time has said that the West and the East shall never meet. Such, however, is Seville — a contradiction in terms, a chapter of impossible contrasts — like the cutting icy winter wind ' Georges Rodenbach. ANDALUSIA 29 which sweeps down the Alcazar's garden-walks flowered on every side with blossoms — and glittering with the glint of baked Moorish tiles. As some colder flower of Western womanhood, garbed in the gorgeous attire of the East and bedizened with strange jewels of Arabia, perfumed with attar of roses and crushed scents from desert lands, Seville stands out, bizarre, enigmatic, elusive, but ever alluring, vibrating with a language of colour as passionate as the sharp ringing of bells in her towering belfry — ecstatic as the sumptuous processional of gorgeous canopies that surge through streets laden with incense in Holy Week. Can Europe, can the East alone show another such wonder as this strange meeting of the tides, where the lofty palm trees and the marbled court yield in nothing to the glories of Islam on African or on Asiatic soil, and where the dim-lit aisles of cathedral vista are stern and rugged as the cloudland of northern mountain fastnesses? But the inmates of this exotic garden seem rather charmed in stupor than vivified by the sharp octaves of their sur- roundings. A devotional hypnotism shows itself in the listless crowd surrounding some shop windows, where are exposed to the public gaze tawdry images of the Virgin or the Saints tinselled with amazing frippery and of a lack of sentiment that is almost artistic in its very crying emptiness and shallowness. The very puppets, seem these citizens, of a great religious spectacle, as though the life which lingers in the letters of the past had sucked out all possibility of a present for them, and had left them only the dimmest wraith of a consciousness of future existence. Andalusia is as the Moorish archives of Spain. When Ximenez, Archbishop of Toledo and author of a history of the Gothic kings, burnt at Grenada all the Arab MSS. he could lay hands on — upwards of 80,000 — he believed that he had obliterated for ever from the book of history the memory of the enemies of his faith, and cleared the way for all the histories of the Spanish people which might follow the work of Alfonso the 30 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS Learned. But the Moors had left a crown of laurel which refused to wither. All the vegetation of Andalusia, the sugar cane, mulberries, rice-fields, banana and cotton trees, the palms and citrons, all still speak with the yearly season that changes the desert into a garden and the brown "camel's back" into a parterre. Only, perhaps, can the olive count this red soil as much its own before the advent of the Moors as in Italy or Greece ; the olive, which never needs transplanting, but chooses as its rightfijl heritage all the most poetic regions of the earth, from the western isle of Japan through the Celestial Empire to the flowering sides of the Arno and the slopes of the Pyrenees. So in Spain, the olive follows not only the most fertile but the most romantic and smiling parts of Spanish landscape ; its sacred oil burnt before certain images becomes miraculous, and it links itself into one of the most unique of Andalusian features — the curious dying-out life of the oil^mills. They are gradually disappearing before machinery, these old oil vintages which for centuries of Decembers and Januaries have typified the rustic Spanish character as it developed, not from the Moors in this instance, but from something more classic, perhaps, in its primitive, agricultural spirit mingled with the yearly ANDALUSIA 31 harvest festivals as were the vintages of the ancients, alive with the songs to Bacchus. Sitting over the fire in the mill-kitchen, on rugged wooden benches, the workmen in the days of vintage collect to tell their stories, and even to act them, before admiring audiences of the men and their wives. Garbed in impromptu costumes, with roughly-painted faces, they make capital actors^ with the strong lights and shadows of the oil-lamps playing about them grotesquely. The burning olive wood, the flame of the virgin's lamp that consumes the first oil crushed from the mill, are said to combine their lights in strange fashion, filling the corners of the great kitchens with wide patches of shadow. Rembrandt must have seen these lights combined, for many of his groups reveal this mysterious illumination, vivid in more than one point, and in more than a hundred insufficient.* The brown faces, black and brilliant eyes, blue shirts and bright melon-coloured handkerchiefs stand out in the determined focus, or are lost in the strange shadows. And against this background these men, as wild as are the shepherds of the Roman Campagna, celebrate their feast of the mills, a feast which is neither Flamanco nor purely Andalusian, nor in any way Moorish. Rather does it echo the Dionysian of the Greeks, and after a day of ceaseless labour, men and women will dance and sing till long past midnight, a dance at once more candid and more natural than the better known dances of Spain, since in these lonely mills men and women meet together wholly for healthy pleasure. The first impression of Seville is as of a garden of oranges, a sparse orange grove. The piazzas, courts, Alcazar gardens, all are honey-coloured with the fruit which the Spanish proverb asserts is *'Gold in the morning, silver at noon, and lead at night." "Civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion," wrote Shakespeare in a playful wording of Seville's pretty name. ^ Mas y Prat. 32 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS The town is far more living than Granada, that mediaeval centre of proud savagery. The atmosphere is so clear and the sun so powerful that the very artists bake their pictures in the sun- shine and declare that in the process the colours acquire a peculiar warmth. There is but one dark recess in Seville where the sun penetrates with difficulty, and that is in the vast and gloomy cathedral which in spite of its lamps — as many as the days of the year — is like all the cathedrals of Spain, only a dark splendid tomb, containing smaller tombs, dwarfed by their gigantic sepulchre. That of Christopher Columbus, borne by four kings of Castile, Aragon, Lion, and Navarre, is worthy of more than a moment s attention. But gloomy as it all seems, and barren of the richer side of Gothic imagination, yet it serves admirably as contrast to the airy minaret, the happy court of oranges and sunflickers, the delicious fountains over which the women bend, with the red carnations in their hair reflected like drops of blood in the clear water. The streets of Seville are among the most characteristic in the world, as they are also the most idle and flippant in atmo- sphere, the most genuinely Bohemian. For where else is the Gipsy element so noticeable ? What strange unforgettable types turn and greet one with lingering stare as we pass. This is the heart of Flamanco Spain where, after many a period of persecution the Gipsy tribe has ingratiated itself into the life of a people over-accustomed to foreign elements in their midst. Without an art of any kind ; without literature, architecture,, without even — here — a genuine expression of music or poetry,, they have coloured the whole place with their individuality. The very songs, the Cantos Flamancos of Demofice, in phonetic Andalusian, which, full of weak poesy, languid morals, and passionate sentiment, are chanted at fairs and markets, in the streets and caf^s of Seville, are probably not genuine gipsy inspirations, Their gifts are as illusory as they themselves Spanish Gipsv Dancing thb Tang a. ANDALUSIA 33 are intangible, and I quote the song by Biranger, because who- soever has read them will remember the words with visions of the streets of Seville and the glassy eyes that never reflect the sunshine, filming over as with a dull tear, when weary. '^ Sorciers, beteleurs, ou filous, Reste immonde D'un ancien monde ; Sorciers, bateleurs, ou filous, Gais boh^miens, d'ouvenez vous ? D'ou nous venons, Ton n'en sait rien. L'hirondelle, D'ou nous vient — elle ? D'ou nous venonSy Ton sait rien. D'ou nous irons, le sait-on bien ? Sans pays, sans prince, et sans lois, Notre vie Doit faire en vie ; Sans pays, sans prince et sans lois L'homme est heureuxs un jour sur trois/' Whether attracted or repulsed, amused or disgusted, we see them on every side, and with difficulty can one imagine Seville without this strange feature of her population. But that half its fantastic colour would vanish with them there can be no doubt, and not all the sunshine of Andalusia could replace it. In spite of their surface gaiety, the Sevillians have the one characteristic which unites all Spaniards — their lack of light humour and a certain forbidding gloom which takes one by surprise in this laughing spot. An Englishman who had lived for years in Seville, and knew the language perfectly, went one day into a pharmacy for some medicine. While it was being prepared the chemist entered into conversation with him, and 34 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS apropos of something began abusing the English very freely. ** No doubt you agree with me, sefior/* he added. ^' Frenchmen think much the same about the English as I do.'' *' No doubt I should too," answered his customer, laughing good- humouredly, " were I not English myself." The man was over- come. He said nothing, but when he handed the medicine to his customer refused to take anything for it. I believe such an instance of unhumorous pride could hardly have shown itself in any other country. Spain must be judged as a two-face medal continually, so strong are the contrasts on every side, in the people's character as well as in the physiognomy of their land. Turn, for instance — those who seek for this power of contrast — out of the sunshine of the streets into the chapel of the Hospital de la Caridad where, in almost impenetrable darkness, hangs the terrible painting of two corpses by Valdes Leal, with its brief inscription : " Finis Gloriae Mundi " ; a painting which seems to sum up all the passion for sharp sensation and violent contrast in this people. The original of Byron's Don Juan was born, as all know, in Seville. His parents were Corsicans, noble on one side at least — noble, proud, ferocious and bloodthirsty, all fine qualities for that age. Their exiled offspring continued the traditions of his race, and found in his own personal beauty, his powers of fascina- tion, his thirst for the blood of hearts, all the weapons for a life of gallant adventure. Then came a sinister vision, and as violent penitent as he had been reckless sinner, he sought admission into the holy order of the Caridad, whose divine mission was to pre- pare condemned criminals for their end. It all seems banal enough — a stormy youth, a sudden re- pentance — ^and Spain's story is full of such incidents ; indeed the message of the monastery to the seventeenth century rarely passed unheard, and sooner or later all sorts and conditions of men — men ANDALUSIA 35 of genius no less than men with weary souls — were tempted to end their lives between convent walls. But how different are the penances men seek out for the sickness or sinfulness of their own consciousness! Where one will turn to the message of Heaven, another will seek out the tortures of Hell as his cure. In spite of the apparent desire for the peace of Heaven which Miguel Manara, Don Juan's flesh-and-blood ghost, seemed to express with his changed existence, here, under the influence of Leal's appalling picture, other solutions of his inner mind seem to enter ours. Don Juan sought neither the promise of Heaven nor the warning of Hell to cure himself of his ills ; but with an indescribable horror of himself and the incorruptible soul of man, sickened by memory of sorrow and suffering that does not die, he sought a last and horrible joy in preserving before his eyes only what was corruptible. In such a man, to whom exaggeration was as the very essence of life, only a refinement of abnormal senti- ment was possible, and this frenzied sensualist found his ease at last in contemplating only what could not outlive the soul, the body that haunted him with its vice till he loathed it and gloated over its ultimate fate. So was Valdes Leal commissioned to open the charnel-house and seek his model. Ah, how all the characters of Spanish story, whether of purely Spanish blood or no, stand out in relief by right of some astound- ing characteristic, some violent contrast of mental physiognomy caught, it would seem, in the very atmosphere of the land. Not one seems normal, whether painter, writer, soldier or lover ; each seems to have been a prey to the volcanic forces that seized upon the mentality of Spain, as elsewhere upon the earth's surfaces. Hardly one of its great men can go down to posterity under one name — painter, or poet, or whatever it be. One is a poet, but a soldier, a fanatic, a monk, as well. Another is a national hero, a King Arthur, but the embodiment of cruelty and treachery also. Another is a disciple of profane love, but far more than that ; this 36 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS typical sensualist for all ages, a pendant to Cassenova and Ben- venuto Cellini, dared to teach as a master the lessons of the soul, and to seek his niche among the canonised saints of the Christian world. And here, among nuns, in the very centre of the Madonnas cult, Don Juan's death mask is seen, and ' curiously we look upon it, as we do upon all the strange contrasts of light and gloom in this land, the antagonism between nature and man, and the yet strong savour which hold all together. CHAPTER III Granada. *' Dans ces palais de f(6es, Mon coeur, plein de concerts, Croit, auz voiz ^touffi£es Qui viennent des deserts. Entendre les g^nies Mtier les harmonies Des chansons infinies Qu'ils chantent dans les airs ! " Victor Hugo. Contrast, sharp and bitter, is the underlying feature of Spain ; and here in Granada it reaches a kind of climax. What a virile and magnificent setting for a decadent people ! What a contrast between this lofty pinnacle where the torch of Moorish progress was extinguished, where the '* strong and ruddy heart of glorious Morisma " ceased to beat — and the race who yearly celebrate that event and their own subsequent decay with the winter snows ! Here where Moor and Spaniard were more closely allied by ties of blood than in any other part of Andalusia, where the vast population of fifteenth-century Granada is said to have barely included five hundred Moors of pure extraction, and where to-day the similarity of type between both races is strongly marked, the racial antipathy has developed to an extraordinary degree since the conquest of the city. We still see the people s crass pride in having descended from the crusaders of their Faith, the caballero spirit which greets one from the gutter upwards, as strong in the South as its origin was in the North. We still trace close ties between the religious fanaticism from which their 37 38 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS popular aristocracy developed and the old spirit of Islam. Still, after five centuries of fallen freedom, the gloomy inhabitants of Granada rouse themselves once a year from their national tristesse to an acute access of joy, other in spirit to their violent enjoy- ment of the bull-fight, that **banalit6 de TEspagne." The streets where sound of song or stringed instrument is now almost unknown, awake to the echo of guitars, timbrels, and rustic drum, which, in spite of all police laws, penetrate into the very churches at the midnight mass— churches ablaze with the mystic lights which Spaniards far back into Visigothic days showed such passion for on their altars and before their images, and which the popular street songs still record : ^^ A las puertas de Granada, Calle de los Herradores £sta la Virgin del Triumfo Con venticinco faroles." After a year's sullen silence this extraordinary enthusiasm puts all authority to the winds, and by the time the crowds have collected to witness the ** Fall of Granada," a drama attributed in its original form to Philip IV. himself, the excitement has well- nigh passed bounds. To witness Moor vanquished by Christian caballero, to see the latter treacherously beset by a dozen power- ful Moors and conquer them one by one, is exquisite joy. The race they destroy in effigy has long ceased to give a thought to the fair country from which it was expelled, but the Spaniards still insist upon a kind of memorial antipathy which savours of the old Arab feuds and of the same blood origin. This yearly fete of independence at Granada is as the mass offered up to the people's social conceit veiled under an exuberance of religious and patriotic pride. There is in its wild hilarity a fanaticism which offers a defiance to progress, for in Spain the serious and the ridiculous are often as close comrades as were Don Quixote GRANADA 39 and his man Sancho. It is, as we have said, the land of contrasts. The modern town of Granada is just *' modern," nothing else. The life of the cafts, the beggars, the maimed, the wretched crowds about the Cartuja, the new streets that hide the incon- ceivable squalor of the old, the bookshops with their dusty books, the short-necked women swathed in shawls and with dark and fiery eyes, the warm-blooded ness of life, and the dearth of existence, fill the new town with a sort of modern decay such as only our own age knows anything about. The microbe of a race's decay which used to hide behind the crannies and nooks of time-eaten walls, until some strong foreign hand had swept it away, is now given, in stagnated countries, a new lease of life with a new kind of whitewash. Let us hope it is not infectious. The ascent to the Alhambra, up the Calle de la Gomares, makes the first picturesque approach to the citadel. Lined with little shops of " antiquities " to attract the visitor who, American or English, finds a curious pleasure in being " done " when it is not by his own countrymen, we see windows full of strange odds and ends, black with soot rather than with time : old keys, ornaments, piled in artistic confusion, the rifl^rafF of a country from which all portable treasures have long flown. Here, too, are coloured stucco models of the Alhambra, reflecting one of the most hopelessly bad tastes that tourist life has developed. But all this pell-mell vie de boutique is soon left behind, and passing under the great portal we reach the shade of magnificent trees which have for a century's long summers sung the praise of the foreign hand that planted them. The ascent is but a short one, and sweet fresh air, songs of birds, enveloping verdure through which trickles the music of many streams, give this climb to the Alhambra a wonderful charm. Then comes the first sight of the great monumental ruin of Carlo Quinto*s ambition, only interesting now as marking in all probability the original site of 40 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS the old mosque, and bringing with it reminder of the words Victor Hugo has put into the proud sovereign's mouth : ^' Si haut que soit le but ou votre orgueil aspire Voila le dernier terme ! " Whether before or after seeing the palace itself, everyone who comes to Granada has, I imagine, leant for a few moments over the parapet of the old Torre de la Vela for the great coup d'oeil. Far beneath it lies the vast Vega, which is as a field of history — a field on which mediaeval chivalry left some of its best traditions of legendic valour and romance ; for was not Spain the "land of chosen warriors*'? There, tinged with those new and chivalric ideals breathed by the King Arthur of Spain into Spanish tradition and its romantic poetry alike, the Moors exalted their old existence, the life of the desert, which is the life of the warrior ; and there was enacted their citadel's last scene, as famous in romantic episode as the fall of Troy. The great panorama of the past lies around, a magic circle of stage on which kings, not only generals, passed, and where deeds, not numbers, made war great. He who climbs here on some wintry day when the lovely hills of snow make earth-bound clouds and when the sun is flecking the fields to red, may well think he sees still the gleam of crimson raiment which Moor and Christian alike wore in battle ; the waving of the crimson flags with their gold and azure fringes, their loops and poles of gold, their inscrip- tions to a victorious God ; may think he sees, too, the last of the Sons of Scarlet throw himself into the combat, mounted upon a mottled white steed, that old-time biblical emblem of good fortune, riding d la genette^ as was his custom, and pursued by his unlucky star. Four centuries ago ; but history stands still for who would read. And it was but within our time that a desecrated tombstone, which disdainful followers of Islam had long trodden GRANADA 4 1 down beneath their feet, gave back to the light of Tlemcen a melancholy reminder of Granada's last milestone. In the great plain of Granada the Moors, whose love of single combat had sprung naturally from the customs of the land of Cid, broke lance against glittering lance and fought their aristocratic duels on superbly caparisoned steeds. Single combat among the Arabs of Arabia, or the Moors and Berbers of Africa, had been all unknown, as it is among those races to-day ; but the Moors showed themselves masters of it, and the fashion in mediaeval Spain kept up the standard of chivalry, as the vendetta of other lands still keeps it down. The aristocracy of the sword was as sacred as that of the descendants of the early Cherifs, and mounted duelling had another characteristic other than the noblesse of valour. It increased pride in the steed, which, like its rider, could feel the prick of the combat. We can no more separate the Moor of history from his horse than we can the Arab of to-day from his. Inseparable in battle, created for man by God from the wind as Adam had been from a handful of clay, the Arab horse had carried the banner of Islam along African shores, as surely as the eagle had spread the pinions of Rome. With far-seeing insight, the Prophet has preached in its favour, and inculcated its respect. *' Horses for the combat, Cattle for poverty, Camels for the desert," says the Arab now as he did yesterday. The world to-day is satiated with descriptions of the Alhambra ; but if satiety shadows most beautiful works of art of our time, ignorance and indifference shadowed them still more in the near past. The very fact that no profound chords are struck and echoed through this enchanted alcazar, makes it more than ever the possession of whoever can enjoy, and who still cares to 42 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS dream. 1 1 is one of those happy spots in the world where nature and man seem to have worked together towards a supreme result. The delicate configuration of the hills, the smiling loneliness of the plains, the wealth of woodland that clothes them, all speak in unison with the fane environed. Scarcely conscious is one of the transition from nature to art, so exquisitely does the human achievement crystallise the dream vaguely enfolded in the land that lies about, and something at least of vague idealism finds a goal in this work of art, into which the essence of flower-laden slopes has passed at the touch of a vanished wand. So wan- dering through the enchanted palace of Granada, gazing each moment through exquisitely modelled windows at the glories of sunlit hills and plain beneath, it is difficult to decide from what source enjoyment is fed most deeply, from infinite nature or from art. As when sitting in a Moorish garden a sense of poetic perfection is borne from all sides with the ever-falling musical ripple of the water, the faint perfume of the myrtles, the dainty ramification of the " architectura verde," so, wandering through the vistas of the Alhambra, it is impossible to distinguish where art begins and nature ends in the exquisite borderland of each. Impressions alike from within and from without are felt, and to the most critical mind it would be labour lost to attempt to resolve this double star, or to appraise the value of the gem, as distinct from the setting. The crowning charms of the Alhambra might be summed up in the words, strangeness and mystery. But let it not be sup- posed that the strangeness woven for us into this fantastic structure is in any way due to our unfamiliarity with the senti- ments of an alien race, nor that the Lions supporting the Fountain of the Court were to the Moor of that period emblems, or realistic images of the monarchs of his own desert home. Even as the Venetians erected upon a column for the gaze of all men a creature whose fantastic wildness breathes with the GRANADA 43 eager and virile life of the young city of the Lagoons, so the Moors in this incomparable piece of sculpture have wafted the dim sense of their own monotonous repose, the sculpturesque calm of the desert, a chord that still echoes in the Arab's music of to-day the fatalism of the Elast petrified in lovely monotonous harmonies. There is a window in the Alhambra — all know it — through which that only real " Chateau d'Espagne " in this chateauless land rises through the thick darkness of cypresses, far above the valley's slopes, framed like living tapestry, between the Mauresque pillars. It was the garden of love, of which Palacio has written ; "un temple ay cr de amores y de gloria, Y hoy, pagina infcliz de nucstra historia '" ^ window i» the alhahbka, GRAHAnA. — a garden that rivals in loveliness the fairest vista of the Alhambra, Never did the Moors show better than in their pleasure grounds. " It is delightful to see their gardens when one has not the weeding and irrigation of them. What fruit ! what foliage ! what trellises ! what alcoves ! what a contest of rose and jessamine for supremacy in odour ! of lute and nightingale for victory in song I and how the little bright ripples of the docile brooks, the fresher for their races, leap up against one another, ' "A temple yesterday of glory and of love. To-day, a darkened page within our history." 44 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS to look on." * A very home was this of Oriental romance, a summer prison for the Moorish princesses of Granada to wander through, hiding amidst the fountains and flowers, themselves like exotic blossoms, with complexions " the colour of an orange flower on which an overladen bee had left a slight infusion of her purest honey. " And speaking now of these Moorish women, for whom all the splendour of secular Mohamedan archi- tecture was built up, in lingering about the Court of the Lions on which the harem apartments gave, the story of their in- tellectual freedom reads strangely like a legend, and, in spite of their delicate charm, these interior courts have the seal of prison on them as well as of palace. Here, if slave could rise to queen, it was the change from one prison to another, where the bars were more brightly gilded and the fair prisoner wore more numerous and exquisitely- wrought chains. It was a strange transplanting, this Oriental harem life into a European land ; but the fair shell where it lay hidden keeps nothing now but the murmur of flowering springs and summer breezes. ^^ Ne songe plus qu'aux frais platan es, Au bain mele d'ambre et de nard, Au golfe ou glissent les tartanes • . . 11 faut au sultan des sultanes ; II &ut des perles au poignard ! ** There is another ** tapestry" view enhanced by delicate Mauresque openings in the tiny Trocador, itself decorated with charming paintings of various towns and ports of Tunis, which tell the date of the ' restoration of the little chamber — probably shortly after Carlo Quinto's grand expedition. He was there- fore enabled to reflnd here, in this fair and laughing setting, the memory of his African victories. ' Landor. GRANADA 45 Surely no other building of the past expresses such gorgeous- ness as the Alhambra. It rouses the imagination with eager effort to picture the life and luxe of its wonderful day. But these dwelling courts have left no homes for Moorish phantoms. Men and women alike were too resplendent with the colour of garment and the brilliancy of gems to have left pale ghosts behind them. Their passion for life and splendour, for glowing colours, for exotic song, had something of bodily fire that refuses to be conjured up with any ghostly moonlight. They belong to the sun heat of the past, not to the shades of to-day ; to the keenest imagination more than to any historic remembrance. The Alhambra is alive with their vitality, but would laugh their ghosts to scorn. Brilliant as is the dress worn by the rich Moors of orsiax i-rom paintiho of charlbs v.-* Fi.imi.u, Morocco to-day, it can give us but a faint idea of the splendour in which the Nasrite sovereigns indulged. Sultan and Sultana alike delighted in the wearing of priceless wealth, and the jeweller's art in Afi*ica, which — not natural to the primitive Arab — had ever been largely in the hands of Jews, Berbers and mixed tribes, grew to be with the Moors of Spain an effete passion. The Berber and Jewish influences were strong, but far stronger was the influence of the East. " Le bijou, c'est I'Orient," and it was the East filtering through every channel of art which trans- formed Spain and the taste of its conquerors. In Spain itself, where the rude Visigothic age had obliterated many of the gentler arts of Rome, the mass of gold and silver work, the pearls and gems of Toledo, which had fallen into the hands of the wonder-struck nomad warriors, hardly reflected a general r 46 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS delight in ornament other than religious. But with the Moors personal adornment was a passion. Did not one Sultan lose his life through the precious stones he wore ? Abou-Said, " le Vermeil," garbed in the crimson robes of his dynasty, (so runs the story,) was the guest of the King of Aragon, Peter the Cruel, whose envy was aroused by the sight of the Moor's priceless jewels. As the simplest way of possessing himself of the coveted gems, he murdered his guest in the fields of Tablada, and one of the rubies worn by this ill-fated king was given by a Spanish sovereign to an English prince, and may be seen to-day in the crown of the Queen of England in the Tower of London/ When in 1492- 1502 the Andalusian Moors took refuge on the African coast, they took with them such riches as had never yet been seen in the country. The garments of the women, their jewellery and golden embroideries, says Paysonnel, sur- passed in quantity all the woollen stuflfs in the tents of the richest Arabs. Whether this is true or not, most of those rare jewels have long disappeared ; but if the story was known of all the extravagant ornaments worn by Isabel and the Catholic sover- eigns, or of the mass of pearls and fantastic wealth which, according to Madame d*Aulnoy, covered the half-starved ladies of the Court of the seventeenth century, we should find that most of them were Moorish spoils rather than Spanish in origin. In the heart of Morocco, where so much of the art and taste of Granada penetrated into the imitated palaces of Boabdil's mourned kingdom, perhaps many of those historic possessions long lay hidden. Who knows how much of the riches of those un- fortunate exiles may not still lie buried in the desert soil of North Africa, since the Arabs from time immemorial have chosen the mother sand about their tent-poles as depository for their secret treasures. With them, buried wealth is often left untouched from father to son, each satisfied, Arab-like, in know- ' Paul Eudel, VOrfevrerie Algertenne et Tunitienne. [ Genbkalipb, Granada. GRANADA 47 ing that his wealth lies hidden, nor caring to dig up or count it over — that profound delight of the Western miser. Not least among the objects of interest in the Alhambra are the curious paintings on the vaultings of the three alcoves in the so-called Hall of Justice, which were added by Muley Hasan in his flourishing and all too brief reign. A writer of the six- teenth century speaks of this hall as that of the Kings' Portraits, and it is strange that the error should ever have arisen which supposed the central paintings of ten figures to represent the Council of the King, since portraits other than of the Sultans themselves could not have penetrated into a hall giving directly on to the women's court. That they represented Nasrite kings is evident from the two shields held at either end by dragons, and bearing on a gold ground the blazon belonging to the twenty- one sovereigns of that dynasty. And that this painting represents only the last ten before Boabdil (from Mohamed V. of the four- teenth century to Muley Hasan, his father) is proved by the words of Mendoza, who was born in 1503 and passed his early years in the Alhambra itself. Speaking of the additions supposed to have been made in the palace by one of its princes, he adds : ^* This royal residence is in its way famous. It was enlarged later by the ten kings who came after this prince, and whose portraits are seen in the hall of the palace. Several of these last have been known in our time by the veterans of the country." These kings are seen seated against a blue ground studded with stars, and wearing the bicoloured dress of Italian fashion, only introduced into Spain early in the fifteenth century, and which penetrated with the merchants of Castile or Genoa into the Moorish Court. The paintings on either side of this central alcove represent Romanesque scenes, probably some Castilian tournament in which perhaps one of the portrayed Nasrite kings figured. The dress of the women is Italian rather than Moorish, for the 48 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS only authentic design existing as to the style of feminine attire of that day, seen in a relief in the Cathedral, shows the womenTof Granada fleeing from the city garbed in loose trousers gathered in at the ankle, such as their sisters of Algiers still wear. Among the delightful confusion of figures and animals in these paintings may be seen buildings, fountains and many details, all of which bear the character of the Gothic style of the fifteenth century ; and all three paintings, whether executed by Moor or Christian, bear the trace of the same hand/ So rare are the paintings of Moorish days that we wonder sometimes what the interpretation of the art was in those times — when the artistic life of Italy was bursting the bonds of the great past In the days of Ibn Khaldoun it was already the Castilian fashion in the Court of Granada to decorate royal interiors with portraits of royalties or celebrities, a taste which had long held its sway in the East, where even portraits of the Prophet hung in the mosques, silent witnesses to the impracticability of a religion that could not embody its God and Prophet in human form. If the practice was directly against the accepted interpretation of the Koran, it was impossible for a people absorbing the culture of the old world to avoid one of the most graceful branches of taste and talent ; and the Moorish kings of Spain, like the Sultan of Morocco in the sixteenth century, no doubt excused themselves by regarding the works of art in their possession as " exceptions to the rule," and justified by the fact that only those men most worthy of commemorating were painted. This, however, must have given their work, if by Moorish artists, an absurd restriction, and it would be difficult to imagine the great masters of the past con- senting to be handed down to posterity by only their royal por- traits, those magnificent " potboilers " of genius. Easier is it to conclude that all Moorish paintings in the true sense were by ' G. de Prangcy. fek^i^ij^ Tick Court of thk. Mvktlks, Tue Ai.hamhh^ GRANADA 49 foreign artists, and that inaptitude and not religious restrictions restrained the Moors' efforts in other than ornamental architec- ture. The words of the Koran, " Oh, believers, wine, games of chance, and statues and the divining arrows are abominations of Satan's work. Avoid them that ye may prosper " — words which might apply merely to the creating of idols — would have been more determined in their sense had Mohamed really laid down commands against this taste which the Arabs of Arabia were totally free of. The law against wine-drinking arising from the decided liking for it displayed by the Arabs, was sternly defined. Yet how was this law carried out ? Wine was the keynote to the poetry of the Omeyyade dynasty of Damascus, and dancing, song and music, though likewise forbidden by the Koran, were all in vogue among the Mohamedans of Spain, who only fol- lowed the teachings of their Prophet ^ ~ where it suited them. The religious t.oc*i»i., au.«.»«. crusade against the drinking of coffee fell to the ground before the weakness of the people for this favourite stimulant. So if the Moorish fashion for plastic arts or portrait-painting only occasionally passed bounds, such artistic abstinence pointed to the lack of any natural talent, and it was only in their adoption of all the foreign forms of culture that the interiors of the Moorish palaces were sometimes adorned with painted panels, their MSS. ornamented with exquisite miniatures, their textures woven with natural figures, and statues inspired by Greek and Byzantine art are said to have marked their artistic glory. So these paintings in the Hall of Justice, tinged throughout with the rich spirit of the Italian Renaissance, seem curiously out of place here, where the gifts of the Moors had more than ever previously thrown off old traditions and evolved an art of build- 50 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS ing so completely their own. That the centre of their most cos- mopolitan existence should have produced only what was purely Mauresque is in itself an interesting proof of Moorish personality, from the time that Granada had been founded as a kingdom^ the spirit of tribe no longer existed in its old meaning. The great Mohamedan family who had sought refuge there after the fall of the old Khalifate of Cordova was composed not only of the descendants of the early emigrants from Syria, Arabia or Egypt, the rude Berber elements of the Almoravide and Almohadc dynasties, but the mass of half-converted Spanish and foreign races who for centuries had been uniting under Islam. A single- handed race can draw more easily from the culture of others than a body of heterogeneous breeds and tastes, yet in the midst of this strange medley of humanity a last and beautiful ray of Moorish civilisation was seen. If it reflected through its very purity lights from fkr-off lands, they were not more than the troubadour poetry of that time breathed of foreign romance through the songs that had passed with the troubadour from strange country to country, uniting in the varied sentiments of a romantic age a single character. This was the charm of Granada, that into its last splendour so many rays from other worlds were distilled ; and whoever turns over the pages of Moorish story will find more of scope, if less of achievement, in the two centuries that preceded its fall than in the sturdier, because younger, centres of Cordova and SeviUe. In Granada may be traced the climax of Moorish art, while the decadent Mauresque, which struggled up in the midst of cruel restriction and the total destruction of Moorish home life — that starting-point in all their art — pointed more to the destroying influence of Spanish tyranny than to any natural decadence of the Moors themselves. They had ceased to bear their very name, and were but Mudejares, garbed in cloaks of greenish yellow, while their women wore a half-moon in blue on the right shoulder. If, following on the fall of GRANADA 51 Granada, hundreds of erewhile converted Mohamedans of mixed Spanish nationality reverted to the Christian religion of their ancestors, through the persuasion that what was good enough for their forefathers was good enough for them, the purer-blooded Moors did not accept the new order of things so easily. We know that the final loss of Spain was bitterly felt by them, and, counting on a speedy return, they had taken with them, on leaving Andalusia, the wrought-iron keys of their homes. These key^ religiously preserved in certain families for long, constituted with them a title of noblesse ; and for long the memory of their lost country inspired the poets of the Western Maghreb, where the greater number of Moorish exiles had taken refuge. ^^ Ah, regretted past ; ah, times long mourned and spent, Ah, Lord, where are those days of pride, days of content ? Ah, we have outlived them all, their evening seen, (Alas, abandonment of Spain, how cruel hast thou been). Ah, Granada, ah, pleasant were the nights we passed In Granada, city of pleasure that could not last. Ah, Lord, there beauty we found and fair disdain, (Ah, harsh hast thou been to me, abandonment of Spain). Ah, my God, by Thy mercy I would return once more, I would revisit that happy spot, ah, once as of yore. Ah, Lord, in this quiet hour unite me again, (Alas, harsh hast thou been to me, abandonment of Spain). Ah, Thou that deceivest not hopes, nor seest with eyes, Ah, Lord, Thou to whom each command enfolded lies In the letter of Kaf and Noun,' whose decrees are unseen, (Ah, abandonment of Spain, how cruel hast thou been)."^ ' That is to say, the imperatives of verb ** to be ; to exist " — words used bj God to give life to what He creates* ^ Author (Tangier) unknown* Translated from Chantf Arabes de Maghreb. Sonneck. 52 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS Most old towns are haunted by some eccentric living land- mark ; and Granada has its own, old and melancholy now, who wanders to and fro within the shadow of the palace. The typical gipsy, Fortuny's old model, is less importunate than of old. It is not age that has changed him as much as the changing spirit of the times. His day is over, he is but a gaudy shadow of artist life of the last century, and he knows it. " Je suis venu id parcequ'il n'y a pas de peintres," wrote Fortuny from Granada, but since then a whole school of artists has haunted the spot, and every pwnter, English, German or French, has found his picturesque attire attractive. *' Now," says Fernandez, " the artists come, but they no longer paint me with my distinc- tive dress, my three varied coats. They paint a cloudy day, with four cypresses and a fringe of sky, such as one might see in a churchyard." ' His model days are over for ever, and even the traditions of those gipsy times passed within the elegant walls '*" of the Alhambra, when the women washed their rags in the Court of the Myrtles and the men lit their kitchen fires in the polished alcoves, have faded away. He now entertains the visitor as guide to the gipsy quarters, the squalid homes of those Gente de Tijeras who in the sixteenth century followed up the &11 of Granada to add to the degradation of the place. Here, in this strange refuge the degraded but Romanesque gipsy has for centuries past in- stated himself with his paraphernalia of filth and shearing scissors ; here he trims and doctors up his wretched donkeys ' Rusiliol. GRANADA 53 for the gipsy fairs, sharpening his wits and scissors alike against those of his own race, in the effort to exist at all, yet so indifferent to wealth as we understand it that the Spanish proverb, ** Mas pobre que cuerpo de Gitano," is an ambitious effort to express where the extremes of poverty meet. It is a strange scene, this colony of gipsy families, held together athwart the centuries by no ties of faith, only by consan- guinity and language, — *' People among us but not of us, nomads of a progressive age, isolated by peculiarities of physique, language and social habits, of absolute materialism, and of a single rule of character, * Self Will.' '* * The Northern Spaniards find in Andalusian blood a distinct gipsy innervation, and here in Andalusia the magnetic glaze of the gipsy eye, as brilliant and as characteristic as in the gipsies of Morocco, is often seen even in the faces of the Southern Spaniards themselves. Alternately persecuted and encouraged — now for their quaint habits, mysteri- ous arts, or their dexterity in iron work ; now for their repulsion to the ordinary ways of life ; now for their burrowing qualities, as though it were a crime to sleep in caves and holes before breath has departed — these Spanish gipsies were at one time even regarded as indigenous to Spain, and they had perhaps a firmer hold in Andalusia than anywhere else in the world. If a genuinely civilised breed of gipsy is ever to evolve, it should be in Spain or France, the two countries where they earliest penetrated in the fifteenth century, and where, through the influence of the French philosophical school, their condition was first ameliorated. ' Sir Richard Burton. CHAPTER IV Origins of Moorish Architecture in Spain ** The Moors introduced a style (of architecture) more fanciful and ornamental, which beside had this advantage : it brought with it no recollections of deterioration and decay." — Landor. '* Unclasp My art from yours who can." — Browning. MoHAMEDAN architecture, though far less profound than the Greek or Gothic, is more difficult to grasp because of its delicacy, its exotic growth, and the wider field that it covers. It is, and will always remain, elusive in style, origin, and even in name ; for what is.it.^ Arabian or "Moorish," Sassanian, Coptic, Persian or genuinely Mohamedan? Whereas antique architecture de- veloped slowly from its own roots deeply implanted in the strong influences of Nature herself, and confined for expression to little else than temple or theatre, the art known as the Moorish of Spain is that of a mysterious and unchanging personality, a purely racial taste expressing itself through its victorious religion in every form of building from mosque to alcazar. This taste accentuated the Oriental character as it developed, but never underwent decline such as marked the Renaissance in later days. The humblest achievements of the Spanish Arabs are marked by the same grace and elegance, the same singularly fanciful character, as were their noblest palaces and loftiest minarets. It was an architecture noticeably human, expressing always the strong senti- ment of the nomad for the desert, and, in spite of the verdict of one French critic who reftises to trace the germs of the develop- ment to their native source, all who have seen and felt the 55 56 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS influence of desert life will find it hard to separate its memory from the monuments of Spain. The spreading arches and the doming of the palm, the light supports of his tent, the knotted ropes of hide that bound them together, the " patterns wrought by the wind upon the sand," and the scalloped shell thereon which may be traced in many a dainty arabesque, the thirst of the desert which called for fountain or stream wherever the tent was pitched, — from these humble features of his familiar exist- ence was gathered, perhaps, the cement with which the Arab bid the foreign artisan bind together old-world arts and make them his own. We trace in the empty alcazars and mosques Byzantine and Persian influences, but the breath that blows through them to-day is still the breath of the desert, fresh, distinct and proud. So, in studying the architecture of the Moors in Spain, the only country where it can be studied in perfection, it might be easier to understand as well as to enjoy, if we admit that so much was theirs, but no more — the sentiment, not the essentials ; the whole more than the parts. The essentials were almost entirely Persian as influenced by the Greeks of Byzantium, and we may safely aflirm that, save in rare cases, the artisans employed by the Moors were Persian or Greek. Of how far the arts of the conquered Sassanians aflFected the Arabs, save in the matter of their adoption of the horseshoe arch, it is now impossible to ascertain, since but a shadow of their handiwork survived the destructive spirit of Omar. But there is much in the splendour and colour of decoration, as compared with the ephemeral lightness of the buildings of Spain, to suggest to us the fabulous beauty of the palaces of Persia which the Arab invaders had destroyed with a touch in their early and brutal ignorance. Persia was the first of the countries, because the weakest, invaded by the Mohamedan hordes, and as Mohamedan civilisation began to take form the Persians remained to the Arabs in much the same relation as did the Greeks to the Romans, save that the Arabs drew not MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN 57 only from them for their wayward inspirations, but from all the old worlds whose glorious decay lay athwart their path. They possessed, therefore, a mind of wealth of which the extent is lost to us, holding as it did among its treasures the connecting links between the monuments of Alexandria and the palaces of Byzantium. No wonder, then, that however wisely is explained the riddle of architectural development in the East, Mohamedan buildings keep a mystery of their own, an individuality robbed from the riches the builders themselves destroyed Persian and Sassanian splendour, Byzantine and Greek forms — what a mosaic of beautiful arts ! Nevertheless, Moorish architecture separated itself from the older schools into something quite unique as a whole, and so surprisingly beautiful that those who see it for the first magical time are often wonderstruck that anything so delicate and so poetical should have resisted the ages, owing its greatness not to marble and precious stones, but to brick, plaster and a rude cement. In the examples existing to-day in Spain can be traced the gradual blending of the borrowed to the Moorish conception of the art. Cordova, city of learning as was Seville of music, offers in its great monument an architectural literature, the language roots of which are almost universal. Though the mosque of Cordova, which sprang from a Christianised growth of Roman debris — if such a term may be applied to the riches of the exist- ing buildings that fell into the hands of the early Arabs — is not Arab-Moresque but Arab-Byzantine in spirit and profoundly influenced by existing forms, it expresses far more than the early use of an architectural grammar. The assertion that where the materials lie to hand the work is simplified, is rarely true in art. We see the younger nations of our day toying with the developed arts of other lands, and producing disastrous results ; but the Arab builders from Mecca showed more than the merely adaptive or imitative spirit. Their old stock of desert pride, H 58 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS albeit but the pride of a primitive form of noblesse, was to avail them more in new soil than it had been able to do in their barren birthplace. If this mosque was identical in plan with the early mosques of Islam, it stood apart in the intellectual ambition which gave it real life. Abdur Rahman's desire that it might resemble the fabulously beautiful mosque of Damascus, exceed in magni- ficence the new sanctuary of Baghdad, and compare with even that of Jerusalem, showed a spirit of royalty as well as a leaning towards civilised standards of art. It is not without interest to note that of the two rival factions of Arabia to whose feud Mohamed had set fire, it was the Meccan noblesse of northern Arabia who founded the first period of the architectural greatness of Spain, and not the agriculturists of southern or happy Arabia, the defenders of the Faith whom the Omeyyades had so long looked down upon. As it was probably the descendants of the defenders who awakened agricultural life in the wilderness of Visigothic Spain, so the more aristocratic stock were the first to start there a new centre of architectural splendour and royalty combined which made the first period of Mohamedan greatness. In the mosque of Cordova, the only one of the three great mosques of Spain now existing, the Arabs typified the more in- tellectual side of their religious and artistic development, almost displaying imagination and not merely fantasy in their striving after the infinite as far as column upon column reaching to in- visible distances could express it. Without the richness of twelfth-century decoration or the minutiae of later Byzantine taste, in spite of its present blocked central nave, its ruined roof once so rich with form and colour, its diminished pillars and vanished vistas, we still find within the shaded labyrinth a hold on the imagination, of which only certain buildings keep the secret. The capilla Villa Visiosa, mingling mysteriously the styles of Cordova and of the most beautiful period of Seville in the Arab restorations of Don Pedro's reign, still fills one with MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN 59 curious wonder as to its origin in the midst of the great mosque's simplicity. The twelve hundred lamps burning their thousand " arrobas " of sacred oil yearly have long been extinguished, but in no building does the play of tinted sunbeam upon wall and pavement seem to throw such bright and speaking illumination on Mohamedan power as here. Heights which, in the Gothic, measure their vainly yearning de- sire ag^nst the sky, are absent in this many - pillared maze where columns and shadows of columns, distances and ghosts of distance, made once an earthly infinitude for the faithful. How was it lighted, this dim religious darkness? Fer- gusson believes that the upper part of the outer walls consisted origin- ally of an open colonnade. This marvel of the Middle Ages, con- sidered as the greatest religious achievement of the Moors, might almost be regarded as achieved dooh op imm cou.t of tub oi