We descended to it from Segovia. Knowing Herrera's lifeless architecture--"a syllogism in stone" it has wittily been called--on that side I did not expect much, but accounts of the setting of the Escorial, of its grand solitary position in the mountains, made me hope for some kind of effect. People see things in such different ways. I could discover no grandeur whatever in the position of the rectangular ashy-colored building. The lower slopes of the Guadarramas rise behind it, but at a little distance, and the town comes between it and the sierras. It was not solitary, it was not imposing. At close range, after we had walked up the leafy avenue from the station, even the appearance of unity was lost, and it seemed nothing but a big block of good town houses like many that fill the square between four city streets. Window after window, alike inadequately small and unadorned; just like any monotonous line of town houses. We stood aghast at the pretentious, ineffectual ma.s.s which they call the eighth wonder of Spain. For us to-day there is little wonder in spending fifty millions in one lifetime to put up myriads of doors, stair-cases, and courtyards, to use two thousand pounds of iron to make the door-keys; we are accustomed to the feat. The pity is that every tourist in Spain comes here, and one in a thousand goes to Poblet or Leon, those other pantheons that are proper burial places for st.u.r.dy old kings. I am not sure that the Hapsburgs in Spain merit anything worthier than an Escorial.

At first we thought it might be the side which we approached that gave so poor an effect, so we proceeded to encircle the building; on all four sides pa.s.sing by window after window we saw not one inch of stone carved worthily, and to our astonishment we found it faced the mountains. Fancy a blank, rocky wall, a quarter of a mile away and fancy such a stupidity as choosing this to open on, instead of the wide horizon of the opposite side. Does this not give the key to the Escorial? It and its builder had no imagination. Since we were here we had to see it all, so we let ourselves be guided hither and thither, through courtyard after courtyard, down one dull corridor after another, in and out of rooms where little interested,--a dreary waste of a place.

In the picture gallery overlooking the gardens we got our first introduction to that eccentric genius, El Greco, at his worst here, with sick color and elongated figures; we thought him quite mad.

Nevertheless, the picture gallery was a respite; it was good to meet again Tintoret's rich visions of Venice, the full superb shoulders of his women, the gold brown of the robes. Ranged in cases there were also some embroidered vestments that were noticeable.

The church of the Escorial is so coldly formal and pretentious that it lay like a load on our spirits. There is something frightening in the way man unconsciously expresses his own nature in the material work of his hand; he may think himself very big, unless he really is he is certain to betray himself, if he paints or writes or builds. This correct, somber church exactly represents the religious ideal of a Philip II. Heaven, so close to one under the soul-feeding Romanesque vault of Santiago, in Seville or Toledo's Gothic aspiration, is very far away under this limited dome; the propriety here is that of a bigot, who would see heresy in the soar of Gothic, and backwardness in the bare solemnity of Romanesque.

We were shown the usual tourist-sights, the seat in the choir where Philip sat when news was brought of the Battle of Lepanto, which broke another inroad of the Mohammedan on Europe; also the life-size marble crucifix (spoiled by too long an upper lip) which Benvenuto Cellini made, and which was carried on men's backs from Barcelona to Madrid.

Statues of Philip and his father, with the ladies of their households, kneel on either side of the altar, rich bronze-gilt work, but hardly in character with a church. Then we descended to that acme of dreariness and morbid misanthropy, the sunken chamber where are buried the royal family of Spain since Charles V; one somber coffin rose above another in the dark place. And art can make death so beautiful, art like the tombs at Miraflores and Avila! Happy beings to have escaped this dreadful hole of burial, we exclaimed. Could only a century separate Isabella in her Castle of Segovia, or in the white marble peace of her sepulcher at Granada, from her descendants' costly ideal of a palace and a mausoleum?

As we stood shivering with the formality and melancholy of it all, with sympathy for the present happy young King and Queen who must lie here some day, a little touch of sentiment took away some of the oppression.

We saw on the tomb of Alfonso XII a fresh wreath of chrysanthemums.

Then, feeling that any more subterranean darkness was insupportable, we hurried up the steep staircase from the Pantheon, through the heavy-bound church, and out in the courtyard--dreary enough, too!--breathed the fresh air with relief.

In the library of the Escorial was the first place where I had seen the gilt edges of books, not their leather backs, presented to the reader, a rich, strange effect which later in the Seraglio at Stamboul I noticed again. We stopped long to examine the portraits that stand between the book-cases. Philip II was pale-eyed, anaemic and white-visaged, with drooping, hypochondrical corners to his mouth. And I had pictured him scowling and black and forceful! The Escorial should have told me that not a forceful personality could have built it but rather a stubborn ability and dogged patience, a narrow consistency, all in character with his pale eyes. The swift degeneration of the Hapsburg line is easily to be read in these portraits. Charles V (in Spain Charles I), keen of face and energetic, has a great-great-grandson, Charles II, last of the line, so rickety and idiotic that no caricature of used-up royal blood could go further.

Weary of sight-seeing where so little roused the imagination, we descended to the gardens, stiffly restrained too, but pleasant to loiter in. So close was the monotonous ma.s.s of gray stone above us, one did not have to look at it, but could gaze out on the wide view toward Madrid.

Then at sunset we went back to the church for an evening service, that hour of prayer, restful and beautiful all over Spain. The Pater Noster was recited, a litany was chanted, a meditation was read slowly with pauses while the people listened with bowed heads and closed eyes. Then followed the primitive, centuries-old Latin hymns, the glory of the church, in which is incorporated for all time the piercing piety of the Middle Ages. I too closed my eyes to shut out the formal church, and for some forgetful moments I could dream that those quavering voices of old and young, so simple, so sincere, were in some unspoiled mountain village, perhaps in that most soul-satisfying temple of all the world, the Lower Church of St. Francis:--a.s.sisi and the Escorial,--the human mind is capable of wide deviations, from the religion of humble love to this haughty contortion of it.

The most fatal effect of the Escorial was to fix the capital in Madrid, a spot, as Ford observed, that had been pa.s.sed over in contempt by Iberian, Roman, Goth, and Moor. Up to the building of the Escorial the choice of a capital had wavered, at times, in Valladolid, in Toledo, or in Seville. Philip's mountain palace caused to be the chief city one of the worst situated towns in Spain, on a waterless river, with no commercial prospects, roasting in summer, swept by icy winds the rest of the year. It too, like the Escorial, lacks all soul for the traveler.

Not a church worth looking at, all of them seventeenth and eighteenth century abominations with fat cupids, prancing angels, and posing, self-glorifying saints, not a cathedral in the capital of a country which has the largest number and most heart-satisfying cathedrals of the world.

I daresay if one lived in Madrid and had a full active or social life one might like it; there must be some cause for the proverb "From Madrid to heaven, and in heaven a peep-hole to look down on Madrid." As a city it can never be anything but second-rate; the new residential part near the parks is like the good districts of any average town. The famous Puerta del Sol is filled at every hour of the day and night with such a rabble of loafers and vociferating peddlers that it takes courage to push one's way through. As the Court was absent we missed seeing the brilliant morning hour of guard mounting before the Royal Palace.

Occasionally some local sight would remind us we still were in Spain, the original and untamed. Ladies in mantillas would pa.s.s on their way to the late Ma.s.s at midday, a brougham drawn by handsome mules would go by, or, if it were a holiday, a few girls of the people wore embroidered shawls. But taken as a whole, for the sightseer Madrid is just a weariness of the spirit.

Except, of course, the pictures, and I must add, the Armory. We hurried off to the Prado, up the steps past the bust of the vigorous saturnine Goya, along the far-stretching hall, with hardly a glance for the white monks of Zubaran, or El Greco's strange canvases, till midway, we turned to the left into the large hall that holds the Velasquez masterpieces.

It is a sensation in one's life, this first meeting with Velasquez at the height of his powers. The wonderful Doria Pope in Rome, the few pictures in London and Vienna whet the appet.i.te for the supreme feast in Madrid. It is an unprecedented collection of one master that no glow of enthusiasm can exaggerate. Canvas follows canvas, all the work of secure, triumphant genius, with brush handling so free that it seems impossible he painted more than two hundred years ago. Don Carlos stands dangling a glove in an absolutely natural moment of nonchalance, Philip IV and the pompous Duke of Olivares ride their proud steeds out of magnificent skies, the gallant little Don Baltasar Carlos dashes at us on his pot-bellied pony, or stands a baby hunter in the Guadarramas.

Velasquez painted him later, a grave, dignified lad of about fourteen, always with a fearless, straight look, and he also painted his piquant Bourbon mother, Philip IV's first wife; his second a wooden-faced Austrian, mother of the doll-like, big-skirted infantas. Had Don Baltasar Carlos lived, surely the race had not ended in a Charles II.

You walk about the Velasquez room bewildered, sorry for the copyists who have set up their easels before work that tells so unflinchingly each slip of a talent what it is to be a master. Portraits and genre studies; the lovely bent neck of the weaving girl, the breathing livingness of the Maids of Honor, the displeasing dwarfs,--each canvas is an achieved success.

At the end of the hall hangs what swiftly became my favorite of all pictures seen, the "Surrender of Breda," called "Las Lanzas," from the soldiers' spears ranged against the sky. It is a canvas about the size of the "Night Watch" in Amsterdam. The two armies fill the background under a sky that is a glorious harmony of cold blue and rose. In the foreground the Fleming, Justin of Na.s.sau, advances to surrender the keys of Breda to its conqueror, the Marquis Spinola, general of the Spanish forces, though by birth a Genoese. Spinola has dismounted, and bends to meet his enemy, vanquished now, hence in his knightly creed, his friend.

With a subtle, delicate shrinking he has placed his hand on his opponent's shoulder, and in his face is an expression of such high chivalry, of such generous effacement of self, of all that is best in man of courtesy and n.o.ble-mindedness, that the tears spring to the eyes.

You return to it again and again and come away refreshed and enn.o.bled.

Only a man loyal himself to the core could render such an emotion, only a technical genius of the first rank could fix so fleeting an instant; this truly is thinking in paint, and it places Velasquez side by side with Leonardo da Vinci as a master of the intellect. I think it is very pleasant to learn that Velasquez knew the General he has immortalized, and you feel he must have known, too, the superb Spanish hidalgos who stand in the group behind the Marquis. On his first trip to Italy, the painter sailed in the same vessel to Genoa with Spinola, and probably sketched him then. I like to imagine the meeting of two such spirits of chivalry.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ISABELLA OF PORTUGAL, BY t.i.tIAN. PRADO GALLERY, MADRID]

Were the Prado only Velasquez and the Spanish artists, it would be among the first of galleries, but it is astonishingly rich in Italian masters as well. It has the best equestrian portrait in the world, Charles V at the Battle of Muhlberg, a picture to be studied long and often. The Emperor has risen from illness, he has had to be lifted upon his horse, but he has pluckily girded himself to take command. The Venetian red of his plumes and scarf is splendid. t.i.tian has another of the Emperor, standing with his Irish hound, near it a gem of woman portraiture, Charles' lovely wife, Isabella of Portugal. It seems a strange irony for such an exquisite creature to have been the mother of a Philip II. Philip was fortunate in his daughters, too, demure, formal little maidens, who stand with the sedate propriety of Spanish infantas, and in his sisters, whose long, aristocratic faces Antonio Moro has left us. Charles V sent Moro to England to paint Queen Mary for her young bridegroom, and here she sits in her rich crimson leather chair, erect and stiff and insignificant, her auburn hair and homely face not one to charm her future husband still in his twenties, she not far from the fatal forty. A deeply pathetic portrait this. Good woman she was personally, despite having been made the scape-goat for a system, yet one can read in the pinched shrewdness of her mouth that she lacked her grandmother's height of brain, nor was she capable of her mother's dignity of sorrow, whose grand insulted womanhood Shakespeare has rendered so magnificently.[22] There are many other notable portraits in the Prado; a stately matron and her three sons by Parmigianino; a rich pigment of color, Rembrandt's wife; Raphael's Cardinal,--the acute, keen, Italian face so different from the Spanish type; a striking Count de Berg by Van d.y.k.e. Mantegna has a small canvas, the "Transito de la Virgen," with the apostles gathered round the couch, a graphic glimpse through the window behind of Mantua. Mantegna put thought into his work, and he compels thought from others; this "Transito" drew me to it in the same browsing study as that small triptych in the Uffizi.

Then upstairs are more Italians. The facile Veronese has here, curiously enough, a really impressive scene, Christ and the Centurion. There are many Rubens, and some peaceful Claude Lorraine sunsets and sunrises, offering the needed siesta of quiet in a full collection. And downstairs in the bas.e.m.e.nt are the primitives, Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memling, mystical enough to refresh the soul of a Huysmans. The gilded backgrounds of these celestial annunciations, these interiors of so intense and breathless a reverence, have always seemed to me a pure symbol of the uncomplicated perfection of their faith, the unquestioning mental background of the age.

After Velasquez it is not easy to feel much enthusiasm for the other Spanish painters. Murillo can only be really known in Seville, in whose gallery he predominates as does Velasquez here. It is a coincidence that both of Spain's first painters should have been born in the same Andalusian city, within twenty years of each other, and that the ashes of both should have been scattered to the wind in the French invasion.

Zurbaran's white-robed monks,--he painted Carthusians as Murillo did Franciscans, and Roelas the Jesuits,--are always effective, but they miss being taken seriously by a dash of pose in them. As for Ribera's martyrdoms, (his portraits are very fine,) if chance led us into his room, one glance and we fled; it is not pleasant to see people disemboweled. The same shuddering horror you feel before some of Goya's, as for instance that awful but tremendously moving blood-red _Dos de Mayo_. Goya is almost too crabbedly individual to be liked unreservedly.

He is in a way the Hogarth of the South, with a gruesome, fantastic imagination, quite pitiless to the vices or follies of his generation; witness the portrait of the Infanta Maria Josefa, or the appalling group surrounding Charles IV, "a grocer's family who have won the big lottery prize," Gautier cleverly said of it. At times you think Goya had no elevation of soul, then you come on a portrait that shows he could see something besides the weakness of human nature. He was a true Aragonese, stubborn, energetic, a.n.a.lytic. And it should never be forgotten that he painted in that desert of art, the eighteenth century, and swept aside the weak methods of generations to return to Velasquez's vigor of technique.

No visitor in Madrid can possibly miss the Prado gallery, but it is not difficult to omit the Armory; for, discouraged by going to see sights not worth the effort, you may think the _Armeria_ just the usual dull collection found in capitals, of interest only to the specialist. No greater mistake could be made. This Madrid museum is like nothing of its kind in Europe, it is an unrivaled show, one hour there and you learn volumes of Spanish history.

It consists of a large hall, down whose center is ma.s.sed a splendid array of hors.e.m.e.n, caparisoned in historic armor. The manikins have been fitted out thoroughly. Their gauntleted hands hold the polished spears, and ostrich plumes wave from their helmets; they give an astonishing effect of life. Among the thirty-odd suits worn by Charles V, here is the identical one t.i.tian painted in the equestrian portrait, decked with the similar doge-red scarf and plumes. There is the gallant little Baltasar Carlos' suit of mail; the armor of that Bayard of Spain, Garcilaso de la Vega; of the hero of Lepanto, Don John of Austria, and some of the banners and ship-prows of his victory; the suit of Charles'

general, the Marquis of Pescara, Vittoria Colonna's husband; the tent of Francis I at the battle of Pavia; the arms of Juan de Padilla, who led the uprising of the independent cities against Charles. History is followed from earliest times in raw gold Visigothic crowns, the sword of Pelayo at Cavadonga, the sword of the great slayer of Moors, King Ferdinand _el Santo_ of Castile, and the winged-dragon helmet of as mighty a battle leader, King Jaime _el Conquistador_ of Aragon, down to the last stage of the seven hundred years' crusade, in Isabella's armor; that of the Gran Capitan; Boabdil's engraved with Moorish letters; and, finally, the surrendered keys of Granada. Spain's majestic hour lives again here.

As we left the Armoury, a present-day scene presented itself and it struck me as very characteristic of a country where the grandee, shopkeeper, and peasant live side by side in friendliness. Before us lay the big courtyard of the Royal Palace, the King's very doorstep as it were, and it overflowed with hundreds of children, nursemaids, families, and soldiers; the crowd being chiefly of a popular character. They tell of strict Spanish etiquette, but it appears to me as if the people here get nearer to their king than elsewhere. Rough boys and men were pouring into the Armoury to wander with pride among the plumed knights, and by their glance they showed they felt themselves part of the stirring past.

Each knew himself a _cristiano viejo_[23] whose forebears had struck a blow for the _Reconquista_.

TOLEDO

"But changeless and complete Rise unperturbed and vast Above our din and heat The turrets of the Past, Mute as that city asleep Lulled with enchantments deep Far in Arabian dreamland built where all things last."

WILLIAM WATSON

Toledo has been compared to Durham, but it is the similarity between a splendid lean old leopard and a beautiful domestic cat. The largest river of Spain, the Tagus, without a touch of England's lovely verdure to soften it, sweeps impetuously round the Spanish ecclesiastic city, through a wild gorge from which it derives its name (_tajo_, cut) and above the river-cliffs rise sun-whitened houses, innumerable monasteries, and church towers, in a compact, imposing ma.s.s. Across the river is a barren wilderness, solitary as if never trod by foot of man, and this, close to an historic city. Stern and a bit fanatic,--for she has lived for generations, with sword in hand to guard her altars,--Toledo represents ascetic, exalted Castile as completely as palm-crowned Seville, stretching out in the meadows by the winding Guadalquivir sums up the ease-loving character of Andalusia. The thought of the Moor is never long absent in the fertile southern province, but here, though for a time he ruled as conqueror, every stone of the city tells of crusading Christian ideals.

Most travelers run down to Toledo from Madrid for merely a day, whereas it is eminently a spot for a pause of several days. Not only once but a second and a third time should you cross the Alcantara bridge and climb the silent hills beyond it. From there Toledo stands up in haunting majesty, one of the imperial things in the world. Wild footpaths lead along the hills, so you can follow the immense loop of the river and return to the city by St. Martin's bridge.

The desolate Tagus is as unchanged by the centuries as the hills confining it. Toledo's first mayor, the Cid, looked on much the same scene that we know, nor could it have been very different when, earlier, the last of the Gothic kings, Roderick, saw the fair Florinda bathing by St. Martin's bridge,--which untimely spying the legend says brought the African invasion on Spain; the same as when King Wamba ruled here, and his name is synonymous with "as old as the hills"; the same as when the city's patron, Leocadia, was hurled down from the cliffs in Dacian's persecution.

Once inside the Puerta del Sol (a real gateway, not a plaza where a gate once stood, like its Madrid namesake), we found ourselves in a fretwork of narrow streets where we got lost at every turning. These twisting pa.s.sages were so built that if the city walls were captured, the people could still offer a stiff resistance. Zig-zag up and down the lanes go, every few yards coming to a small triangle, out of which lead three narrow ways,--which to choose is ever the bewildering question. Push on boldly, the tortuous streets are worth exploring at random, and if you wander long enough you are sure to find yourself before the Cathedral or in the famous Zocodover Square. Morning and afternoon we were out exploring, with a good map to guide us, yet up to the very last day, we lost the way half a dozen times. The constant uncertainty was fascinating; only in such unhurried rambles does the _genius loci_ reveal itself. Now we stumbled on San Cristo de la Luz, in whose diminutive chamber are Visigothic capitals, Moorish arches, and a Christian _retablo_; it was here Alfonso VI heard his first Ma.s.s in the conquered city, the Cid Campeador at his side. Now we stopped to see the empty church of El Transito, in the Mudejar style, built originally as a synagogue, and we found there an astonishingly beautiful arabesque frieze. This Mudejar style (Moorish and Christian architecture mixed) has here what I think is its most perfect example, Santa Maria la Blanca, also a former synagogue, then a church, and at present national property.

As usual, our first visit after arrival, was to the Cathedral, not so easy to find as in most places, since it is not set on the highest part of the city, and is shut in with cluttering houses. As usual, too, like most Spanish churches, the exterior is meaningless; but the interior is a vigorous, pure Gothic, which is called the most national expression of this style in Spain. Like Seville, the ground plan is a _sala_, or hall; though the aisles here lessen in height so rapidly that they give a far different effect from Seville's lofty nave. The double-aisled ambulatory as at Avila is unique and beautiful in its effect. Spanish Gothic may be less artistically faultless than that of France, but certainly its ma.s.sive grandeur and even its very extravagance render it many times more picturesque.

The primate of Spanish cathedrals is the richest in tombs, paintings, _rejas_, carvings, vestments, and jewels, even after the French carried away some hundred weight of silver treasure. Unfortunately, it was here we began to feel like tourists and to experience the jaded weariness of the personally conducted. We had wandered freely over the churches of the north, for a slight fee the verger had unlocked the choir and separate chapels, and then had gone off to let us examine them undisturbed. Here the flocking tourist has brought about the pest of tickets for each separate part of the church, and the guide, when one pauses to loiter, impatiently rattles his keys. And one longs to loiter in the most perfect _coro_ of Spain, where Maestro Rodrigo, and Berruguete, and Vignani carved; in the _sala capitular_, or the Alvaro de Luna chapel of florid Gothic, where the beheaded Grand-Constable lies guarded by four stone knights of Santiago.

Since Spanish cathedrals were gradual growths, here is to be found, in a ma.s.s of violent sculpture called the _Transparente_, the bad taste of the eighteenth century. The bishop who erected the _Transparente_ lies buried near by, covered by a mammoth slab of bra.s.s, on which, in bold letters, you read, "Here lies dust, ashes, nothing," an epitaph whose ironic, fatigued simplicity does not ring true; very different from that genuinely humble epitaph in Worcester Cathedral, that one impressive word "Miserrimus." _Transparente_ and tombstone are subtly allied, not inappropriate memorials of one who was instrumental in bringing the academic Bourbons to the Spanish throne in 1700.

In the sacristy is a beautiful picture, the _Expolio_, "Stripping Our Lord before the Crucifixion," by El Greco, the strange Byzantine Greek who drifted to Toledo and in his forty years there because more Spanish than the Spaniards. In his case the accident of birth was nothing; though born in Crete of Greek parents, refugees from Constantinople, El Greco was a true Castilian soul. He had known Venice in the days of Tintoret and t.i.tian, but it was only when he came to Toledo that he found the atmosphere, mystic and chivalrous, in which his genius could develop. His was the spiritualized mysticism of a Teresa or a John of the Cross, with little of the conventional piety of Murillo. And he has rendered the Spanish hidalgo as has none other, on his canvas "they live an inner life, indifferent to the world; sad with the nostalgia for a higher existence, their melancholy eyes look at you with memories of a fairer past age that will not return. They are the dignified images of the last warrior ascetics."[24]

There is no denying that some of El Greco's pictures are aberrations; when I first saw him in the Escorial gallery, I thought him eccentric to madness. Thanks to Professor Raphael Domenech of the Prado School of Art, I looked a second time and learned to appreciate him. "What he did ill, no one did worse, but what he did well, no one did better." Toledo has many of his masterpieces. In the Church of Santo Domingo is his "Ascension" and the two Saint Johns; in Santo Tome, his splendid "Burial of Count Orgaz." The chapel of San Jose and the churches of San Vicente and San Nicolas have some good examples of his, and the Provincial Museum has a remarkable series of the apostles with a truly n.o.ble representation of their Master. El Greco--by the way, his real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos--lived with princely magnificence, his friendship sought by the cultivated society round him, and on his death he was buried in San Bartolome, regretted by the whole city. His sumptuous way of life was continued by his son, who built the cupola that covers the Mozarabic Chapel of the Cathedral.

This brings us to perhaps the most interesting survival of the past that exists in Spain, the Mozarabic Ma.s.s, said every morning in the western end of Toledo Cathedral. Mozarabic means Mixt-Arab, and is the name applied to the Christians who were under Moorish rule. Living isolated from their fellow-believers they kept to the old Gothic ritual. In the eleventh century the Christian conqueror of Toledo, Alfonso VI, after an artless trial by fire of the rival books, introduced the Gregorian liturgy, used by the rest of Europe. The learned Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Ximenez, thought the Gothic ritual too interesting a national memorial to be lost, so he endowed a chapel with its own chapter of canons.

The morning after our arrival, I hastened down to the Cathedral to hear a Mozarabic Ma.s.s. It puzzles me how Ford, the traveler, could have written of it as he did, as if its simplicity put to shame the later rite, for a Catholic could to-day attend the Mozarabic service with no striking feeling of difference. In some respects it is simpler than the Gregorian Ma.s.s, in others more elaborate; thus, for instance, the Host is divided into nine parts, to represent the Incarnation, Epiphany, Nativity, Circ.u.mcision, Pa.s.sion, Death, Redemption, Ascension, and Eternal Kingdom. The kiss of peace is given before the Consecration; the Credo is recited after the offertory.

In my eagerness to be in time, I arrived half an hour too early, so I whiled away the minutes watching the altar boys prepare for the ceremony. It was easy to read, in their air of proprietorship that their duties were an achieved ambition, the reward of good conduct. One of the lads climbed up on the big bra.s.s eagle of the lectern and gave it an affectionate polish; then, having partly illuminated the altar,--during the ceremony more candles were lighted,--they whipped out their smart red ca.s.socks, and stood side by side in severe precision, to salute the eight canons, "_Buenos Dias!_" altar boys and dignitaries bowed with leisurely Spanish courtesy. In their preparations the small acolytes had found the supply of altar wine somewhat short, so more was sent for.

During the solemn moments of the Ma.s.s, a messenger arrived with an offensive flask. With rustling dignity in his trailing red gown, the majordomo of ten swept across the chapel to thrust out the tactless blunderer, and the look of apologetic confusion on his cherub face, as he returned to his post of honor, was adorable.

Some German tourists noisily came into the chapel, and refusing to kneel at the moment of the elevation, the verger, in a spirit the founder would have applauded, pointed with his silver wand, a silent but inflexible dismissal. This first morning of my visit, too, a group of hardy countrymen came to the Mozarabic Ma.s.s; with cap in hand and cloak flung toga-like over their muscular shoulders, they knelt on one knee, as instinctively graceful as the shepherds in Murillo's "Nativity." When the service was over, in respectful quiet despite their arrogant carriage, these unlettered men rose and pa.s.sed out to loiter in the Cathedral for a half hour. "The rank is but the guinea's stamp, the man's the gold for a' that," rings often in the ear in Castile.

Cardinal Ximenez, founder of the Chapel, was Castilian to the core, and Toledo for him, just as for El Greco, was fittest home. He was born in 1436 in the province of Madrid of an old family that had fallen in his day on moderate circ.u.mstances. In Spain, Ximenez is often called Cisneros, for there two surnames are used; the first following the Christian name is the patronymic name of the father, the second that of the mother. Sometimes a man uses his paternal surname alone, more seldom his mother's family name alone, as in the case of Velasquez, whose father was a de Silva.

A studious disposition early destined Ximenez to the priesthood, and following a few years' study in Alcala, which he was to raise to a world-known university, he went to Salamanca. After a long stay in Rome, on his return to Spain he wasted some precious years in an unfortunate ecclesiastic dispute. His true worth was not discovered till he went, when over forty, to serve in the Cathedral of Siguenza, where Cardinal Mendoza, the future "Rex Tertius," was then bishop. Recognizing the new chaplain's remarkable powers, he made him his vicar-general. But Ximenez, in the face of every chance of rapid advancement in the Church, felt within him a longing for the retired life of prayer. He chose the strictest order of his day, and entered the Franciscan monastery of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo. All who know Toledo will remember it, built in the bizarre, flamboyant, often overladen but always grandiose style of Isabella and Ferdinand. On its outer walls hang iron chains, the votive offerings of Christian captives ransomed from the Moors in Africa, and one cannot help thinking that the concentrated mind of the new novice received an indelible impression from these souvenirs of Moslem barbarity, a bias that found later expression in his stern treatment of the Moors of Granada and his crusading siege of Oran.

Ximenez had sought a life of prayer in San Juan de los Reyes, but a personality such as his could not help but rise in acknowledged supremacy above those around him. The fame of his intellect and holiness soon drew to his confessional the leading minds of Toledo, and he found himself, to his distress, again in touch with the world. He retired to a more isolated Franciscan monastery, and gave himself up to years of study and prayer. Men seemed then to find time for the long s.p.a.ces of tranquil thought that solidify character; holding the highest posts that ambition could achieve, they seemed to know themselves as dust before the wind. The key-note of to-day is breadth not intensity, and it sometimes seems as if our scattered knowledge leads to a more superficial outlook on the elemental and eternal verities, that universal education tends to universal mediocrity. Why have so few to-day the old-time s.p.a.ciousness of vision? Is it because education then meant the development of the soul as well as of the intellect, because in acknowledging that there are an infinite number of things beyond reason they attained what Pascal calls the highest point of reason?

"Ever learning and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth" we seem indeed. Wholly-rounded opportunities were given in that age. Poets and novelists then were soldiers in the roving wars of Europe,[25]--Garcilaso, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, these last two priests as well, and Garcilaso making a holy end helped by a grandee who was a saint, and Cervantes dying in the habit of the a.s.sisian. But I suppose this carping comparison is just the never-ending tendency to look on a previous day as better than one's own. Jorge Manrique felt the same way:

"a nuestro parecer Cualquiera tiempo pasado Fue mejor"