Heroic Spain Part 9

and he wrote his immortal "Coplas" in the golden age of Isabella herself.

To return to Ximenez. After a long period of retirement he was made, against his will, confessor to the Queen at Valladolid. There exists an account by a witness of the sensation his thin, ascetic face caused in the court, as if an early Syrian anchorite had wandered thither. Three years later, on the death of Mendoza, the Queen's influence in Rome had Ximenez named his successor in Toledo. So angry was her confessor that he left the court. Isabella, gallant woman of heart and brain, who so enthusiastically perceived greatness in others, appealed to the Pope to order Cisneros to accept his see.

Up to this the Archbishops of Toledo had been men of great lineage who lived with splendor. And a striking succession of master minds they make, lying ready for an historian to group in a remarkable record; scholars, statesmen, founders of hospitals and schools, now a prelate of saintly life, now a leader of armies like Archbishop Rodrigo, who having borne the standard of the Cross in the thick of the fight at Las Navas de Tolosa, chanted the Te Deum of victory on that memorable field, the first Christian foothold in Andalusia. Of all the primates of Toledo, Mendoza, "Tertius Rex," had been highest in rank and power. The monk who succeeded this prince of the church dropped all pomp and lived like a humble Franciscan. Again the undaunted Isabella appealed to her friend the Pope to advise the new Archbishop to keep up the dignity of his see before the people. Cisneros yielded outwardly, but under the veneer of display he led the ascetic life.

The Queen's insight into character had judged right. Mystic contemplator though he was, Ximenez was a born ruler: prudent, courageous, and firm.

He straightened difficulties and reformed abuses. As his own moral character was stainless and his disinterestedness well proven, there was happily no inconsistency in his preaching. Gomez tells that the moral tone of society, lay and ecclesiastic, was so improved by the energetic bishop that "men seemed to have been born again."

As to Ximenez' much criticised att.i.tude toward the Moors, it was at one with its age. To reproach him with it is as unreasonable as to condemn Marcus Aurelius for having persecuted the Christians, or George Was.h.i.+ngton for having silently accepted negro slavery. A man, no matter how great his character, is limited somewhere by the standards of his period. The fifteenth century was far from being radical in the privileges it extended to free opinion. Even some generations later we find, in the Palatinate, when the Elector Frederick III turned from Lutheranism to Calvinism, in 1563, he forced all his subjects under pain of banishment, to turn with him. Within a few years his son changed them back to Lutheranism, only to have them, under the next ruler, constrained with severe punishments to again accept the Heidelberg catechism. The religious history of most of the states of Europe prove that the same theory was held: "cujus regio, ejus religio." Ximenez can plead more excuse for his att.i.tude since in Spain was the problem of the more radical difference of Christianity and Islam. He felt, and the constant later revolts somewhat justified the idea, that a newly conquered people is not likely to remain loyal, when they are bound together against their ruler in an antagonistic creed. So he went to Granada in 1499 to labor for the conversion of the people.

At first he used much the same methods that prevail to-day in some of our cities, what we may call the soup-kitchen missionary system to evangelize the emigrant. Ximenez instructed the Mohammedan in doctrine, and he also gave presents to impress the oriental mind. So effectively did the method work that immense numbers of citizens embraced the faith.

On one day four thousand were baptized. So far the treaty of the Conquest was not violated, since the conversions were voluntary. When, however, there was a revolt of those Moors who were angered by seeing the rapid spread of Christianity, harsher methods than persuasion were resorted to. The letter of the treaty was kept but its spirit, that reflected Isabella's magnanimous tolerance, was stretched indeed. The first uprising turned to open rebellion, and when this was put down, the majority of the citizens let themselves be baptized to avoid exile and confiscation. Though the two great prelates, the gentle Talavera and the indomitable Ximenez, burning with zeal, went about the city catechising and instructing the poorest, there were many thousands of Mohammedans who hated the religion to which outwardly they conformed. A child to-day can understand the futility of such conversions. No one denies that Ximenez was stern. He who loved learning with the pa.s.sionate devotion of a Bede or an Erasmus, (we all know the remark of Francis I when confined at Alcala, "one Spanish monk has done what it would take a line of kings in France to accomplish"), this same humanist scholar burned in public bonfire the Moslem books, only reserving the medical ones for Alcala: surely this is proof of his grim sincerity.

When Isabella died, Ximenez took Ferdinand's side against his impertinent Austrian son-in-law. Philip I did not live long enough to involve Spain in an internecine war, her curse for ages; and it was the great statesman's hold on the government, at the time of the young king's sudden death, that saved the country from a revolution. Ferdinand had the man to whom he owed Castile, created a Cardinal, and he also appointed him Grand-Inquisitor.

Many hold the erroneous opinion that Ximenez was one of the founders of the Holy Office in Spain. It was established ten years before he came to court as Isabella's confessor, and it was only now, in his sixty-first year that he had control in it. True to his reforming character he set about changing what abuses had crept in. He fostered the better religious instruction of the newly converted; and he prosecuted the inquisitor Lucero, who had been guilty of injustice.

The great Cardinal-Archbishop was over threescore and ten when he undertook the expedition to Northern Africa. He had long burned to plant the Church again where it had flourished under St. Cyprian and St.

Augustine. As the pirates of Oran were a terror in the Mediterranean, it was against that city he set out in the year 1509. His address to the troops before the battle, encouraging them against an enemy who had ravaged their coasts, dragged their children into slavery, and insulted the Christian name, roused the men to an heroic charge up the hill of Oran with Spain's battle cry _Santiago!_ on their lips. Of the vast treasure found in the city, Ximenez who had spent a fortune to fit out the expedition, only reserved the Moslem books for his University of Alcala. For it must not be forgotten that in the midst of state questions, this remarkable man was carrying on the building and endowing of an University to whose halls the learned minds of Spain and Europe were invited. He was printing at his own expense the well-known Polyglot Bible, the first edition in their original texts of the Christian Scriptures. From his early years a close student of the Bible, he had learned Chaldaic and Hebrew for its better study; every day on his knees he read a chapter of the Holy Word. Besides these interests he found time to build various hospitals, libraries, and churches, to organize summer retreats for the health of his professors, to print and distribute free works on agriculture, to give dowries to distressed women, to visit the sick in person, and to feed daily thirty poor in his palace.

Ferdinand, a good ruler, but suspicious and ungrateful, never had much love for the Cardinal. Yet on his deathbed he left him Regent of Castile, saying that a better leader on account of his virtues and love of justice could not be found to reestablish order and morality, and only wis.h.i.+ng he were a little more pliable. Some idea of Ximenez' genius may be gathered from a hasty review of his Regency, which covered the last two years of his life. It stands an astonis.h.i.+ng feat of n.o.ble activity. He brought order into the finances and paid the crown debts.

He introduced the militia system into the army, proving that men fight better when they defend their own homes. He strengthened the navy to help break the Moorish pirate Barbarossa who controlled the sea. He restored the dockyards of Seville. He crushed a French invasion in Navarre, and put down local disorders in Malaga and other places, for the n.o.bles took this opportunity to again a.s.sert themselves. He adjusted troubles with both the ex-queens, Juana la Loca and Germaine de Foix. It was just four months before his death that the Polyglot Bible was finished. When the young son of the printer, dressed in his best attire, ran with the last sheets to the Cardinal, Ximenez exclaimed fervently: "I thank thee, O most high G.o.d, that thou hast brought this work to its longed-for end!" To-day the more scientific methods of philology have put the Complutensian Polyglot in the shade, but none deny that for its period it was a notable work.

Another of Ximenez' reforms, little known, was his advocacy of Las Casas in the crusade against Indian slavery in the American colonies. As early as 1511, a Dominican preacher named Montesino gave a sermon in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, before the governor Diego Columbus, in which he thundered against the ill-treatment of the natives. The monks were threatened with expulsion by the rich settlers unless Montesino retracted, whereupon on the following Sunday, the brave reformer not only repeated his previous attack but added fresh proofs. Against fierce opposition the Dominicans refused the sacraments to every one who owned an Indian slave. But they could not end the evil, so the pa.s.sionate Las Casas, whose whole life may be said to have burned with fury for this cause, returned to Spain to plead for the Indians.

The Regent took up the question with interest, and the commission which he organized and sent out to the Colonies is a model of reforming government worthy of study. Just as it was about to start, fourteen pious Franciscans came down to Spain to offer themselves for the good work. Among them was a brother of the King of Scotland,--a rather delightful episode of the cosmopolitanism of religion. Ximenez also issued a proclamation forbidding the importation of negro slaves, for the colonists had already learned that one negro did the work of four Indians. Should not this act of fa.r.s.eeing wisdom, be set against his stern treatment of the Moors?

Ximenez ruled as Regent of Castile from the time of Ferdinand's death to the coming of Charles V to his distant possessions. The Cardinal-Archbishop, alert in mind and body though over eighty, was on his way to meet the young Emperor on his landing in the north, when he died suddenly at Roa, in the province of Burgos. He was buried in his loved Alcala, and his tomb still rests in the dismantled town whose University has been removed to Madrid. Just thirty years after the Cardinal's death, one of the world's supreme geniuses was born under the shadow of his University, as if a compensating Providence would reward the Franciscan friar's unresting love of letters. Ximenez has received scant justice, but if the atmosphere of culture which he created at Alcala, had aught to do with making Cervantes what he was, the stern educator did not live in vain.

In Toledo it takes no effort of the imagination to people the streets with the figures of the past; it is every-day life that drops away, and the surprise is that one does not meet some intellectual-faced cardinal, some hidalgo in velvet cloak or chased armor. The stone effigies on the tombs of Spanish churches make it easy to picture a certain very splendid presence that once walked, in youth's proud livery, these silent streets. Garcilaso de la Vega is a pure type of the grandee, Spain's Philip Sidney, a courtier, a soldier, a poet whose gift of song made him the idol of the nation, he is one of the alluring figures of history. By writing in Virgilian cla.s.sic verse, he changed the rhythm of Spanish poetry from that of the "Cid," of Juan de Mena and Manrique. "In our Spain, Garcilaso stands first beyond compare," wrote a contemporary poet, a judgment held later by Cervantes and Lope de Vega.

This lovable hero was born in Toledo while Ximenez was still its active if aged Archbishop. He came of distinguished stock, the first Garcia Laso de la Vega was the favorite of Alfonso XI in 1328. This later namesake had for father a knight of Santiago, lord of many towns, amba.s.sador to Rome, and one of Isabella and Ferdinand's councilors of state; on his mother's side his lineage was still more ill.u.s.trious, she was a Guzman, another of Spain's families whose prominence continued for centuries.

Garcilaso, who early showed his love for the liberal arts, received a finished education. At fifteen he became guardsman to Charles V, and his qualities of heart and brain soon won him the affectionate admiration of the court. "Comely in action, n.o.ble in speech, gentle in sentiment, vehement in friends.h.i.+p, nature had made his body a fitting temple for his soul." And Spain can show this harmony in many of her sons. Some untranslatable words describe Garcilaso, _hermosamente varonil_, the superb manhood of beauty. During the Emperor's wars in Italy he fought bravely, and at the Battle of Pavia, where Pescara's lions of Spain carried all before them, he won distinction. He was not merely a soldier in Italy, his richly-endowed nature avidly seized on her art and learning. Cardinal Bembo calls him "best loved and most welcome of all the Spaniards that ever come to us." Like Sir Philip Sidney, the young poet was not destined to reach middle age; a short thirty-three years is his record. At a siege near Frejus, in the south of France, he fell wounded into the arms of his dearest friend, the Marquis de Lombay, and in spite of Charles V sending his skilled physician and coming in person to visit the wounded knight, he died. He was buried among his ancestors in the church of San Pedro Martir, in Toledo, "where every stone in the city is his monument," wrote the euphuistic Gongora.

Truly that age was past rivalry in the appealingly n.o.ble characters it produced, fine spirits of heroism, fit inheritors of Isabella's period that had prepared the soil for such a flowering. A Garcilaso de la Vega is the bosom friend of a Francis Borgia, a Francis Borgia communes with a Teresa de Jesus with the intense pleasure of feeling souls akin, an Ignatius Loyola serves as guide to a Francis Xavier, and so on, these noted lives touch and overlap. What an array the first fifty years of the sixteenth century can show! 1503 Garcilaso was born, also Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the noted diplomat and patron of letters; 1504 Luis de Granada, the religious writer; 1506 St. Francis Xavier of Navarre, who died the great missionary of the East; 1510 St. Francis Borgia; 1515 St. Teresa, "fair sister of the seraphim"; 1529 Luis de Leon, Spain's best lyric poet; 1534 Fernando de Herrera, another poet; 1542, St. John of the Cross, that mystic flame of Divine love; 1545, the das.h.i.+ng hero of Lepanto, Don John of Austria; and final glory of this half century, and of all centuries, 1547, Miguel de Cervantes. The opening of the next century was fecund in men of creative genius: 1599, Velasquez; 1616, Calderon; 1617, Murillo, but to one who loves _Espana la heroica_, the earlier age is dearer.

The gray city on the Tagus is worthy of such citizens, "fit compeer for such high company." So many are her a.s.sociations that one turns aside in irresistible digressions. In a palace near Santo Tome, Isabella of Portugal, Charles V's wife, died: to those who know t.i.tian's portrait of her in the Prado, she is a beautiful, living presence. Francis Borgia who in early youth had married one of her ladies in waiting, was the equerry appointed to escort her dead body to Granada, where it was to be laid in the Chapel Royal. When the coffin was opened to verify the Empress, she who had been all loveliness so short a time before was changed to so horrible a sight that the Marquis de Lombay is said to have exclaimed, "Never more will I serve a master who can die!" The Hound of Heaven was in pursuit of grand quarry here. A few years before, the death of Garcilaso his friend had sobered Francis. Now came the loss of his cherished wife, with whom he had lived in truly holy wedlock: in Catalonia where he was the Emperor's viceroy, a lady asked the Marquesa one day why she of such high standing and beauty dressed so plainly, and she answered how could she do otherwise when her husband wore a hair-s.h.i.+rt beneath his velvet. Lombay succeeded to his father's estates and the t.i.tle of Duke of Gandia, his children--who eventually rose to distinction--were a natural temptation to stifle the higher call of which he was conscious:

"For, though I knew His love who followed, Yet was I sore adread Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside."

It was a tremendous decision to make, completely to relinquish a future of international influence; relentlessly the heavenly Feet pursued:

"I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped; And shot, precipitated Adown t.i.tanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurried chase, And unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, Majestic instancy, They beat--and a Voice beat More instant than the Feet-- 'All things betray thee who betrayest Me.'"[26]

The compelling Voice won. Having settled his children, the Duke of Gandia gave up t.i.tles and estates to enter the Company of Jesus, of which he has been called the second founder, so fruitful were the years of his generals.h.i.+p.

The death of Isabella of Portugal is connected with another foremost member of the _Compania_. The Pope sent Cardinal Farnese to carry his condolences to the Emperor, and the papal suite lodged in a house of Toledo near that of a widow named Ribadeneyra. Her willful, high-spirited and captivating boy Pedro attached himself voluntarily to the emba.s.sy, and so won the notice of the Cardinal that he was taken back to Rome, where, by another hap-hazard in his life, he fell under the influence of St. Ignatius Loyola, became his loved pupil and future biographer. The books of this delightful Pedro, telling the early history of the Jesuit Order make as solidly interesting a bout of reading as can while away a month. He was not only the confidant of the first General, but of his two successors, Lainez and Borgia, he helped St. Charles Borromeo in his reforms at Milan, and lived long enough to rejoice on the day of his great master's beatification, 1609.

In Toledo many a time Cervantes strolled, here he has set several of the interesting "Novelas Exemplares"; St. Teresa founded one of her houses here, described in her "Libro de las Fundaciones," a companion book to the "Novelas"; that prodigy of improvization, Lope de Vega, also placed some dramas in these dark winding streets; and in the Jesuit house the historian Mariana, a friend of Ribadeneyra, browsed over his work, called by Ticknor "the most remarkable union of picturesque chronicling with sober fact that the world has ever seen."

Our days in Toledo sped all too fast. For me it is one of those few fascinating cities of the world that rouses a recurrent longing to return. The impressive, solitary walk above the Tagus gorge at the hour of sunset is an unforgettable memory. Another walk leads to San Cristo-in-the-fields, the legend of whose crucifix, with one arm hanging pendant, has been told by Becquer; beyond this church, across the _vega_, where the Tagus spreads out in relief from the confining gorge behind, is the _Fabrica de Armas_, where good Toledan blades are made, so elastic that they are packed in boxes curled up like the mainspring of a watch. Within the town the rambles are endless, now down the step-cut hill, past the Plateresque facade of Santa Cruz hospital, founded by Cardinal Mendoza; now out by the one sloping side of the city to another hospital, where the sculptor Berruguete died, and lies buried near his last work, the marble tomb of the founder, Cardinal Tavera. One day in the narrow street, hearing the sound of singing, I entered a monastery church, to listen for an enchanted hour to a choir of male voices admirably trained.[27] There is about this town an atmosphere that makes you sure that real peace and holiness lie within the looming convent walls under which you pa.s.s. The wise Chinese statesman, Kang Yu Wei, who has toured the world studying its religions, said he found in a monastery of Toledo an impressive spirit of devout silence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOMB OF BISHOP SAN SEGUNDO, BY BERRUGUETE, AVILA]

We carried away a beautiful last picture of the "Crown of Spain," as her loyal son Padilla called her. We were to catch the night train to Andalusia, at Castillejo on the express route. It was a night with an early moon. So white and romantic lay the city streets that we sent the luggage by the diligence and went on foot to the distant station. When we crossed the Alcantara bridge, we turned to look back at the climbing ma.s.s of houses and churches. With a feeling of sadness we gazed at the old mediaeval city, so far from the fret of modern life. This was to be, we thought, our last impression of the Castiles. Andalusia, enticing, warm in the sun, facile, impudent, lay ahead. Farewell to the grave, courteous Castilian! Farewell to the valorous stoic-heart of Spain!

CORDOVA AND GRANADA

"The art of the Alhambra is eminently decorative, light, and smiling; it expresses the well being, the repose, the riches of life; its grace lay almost entirely in its youth. Not having the severe lines that rest the eye, these works paled when their first freshness faded. Theirs was a delicate beauty that has suffered more than others from the deterioration of its details."

RENe BAZIN.

In his "Terre d' Espagne," M. Rene Bazin speaks of the faded city of Cordova, and the term is singularly exact. It is a tranquil, faded ghost, not a nightmare ghost, but an aloof, melancholy specter. I have been haunted by it often since the day and night spent there. Dull and unimportant as it now is, hard to be imagined as the Athens of the West with almost a million inhabitants and an enlightened dynasty of Caliphs, yet, like a true ghost, vague in feature, Cordova succeeds in making itself unforgettable. The past covers it like a mist. It gave me more the sensation of the Moslem than any other spot in Spain: Allah, not Christ, is its brooding spirit.

We strolled hither and thither through its preternaturally quiet streets which are lined with two-storied white or pinkish houses. Every few minutes we stopped with exclamations of delight to gaze through the iron grilles at the tiled and marble patios, here seen for the first time. "A patio! How shall I describe a patio!" exclaimed De Amicis, when he first came into Andalusia. "It is not a garden, it is not a room, it is not a courtyard, it is the three in one,--small, graceful, and mysterious."

They are so spotless a king could eat off their paving-stones. Isolated from the stir of the world, they breathe that intimate quiet of the spirit felt in the pictures of the Primitives. To wander for the first time over a city filled with these oases, gives that exhilaration of novelty which as a rule the traveler has long since lost with his first journeys.

I should not say our very vivid impression of Cordova depended on chance details,--the hour of arrival, a personal mood, the weather. Of course the strangeness was heightened by our coming from the north, through a cold night of travel on the train that made the transition from the central plateau of the Castiles to the semi-tropical coast belt of Andalusia, an abrupt one. Toledo, the last seen Castilian town, had been so distinctly Christian in spite of Moorish remains, and our night-flitting over the level sea of La Mancha was so possessed by that _espanol neto_, the adventuresome Don, that suddenly to awake among palm trees and oranges gave the sensation of another race and climate.

It was this province with its astonis.h.i.+ng fertility that had been the land of Elysium of the ancients.

Having grown familiar with the orderly streets of Cordova by day, it was quite without fear that we took a night ramble. Not a soul was astir.

What were they doing, these cloistered people? It was as deserted as Stamboul at night, more lonely even, for here was not a single yellow cur to bay the moon, nor the iron beat of the watchman's staff; and though like the Orient in some aspects, these streets were far too orderly and the houses too spotless. Perhaps there lay the source of the indefinable fascination; this was neither East nor West, but a place stranded in time, made by circ.u.mstances that never will be repeated. The Oriental influenced the Spaniard deeply, a psychological as well as a racial influence. I often felt that the dignified gravity which so distinguishes a Spaniard from his fellow Latins is a trait acquired unconsciously from his Arab neighbors: nothing like it is found except among races whose ancestors dwelt in the desert. Also the excessive generosity and hospitality of the Spaniard are oriental virtues, just as the Andalusian procrastination and acceptance of fate are oriental failings. We too often forget that there were generations when, religious hatred quieting down, the two peoples lived side by side in friendly consideration. If the Christian gained from the Moslem, the Moor in Spain was influenced no less potently by the standards of the European. He became a very different being from his brother in northern Africa. He learned to gather libraries, to express himself in buildings where he translated his nomad carpet into colored stucco; much of his traditional jealousy was laid aside and Moorish ladies appeared at the tournaments to applaud their Moorish cavaliers who tilted with the same rules of romantic chivalry as the Christian knights. Moslem civilization could even boast some femmes savantes. The stimulus of the two opposing races gave Spain just the impetus she needed, and the conqueror lost with his very victory. When all men think the same way without the spur of compet.i.tion, inaction and ill-health are sure to follow. Perhaps the upholders of law and order need not worry too much to-day over the anarchists and socialists in the commercial districts of Spain: is not the health of a nation quickened by struggle?

The soul of a Spanish city is always the Cathedral, and Cordova has what it called one, but it is no more a Christian church than the Caaba at Mecca. The canons in Charles V's time tore out the center of the Mosque and built a Plateresque-Gothic _capilla mayor_ and _coro_. It was an ignorant thing to do, and when the Emperor saw their work he exclaimed in disgust, "You have built here what anyone might have built elsewhere, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world!" Nevertheless, those old canons had some excuse. They felt that they could not pray in a proper Christian manner under the low, oppressing roof of Islam.

Instead of "Christe Eleison," it was "Allah illal allah, ve Mahommed recoul" that came to their lips in abominable heresy, so in desperation they put up the incongruous enclosure and tried to shut Islam out.

A building every one of whose stones has been laid in earnest faith, seems to have a spirit that will never desert it, let the ritual change as it may. Santa Sophia is Christian in spite of eight thousand Mussulmans prostrated there on the 27th of Ramazan: the Gregorian chant still echoes in Westminster Abbey. So here the canons' efforts were in vain, the Mezquita makes heretics of us all, we turn to the Mihrab as the holy of holies, not to the High Altar.

The Mihrab is a dream of art, the mosaics are richer and softer in hue than an eastern rug. Leo, the Christian Emperor on the Bosphorus, sent Byzantine workmen to teach the Caliph this art. The enclosing carvings have the distinction of being in marble, not in the customary plaster, also a Christian innovation. "Let us rear a mosque which shall surpa.s.s that of Bagdad, of Damascus, and of Jerusalem, a mosque which shall become the Mecca of the West," said the founders in the eighth century; and there is a tradition that the Caliph himself worked an hour a day with the builders. It is truly "unique in the world," for nothing was ever like these myriad aisles, forty in one direction crossed by twenty in another, with nine hundred short pillars of every kind of marble--green, red, gray, brown, fluted white--holding up the roof.

These pillars are baseless and only thirteen feet in height; and arches of an ugly red and yellow spring in two tiers from column to column. The effect is incredibly original and eccentric,--a veritable forest of pillars. The fatalist spirit of Mohammed, the acceptance of life's limitation, is insistent here, the desert Arab's att.i.tude of adoration, forehead p.r.o.ne to earth, is forced on you: to kneel with upraised face is impossible under so low a roof; were there the usual hanging b.a.l.l.s and roc's eggs, even the Inquistor-General himself would have genuflected toward Mecca! As I wandered about the Mezquita, the two creeds seemed to formulate themselves more distinctly for me: one, soaring and idealistic, channel for the loftiest aspirations of the soul, the other a magnificent step forward from the lower forms of wors.h.i.+p about it in the East, nevertheless limited, so far and not beyond, not cleaving to the impossible, to the unattainable. "Be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect" was not taught by Mohammed.

Islamism is a very n.o.ble average, and perhaps because men in general are the average, it may seem better to satisfy them. Christianity is a religion for the chosen souls of humanity, only by aiming at the impossible can the best in man develop. The majority of us are not chosen souls, hence we have the bitter inconsistencies between the theory and the practice of our faith to-day; and yet, once the vision of the unspeakable soul-paradise of the mystic has been conceived of, to rest satisfied with an average religion is impossible. Islam makes men happy with a dreaming bliss that veils the sun, Christianity bids you look up at the sun whether it blinds you or not, and here and there arise souls that can bear the vision and help weak eyes to see.

When we left the Mosque, the obsession of the East still continued in the courtyard, where about the fountain sat groups of idlers only wanting the fez and turban for completion. Once the Mezquita opened on this court, there was no dividing wall, the trees planted in symmetrical lines carried on the rows of columns within, and an absolutely enchanting sight it must have been to look from this orange grove far into the dim interior of the Mosque, lighted every evening with some five thousand hanging lamps.

All tourists in Spain go to Granada, so they know the confusing station of Bobadilla where trains from north, south, east, and west, meet and exchange pa.s.sengers; the journey from there on to Granada gives a beautiful glimpse of Andalusia; picturesquely set towns, scattered white villas, olive groves, even in winter the gra.s.s as green as spring. As apples, in the Basque provinces, and carrots at Toledo, so here oranges were piled up in ma.s.ses. The last thirty miles of the journey were through the historic _vega_, a veritable garden of Eden in fertility.

Before we reached Granada it was dark and above the city was rising an early moon as big as one in a j.a.panese print. The proprietor of the Pension-Villa Carmona in the Alhambra grounds was there to meet us, and we soon rattled off for the long drive up to the Moorish citadel.

A night arrival at Granada enhances the romantic effect. It is mysterious to turn in from the noisy streets of the town at the Carlo Quinto gate and under the heavy foliage of elm trees slowly to mount the Alhambra hill; there is a gurgle and rush of running water on every side, one has the feeling of being in a thick Alpine forest. The horses mount slowly, wind and turn, pa.s.s through various gates and at length you are in the small village of the citadel, and in three minutes can walk right into the Caliph's palace. Spain cannot show many such beautiful northern parks, with a growth of ivy and a s.h.i.+mmer of arrow-headed leaves under the elm trees where nightingales sing in season.

It was Ford I think who started the statement which most guide books have gone on repeating that the Duke of Wellington planted these elms ("the Duke" occupies more s.p.a.ce in Murray's Hand-book than _los Reyes Catolicos_ themselves!) He may have planted some, but a certain old book of travels, yellow with age, tell us that just these same elm trees were growing and just the same kind of songster singing in 1789. "The ascent toward the Alhambra," wrote the Rev. Joseph Townsend in that year, "is through a shady and well watered grove of elms abounding with nightingales whose melodious warbling is not confined to the midnight hour; here, incessant, it is equally the delight of noon."