I Am Afraid I Have Forgotten
His Name; Perhaps I Should Not Have The Right To Parade It Here If I
Remembered It; But I Cannot Help Saluting Him Brother In Imagination,
And Thanking Him For One Of The Rarest Pleasures That Travel, Even
Spanish Travel, Has Given Me.
II
One must recall the effect of such a gentle fantasy as his with some
such emotion as one
Recalls a pleasant tale unexpectedly told when one
feared a repetition of stale commonplaces, and I now feel a pang of
retroactive self-reproach for not spending the whole evening after
dinner in reading up the story of that most storied city where this
Spanish castle received us. What better could I have done in the smoky
warmth of our hearth-fire than to con, by the light of the electric bulb
dangling overhead, its annals in some such voluntarily quaint and
unconsciously old-fashioned volume as Irving's _Legends of the Conquest
of Spain;_ or to read in some such (if there is any such other)
imperishably actual and unfadingly brilliant record of impressions as
Gautier's _Voyage en Espagne,_ the miserably tragic tale of that poor,
wicked, over-punished last of the Gothic kings, Don Roderick? It comes
to much the same effect in both, and as I knew it already from the notes
to Scott's poem of Don Roderick, which I had read sixty years before in
the loft of our log cabin (long before the era of my unguided Spanish
studies), I found it better to go to bed after a day which had not been
without its pains as well as pleasures. I could recall the story well
enough for all purposes of the imagination as I found it in the fine
print of those notes, and if I could believe the reader did not know it
I would tell him now how this wretched Don Roderick betrayed the
daughter of Count Julian whom her father had intrusted to him here in
his capital of Toledo, when, with the rest of Spain, it had submitted to
his rule. That was in the eighth century when the hearts of kings were
more easily corrupted by power than perhaps in the twentieth; and it is
possible that there was a good deal of politics mixed up with Count
Julian's passion for revenge on the king, when he invited the Moors to
invade his native land and helped them overrun it. The conquest, let me
remind the reader, was also abetted by the Jews who had been flourishing
mightily under the Gothic anarchy, but whom Don Roderick had reduced to
a choice between exile or slavery when he came to full power. Every one
knows how in a few weeks the whole peninsula fell before the invaders.
Toledo fell after the battle of Guadalete, where even the Bishop of
Seville fought on their side, and Roderick was lastingly numbered among
the missing, and was no doubt killed, as nothing has since been heard of
him. It was not until nearly three hundred years afterward that the
Christians recovered the city. By this time they were no longer Arians,
but good Catholics; so good that Philip II. himself, one of the best of
Catholics (as I have told), is said to have removed the capital to
Madrid because he could not endure the still more scrupulous Catholicity
of the Toledan Bishop.
Nobody is obliged to believe this, but I should be sorry if any reader
of mine questioned the insurpassable antiquity of Toledo, as attested by
a cloud of chroniclers. Theophile Gautier notes that "the most moderate
place the epoch of its foundation before the Deluge," and he does not
see why they do not put the time "under the pre-Adamite kings, some
years before the creation of the world. Some attribute the honor of
laying its first stone to Jubal, others to the Greek; some to the Roman
consuls Tolmor and Brutus; some to the Jews who entered Spain with
Nebuchadnezzar, resting their theory on the etymology of Toledo, which
comes from Toledoth, a Hebrew word signifying generations, because the
Twelve Tribes had helped to build and people it."
III
Even if the whole of this was not accurate, it offered such an
embarrassing abundance to the choice that I am glad I knew little or
nothing of the antagonistic origins when I opened my window to the sunny
morning which smiled at the notion of the overnight tempest, and lighted
all the landscape on that side of the hotel. The outlook was over vast
plowed lands red as Virginia or New Jersey fields, stretching and
billowing away from the yellow Tagus in the foreground to the
mountain-walled horizon, with far stretches of forest in the middle
distance. What riches of gray roof, of white wall, of glossy green, or
embrowning foliage in the city gardens the prospect included, one should
have the brush rather than the pen to suggest; or else one should have
an inexhaustible ink-bottle with every color of the chromatic scale in
it to pour the right tints. Mostly, however, I should say that the city
of Toledo is of a mellow gray, and the country of Toledo a rich orange.
Seen from any elevation the gray of the town made me think of Genoa; and
if the reader's knowledge does not enable him, to realize it from this
association, he had better lose no time in going to Genoa.
I myself should prefer going again to Toledo, where we made only a day's
demand upon the city's wealth of beauty when a lifetime would hardly
have exhausted it. Yet I would not counsel any one to pass his whole
life in Toledo unless he was sure he could bear the fullness of that
beauty. Add insurpassable antiquity, add tragedy, add unendurable
orthodoxy, add the pathos of hopeless decay, and I think I would rather
give a day than a lifetime to Toledo. Or I would like to go back and
give another day to it and come every year and give a day.
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