Things Seen in Spain — Chapter 1, The Fascination of Spain, Part 1

Coming into Spain by any of the chief portals—at Port Bou, at Algeciras, or at Irun—one finds oneself in a totally new country.

You cast much behind you as you come, for instance, from France; you will be impressed by a certain strangeness of aspect far different from all you have learnt to expect in other countries.

You will feel transplanted back into another world.

It is as if Spain had sat aside waiting, indifferent and proud, while elsewhere life has rushed onwards.

The conservatism of Spain may be gathered from the old impressions we find in the pages of writers describing the people and the country of more than a century ago, which are still true in so much as they refer to what is essential in the national spirit, and to the survival of the customs of mediæval Europe.

“I regard the Spanish people,” says Stendhal, “as the living representatives of the Middle Ages.

” [Picture: A Busy Street Leading to the Market, Valencia] Spain is still the home of the romance which belonged to an age that has passed.

And although the more flourishing Spanish towns are nowadays full of animation—factories are springing up and signs of commercial activity are not wanting—this new movement of progress has not destroyed this romance.

The Spain which Cervantes immortalized still lives.

We may still take Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as typical figures, whom you may see any day in the towns of Castile or walking on the roads of La Mancha.

These are the types that have remained unchanged.

And herein rests the fascination of Spain—this conservatism which has lasted into an age of hurrying progress.

It is a fascination that everyone will not feel, but for those whom it touches the glamour is more permanent and irresistible than that of any other country I know.

Many details of life, and especially in the smaller towns still unvisited by the tourist, remind us of a past that other countries have left behind.

The _serenos_, or night watchmen, with long hooded cloaks, tipped staves, and lanterns, are familiar figures in every town.

In the country the shepherd is seen, wrapped in his coloured blanket, leaning on his tall staff in the midst of his flock.

The wandering palmer with his cockle-shell, known to the England of Chaucer, may still be met in Spain.

You realize how far you are from the present when you enter a Spanish town.

You pass under a Moorish gateway, dark and imposing, with a suggestion of savage strength in its gaunt yellow masonry that carries memories of battles that have been fought.

Here you wait for the _consumos_ to examine your luggage, which, if they doubt your honesty, they will probe with their long steel prong.

The dull jangle from the bells of your straining mules gives an unaccustomed sound as you drive upwards, for almost every Spanish town is set upon a hill.

If the town is small, the _posada_ where you seek for lodging will have a wineshop below.

You will see a crowd of wild-looking men, with great cloaks and _sombreros_ pulled low upon their foreheads, seated at a rude table.

They are taking wine from the _bota_, the long-spouted leather bottle from which only the Spaniard has the skill to drink.

Thoughts of brigands will crowd your mind.

But you need have no fear; these are simple townsmen.

Savage looks and this strange, wild appearance cover the simple friendliness of the child.

The excited conversation will cease as you enter.

Most likely you will hear the word “Francéses” muttered by one and another, for in Spain every foreigner is first taken to be French.

You answer, “No, Ingléses.

” At once an atmosphere of friendliness springs up, and an exchange of greetings will be made.

No one will take any further notice of you.

It is not the custom of the Spanish landlord to force his attentions upon his guests.

He is constitutionally incapable of the obsequious fussiness that belongs to commercial hospitality.

You will be accepted as one of the family, and the friendly trustfulness that is one characteristic of the fine Spanish courtesy will soon cause the foreign _caballero_ to feel at home.

Spain is still the most democratic of countries.

Every Spaniard expects as a matter of right to be treated as an equal.

It is significant that the title _Señor_ is given alike to God and to a beggar.

Your host at the _posada_ will sit down with you to meals, and his son, who waits upon you, will slap you on the back with easy friendliness as he makes plans for your enjoyment.

These familiar and intimate relationships, which once were common in every country, are found to-day nowhere so universally practised as in Spain.

Each Spaniard that you meet gives the greeting which commends you to God.

And no native ever eats in company without first uttering the customary _gusta_, an invitation to share in the repast, which is a survival, most probably, of the belief of primitive peoples in the evil eye that poisons the food of those who eat alone.

[Picture: The Puerta Visagra Antigua, Toledo] The snobbery that has arisen out of modern progress is unknown to the Spanish man and woman.

Business is not here the highest aim of life.

The Spaniard still feels true what Ganivet made Hernan Cortes say: “The grandest enterprises are those in which money has no part, and the cost falls entirely on the brain and heart.

” The hustling, besmirching spirit of commercialism is absent from the Spanish character; and for this reason, although Spain belongs to the past, the country, to those who have eyes to see, will seem to belong also to the future.

El Mitayo Cid Campeador, as the old chronicles affectionately call the Spanish hero, with his democratic manners, his rough-and-ready justice, and his acts at once ideal and yet practical in achievement, is the supreme representative of chivalry.

Valour and virtue, the qualities peculiarly identified with the Spanish romantic spirit, were his.

His energy in warfare, his power in love, his childlike religious faith, and his fearlessness in facing pain and also death, are characteristics that belong to all the men who have made Spain great.

Spain was the land of the sword, and the business of the true Spaniard was war.

And this love of action, strange as it may seem to those accustomed to think of the lazy Spaniard, is a very real trait in the Spanish character.

But the action must be connected with romance.

It has nothing at all to do with the idea of working for the gain of money which belongs to the “getting on” spirit of modern civilization.

The Spaniard works as the child works, for joy, and not for gain.

Living in Spain, you come to understand that this land is really the connecting link between Europe and Africa.

Both in his physical traits and in his character, the Spaniard shows his relation to the North African type—“the child of a European father by an Abyssinian mother” he has been called.

This is true.

Lithe and vigorous, with long-shaped heads and rich pigmentation of skin—the type is clearly seen in the pictures of Murillo and Zurbaran, and with a more vivid expression in the portraits of El Greco—the Spaniard has more points of contact with the Eastern than with the Western races.

Seldom indeed is he entirely a European.

But it is among the women that the resemblance stands out most clearly.

There are women with dark long African faces.

You will see them among the _flamencas_ of Seville, or in the gipsy quarter of the Camino del Sacro Monte at Granada—women with slow, sinuous movements, which you notice best when you see them dance, and wonderful eyes that flash a slow fire, quite unforgettable in their strange beauty.

In dress we still find the Oriental love of bright and violent colours.

The elegant Manilla shawls and the mantilla, which give such special distinction to the women of Spain, are modifications of the Eastern veil.

The elaborately dressed hair, built up with combs, with the rose or carnation giving a note of colour, has also a very ancient origin.

Then, the men in some districts still retain the fashion of loose, baggy trousers such as women wear in the East.

We see the Moorish influence in the Oriental seclusion of the houses, with the barred windows and high gates, often studded with bosses, seeming to forbid an entrance.

The Spaniard still constructs his house as the Moors built their houses, around the inner court, or _patio_, those gardens of colour and rest, sometimes quite hidden from the passer-by, as at Toledo; sometimes visible through an openwork iron gateway, like the gay _patios_ of Seville.

Each house still has its _buzon_, and is fronted with a _zaguán_, or vestibule of wood.

In every department of Spanish life we meet with this persistence of the Moorish influence.

This need not surprise us.

The coming of the Moors into Spain was a civilizing expedition more than a conquest.

It was the Orient entering Europe.

The invaders—for the most part Berbers with a few Arabs—were a race of young and vigorous culture, of such astonishing and rapid growth that, although in Africa they had hardly emerged from savagery, in Spain they manifested a truly wonderful receptivity, and absorbed and developed the best elements they found in the life of the country.

[Picture: Pastimes of the Gitanos in the Camino Del Sacre Monte, Granada] In two years the Moors became masters, and under their dominion, from the eighth to the fifteenth century, the most elevated and opulent civilization flourished.

All the arts, sciences, industries, inventions, and culture, of the old civilization budded out into fresh discoveries of creative energy.

Religious toleration came with them, and was lost with them.

The spirit of chivalry arose among the Moors, and was afterwards appropriated by the Christian warriors of the North.

A Moorish knight was in every respect like a Spanish knight.

It was religion alone that divided them—one called on the name of Allah, the other on that of Christ.

We must remember that the primitive Iberians of Spain were themselves of Berber stock, and this affinity in racial origin explains the peaceful amalgamation of the conquerors with the conquered.

Afterwards by the constant mingling of their bloods the Moors and the old Spaniards became one.

The Moor gave to the Spaniard and he took from him, and they contributed to the same work of national civilization.

Ganivet has said truly that those who deny the Moorish influence show themselves unable to comprehend the Spanish character.

The Moorish dominion ended, passing almost as swiftly as it came.

But the spirit of their exquisite civilization, perhaps the most exquisite that the world has yet seen, moulded their Christian conquerors into its likeness.

And penetrating the Spanish character, and the daily life and habits of the people, this influence remains; indeed, it is not overstating the truth to say that to-day the pulse of the land still beats with Moorish life.

It is in the gardens of Spain that the stranger will find best the reflection of the Moorish spirit.

The Moors made their cities places of gardens and waters.

The very names that they gave to their pleasure places speak of joy.

“The Meadow of Murmuring Waters,” “The Garden of the Water-wheel”—what magic lingers in the suggestion of the words!

Many of these old gardens have perished.

Cordova has lost all except its Orange Court and the old garden of the ruined Alcázar.

In Seville the parks are new.

But in Granada the gardens have triumphed over the devastations of the Christians; and it is one of the exquisite surprises of the place to come suddenly on some fragment of a delicious garden where the Moorish tradition lives almost undisturbed.

[Picture: Walls and Towers of the Alhambra, on the banks of the Darro, Granada] There are few cities, even in Spain, that hold so many gardens.

There is the Alameda of the Alhambra, the green garden which lies around the Moorish citadel; the _paseos_ on the banks of the Genil, planted with trees and cooled by fountains, the pleasure-grounds of the people; and the Jardín de los Adarves, on the south terrace of the Alhambra hill, a trellised retreat, with climbing vines and flowers, and splendid view of Vega and distant snow-capped hills.

Everyone will find in these gardens something that makes special appeal to him.

But the most exquisite haunt even among the gardens of Granada is the Generalife—the summer palace of the Moorish Princes, at the foot of the Cerro de Sol, and to the east of the Alhambra hill.

Here you have the charm of small and perfect gardens laid out in terraces, with great clipped cypresses, myrtles, and orange-trees, and the glow of flowers, with that of the delicate Moorish architecture, of richly coloured tiles and rare inscriptions.

And everywhere is the joyous sound of flowing water; the fountains are always playing, and water runs in channels made of inverted tiles placed on the top of the balustrades.

One of the charms of Moorish life was the love of pure water.

An old legend says that the name Generalife in Arabic signifies the “house of love, of dancing, and of pleasure,” and, further, that it was built by one Omar, a passionate lover of music, that he might retire here and entirely give himself up to that amusement.

The story is probably untrue, and the name, as the chronicles state, is a corruption of the Arabic “Djennat-al’-Arif,” which means “the garden of Arif.

” But romance so often is more beautiful than fact.

One likes to think that this exquisite palace and gardens were designed as a place wherein a man could give his soul to music.

“Charming place!

Thy garden is embellished with flowers which repose upon their stalks and exhale the sweetest perfumes; fresh air agitates the orange-trees and spreads abroad the sweet odour of its blossoms.

I

hear voluptuous music joined to the rustling of the leaves of thy grove.

Everything around is harmonious, green, and flowering.

” Such is part of the inscription upon the arcades of the Garden of the Pond, and how perfectly the rich imagery of the words conveys the charm of the garden!

The Generalife has kept more than any place in Spain its Moorish character, combining in its palace and garden, in spite of decay and alterations, much of that full suggestion of all beautiful things that was their gift.