THERE is no place in the world like the Alhambra, so graceful, so perfect, so sad. No words can describe it, no pencil can portray it; it remains apart in the heart and fancy, like some second, more golden youth, that has come for a brief season, and made us happy and passed away.

The gardens are bordered with violets and myrtle, and shadowy with orange and lemon trees; the marble floors, the dried fountain, the slender alabaster columns, the gorgeous ceilings, the walls covered with delicate arabesques and verses, the airy courts, the sunny fish-ponds, the luxurious baths, the silence and desolation that have fallen over all, are indeed indescribable, and grow upon one like the graces of a most musical poem.

It is a fairy tale for men and women of all countries and religions—a realization of beauty, the most inconceivable and the most intoxicating—a sweet and subtle embodiment of Eastern thought and art. The Alhambra is so ruined as a whole, and yet so perfect in parts, so bare here, so rich in colour there, so desolate and yet so haunted by voices, that it reminds one most, I think, of beautiful antique jewellery. Some of the jewels have dropped out, the gold is tarnished, the clasp is broken, the crown is bent, but gaze a little while, and all becomes as it once was. Pearl and amethyst, emerald and opal, blaze out on some lovely throat, a golden clasp is wound on some round white arm, and a crown shines on some golden head, perhaps of a goddess, perhaps of a woman. Nothing is lost, or changed, or dead.

One doesn’t know what to admire most in this small but exquisite realm of enchantment. Like children at a fair, who clap their hands and laugh for joy at every new toy, crying out,—“This is best! no, this! no, this!” we passed from court to court, and hall to hall, declaring each to rival each as we went along. At one time I held that the court of Lindaraja bore the palm, at another the Alberca; but each is so perfect in its way that it is almost impossible to have preference for any. The view of the Alberca, or fish-pond court, is very sweet on a sunny day. We first saw it when the sunlight were playing on the water, and the rainbow-coloured reflexion of it on the delicate alabaster colums was magical. But all is magical—the Court of Lions, the Baths, the Hall of Ambassadors, the Mezquita, the Hall of the Two Sisters; and one could weep at the desecration that has done its best to ruin them.

What never ceases to surprise you is the richness and the delicate, one might almost say, effeminate finish and elaborateness of every part. The walls are covered with coloured faÏence and arabesques; the ceilings are either of inlaid pine or cedar wood, and hollowed after the fashion of stalactite caves; the floors are of polished white marble, the palm-like columns, of alabaster and fountains abound everywhere. There is nothing to add and nothing to take away from this Palace of Aladdin; and as you learn to know the place, you love it, and marvel at it more and more. But if it is a Palace of Aladdin now, what must it have been when the fountains were shedding floods of pearl in the sunlight; when all the courts were filled with perfume of myrtle, of oleander, and of orange-blossom; when the glistening white floors were partly hidden by gorgeous carpets; when the delicate columns were covered with gold, and the fretted domes blazed with colour, orange, purple, and red; when the Caliph administered justice, surrounded by his courtiers, a second Solomon with more than Solomon’s glory; when the Alberca Court rang with the merry voices of Moorish girls, who bathed, and played, and told each other love-stories all day long; when every hall echoed with voices, and was bright with the rich Oriental dresses, what must it have been indeed? Only the poets and chroniclers of the time can tell us; but their name is Legion, for never did the sun of patronage shine brighter than under the Ommeyad dynasty, and the glories and disasters of beautiful Granada formed a favourite theme of both poet and poetess.

The Alhambra is not understood in a day. At first sight you are apt to be disappointed. The courts are smaller than you thought, or they seem over-laden with ornament, or they want breadth here, loftiness there; but this is only the captiousness of ignorance. Like a beautiful, capricious child, who tries you and torments you one moment, and the next is all sweetness and grace, and only in need of caresses, the Alhambra must be taken on trust; and when you have seen it as we saw it, in the pearly light of early morning, in the blaze of noon-day sun, in the dusky twilight, in the silvery night, you will come away, filled with the joy that is born of beauty, and thank the happy chance that led your steps to Granada. The outer walls and towers are very grand; but to enjoy their grandeur you must lose sight of the Palace of Charles V., the rankest toad-stool that ever grew up amid sweet summer flowers.

We had come to Granada in the season of sunsets, and what sunsets they were! Then the long lines of broken wall, ordinarily of that rich yellow colour, with which the pipe stains white marble, were flushed into deepest crimson, the faded elms were aglow with rosy light, the whole world seemed floating in golden mist. Or if we lost sight of the walls, and turned our faces westward, we looked across a broad purple plain, bounded by the snow-tipped Sierra, behind which the sun was setting in an unutterable splendour of colour and light. Another moment, and the blaze was gone; pink clouds, like rose-leaves, floated about the sky and disappeared slowly one by one, and, last of all, came the bluish-grey twilight, and myriads of large southern stars.

One grows so rooted to the place, for sake of its many-sided beauty,—beauty of art, of atmosphere, of everything, that one never wishes to leave it. That is to say, if one were an intellectual being one would never wish to leave it; but the material part of every poor person and every Protestant must make the thought of dying at Granada simply horrible. I never felt such a distaste for Catholic Spain, and such a respect for Mahomedan Spain, as here. The Moors made Granada the paradise we find it, and it was an evil hour for the civilised world when their enlightened rule came to an end. Everything good in Granada is Moorish; instead of arts, philosophy, toleration, charity, and wealth, came ignorance, the Inquisition, superstition, misery, pauperism.

But let us forget these things and give our time and thoughts to the Alhambra. It is quite marvellous that such a creation—what other name can one use in speaking of the Alhambra?—should have been the work of the last period of Mahomedan glory. Like some flower, the last and loveliest of an Indian summer, it only reached maturity when the sun, that had ripened it, was on the wane; and hardly had the petals opened one by one when they were nipped by frost and wind. Everything that contempt and malice, and it must be admitted also earthquakes, could do, was done to despoil the fairy palace of the Moors, and the only marvel is, that anything remains to show what it once was. This mixture of beauty and desolation on every side reminds one of Heidelberg; only that Heidelberg is less perfect and less melancholy, since with its prosperity, the civilisation that had called it into existence did not pass away.

Descriptions, however poetic or minute, photographs, water-colour drawings, fail to give one a complete idea of the Alhambra. A single visit disappoints all preconceived expectation. To know it and value it for what it is, it must be seen again and again, and studied in every part; and to appreciate it according to its real worth, requires real knowledge of Moorish art and sympathy with its deep religious feeling.

“The architecture of the Arabs,” says Mr. Owen Jones, “is essentially religious, and the offspring of the Koran, as Gothic architecture is of the Bible. And this truth must always be held in the traveller’s remembrance. Indeed, it is impossible to understand any of the great works of the Moors without having read the Koran, their reverence for which is testified in the numerous texts from it with which they adorned their walls. In the Alhambra these sacred writings have been most gorgeously and elaborately inscribed; and what Arabic scholars consider as a labour of love, with no omission of vowel or grammatical sign. In writing ordinary Arabic the vowels are treated as if they were women and are kept out of sight, but as the Koran admits women to Paradise, so Art admits the inferior letters into his service.”[12]

The life of the East is so full of charm, that it is grateful alike to the heart and fancy to find in Arab architecture a transcript of it. Who can doubt that the graceful columns were suggested by the still more graceful palm, the light colonnade by the airy tent, the arabesques of colour and gold, by the silk stuff of Damascus? And the Alhambra itself, so gorgeous within, so unadorned and warlike and well defended without, may be called an embodiment of the spirit of the Koran, which is at the same time, religious, warlike, luxurious, sensuous, Æsthetic.

If you wish to study Moorish art in detail, take in hand one of the beautiful marqueterie, or artesonado ceilings, or a glazed tile, or azulejo. In both these cases the history of the word is the history of the thing. Artesonado means a kneading-trough; which, doubtless, first suggested the form of these ceilings; and azulejo is directly derived from the Arabic word zuluja, a varnished tile, and azul, which in its turn is derived from luzmad, lapis lazuli. Most names for colour in Spanish are derived from the same source in all arts, for as in the case of the azulejo, or coloured tile, the teachers of the art had to supply the name. Both artesonado roofing and azulejo pavements are very Oriental and ancient. We read in the Bible of the houses “cieled with cedar and painted with vermilion,” and of the “pavements of saphire,” &c.

Nothing can equal the taste and good sense,—always an infallible criterion of art—displayed in both these triumphs of form, colour, and convenience. The tile, which is always of graceful pattern and beautifully enamelled colours, is cool, clean, and exactly the flooring suited for hot climates. Labour both of brain and hand are never spared, for wherever good azulejo work exists, there is sure to be plenty of variety, both as to colour and design. But it is chiefly in the artesonado ceilings that the Moorish artist is unrivalled. Here his gorgeous fancy runs riot, and the eyes are dazzled by the wonderful combinations of form and colour that have no counterpart save in his equally intricate and equally rich poetry. A verse of the Koran is just as florid and harmonious to the ear of the Arab scholar, as one of their designs must be to the eye of any artist, no matter what his nation may be.

But the simplicity of the original plan is the most striking point to consider. The Arab was as thorough a geometrician as he was an artist, and brought his geometry to bear upon his art in an extraordinary fashion.

Some of the most beautiful tiles and ceilings are to be seen at the Generalife, the summer palace of the kings of Granada. A pretty walk leads to it; and here, even in December, I found the gardens full of roses and other summer flowers in blossom. Granada is indeed a garden of roses; and the Generalife is the lightest, airiest summer-house ever reared by Oriental lover of coolness, and running streams and bosquets of myrtle. It recalls how:—

But why say more of Granada? After all, descriptions are all but useless. Vidi tantum! Having seen the Alhambra, one seems to have seen everything.