He Had A Human Effect Of Having Brushed His
Hair From His Strange Grave Eyes, And Of A Sad, Hopeless Puzzle In The
Effort To Make Us Out.
If he was haunted by some inexplicable relation
in me to the great author whose dog he undoubtedly had
Been in a
retroactive incarnation, and was thinking to question me of that ever
unfulfilled boyish self-promise of writing the life of Cervantes, I
could as successfully have challenged him to say how and where in such a
place as that an Exemplary Novelist could have written even the story of
_The Illustrious Scullion._ But he seemed on reflection not to push the
matter with me, and I left him still lost in his puzzle while I came
away in mine. Whether Cervantes really wrote one of his tales there or
not, it is certain that he could have exactly studied from that _posada_
the setting of the scene for the episode of the enchanted castle in _Don
Quixote,_ where the knight suffered all the demoniacal torments which a
jealous and infuriate muleteer knew how to inflict.
IV
Upon the whole I am not sure that I was more edified by the cathedral of
Toledo, though I am afraid to own it, and must make haste to say that it
is a cathedral surpassing in some things any other cathedral in Spain.
Chiefly it surpasses them in the glory of that stupendous _retablo_
which fills one whole end of the vast fane, and mounting from floor to
roof, tells the Christian story with an ineffable fullness of dramatic
detail, up to the tragic climax of the crucifixion, the _Calvario,_ at
the summit. Every fact of it fixes itself the more ineffaceably in the
consciousness because of that cunningly studied increase in the stature
of the actors, who always appear life-size in spite of their lift from
level to level above the spectator. But what is the use, what _is_ the
use? Am I to abandon the young and younger wisdom with which I have
refrained in so many books from attempting the portrayal of any Italian,
any English church, and fall into the folly, now that I am old, of
trying to say again in words what one of the greatest of Spanish
churches says in form, in color? Let me rather turn from that vainest
endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing which endear the memory of
monuments and make the experience of them endurable. The beautiful
choir, with its walls pierced in gigantic filigree, might have been art
or not, as one chose, but the three young girls who smiled and whispered
with the young man near it were nature, which there could be no two
minds about. They were pathetically privileged there to a moment of the
free interplay of youthful interests and emotions which the Spanish
convention forbids less in the churches than anywhere else.
The Spanish religion is, in fact, kind to the young in many ways, and on
our way to the cathedral we had paused at a shrine of the Virgin in
appreciation of her friendly offices to poor girls wanting husbands;
they have only to drop a pin inside the grating before her and draw a
husband, tall for a large pin and short for a little one; or if they can
make their offering in coin, their chances of marrying money are good.
The Virgin is always ready to befriend her devotees, and in the
cathedral near that beautiful choir screen she has a shrine above the
stone where she alighted when she brought a chasuble to St. Ildefonso
(she owed him something for his maintenance of her Immaculate Conception
long before it was imagined a dogma) and left the print of her foot in
the pavement.
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