Legends & Romances of Spain Part 28

In 1520 Torralva went once more to Rome. Ere he left Spain he told Zuniga that he would be able to travel there astride a broomstick, the course of which would be guided by a cloud of fire. On his arrival at Rome he interviewed Cardinal Volterra, and the Grand Prior of the Order of St John, who earnestly begged him to abandon all commerce with his familiar spirit. Because of their exhortations, Torralva requested Zequiel to leave his service, but met with a stern refusal. The spirit, however, advised him to return to Spain, a.s.suring him that he would obtain the place of physician to the Infanta Eleanora, Queen-Dowager of Portugal, and later consort of Francis I of France. Acting upon this counsel, Torralva sailed once more for the land of his birth, and obtained the promised appointment.

In 1525 an incident occurred which greatly enhanced Torralva's celebrity as a seer. On the 5th of May of that year Zequiel a.s.sured him that the troops of the Emperor would take Rome on the following day. Torralva desired the spirit to carry him to Rome so that he might witness this great event with his own eyes. Zequiel gave him a stick full of knots, and commanded him to shut his eyes. Torralva obeyed the request of the famulus, and when after a s.p.a.ce the spirit told him to open his eyes once more, he found himself in Rome, standing on a high tower. The hour was midnight, and when day dawned he duly witnessed the terrible events which followed--the death of the Constable of Bourbon, the flight of the Pope into the Castle of St Angelo, the slaughter of the citizens, and the wild riot of the conquerors. Returning to Valladolid by the same means as that by which he had come, Torralva immediately made public all he had seen, and when, a week or so later, news arrived of the capture and sack of Rome, the Court of Spain was very naturally filled with unbounded surprise.

Many persons of high rank had been accomplices of the gifted doctor in his practice of the black art, and one of these, in a fit of remorse, notified the Holy Inquisition of his dealings with the supernatural. Zuniga too, who had benefited so greatly by the occult knowledge of Torralva, now turned against him, and denounced him to the Holy Office of Cuenca, which had him arrested and cast into prison. The terrified magician immediately confessed all his doings with Zequiel, whom he persisted in regarding as a beneficent spirit, and penned no less than eight declarations of his dealings with the supernatural, some of which contradicted statements made in others in a most ludicrous manner. In view of their unsatisfactory nature, the unhappy necromancer was put to the torture, and an admission of the demonic nature of his familiar was quickly extracted from him. In March 1529 the Inquisitors suspended his process for a year, a common practice of the Inquisition, which thus attempted to wear its victims down. But, to the dismay of Torralva, a new witness made his appearance, who testified that in his early days at Rome the imprisoned medico was p.r.o.ne to indulgence in occult arts, so that in January 1530 Torralva was once more put upon his trial. The Inquisition appointed two learned theologians to labour for his conversion, to whom Torralva promised amendment in everything, except the renunciation of the evil spirit with whom he had been a.s.sociated for so long, a.s.suring his mentors that he had not the power to dismiss Zequiel. At length, on his making a pretence to cast off his familiar and abjure his heresies, he was released, and entered the service of the Admiral of Castile, who had employed all his influence to obtain a pardon for him. Immortalized in the pages of Don Quixote, he remains for all time the archetype of the Spanish magician of the sixteenth century.

Moorish Magic

By no race was the practice of the occult arts studied with such perseverance as by the Moors of Spain, and it is strange indeed that only fragmentary notices of their works in this respect remain to us. The statement that they were famous for magical and alchemical studies is reiterated by numerous European historians, but the majority of these have refrained from any description of their methods, and the Moors themselves have left so few undoubted memorials of their labours in this direction that we remain in considerable ignorance of the trend of their efforts, so that if we desire any knowledge upon this most recondite subject we must perforce collect it painfully from the fragmentary notices of it in contemporary European and Arabic literature.

The first name of importance which we encounter in the broken annals of Moorish occultism is a great one--that of the famous Geber, who flourished about 720-750, and who is reported to have penned upward of five hundred works upon the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. In common with his fellow-alchemists, he appears to have failed signally in his search for those marvellous elements, but if he was unable to point the way to immortal life and boundless wealth, he is said to have given mankind the nitrate of silver, corrosive sublimate, and nitric acid. He believed that a preparation of gold would heal all diseases in both animals and plants, as well as in human beings, and that all metals were in a condition of chronic sickness in so far that they had departed from their natural and original state of gold. His works, all of which are in Latin, are not considered authentic, but his Summa Perfectionis, a manual for the alchemical student, has frequently been translated.

The Moorish alchemists taught that all metals are composed of varying proportions of mercury and sulphur. They laboured strenuously to multiply drugs out of the various mixtures and reactions of the few chemicals at their disposal, but although they believed in the theory of trans.m.u.tation of metals they did not strive to effect it. It belonged to their creed rather than to their practice. They were a school of scientific artisans and experimentalists, first and last. They probably owed their alchemical knowledge to Byzantium, which in turn had received it from Egypt; or it may be that the Arabs drew their scientific inspiration at first hand from the land of the Nile, where the 'great art' of alchemy undoubtedly had its birth.

Astrology

Astrology was also an important branch of occult study with the Moors of Spain, whose consideration of it greatly a.s.sisted the science of mathematics, especially that branch of it which still retains its Arabic name--algebra (al = the, jabara = to set, compute). It is probable that the Arabs first received an insight into the practice of foretelling events by the position of the planets at a given time from the Chaldeans, who undoubtedly were its earliest students. References to astrology are plentifully encountered in Spanish story, as the reader will have observed. But high as it stood in the estimation of the Moorish sages, it was still subservient to the grander and more mysterious art of magic, whereby the spirits of the air could be forced to do the will of the magus, and carry out his behests in four elements. Most unfortunately, we are almost entirely ignorant of the tenets of Moorish magic, owing probably to the circ.u.mstance that it was averse to the spirit of Islam. But we know that it was founded upon Alexandrian magic, and therefore recognized the principles of that art as laid down by the great Hermes Trismegistus, who was none other than the Egyptian Thoth, the G.o.d of writing, computation, and wisdom.

About the end of the tenth century the learned men of Europe began to resort to Spain for the purpose of studying the arts, occult and otherwise. Among the first to do so was Gerbert, afterward Pope Sylvester II, who spent several years in Cordova, and who introduced into Christendom the knowledge of the Arabic numerals and the no less useful art of clock-making. Strange that he did not apply his knowledge of the one to the other, and that even to-day our timepieces are burdened with the old and c.u.mbrous Roman numerals! William of Malmesbury a.s.sures us that Gerbert made many discoveries of treasure through the art of necromancy, and relates how he visited a magnificent subterranean palace, which, though dazzling to the sight, would not remain when its splendours were subjected to the test of human touch. Ignorant Europe took Gerbert's mathematical diagrams for magical signs, and his occult reputation increased as his moral character withered. It was said that the Devil had promised him that he should not die until he had celebrated high ma.s.s at Jerusalem. One day Gerbert celebrated his office in the Church of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem at Rome, and, feeling ill, asked where he was, observed the double entendre of the Evil One, and expired. Such was the tale that benighted ignorance cast round the memory of this single-minded and enlightened man, much in the same spirit as it bedevilled the recollections of our own Michael Scot and Roger Bacon.

The Dean of Santiago

In the Conde Lucanor, a Spanish collection of tales and homilies of the fourteenth century, already alluded to, is a story of the Dean of Santiago, who went to Illan, a magician of Toledo, to be instructed in necromancy. The magus raised a difficulty, saying that as the Dean was a man of influence, and would attain a high position, he would probably forget all past obligations. The Dean, however, protested that no matter to what eminence he attained he would not fail to remember and a.s.sist his former friends, and particularly his tutor in things supernatural. Satisfied with the churchman's promises, the necromancer led his pupil to a remote apartment, first requesting his housekeeper to purchase some partridges for supper, but not to cook them until she had definite orders to do so.

When the Dean and his instructor had settled themselves to the business before them, they were interrupted in their labours by a messenger, who came to inform the Dean that his uncle, the Archbishop, had summoned him to his death-bed. Being unwilling, however, to forgo the instruction he was about to receive, he excused himself from the duty. Four days later, another messenger arrived, informing the Dean of the Archbishop's death, and later he learned that he had been appointed Archbishop in his uncle's place. On hearing this, Illan requested the vacant deanery for his son. But the new Archbishop preferred his own brother, inviting, however, Illan and his son to accompany him to his see. Later the deanery became vacant once more, and once again the magician begged that his son might be appointed to it. But the Archbishop refused his suit, in favour of one of his own uncles. Two years later the Archbishop became a cardinal, and was summoned to Rome, with liberty to appoint his successor in the see. Once more Illan was disappointed. At length the Cardinal was elected Pope, and Illan, who had accompanied him to Rome, reminded him that he had now no excuse for not fulfilling the promises he had so often made to him. The Pope, in anger, threatened to have Illan cast into prison and starved as a heretic and sorcerer. "Ingrate!" cried the incensed magician, "since you would thus starve me, I must perforce fall back upon the partridges I ordered for to-night's supper."

With these words he waved his wand, and called to his housekeeper to prepare the birds. Instantly the Dean found himself once more in Toledo, still Dean of Santiago, for, indeed, the years he had spent as Archbishop, Cardinal, and Pope were illusory, and had existed only in his imagination at the suggestion of the magus. This was the means the sage had taken to test his character, before committing himself to his hands, and so crestfallen was the churchman that he had nothing to reply to the reproaches of Illan, who sent him off without permitting him to sup upon the partridges!

It is strange that physicians and priests figure most notably as the heroes of Spanish magical story--strange, until we reflect upon the manner in which the learned cla.s.ses were regarded by an illiterate and illiberal commonalty. Torquemada tells a story of a youth of his acquaintance, a young man of great ability, who was afterward physician to the Emperor Charles V. When he was a student at Guadalupe, and was travelling to Granada, he was invited by a traveller, dressed in the garments of a churchman, whom he had obliged in some manner, to mount behind him on his horse, and he would carry him to his destination. The horse seemed a sorry jade, unable to carry the weight of two able-bodied men, and at first the student refused the mount, but, on pressure, at length accepted a seat behind the seeming ecclesiastic. The horseman requested his companion not to fall asleep in the saddle, and they jogged on, without any appearance of their going at an extraordinary rate. At daybreak, to the student's surprise, he found himself near the city of Granada, where the horseman left him, marvelling that the distance between two places so widely separated could have been covered in a single night.

Spectres and Apparitions

As might be imagined, the strong vein of superst.i.tion in the Spanish character, if subdued to some extent by the harsh dictates of the Holy Office, yet rose triumphant in other spheres of occult belief. We find, for example, a widely diffused belief in the power of the dead to return to the scenes of previous existence, and this superst.i.tion is well ill.u.s.trated by a weird pa.s.sage in the thrilling and mysterious pages of Goulart, who in his Tresor des Histoires admirables [56]

knows well how to mingle shadows with the colours on his palette.

He tells us how Juan Vasquez Ayala and two other young Spaniards, on their way to a French university, were unable to find suitable accommodation at a certain village where they had halted for the night, and were obliged to take shelter in a deserted house, the reputation of which as a haunted vicinity had flourished for a considerable time among the villagers.

The young men made the best of matters, borrowed articles of furniture from several neighbouring houses, and resolved to give a warm reception to any supernatural visitant who should have a mind to pay them a call. But on the first night of their occupancy they had scarcely fallen asleep when they were awakened by a noise as of clanking chains, which seemed to proceed from the lower regions of their temporary dwelling.

Absolutely fearless, young Ayala leaped from his bed and, donning his clothes, sallied downstairs in search of the cause of the clamour which had awakened himself and his comrades. In one hand he carried his drawn sword, in the other a lighted candle, and on coming to a door which led to the courtyard of the house he perceived a dreadful spectre--a grisly skeleton, standing in the entrance. The grim apparition which confronted him was loaded with chains, which clanked with a doomful and melancholy sound on the ears of the gallant young student, who, however, undismayed by the spectacle before him, advanced the point of his sword and demanded the intruder's reason for disturbing his rest. The phantom waved its arms, shook its bony head, and beckoned with its hand, as if asking Ayala to follow it. The student expressed his willingness to do so, on which the ghost commenced to descend a flight of steps, dragging its legs as it went like a man whose limbs were weighted with iron shackles. Ayala followed fearlessly, but as he advanced his candle suddenly flickered and went out, a circ.u.mstance which did little to reinforce his courage. "Hold!" he called to the phantom. "You perceive my candle has gone out. If you will wait till I relight it, I shall return in a moment."

Rus.h.i.+ng to a light which burned in the hall, he relit his candle, and returned to the spot where he had left the apparition. He entered the garden, where he saw a well, close by which he perceived the ghost, which signed to him to continue his progress, and having gone a little way forward, vanished.

Puzzled, the student returned to his apartment, and told his comrades to accompany him to the garden, but search as they might, nothing could they find. Next day they reported what had occurred to the alcalde of the village, who had the garden examined, with the result that immediately beneath the spot where the phantom had disappeared a skeleton was exhumed, loaded with chains. When proper burial had been given to the remains the noises in the house abruptly ceased, but the adventure proved too much for the superst.i.tious Spaniards, who returned home abruptly, without fulfilling the object of their journey.

This tale is a capital example of the typical ghost story in its earliest phase. I will not descant upon it here, as a book on Spanish romance and legend is scarcely the place for a disquisition on the occult. But we are learning, slowly and painfully perhaps, to regard these matters from another point of view than our Victorian grandfathers, whose materialism pooh-poohed the supernatural without trying to account for it. In any case I am one of those who believe in it and who desire to believe in it, so that the reflections of such a biased person are perhaps better dispensed with.

Torquemada tells a gruesome story of one Antonio Costilla, a Spanish gentleman, who one day left his mansion, well mounted, on a matter of personal business. When he had ridden several leagues, night suddenly fell, and he resolved to return to his home, but to his dismay he was overtaken by the darkness, and seeing a light ahead rode his horse at a walk in its direction. He saw that it proceeded from a small hermitage, and, dismounting, he entered the little chapel and engaged in prayer. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw that he was not alone, for the hermitage was occupied by three persons, who lay upon the ground, wrapped in black mantles. They did not address him, but lay regarding him with wild, melancholy eyes. Terrified, he knew not by what, he leaped into the saddle and rode off. In a little while the moon shone out, and showed him the three men whom he thought he had left in the chapel riding a little in front of him on black horses. In order to avoid them, he turned down a by-path, but to his horror still observed them riding a few paces ahead. Spurring madly on, yet always preceded by those whom he desired to avoid, he came in time to the gate of his own house, where he dismounted, and led his horse into the courtyard--only to find there the three cloaked figures awaiting him. He rushed into the house, and entered his wife's apartment, calling for help. Instantly the entire household came to his a.s.sistance, but although he screamed loudly that the three fiends or apparitions stood by the couch on which he had thrown himself, they were invisible to all others. A few days later the wretched Costilla died, maintaining to the last that three forms with glaring eyes stood over his bed, menacing him with frightful gestures.

Pity it is that our knowledge of the supernatural as manifested in Spain is so slight and fragmentary. But the dread of the sorcerer's fate was heavy upon the people, and the fear of torture by rack or fire successfully banished witch, wizard, fay, and phantom from the fields and cities of the Peninsula.

CHAPTER XIII: HUMOROUS ROMANCES OF SPAIN

Cervantes, the bold metal of thy lance Shatters the crystal turrets of Romance; Down falls the wreck in ruin most immense Upon the dreary plains of common sense.

L. S.

Cervantes' "Don Quixote"

Cervantes was one of the world's great satirists, a man gifted with a keen and peculiar sense of the ridiculous. He would himself have been the first to laugh at those modern critics who professed to see in him a great poet, and indeed, at the end of his days, when he a.s.sessed his life's work in his mock-heroic Voyage to Parna.s.sus, he admitted that he had not the poetic gift. That he had a golden imagination is obvious to anyone who cares to read his Galatea, imitative as it is, and Don Quixote overflows with imagination and invention, although certain later pa.s.sages of the wondrous satire are extremely reminiscent of some of its earlier pages.

To me Don Quixote has always seemed one of the most precious and curious of books, but probably for very different reasons from those by which it makes its appeal to the majority of people, for it is because of the information it affords concerning romantic literature and customs that I treasure it most. Where the satire is really legitimate I revel in the fun as much as it is possible for anyone to do, but I feel that many of its pa.s.sages are rather shabbily iconoclastic, and that some of its strictures are levelled not only against the absurdities of chivalric extravagance, but against the whole spirit and structure of romance. It had been well, too, for Cervantes had he confined himself entirely to the satiric vein, for when he essays to employ the very literary vehicle at which he chiefly scoffed he frequently becomes more maudlin--that is the only word for it--than the most sentimental writers against whom he girds. His shepherds and shepherdesses and his runaway nuns are long-winded and pedantic, and he was indeed badly bitten by that tiresome Arcadian phase in European literature which culminated in the prose pastoral, which had its roots in false conventions and employed as its mise en scene an atmosphere of sham rural felicity. Sannazaro, in his Arcadia, had indeed piped the tune to which Cervantes danced for many a day ere his own strong common sense showed him the fatuity of the models which he followed. The author of the Pastor de Filida, Luiz Galvez de Montalvo, was his own close friend, and there is every evidence that he made wholesale raids upon the distinctly minor efforts of such poetasters as Hebrao and Alonso Perez. The works of the men who composed this school of pseudo-Arcadianism had none of the charm of the delightful canvases of Watteau and Fragonard, silk-coated and satin-gowned though their shepherds and shepherdesses be. The country of the Spanish pastoral had a background of pasteboard scenery, and theatrical effects of lighting flashed across its stage. It was peopled by bores of the most intolerable description, who, instead of looking after their live stock, as they were paid to do, wearied each other and the wretched traveller who was unhappy enough to encounter them with their amorous bellowings and interminable tales of misfortune. Little wonder that the native good sense of Cervantes recoiled later from this unworthy and unmanly nonsense. But it is extraordinary that although he meted out such merciless treatment to chivalric romance, he still retained a weakness for the follies of Arcady, from which, to the last, he was unable to free himself.

The circ.u.mstances of Cervantes' career undoubtedly a.s.sisted him to discipline his ideas. As a collector of taxes he had, perforce, to come into contact with the seamy side of life, and much of his time was spent in the Bohemian atmosphere of inns, where he was compelled to lodge while he worked the district allotted to him. In these circ.u.mstances and in these places he encountered men and women of flesh and blood, and came up against the iron wall of hard, solid reality. Such an experience is undoubtedly most valuable to a man of romantic or imaginative temperament, gifted with creative ability. It tempers his natural capacities and enlarges his views. Doubtless Cervantes, when he first went his rounds, had been in the habit of regaling his fellow-travellers in the posadas in which he sojourned with high-falutin stories of errant shepherds and wandering shepherdesses. We can imagine the degree of amus.e.m.e.nt with which the rough muleteer, the blunt soldier, and the travelling quack would greet those sallies. The criticism of such people is not strained--it is annihilating! Can we doubt that the laughter with which his earlier rhapsodies were received in company of this sort blew away the fantastic cobwebs from Cervantes' brain?

I have already indicated that in the age in which he lived the romance proper had fallen into considerable popular disfavour. This was due partly to the circ.u.mstances of a changed environment, and partly to the type of literary opinion which had recently been fostered by the rise of the Spanish drama, which had brought about an entirely new literary ideal. Can it be that Cervantes, finding that his audiences regarded the Arcadian type of tale with disfavour, attributed this to the circ.u.mstance that it was fas.h.i.+onable in high circles, and fell back upon the romance, only to find that it too was greeted with guffaws and laughed out of the inn parlour? Was it in the quips and sneers of such audiences, the very ant.i.thesis of the romantic personages of whom he had dreamed, that the idea of Don Quixote took shape in his brain, and that in the laughter of clowns and men of the hard world, of the struggling lower middle cla.s.s, he perceived the certain popularity which a caricature of chivalry would enjoy? So, it seems to me, it may have been.

For many a year the sham romance of chivalry had been regarded as a pest. Serious and responsible writers had thundered against it, and there is every evidence that in a measure it stood between a certain section of the people of Spain and anything like mental advancement. It had, indeed, turned the heads of that portion of the nation unaccustomed to think for itself, and unable to form a rational opinion regarding its demerits. In all countries and at all times, this cla.s.s, usually impressionable and easily led, falls an easy prey to the blandishments of the hack writer of sensational proclivities. It is not too much to say that unhealthy sensationalism in literature const.i.tutes a real and active danger to national well-being. It seduces the people from their duties, unfits them for the serious business of life, renders them pretentious rather than independent, and leads them to the belief that they reflect the virtues or vices of the absurd heroes and heroines of their favourite tales. The one weapon which the more sensible portion of the community can bring to bear against such a pernicious condition of affairs is healthy ridicule, which it usually meets with from the rational and the well-balanced. But the danger exists that in the revulsion of public feeling against literary extravagance not only the absurdities which have obsessed the thoughtless and irritated the sensible will undergo destruction and banishment, but those higher virtues and graces of which they are the distorted reflection will not be discriminated against, but will be demolished along with them. Such, indeed, was the fate which befell the greater romances, those jewels of human imagination, which, although Cervantes himself made an effort to save them, shared in the general wreck and ruin of the fiction of which they were the flower, until the taste and insight of a later day excavated them from the super-inc.u.mbent ma.s.s under which they lay buried.

The Figure of Don Quixote

Don Quixote, the central figure of the mighty satire which gave its death-blow to chivalry, is perhaps typical of the romance reader of Cervantes' day. Crack-brained and imaginative to the verge of madness, he is entirely lost to the uses of everyday existence. He lives in a world of his own, and has nothing in common with that of his time, to the spirit of which he cannot adapt himself. In this gentleman of La Mancha the vices of the imagination are well portrayed, but they are unaccompanied by those gifts through which imagination can be rendered of utility to the community. Don Quixote dwells on the heights of a chivalric Parna.s.sus, a land of magic peopled by the spectres and shadows which he has encountered in the books with which his library is so well furnished. His imagination is thus not even creative, but derivative; reliance upon the "idols he has loved so long" has "done his credit in men's eyes much wrong," and he is regarded by his neighbours as an amiable lunatic of no importance. But the dreamer, when roused to action, can be a very terrible person if his visions chance to direct him astray, and if he attempt to realize a nightmare. Thus it was with Don Quixote. Scarcely mad enough for confinement, but yet sufficiently crazy to become a public nuisance, if not a public menace, he justly typifies the kind of person in whom romance runs mad, and is thus of the same cla.s.s as the small boy who is incited to acts of petty larceny by the perusal of detective stories, or the young lady behind the ribbon-counter who is under the impression that she is the long-lost daughter of a mysterious peer.

It is symptomatic of such craziness that it craves companions.h.i.+p. It is indeed a species of vanity which must have an audience, however small or however unsuited to its purposes. Again, the element of conspiracy is as the apple of its eye, and it must confide its ideas and aspirations to one sympathetic ear at least. In Sancho Panza, Don Quixote finds a strange confidant. The luckless peasant is completely unable to comprehend his master's point of view, but is carried away by his rodomontades and the glib and gorgeous promises of preferment and prosperity which the crack-brained knight holds out to him. To his partic.i.p.ation in the wild scheme of the visionary Don, Sancho's shrewd spouse violently objects, but when dreamer and dunce get together common sense may hold its tongue and content itself with the knowledge that it is not until windmills have been tilted at and sound trouncings have been received that its advice will be listened to.

But though he begins his travels as a dunce, Sancho by no means remains one. He profits from his experiences, and almost every page shows him increasing in judgment and in that humour which is the salt of good judgment. As his master grows madder, Sancho grows wiser, until at last he becomes capable of direction and guidance toward the rueful knight. As we proceed we begin to suspect that the peasant-squire exists as a kind of chorus to ill.u.s.trate the excesses of his master and criticize his absurdities. But apart altogether from Don Quixote, Sancho Panza is a striking and arresting figure in modern fiction, possessing a philosophy of his own, rich in worldly wisdom and abounding with practical ability. On the humorous side he is equal to Falstaff, only whereas Falstaff's humour is typically English that of Sancho Panza is universal. He is a world-clown, with the outlook of a philosopher and the unconscious humour of a Handy Andy.