We Had To Stop In The Narrow Street, And Let Them Pass
Piled High On A Vintner's Wagon, And Looking Like A Load Of Pork:
They
are trimmed and left to keep the shape of the living pig, which they
emulate at its bulkiest, less the head and feet, and seem to roll in
fatness.
It was joy to realize what they were, to feel how Spanish, how
literary, how picturesque, how romantic. There they were such as the
wine-skins are that hang from the trees of pleasant groves in many a
merry tale, and invite all swains and shepherds and wandering cavaliers
to tap their bulk and drain its rich plethora. There they were such as
Don Quixote, waking from his dream at the inn, saw them malignant giants
and fell enchanters, and slashed them with his sword till he had spilled
the room half full of their blood. For me this first sight of them was
magic. It brought back my boyhood as nothing else had yet, and I never
afterward saw them without a return to those days of my delight in all
Spanish things.
Literature and its associations, no matter from how lowly suggestion,
must always be first for me, and I still thought of those wine-skins
in yielding to the claims of the cathedral on my wonder and reverence
when now for the second time we came to it. The funeral ceremony of the
dean was still in course, and after listening for a moment to the mighty
orchestral music of it - the deep bass of the priests swelling up with
the organ notes, and suddenly shot with the shrill, sharp trebles of the
choir-boys and pierced with the keen strains of the violins - we left the
cathedral to the solemn old ecclesiastics who sat confronting the bier,
and once more deferred our more detailed and intimate wonder. We went,
in this suspense of emotion, to the famous Convent of Las Huelgas, which
invites noble ladies to its cloistered repose a little beyond the town.
We entered to the convent church through a sort of slovenly court where
a little girl begged severely, almost censoriously, of us, and presently
a cold-faced young priest came and opened the church door. Then we found
the interior of that rank Spanish baroque which escapes somehow the
effeminate effusiveness of the Italian; it does not affect you as
decadent, but as something vigorously perfect in its sort, somberly
authentic, and ripe from a root and not a graft. In its sort, the high
altar, a gigantic triune, with massive twisted columns and swagger
statues of saints and heroes in painted wood, is a prodigy of inventive
piety, and compositely has a noble exaltation in its powerful lift to
the roof.
The nuns came beautifully dressed to hear mass at the grilles giving
into the chapel adjoining the church; the tourist may have his glimpse
of them there on Sundays, and on week-days he may have his guess of
their cloistered life and his wonder how much it continues the tradition
of repose which the name of the old garden grounds implies. These lady
nuns must be of patrician lineage and of fortune enough to defray their
expense in the convent, which is of the courtliest origin, for it was
founded eight hundred years ago by Alfonso VIII. "to expiate his sins
and to gratify his queen," who probably knew of them. I wish now I had
known, while I was there, that the abbess of Las Huelgas had once had
the power of life and death in the neighborhood, and could hang people
if she liked; I cannot think just what good it would have done me, but
one likes to realize such things on the spot. She is still one of the
greatest ladies of Spain, though perhaps not still "lady of ax and
gibbet," and her nuns are of like dignity. In their chapel are the tombs
of Alfonso and his queen, whose figures are among those on the high
altar of the church. She was Eleanor Plantagenet, the daughter of our
Henry II., and was very fond of Las Huelgas, as if it were truly a rest
for her in the far-off land of Spain; I say our Henry II., for in the
eleventh century we Americans were still English, under the heel of the
Normans, as not the fiercest republican of us now need shame to own.
In a sense of this historical unity, at Las Huelgas we felt as much at
home as if we had been English tourists, and we had our feudal pride in
the palaces where the Gastilian nobles used to live in Burgos as we
returned to the town. Their deserted seats are mostly to be seen after
you pass through the Moorish gate overarching the stony, dusty, weedy
road hard by the place where the house of the Cid is said to have stood.
The arch, so gracefully Saracenic, was the first monument of the Moslem
obsession of the country which has left its signs so abundantly in the
south; here in the far north the thing seemed almost prehistoric, almost
preglacially old, the witness of a world utterly outdated. But perhaps
it was not more utterly outdated than the residences of the nobles who
had once made the ancient Castilian capital splendid, but were now as
irrevocably merged in Madrid as the Arabs in Africa.
VI
Some of the palaces looked down from the narrow street along the
hillside above the cathedral, but only one of them was kept up in the
state of other days; and I could not be sure at what point this street
had ceased to be the street where our guide said every one kept cows,
and the ladies took big pitchers of milk away to sell every morning. But
I am sure those ladies could have been of noble descent only in the
farthest possible remove, and I do not suppose their cows were even
remotely related to the haughty ox-team which blocked the way in front
of the palaces and obliged xis to dismount while our carriage was lifted
round the cart.
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