Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly

"The epochs in which faith prevails are the marked epochs of human history, full of heart-stirring memories and of substantial gains for all after times. The epochs in which unbelief prevails, even when for the moment they put on the semblance of glory and success, inevitably sink into insignificance in the eyes of posterity which will not waste its thoughts on things barren and unfruitful."—GOETHE.

PASSING through the fertile Basque valleys, the train mounts the Pyrenees by a series of skillfully-engineered tunnels. This natural barrier between France and Spain, is far from being the straight rampart of school geographies. It is a wide expanse of ramifying hills and intricate valleys, a jumble of mountains that explains why Spain remained isolated from northern Europe until the days of the railway.

When we reached the crest of this watershed between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, we had a noble view of the villages far beneath. Around us was a strange outcrop of white rock, and the descent to Vitoria was barren too: with every mile the scene grew bleaker till the rustling woods of the Basque valleys behind seemed a dream.

Beyond Miranda, the first town of old Castile, the desolate scene appeared in its full awfulness. The plain lay like brown dunes of sand, "as for the grass, it grew as scant as hair in leprosy." It was indeed the haunting landscape of "Childe Roland." Passing over this wide stretch, the train again mounted, this time not to cross another range of hills, but to climb to the great truncated mountain which forms the center of Spain. Three-fourths of the area of this imagined orange-laden land is this tragic central plateau, comprising Old and New Castile, LeÓn, and Estremadura. Most of the historic cities are on this bleak upland, almost 3,000 feet above the sea, wind-swept, wintry, and made still colder by the snow mountains that cross it from east to west. Riding for days through the monotonous scene you begin to wonder not that Spain should be poor, but rather that she, an agricultural land, should have made so good a fight against such heavy odds. The guide books that so harshly criticise, saying hers is a land where Nature has lavished her prodigalities of soil and climate yet shiftless man has refused her bounty, seem to forget that only one-fourth of the country is the traditional rich south. The fruitful provinces form but the fringe of the Peninsula.

It was early October when we mounted the Pass of Pancorbo. A fierce wind was blowing. It suddenly blew open the door of our compartment, and flung it back, smashing the glass. It was impossible to draw it to in the fierce gale, and this little incident added to the desolation round us. We looked down through the open door on the white road of the Pass, over which Napoleon's armies poured a hundred years before to plunder Spain with ruthless cruelty, and yet, so hidden is the guidance of things, that seeming disaster waked the country from its long abasement.

Having reached the great central steppes, the same melancholy scene continued. The land was scorched and calcined. Everything was a dull brown. Villages were undistinguishable from the plain, and the churches from the villages; man, his ass, and his dog, were all the same dull tone. Even the brown deserts of Egypt failed to give me as powerful a sensation of the forsaken. The plateau was treeless, except for an occasional wind-threshed poplar, and an isolated moth-eaten poplar can be the final touch of desolation. At times, miles from any village, a solitary figure guided his oxen and plow in a stony field, or silhouetted against the sky a tandem of five or six mules slowly crawled along. Since the villages are far apart, each worker must leave his home long before dawn to reach his distant field, and after sunset plod back patiently to the aldea.

Forlorn as it all appeared one saw that every inch of the soil was under cultivation. The peasants are as attached to their cheerless tract, which has its one hour of green bloom in the spring, as are the Basques to their beautiful valleys. The fields are passed from father to son, and are acquired with the same zest as are teeming English farms; a stern soil and still sterner climate has made a peasantry full of grit and courage. Hardy and undepressed they gathered round the train with pleasant greetings, for the long pauses in the stations are moments of sociability from one end of Spain to another. The sad landscape continued up to Burgos, one might say to its very gates if it were not that the townspeople have planted avenues of trees near the city.

As we approached we had a splendid view of the Cathedral towers dominating the town. There was something magnificent in the souls of the old builders who made a temple such as this in the midst of a desert, as if they defied the arid desolation to conquer their soaring faith. The great structure rose doubly impressive from the juxtaposition of richness and sterility, of the spirit's triumph over the material that makes Burgos as impressive in its way as Toledo with its more imposing setting.

Copyright, 1910 by Underwood & Underwood Burgos Cathedral from the Castle Hill
Copyright, , 1910 by Underwood & Underwood
Burgos Cathedral from the Castle Hill

"Nuestro paÍs es el paÍs de las anomalÍas" says the critic De Larra, and the first step in Spain strikes this note. She is a land of violent contrasts; level plain and broken sierra, elysian garden of Andalusia and tractless wastes of Castile, frosty Burgos and sunny Seville. She is the home of the hidalgo and home of the strongest existing democracy between man and man, only equaled by early Rome. It was in Burgos we first noticed what we later saw frequently, the labrador who drove his master's carriage, enter the inn with him and sit at the same table to eat, master and man alike in their dignity. She has a peasantry beyond praise for its virile industry, and she has a class of city loafers the idlest that ever encumbered a plaza. Cradle of exalted mystics and mother of realistic painters, this land of racy personalities never allows one's interest to flag.

We spent a week in Burgos, and not once did the sun shine. The cold was piercing. At the corner of every street a biting wind seized and buffeted one about; besides being on a mountain, there are still higher mountains near, and snow has been known to fall in June. Wind and cold, however, were soon forgotten once inside the Cathedral. Our first visit was within the hour of arrival, at dusk when details were hidden. The great temple rose around us mysterious and awe inspiring. Though almost with the first breath of wonder came a sense of bewilderment,—what was this heavy wall rising some thirty feet in the center of the church, that hid the altar and blocked up the nave so that only an encircling aisle was left free? So confusing was it I could not at first tell by what door we had entered, where was the east, where was the west end?

Books of travel all tell of this placing of the choir, or coro, in the nave of Spanish cathedrals, but one can read them and imagine nothing like the reality. I had pictured an open platform running down the center of the church, whereas high walls are built round the coro as well as round the capilla mayor, thus making a smaller church within a larger one. Wherever the inner church opens on the other, they have placed a towering metal screen called a reja. A narrow passageway, fenced by an open rail, usually runs from the altar enclosure to the coro, and the people gather close to this, under the transept-crossing tower; thus, practically, the priest at the altar and the canons chanting in the choir are separated by the congregation. It is hard to make the picture clear. I feel that no explanation can prevent this arrangement of Spanish cathedrals coming as a surprise to the traveler.

The evening of our first visit, we wandered round in the dusk bewildered by the blocking coro, and at length entered the chapel of St. Anne, where a service was going on. The side chapels of Burgos are churches in themselves, they often belong to private individuals, this of St. Anne being, for instance, the property of the Duke of Abrantes. It was now crowded with people of all kinds,—officers in uniform, a few ladies in hats but the bulk of the women in black veils. From a small balcony on one side the litany was sung.

Before the altar was what appeared to be a black covered bier, so I thought we must have stumbled on some special service for the dead. This would account for so large a gathering on a weekday, for at first one fails to grasp the every-day religious attitude of the Spaniard. Looking closer at the bier before the lighted altar a human figure was outlined under the dark pall. How displeasing, I thought, not to use a coffin!

Suddenly the head of this recumbent figure unmistakably moved. With a shiver I looked round me. No one appeared to notice what was to me so terrifying, yet they were gazing over the bier at the altar. Strange visions floated through my imagination, made up of memories of Charles V's funeral before his death, and of contorted accounts of Spain and her ways. Perhaps it was not an unusual custom here, thus morbidly to sample beforehand one's own funeral service. Then, as the litanies continued, now the solo from the choir, now the full-voiced responses of the people, I realized these sweet evening melodies could hardly be the dirges of a burial. The supposition of a living corpse was too bizarre in the midst of this composed crowd.

I fastened my eyes on the round head of the bier, and again it moved, but this time so thoroughly moved that the mystery was solved. With a breath of relief I knew this was indeed a quiet evening service and what had seemed a bier was merely one of the many marble tombs before the altars of old churches, covered over with a dark mantle as they sometimes are. What I had imagined the round head of a corpse, or future corpse, was the veil-draped head of a living woman, seated on a higher chair than usual between the tomb and the lighted altar. So ended my first and only romantic episode in Spain.

I mention it as showing with what vague notions of terror the average English-speaking tourist enters this harmless land. He comes full of the prejudices inherited from the days of the Invincible Armada, when a Spaniard was to an Englishman his satanic majesty incarnate, and this in an age of which Froude himself, the enthusiastic chronicler of Drake, says: "Perhaps nowhere on earth was there a finer average of distinguished and cultivated society than in the provincial Castilian cities."

Strange how tenaciously we cling to disproved ideas, I thought, as the next day we examined the beautiful tomb of Bishop AcuÑa which had caused my fright. Spain is as safe to-day as any civilized country. Yet we met two Californian ladies traveling with pistols, about as needed here as firearms in the lanes of Surrey or the brigand-infested hills of Massachusetts. Little by little the traveler who keeps an open mind learns that the cruel and morbid Spaniard of the popular fancy has no existence except in his imagination. Unfortunately there will always be some travelers here who see the heads on death biers move and carry away the gruesome tale to swell the old prejudices, who will not wait long enough nor look deep enough to find their living corpse a noble old bishop in alabaster who has lain in peace some hundred years.

Every day of our week in Burgos found us several times in the Cathedral. I used to arrive for the High Mass at nine, though before daybreak until nine there had been many services in the side chapels; it is still the custom with most Spaniards to kneel in recollection every morning. Strangely enough, I soon grew reconciled to the clumsy coro. It enabled the people to approach close to the altar in a peaceful secluded spot. Here at Burgos one can kneel on the altar's very steps, beside the big sanctuary lamp and the silver candlesticks that rise higher than a man. The onlooking tourist, who often spoils Italian churches for those who go to pray not to sightsee, in Spain is not permitted his ill-timed liberty. He can wander freely through the outer cathedral, but during the Mass, he cannot enter this inner temple unless he conforms to the accustomed usages. All must kneel at the moment of the Elevation or else leave. The lesson was taught us soon, for when the first morning in Burgos a lady near by in the chancel inadvertently began to read in her guide book, a verger in red plush cloak, bearing an authoritative silver staff, approached, and kindly but firmly showed her out.

The richness of Spanish cathedrals at first is overpowering, that they are too rich and overloaded is a criticism which is quite justified, but it is the profusion of strength, not the cluttering of details to hide a weak understructure; it is a profusion that speaks the nation's character, her burning faith, her oriental generosity. In antique silver, jewels, vestments, wood carvings, tombs, they are veritable museums of art. A Spaniard has given generously to the church in all ages. Though even when prosperous he is content to live with a frugal simplicity hardly understood by our luxury-loving time, it is a law of his nature that his ideas of grandeur and of beauty should find their free expression in the House of God. I often had the sensation that the beggar kneeling in these truly royal churches felt himself a part of them; his own poor home was but one side of the picture, he could claim this other home as well.

It was at Burgos we first met in the churches minor features that are essentially Spanish. The organ pipes flare out like trumpets; the reredos, or retablo, made up of carved wood panels, rises sometimes to a hundred feet behind the altar; and there is the metal-work of the great screens or rejas. This last was an art de propia EspaÑa, and her churches would lack half their sublimity without the massive fretwork of iron or brass that shuts in the richly-decked altars. At Burgos we especially noticed the reja of the Condestable chapel, with graceful wind-blown figures at the top. In the choir, round the lectern were piled ancient psalm books, some of them three feet high, their calfskin covers strengthened with metal claspings. The naturalness with which these priceless books are treated shows how happily bound to preceding generations, with no break of revolution and destruction, is this old land. This thought of the antiquity of her usages is a very potent one to every Spaniard, and the stranger too finds the purple robed canons chanting in their choir-stalls more impressive because for six hundred years in this same Cathedral they have intoned daily these same psalms.

Another national talent is her carving in wood. The choir-stalls here were a revelation. The masters of this art, Berruguete, Vigarni, MontaÑÉs, may not be known to the rest of Europe, but they are locally very famous. Their intense realism appeals to the popular mind, and though in later centuries this realism degenerated into the bad taste of hanging the statues with robes, enough of earlier art remains to make one overlook these lapses. Should not a poet be judged by his best lines? Why must an image in wig and jewels blind one to the remarkable carved statues found side by side with it?

The wood carvers of Spain speak the same language of sincerity as the mystic writers, and a knowledge of Luis de LeÓn, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa, makes one better appreciate the sculptors. Not that they too are mystical. They do not soar so high. It is only a few chosen souls here and there through the centuries who can walk that perilous path, and probably they can express themselves only through the more intangible medium of speech. But these wood carvings are the fruit of men who understood the mystics and who worked in a like spirit of intense faith. I should say it was not in her paintings that the religious essence of this race was to be found, not in the somewhat posing monks of Zurbaran, nor in the gentle religiosity of Murillo's madonnas. Though a master of color, Murillo is too often akin in spirit to Carlo Dolce and Sassoferrato. It is the fashion to call these typically religious painters. But in the carved biblical scenes of retablo and sillerÍa is shown more truly the inner spiritual intelligence of the serious Spaniard. Velasquez spoke for the reality of his time, its chivalry, its material force; and these masters of wood carving in more halting speech expressed the religious aspirations of the people. They worked with a realism that is often painful, yet the intensity with which they felt the scenes they depicted links them with the mystics. The wood carvings have not had justice done them, perhaps because they are for the most part painted, which certainly detracts from them. Fortunately choir-stalls were left in the natural wood, those at Burgos being a rich dark walnut with the polish that time only can give. We spent many happy hours studying this twelve years' work of the sculptor Vigarni. The seats are carved with grotesque, fantastic creatures, half man, half beast, the arm of the chair now made by an acrobat bent double backward, now by a monster with a tail in his mouth, or some bat-like demon. There is a frieze of Old Testament scenes too high to be well seen, but below them the New Testament story is told from the Annunciation to the Doubting Thomas after the Resurrection. Though the simpleness of earlier times is shown in the miniature devil that passes from the possessed man's lips, and in Mary Magdalene's dropped jaw of surprise when she meets her risen Lord, these carvings are not merely curious, they are soul-touching and beautiful. The type of face is the high-boned one the Spaniard prefers, with well-cut brows and aquiline nose. Notice the solemn beauty of Christ's face in the qui ci ne pecato. In the panel, the blind cured, seldom has the expression of absolute faith been better rendered than in the raised face of the old blind man. Do not pass by the Garden of Gethsemane with the three Apostles lying heavily asleep, the human shrug of the shoulder and outstretched hand of the Master: "Could ye not watch with me one hour?"

While the Cathedral of Burgos shows much florid later work, especially the central tower and that of the Condestable chapel, under the too ornate additions the ancient purer church is plainly perceptible. It belonged to the Gothic of the Northern-France type, for pilgrims to her shrines and to fight in her crusades, brought foreign ideas to Spain at so early a date that it is useless to speculate about what a native architecture might have been.

Some of the smaller churches of the town are worth visiting, such as San NicolÁs, with a stone retablo which is a tour de force of handicraft; San Lermes, and facing it the hospital of San Juan, where we first met the escutcheoned doorways of Spain, which, if kept within bounds, are arrogantly effective and national. Throughout the city are good examples of domestic architecture, such as the Casa del CordÓn, built by the Constable of Castile, Don Pedro FernÁndez de Velasco, whose sumptuous tomb lies in the center of the Condestable Chapel, and whose pride as a Castilian speaks in the family proverb:

"Before God was God, or the sun shone upon the rocks, already was the house of Velasco noble."[4] Above the entrance to his house the girdle of St. Francis connects his arms with those of his wife, as proud as he, for she was a Mendoza. One rainy afternoon we spent in the Museo over the Gateway of Santa MarÍa, and there, step by step, traced Spain's art history,—statues from the former Roman city of Clunia in this province, a remarkable enameled altar-front of the Byzantine period, Romanesque and Gothic relics from the monasteries out on the plains, a Moorish arch found in situ, and tombs of that transition time from Gothic to Renaissance which in Spain was so flourishing a phase of art.

Much as there is to hold one in the town, the bleak uplands outside have a desolate fascination that calls one out to them. There is an excursion to be made not far away to the Monastery of Miraflores, where Isabella built for her parents "the most perfectly glorious tomb in the world." Personally I prefer the quieter art of a Mino da Fiesole to this work of Gil de Siloe, rich though it is. The tomb is white marble, octagonal in shape, with sixteen lions supporting it. The weak Juan II lies by the side of his queen, who is turned slightly from him to read in her Book of Hours, in a natural attitude, as if she said pleasantly, "Now do be silent, I must read in peace for a few minutes." At Miraflores is a wooden statue of St. Bruno, with a keen and subtle face of the same ascetic type as that of the young monk we watched praying quite oblivious of the gaping tourists. It is of this statue that Philip IV remarked: "It does not speak, but only because he is a Carthusian monk." The indifference to strangers in the mystic young penitent before the altar was our second meeting with a trait found in the average Spaniard. He does not care an iota what the stranger thinks of him. He is not like the Italian, inclined to put his best foot forward. He will not change his ways because they are criticised; you can admire or you can dislike, it makes little difference to him; and this quiet poise, in peasant as well as grandee, is not fatuous, for its root lies in an innate self-respect. He feels he is loyal to his God, to his King, and to himself,—what better standards can you have?

Avenues of trees lead out to another house of the Benedictine rule, a convent for nuns founded by the sister of Richard Coeur de Lion. Many ladies of the royal line have retired to Las Huelgas, the nuns brought their dowries, and the mitered abbess held the rank of Princess-Palatine, with the power of capital punishment. The church has outside cloisters for the laity; the cloisters within the convent are never seen except on the rare occasions of a king's visit, when all who are able crowd in at the moment he enters. We were standing before the chancel where so many knights had performed the vigil of the armor—among others Edward I of England was knighted here—when a nun entered the coro, and in her trailing white robes bowed toward the altar—rather it was the slow courtesy of a court lady. We shrank away with the feeling that we had intruded uninvited on a ceremony, that the days of the abbess, Princess-Palatine, were the reality and we, inquisitive guide-book tourists, the anacronism, a sensation not uncommon in Spain.

Burgos is the birthplace of the national hero, the Cid Campeador, "God's scourge upon the Moor." This contemporary of William the Conqueror, whom the erudites of the eighteenth century tried in vain to prove a mythical character,[5] may be said to dominate Spanish literature. Spain's epic, the "Romancero del Cid," has made its hero the historic Cid for all time, just as Shakespeare's genius vitalized a Henry V. Don Roderick DÍaz de Bivar was born under the castle hill of Burgos in 1026, some small monuments standing on the site of his casa solar. He was a champion of popular rights, generous, chivalrous, faithful ever to his wife Jimena, a true guerrilla warrior, like the men of his age, sometimes crafty and cruel. The Cid was every inch a man, as his fellow countrymen are eminently varonil, his hold on the heart of the people is secure. There are no poems in the world whose lines ring and clang more valiantly than the "Romancero." Here is untamed red blood and courage:

Wandering minstrels sang these chansons de gestes for centuries, till they were a very part of the nation. The wooing of Jimena is strong with the unconscious vigor of those times. The Cid had slain her father in combat:

And to the end the free-lance warrior proved a gallant husband. The ballad of their wedding feast was often in my mind in the silent streets of Burgos.

The old poet must have written with his eye straight on his subject; those eleventh century urchins baiting the bulls are startlingly realistic. When the Cid died, at Valencia, in 1099, still called on the maps Valencia del Cid, he was placed in full armor on his battle horse, Bavieca, and brought to San Pedro de CardeÑa, eight miles from Burgos. Thither Jimena retired, and on her death was laid with her husband. The faithful horse, famous in the "Romancero" as Jimena herself, was buried under a tree of the convent near his master. For the Cid had left word, "When you bury Bavieca, dig deep. For shameful thing were it that he should be eaten by curs who hath trod down so much currish flesh of Moors." To-day Bavieca's master does not lie in the quiet dignity of San Pedro. After various vicissitudes his remains are kept in a chest in the city hall of Burgos, not the most appropriate of sepulchers for a national hero.

On the last day of our stay in the old Gothic city, we climbed the hill from which it doubtless got its name, Burg, a fortified eminence. The castle where the Cid was married is a complete ruin, for when the French evacuated the fort in 1813 they blew it up. On every side stretched the level melancholy plain, and silhouetted against it was the elaborate stone lace-work of the Cathedral. For long I looked out on the remarkable landscape, so far from beautiful yet so thought arousing. Little by little I was learning how a race can be ascetic to its inmost core yet express itself in grandiose architecture; exalted in soul yet the most realistic people in Europe; serious and dignified, yet childlike in their zest of life. Here was man in his unsubtle vigor, not so liberal that he had no creed left, not so polished that he had lost the power of first wonder and emotion. Life was lived here, not analyzed and missed.