It Is Not A Ruin In Its Long Arrest, And One Hears
With Hopeful Sympathy That The Spanish King Means Some Day To Complete
It.
To be sure, the world is, perhaps, already full enough of royal
palaces, but since they return sooner or later to the people whose
pockets they come out of, one must be willing to have this palace
completed as the architect imagined it.
We were followed into the Moorish palace by the music of three blind
minstrels who began to tune their guitars as soon as they felt us: see
us they could not. Then presently we were in the famous Court of the
Lions, where a group of those beasts, at once archaic and puerile in
conception, sustained the basin of a fountain in the midst of a graveled
court arabesqued and honeycombed round with the wonted ornamentation of
the Moors.
The place was disappointing to the boy in me who had once passed so much
of his leisure there, and had made it all marble and gold. The floor is
not only gravel, and the lions are not only more like sheep, but the
environing architecture and decoration are of a faded prettiness which
cannot bear comparison with the fresh rougeing, equally Moorish, of the
Alcazar at Seville. Was this indeed the place where the Abencerrages
were brought in from supper one by one and beheaded into the fountain at
the behest of their royal host? Was it here that the haughty Don Juan de
Vera, coming to demand for the Catholic kings the arrears of tribute due
them from the Moor, "paused to regard its celebrated fountain" and "fell
into discourse with the Moorish courtiers on certain mysteries of the
Christian faith"? So Washington Irving says, and so I once believed,
with glowing heart and throbbing brow as I read how "this most Christian
knight and discreet ambassador restrained himself within the limits of
lofty gravity, leaning on the pommel of his sword and looking down with
ineffable scorn upon the weak casuists around him. The quick and subtle
Arabian witlings redoubled their light attacks on the stately Spaniard,
but when one of them, of the race of the Abencerrages dared to question,
with a sneer, the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin, the
Catholic knight could no longer restrain his ire. Elevating his voice
of a sudden, he told the infidel he lied, and raising his arm at the
same time he smote him on the head with his sheathed sword. In an
instant the Court of Lions glistened with the flash of arms," insomuch
that the American lady whom we saw writing a letter beside a friend
sketching there must have been startled from her opening words, "I am
sitting here with my portfolio on my knees in the beautiful Court of the
Lions," and if Muley Aben Hassan had not "overheard the tumult and
forbade all appeal to force, pronouncing the person of the ambassador
sacred," she never could have gone on.
V
I did not doubt the fact when I read of it under the level boughs of the
beechen tree with J. W., sixty years ago, by the green woodland light of
the primeval forest which hemmed our village in, and since I am well
away from the Alhambra again I do not doubt it now. I doubt nothing that
Irving says of the Alhambra; he is the gentle genius of the place, and I
could almost wish that I had paid the ten pesetas extra which the
custodian demanded for showing his apartment in the palace. On the
ground the demand of two dollars seemed a gross extortion; yet it was
not too much for a devotion so rich as mine to have paid, and I advise
other travelers to buy themselves off from a vain regret by giving it.
If ever a memory merited the right to levy tribute on all comers to the
place it haunts, Washington Irving's is that memory. His _Conquest of
Granada_ is still the history which one would wish to read; his _Tales
of the Alhambra_ embody fable and fact in just the right measure for the
heart's desire in the presence of the monuments they verify or falsify.
They belong to that strange age of romance which is now so almost
pathetic and to which one cannot refuse his sympathy without sensible
loss. But for the eager make-believe of that time we should still have
to hoard up much rubbish which we can now leave aside, or accept without
bothering to assay for the few grains of gold in it. Washington Irving
had just the playful kindness which sufficed best to deal with the
accumulations of his age; if he does not forbid you to believe, he does
not oblige you to disbelieve, and he has always a tolerant civility in
his humor which comports best with the duty of taking leniently a
history impossible to take altogether seriously. Till the Spaniards had
put an end to the Moorish misrule, with its ruthless despotism and
bloody civil brawls, the Moors deserved to be conquered; it was not till
their power was broken forever that they became truly heroic in their
vain struggles and their unavailing sorrows. Then their pathetic
resignation to persecution and exile lent dignity even to their
ridiculous religion; but it was of the first and not the second period
that Irving had to treat.
VI
The Alhambra is not so impressive by its glory or grandeur as by the
unparalleled beauty of its place. If it is not very noble as an effect
of art, the inspiration of its founders is affirmed by their choice of
an outlook which commands one of the most magnificent panoramas in the
whole world. It would be useless to rehearse the proofs by name. Think
of far-off silver-crested summits and of a peopled plain stretching away
from them out of eye-shot, dense first with roofs and domes and towers,
and then freeing itself within fields and vineyards and orchards and
forests to the vanishing-point of the perspective; think of steep and
sudden plunges into chasms at the foot of the palace walls, and one
crooked stream stealing snakelike in their depths; think of whatever
splendid impossible dramas of topography that you will, of a tremendous
map outstretched in colored relief, and you will perhaps have some
notion of the prospect from the giddy windows of the Alhambra; and
perhaps not.
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