Part 6 (1/2)
A prouder distinction is that Sevilla is the capital of Andalusia, that gayest and most diversified province of Spain; the native ground of the bull-fight and breeder of the best bulls; a region abounding in racy customs and characteristics. The sea-going Phoenicians, who bear down on us from so many points of the historical compa.s.s, found in Andalusia an important trading field. Its mountains are still stored with silver, copper, gold, lead, which have yielded steady tribute for thousands of years. In its breadths of sun-bathed plain and orange-mantled slope the ancients placed their Elysian Fields. Goth and Roman, Moor and Spaniard, struggled for the mastery of so rich a possession; and meanwhile Sevilla, the favorite of Caesar--his ”little Rome”--lay at the core of the fruitful land, herself careless in the main as to everything except an easy life, with plenty of singing and love-making. From climate and history, nevertheless, from art and the mingling of antipodal races, Sevilla received those influences which have shaped her into the bizarre and eminently Spanish creation that she is--a visible memory of the past, and a sparkling embodiment of the present. Society, amus.e.m.e.nt, and religious awe are the controlling aims of the people, blended with revolutionary politics, and great liveliness in their increasing commerce. The songs of Andalusia pervade the whole kingdom; its dances--_cidarillos_, _manchegas_, _boleros_, the _cachuca_, and the wildly graceful _Sevillanas_--enjoy an equal renown.
To accept Sevilla without disappointment, however, a robust appreciation is needed. Its squalors and splendors are impartially distributed.
Luxurious mansions are dropped down indiscriminately among mean abodes and the homes of dirt. Poverty and showiness, supreme beauty and grotesque ugliness, jostle each other at close quarters. It is a sort of _olla podrida_ among cities; but the total result is exceedingly curious, and piques the observation.
[Ill.u.s.tration: MAIN ENTRANCE TO THE CATHEDRAL, SEVILLA
From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GIRALDA TOWER.
From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.]
The first of it that met our eyes was the Giralda tower of the cathedral, rising in unique majesty above the unseen town, and as if inspired with a fresher grace by its own fame. If the bronze female figure of Faith on the summit could have spoken, it might have said: ”In all the range of view from this pinnacle there is nothing so fair as Sevilla.” The very next object of notice was a woman in the street, who began begging from below the instant we set foot on the balcony for a general survey. She gave us our money's worth of misery, but the supply afterward proved too great for our demand. The mendicants of Sevilla are much more daring and pertinacious than their craft elsewhere. They call your attention with a sharp ”tst, tst,” as if you were hired to go through life casually, stopping the instant they summon you. There was in particular one energetic man who never failed to pounce upon us from his lair, and place some few inches in front of us the red and twisted stump from which his hand had been severed. He had seemingly persuaded himself that our journey of several thousand miles was undertaken princ.i.p.ally to inspect this anatomical specimen. The amount of execution he did with that mutilated member was enough to shame any able-bodied, self-supporting person. With a single wave of it he could put us to flight. The effect would not have been more instantaneous if he had suddenly unmasked a mitrailleuse a yard from our noses. To a.s.sume unconsciousness was futile, for, whichever way we turned, he was always (it would hardly be correct to say ”on hand,” but) on time with his fingerless deformity--he always placed it, with the instinct of a finished artist, in the best light and most effective pose--getting it adroitly between us and anything we pretended to look at.
I imagined the n.o.ble cathedral might afford a refuge from such attacks, but every door was guarded by a squad of the decrepit army, so that entrance there became a horror. These sanctuary beggars serve a double purpose, however. The black-garbed Sevillan ladies, who are perpetually stealing in and out noiselessly under cover of their archly draped lace veils--losing themselves in the dark, incense-laden interior, or emerging from confession into the daylight glare again--are careful to drop some slight conscience-money into the palms that wait.
Occasionally, by pre-arrangement, one of these beggars will convey into the hand that pa.s.ses him a silver piece a tightly-folded note from some clandestine lover. It is a convenient underground mail, and I am afraid the venerable church innocently shelters a good many little transactions of this kind.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ”UNDERGROUND” MAIL.]
Nothing can surpa.s.s in grandeur, in solemn and restful beauty, the hollow mountain of embellished stone which const.i.tutes this cathedral.
It does not present the usual cross shape, but is based upon the oblong form of an old mosque, originally formed somewhat like that at Cordova, but now wholly gone, excepting for the unequalled Giralda, and a few other minor muezzin towers. The Court of Oranges is another relic of the mosque-builders, where clumps of polished leaf.a.ge contrast their own vivid strength with the energetic lines of flying-b.u.t.tresses in the background--a florid yet melancholy height of trellised stone. The enclosing walls of the Orange Court, made of firmly cohering mud, or _tapia_, are tipped with flame-pointed battlements. At their eastern end rises the tall, square Giralda, with a serenity in its simple lines expressing, like Greek temples, the satisfied senses controlled by an elevated mind. The lower portion bears other impress of its Moorish origin in variously patterned courses of sunken brick; but the whole tower terminates in a filigree Christian spire of the sixteenth century, with a row of queer rusty iron ornaments, imitating vases filled with flowers, placed on the ledge above the belfry at the spire's base. Then, as you continue the circuit on the east, you arrive opposite the apse curve marking the chancel of the Chapel Royal; and here the wall is moulded to the taste of Charles V.'s time, which affected Roman simplicity and weight, adding to it a trace of feudal pomp in high-relief coats of arms. On the third and south side a crumbling frieze of deer's heads and flower garlands skirts the cornice above a long plain front, the straight-ness of which our friend Whetstone, clambering up on a low coping so as to squint along the side, and see if the lines were perfectly true, admired more than anything else.
Afterward one reaches a corner where the work remains unfinished, and the blackened trunks of incomplete pinnacles in graded ranks suggest the charred fragments of a faith once all afire, now darkened and cold.
There is no all-dominating dome; but there are two or three bulbous upheavals in the roof, some spindling turrets on the north, and a square elevation in the middle revealing the form of the transept. The whole top is ribbed with stone, serrated with ornate crockets, crowded with bosses and small spires, or edged with a double bal.u.s.trade mimicking in its flame-points a thousand altar lights. Petrified rosettes and spiral wreathings project from the sides in unchangeable efflorescence, and great arches, furrowed around by concentric ripples of carving, and sometimes overpeered by quaint terra-cotta heads, give entrance to the interior of the gigantic marvel. And over all towers the Giralda to a height of three hundred and fifty feet, surmounted by the Giraldillo vane--a woman's form, which turns its twenty-five hundred-weight of bronze from point to point at the slightest veering of the wind. But the consummate wonder of this great fabric, under which prostrate ages seem to crouch while lifting it to heaven, is the union of diverse styles and spirits in its construction. The different schools conglomerated in such an exterior give the cathedral a great and mysterious power of variety; yet, decided though their contrasts are, the effect is not harsh. It bears witness to the truth that the spirit of man when attuned to the mood of sincere wors.h.i.+p, however unlike its expression may be at different epochs and through different races, will always make a certain grand inclusive harmony with itself.
The coolness of the lofty and umbrageous aisles within is not penetrated by the fiercest summer heats; but their religious twilight, though inciting to a devout and prayerful sentiment, wraps in obscurity the crowded works of art, the emblazoned _retablos_, the paintings of Murillo, Campana, and Morales, and the costly ornaments bestowed upon the high altar, as well as those of some thirty side-chapels. In the central nave, before a shrine at the choir-back, lies the tomb of Ferdinand, son of Christopher Columbus. The colossal form of another Christopher, the saint, lifts itself up the wall to a height of thirty-two feet, near the Gate of the Exchange. Whoever looks upon St.
Christopher, to him no harm shall come during that day; hence this worthy is a common object in Spanish cathedrals, and always painted so large that no one who diligently attends ma.s.s can possibly miss seeing him. A curious relic on the Chapel Royal altar is the Battle Virgin, a small ivory image which King Ferdinand the Sainted always carried in war firmly fixed on his saddle-bow. There, too, the King himself, embalmed, is preserved in a chiselled silver case, to be uncovered and shown three times a year with great pomp of military music. A life-size Virgin with movable joints and spun-gold hair watches over him, but did not prevent his crown from being stolen a few years ago. Not far away Murillo's San Antonio hangs, the chief figure in which was also stolen, being cut out in 1874, as many who read this will remember, and carried to New York, where it was recovered. Innumerable other works and wonders there are, and the sacristies contain great value of goldsmiths' products; but, unless it be made a subject of long artistic study, the fundamental charm of the cathedral consists in its general aspects, its mysterious perspectives, its proportions so simple and grandiose; the isolated pictures formed at almost any point by jewelled and candle-lit chapels sparkling dimly through a permanent dusk, rainbowed here and there by the light from old stained windows.
From the Giralda, which is mounted by inclined planes in place of stairs, one looks down upon the glorious building as if it were something belonging to a lower and different world. All around, beyond, the mazy city flattens itself out in a confusion of white walls and tiled roofs, that look like the armored backs of scaly monsters huddled sluggishly in the powerful suns.h.i.+ne, with impossible streets among them reduced to mere thin lines of shadow. The tawny river touches it; palaces and gardens and abandoned monasteries fringe it. Quite near you see the Tower of Gold--a surviving outwork of the Moorish defences--which was formerly coated with orange-colored tiles on the outside, while the inside furnished a repository for treasure brought from the New World. A crenellated Moorish fortification rises up dreamily at one point, but finding itself out of date, abruptly subsides again. Farther out are the seven suburbs, including the gypsy and sailor quarter, the Triana; and then the plains stretch into an immense area of olive, gold, and white, reaching to mountains on the north and east. A mult.i.tude of doves inhabit the spire, and there is almost always a hawk sailing above it, higher than anything else under the cloudless sky. At the base lives the bell-ringer, through whose stone-paved dining-room and nursery, filled with his family, we had to pa.s.s in order to ascend.
Once, as we stood toward sunset in the high gallery where the bells are hung in rectangular or arched apertures, we heard the _repique_ sounding the Angelus. It was a furious explosion of metallic resonance.
Twenty bells on swinging beams, that throw the echoing mouths outward through the openings, and two fixed in place within, of which Santa Maria--profanely called The Fat One--is the largest: such is the battery at command. They are not all used at once, however, for the Angelus. The ringer and his two sons were satisfied with touching up Santa Catalina (of a tone peculiarly deep and acceptable), St. John the Baptist, San Jose, and one or two others. The whole brazen family have been duly baptized, among them being San Laureano and San Isidoro, named after the special patrons of Sevilla. One after another their tongues rolled forth a deafening roar, in a systematic disorder of thunderous tones, while the chief ringer went about unconcernedly with a smouldering cigarette in his lips. One of his sons, after uncoiling the twisted rope around the beam of San Laureano, thus getting it into violent motion, watched his chance, sprung on to the beam, agile as a cat, and stood there while it rocked, the bell under him swinging out at each turn, over the open square below. It was three hundred feet, down to the pavement, and the least slip would have sent him down to it like a handful of dirt. His conception of what would please us, nevertheless, led him thoroughly to unnerve us by repeating the performance several times.
”Why don't the high-priest, or whatever he is, go on and finish up this church?” asked Whetstone of the guide. ”Seems to me it's about time.”
”The priest? He don't want to,” was Vincent's answer, given with a movement of the fingers meant to imply the receiving of money. ”It make too good excuse.”
Our conductor, who I am sure was a sceptic, went on to declare that within the last ten years ninety thousand dollars had been left by will for carrying on the unfinished portion of the cathedral, but as yet no movement to begin the work had been made. ”Where all that money go?” he asked, innocent curiosity overspreading his features, while his eye gleamed with hidden intelligence.
”What do the people think of the priests?” one of us asked.
”The chimneys[7] will find out some time,” he replied; adding, in the proverbial strain common with Spaniards: ”When the river comes down from the mountains, it brings stones.”
”By the river, you mean revolution? But you've had that before.”
The conclusive answer to this was a maxim borrowed from the ring: ”The fifth bull is never a bad one” (meaning, ”Success comes to those who wait”).
Our guide's English was put to a severe strain in the Alcazar, a palace largely Oriental, with interiors that outs.h.i.+ne the Alhambra in resplendent color and gilding. There is, in particular, one round-domed ceiling constructed with an intricacy of interdependent supports, cones, truncations, dropping cusps, which is counterpoint made plastic; and in its inverted cup-like cysts the burnished gold glows like clotted honey.
But, for all that, it does not equal the matchless Alhambra in arrangement, variety, or poetic surroundings. The memory of King Pedro the Cruel is closely connected with this Alcazar. From it he used to make night sallies into the town, by means of what Vincent termed a ”soup-tureen pa.s.sage,” which brought him up through a trap-door somewhere in the thick of his subjects. Pedro, who lived in the fourteenth century, was a monarch of a severely playful disposition. He used to have the heads of people that were obnoxious to him cut off, and hung up over the lintel of his dressing-room door, where he could look at them while he was putting in his s.h.i.+rt-studs, or whenever he felt bored. In the extensive gardens, half Eastern and half mediaeval, behind the palace, among the box and myrtle planted in forms of heraldic devices, among the palms and terraces and fountains, there run long paths, secretly perforated in places for fine jets of water. These are the traces of a still more ingenious amus.e.m.e.nt invented by Pedro. From a place of concealment he would watch until the ladies of the court, when promenading, had got directly over one of his underground--I mean ”soup-tureen”--fountains, then he would turn a faucet, and drench them with a shower-bath from below.
There are other palaces in Sevilla, of which the Duke of Montpensier's San Telmo is the chief, and a model of uninteresting magnificence, aside from the valuable collection of old Spanish masters which it contains.