Chapter XXIII: Toledo and El Greco 244 (2)

The Bidasoa, in the last part of its course, divides Spain from France. It further divides Basque from Basque. It has thus a local and an historic interest. It is the scene of smuggling between French and Spanish Basques and, as a frontier river, it has seen many a quaint and solemn episode in the past--the passage of Wellington’s troops, for instance, in 1813, or the exchange in boats of Francis I. against two hostages (his sons) in 1526, the King showing an eager haste to win across the river and reach the friendly inhabitants of St. Jean de Luz[51] and the sheltering walls of Bayonne. But it is the passing beauty of the whole Bidasoa valley that attracts the visitor, the loveliness of the river and the hills and the villages by the river. The Bidasoa is beautiful during its whole course from where it rises near the village of Maya, a little mountain stream running swiftly through woods of oak and chestnut. At times the hills break abruptly down, the water lies deep and dark-green beneath, and there is a look of Ullswater about both hills and river. A little above Endarlaza the road leaves the river, and from here may be had a glimpse of the Bidasoa of unrivalled beauty. For it runs in a long, irregular stretch, irregular for the rough backbones of hill covered with boulders and bushes of box. At each hill-ridge one might expect the river to bend and vanish, but still it appears beyond. Nearer the village of Vera it contracts to a narrower flow, and the water lashes over rocks, magnificently white and green. The river is known to fishermen as well as to smugglers and Carlists and lovers of Nature. Certainly the wisest travellers, before passing on to the bleak uplands of Castille, will stay to explore this little strip of green country, with its fresh woods and valleys and villages full of state and ancientry. Vera, in a sunny hollow, has an especial fascination. The vine-covered balconies and projecting roofs keep the houses in shade, and on two sides is the rustle and flow of water. The houses stand on different levels, several storeys of them mounting roof above roof from the river to the church. They are curious in their sculptured stone, their quaint carved buttresses, their nail-studded doors or rounded arches leading to the outer court, their crazy wooden balconies, their coats-of-arms, their inscriptions. At the very entrance of the Bidasoa stands Fuenterrabía, beneath gently sloping Jaizquibel. It is a little town of marvellous, narrow streets, steep and crooked, and overjutting houses carved in wood and stone. In front is a little bay, black with fishing-boats, and seen from across the water, Fuenterrabía’s clustered group of houses, yellow and brown and grey, crowned by the ancient church and tenth-century castle, is of a rare and enchanting beauty. Not only a narrow strip of river, but several centuries separate it from Hendaye opposite, with its shore on the Bidasoa and its shore on the sea, and its woods above the river, crowded in spring with daffodils. The sudden change from everything that is French to everything that is Spanish cannot but be surprising. It is due, no doubt, to the fact that beneath the French and the Spanish civilization and language, the people have an older language and civilization common to either side. The Basque spoken varies but little, being merely a little broader in Spain than in France. Mme. d’Aulnoy noticed the abrupt change wrought by a few yards of travel. “It’s certain, as soon as I past the little river of Bidassoa, I was not understood unless I spake Castilian; and not above a quarter of an Hour before I should not have been understood had I not spoke French.”[52] Obstacles and delays begin: “Here are Toll-gatherers who make you pay for everything you carry with you, not excepting your Cloaths. This Tax is demanded at their Pleasure and is excessive on Strangers.” Letters are no longer received in a well-ordered service: “There is in this country a very ill order touching commerce, and when the French carrier arrives at St. Sebastian, all the letters he brings are deliver’d to others who are good footmen and ease one another. They put their packets into a sack tied with rotten cords to their shoulder, by which means it oft happens that the secrets of your heart and family are open to the first curious body who makes drunk the Footpost.” Mme. d’Aulnoy is irritated by the unintelligibility of Basque: “This country called Biscaye is full of high mountains where are several iron mines.[53] The Biscays climb up the rocks as easily and with as great swiftness as stags. Their language (if one may call such jargon language) is very poor, seeing one word signifies abundance of things. There are none but those born in the country that can understand it; and I am told that to the end it may be more particularly theirs they make no use of it in writing: they make their children learn to read and write French and Spanish according to which King’s subjects they are.” “They are said to understand one another,” said Scaliger of the Basques, “but, for my part, I doubt it.” The most famous scene of peace witnessed by the Bidasoa was the meeting held in the _Île des Faisans_, or _de la Conférence_, a narrow island, now worn to a mere strip by the flow of the tide, between Philip IV. of Spain and Louis XIV. of France in 1660. It was a scene of lavish splendour and magnificence, and Velázquez, then in the last year of his life, superintended the decorations and assisted at the interview.[54] But most often we hear of the Bidasoa as a scene of strife and anxiety, escape and pursuit. The very river was an object of dispute between the Governments of France and Spain, until it was decided that the one half of it belonged to France, the other to Spain; in the centre of the bridge of Béhobie is the dividing line, marked in blue for France and red for Spain. Many a time has the sight of its waters, flowing swiftly to the sea, been welcomed by men in danger of life and liberty. Colonel Péroz[55] has graphically described his escape by swimming the river during the last Carlist war. On May 5, 1808, Marbot reached the Bidasoa, after riding day and night through hostile country to bring the Emperor (then at the Château de Marrac, near Bayonne) news of the _Dos de Mayo_ rising at Madrid. At the beginning of November Napoleon himself crossed the frontier, and as he rode rapidly along the _route d’Espagne_ and beneath the Church of Urrugne, with its ancient, sad inscription,[56] little thought that the enterprise upon which he was now engaged was to be a main cause in bringing him swiftly to the last hour that kills.

In the Middle Ages the pilgrims to the shrine of Santiago went through the Basque country and across the frontier in fear of their lives. The Basques were fierce and brave, and fond of plunder. In 1120 a Bishop was obliged to lay aside his episcopal robes, and taking with him only two servants and a guide who understood the “barbarous tongue of the Basques,” so passed through to Compostella. In later times the pilgrims would sing, as they left Irun,--

“Adieu la France jolie
Et les nobles fleurs de lys
Car je m’en vais en Espagne,
C’est un étrange pays,”

and would look back with sighs to the good cheer of France:

“Quand nous fûmes á Saint Jean de Luz[57]
Les biens de Dieu en abondance,
Car ce sont gens de Dieu élus,
Des charités ont souvenance.”

The older way into Spain was the Roman road from Dax to S. Jean Pied de Port and Roncesvalles--where, indeed, and not “by Fontarabia,” Charlemagne was attacked by the Basques;[58] but often this road was rendered impassable by war. In the middle of the 12th century the French Basque country passed, with the rest of Aquitaine, into the possession of the English Crown, and henceforth many were the battles and frontier raids between the Basques on either side. In 1296 we read of a truce in the quarrels between San Sebastian and “Fuent Arrabia,” and of an agreement made between them not to “send or take bread, or wine, or meat, or arms or horses, or other merchandise to Bayonne, or England, or Flanders while the war lasts between the King of France and the King of England.” On July 19, 1311, a peace is made between Bayonne and Biarritz (Beiarritz) on the one hand, and Laredo, Castro-Urdiales, and Santander on the other. A few years later we find the King of Castille writing to the King of England to complain of the seizure of the goods of his vassals of Biscay by the Seneschal of Aquitaine, “against all right and reason.” As often before and after “en ce temps avoit grand rancune entre le roy d’Angleterre et les Espagnols.” In 1352 a treaty is formed between “England and the people of the coast of Cantabria,” who were famous for their prowess in catching whales, as well as in frontier warfare, and came into rivalry with English fishermen. In 1482 “amicable intelligences” are concluded at Westminster between “Edward, by the Grace of God King of England and France and Lord of Ireland” and “the inhabitants of the noble and loyal Province of Guipúzcoa.”[59] During the 17th century the frontier raids continued, and in 1636 (as before in 1558) the town of St. Jean de Luz was taken and pillaged by the Spaniards. Up in the hills, near the little village of Sare, the Spaniards of Vera were defeated, and Sare still displays on the walls of its _mairie_ the coat-of-arms given by Louis XIV. after the victory won by the bravery of its inhabitants, with the following inscription in Basque:--“Reward of courage and loyalty, given to Sare by Louis XIV. in 1693.”[60] In the Peninsular War, Sare and its mountain, La Rhune, played a prominent part, and many a vivid description, such as the following, occurs in Napier:--“Day had broken with great splendour, and three guns were fired as signal of attack from Atchuria. The French were driven from La Rhune, Sare was carried, and the enemy brushed away from Ainhoa and Urdax: “It was now eight o’clock, and from the smaller Rhune[61] a splendid spectacle of war opened upon the view. On the left the ships of war, slowly sailing to and fro, were exchanging shots with the fort of Socoa, and Hope, menacing all the French lines on the low ground, sent the sound of a hundred pieces of artillery bellowing up the rocks, to be answered by nearly as many from the tops of the mountains. On the right the summit of the great Atchuria[62] was just lighted by the rising sun, and fifty thousand men rushing down its enormous slopes with ringing shouts seemed to chase the receding shadows into the deep valley.” The description of the passage of the Bidasoa in October, 1813, is equally graphic: “From San Marcial seven columns could now be seen at once, moving on a line of five miles, those above bridge plunging at once into the fiery contest, those below appearing in the distance like huge, sullen snakes winding over the heavy sands.” The mountainous character of the frontier, causing Spain to be entered by one or two narrow passages, has indeed concentrated upon a few points a picturesque variety of traffic through the centuries--a historical pageant of soldiers, pilgrims, smugglers, Kings and Queens dethroned or released from imprisonment, wily agents, gorgeous ambassadors, fugitive politicians, exiled Jesuits, heretic missionaries, Carlist conspirators, with a large sprinkling of visitors and adventurers from many lands.

IV

ESKUAL-ERRIA

I.--BASQUE COUNTRY

There are few peoples more deserving of study than the Basques, and few countries more pleasant to visit and to live in than the Basque Provinces. After the treeless, unsheltered mountains and plains, and the compact villages of Castille or Navarre, the villages of the Basque country, set in green, and, to quote the phrase of a Spanish novelist, “all in the peace of prayer,” are a delightful contrast. The sky has no longer the harsh intensity of the Castilian, and everywhere is a softness of outlines; everywhere, too, is green--the green of chestnut and oak, of maize and trefoil, meadow and cider-orchard. The maize is the principal crop of the year, providing the heavy, yellow bread, _artoa_, as well as food for the oxen and material for mats, mattresses, and even cigarette-papers. The fields are divided by slabs of stone, and in the mists of the early mornings the Angelus rings from hidden towers; and the only other sound is that of scythes cutting the drenched grass or trefoil. Every true Basque is of noble, ancient family, and the Basque farmhouse, with its wooden façade and carved projecting buttresses, its wide balcony and deep ornamented eaves, is handed down from father to son without change. It stands surrounded by orchards and fields of maize, and often overshadowed by an immense fig-tree or a group of splendid walnut-trees. The roof slopes down on one side till it nearly reaches the ground. The lower part of the front is hollowed into a court, and on one side of this a door leads straight into the spacious kitchen, with its huge fireplace and many vessels of scoured bronze and copper, which forms the principal room of the house. A dark, narrow staircase leads to the bedrooms; through the cracks of the floors may often be seen the oxen in their stalls beneath. Large chests of oak, some of them beautifully carved, are to be found in most Basque farms. In Vizcaya a large vine-trellis, running forward on posts from the inner court beneath the balcony, further deepens the dark velvet spaces in the whitewashed front of the farm; in Guipúzcoa many houses have no balcony or trellis, but are overgrown with heavy vines, that often entirely cover all the windows. From the windows hang long strings of red piments or white onions; above the door there is frequently an ancient stone coat-of-arms or an inscription with the name of the founders and the date, and above this a cross or the letters I. H. S. The house is thus half sacred. After the father’s death, the eldest son becomes “Lord of the house, etcheco-jauna,” while the younger sons often emigrate.

It was from their farms, so dear to them, that the Basques formerly took their names, so that they are called not Smith or Collier, but At-the-head-of-the-hill (Mendiburu) or Under-the-new-road (Bideberripe). Even now a Basque in the country is never called by his surname, but either by his Christian name or a nickname, or the name of his house or property. Etche (“house”) is perhaps the commonest compound. Etcheberri (“newhouse”) has numerous variants--Echeverri, Echevarri, Echavarri (in Vizcaya and Alava, where the Basque spoken is broader than in Guipúzcoa, new is “barri”), Chavarri, Echarri, Echave, Xavier, Javer, etc. The number of Basque-speaking people can now but little exceed half a million, and only very rarely is a Basque found who is unable to speak Spanish or French.[63] Of the three Spanish-Basque provinces, Guipúzcoa (capital San Sebastián) alone is entirely Basque. At Bilbao, the capital of Vizcaya, no Basque is spoken; and long before reaching Vitoria, the capital of Alava, the language spoken is Castilian. Nor is Basque spoken at Pamplona, the capital of Navarre, though it reaches almost to its walls, and till quite recently had a wider extension in Navarre, names of places such as Mendigorria (“red mountain”) surviving. The difficulty of the language has been somewhat exaggerated; there is a well-known story that the Devil spent three years in the Basque country, and only succeeded in learning two words: _Bai_, “yes;” and _Es_, “no.” But it remains true that the immense and complicated system of Basque conjugations is for a foreigner almost impossible to master; and at the same time the Basque literature to reward the learner is of the scantiest. Interesting indeed are the proverbs, some of the songs, and the pastorales, which have been compared in more than one particular with the Greek drama, but which are now acted only in the province of Soule. The stage, in the open air, is formed of plain planks, supported most often on barrels. A curtain cuts off a part for the actors to change their costumes, the same person often taking several parts in a play. The curtain has two doors, one for the good and one for the wicked. The good and the wicked are kept strictly separate. The pastorale is always in honour of Christianity and the Roman Catholic religion, and the wicked are the heathen, the Turks, the English, etc. Red is the colour of the wicked, that of the good is blue; in this respect no change is ever made. The good always walk slowly and solemnly, but when the wicked come on the stage the music is immediately changed to a lively air, and they never remain long quiet, their movements continuing quick and agitated. The acting is very simple; a journey, for instance, is represented by walking up and down the stage several times. The characters are usually taken exclusively by men and boys, but there are a few pastorales acted by women only; the sexes are never mingled. Strange and amusing anachronisms abound. In the pastorale entitled _Abraham_, Abraham appears in high boots and felt hat; Sarah in a modern, bright-coloured dress, with hat, veil, and fan; Isaac carries one or two sticks on his shoulder for the sacrifice; the Angel is a little boy in white. Then there are the heathen and the Christian kings, the former dressed in red, with high crowns arrayed with plumes and ribbons, the latter in blue with crowns of gold. In the middle of the play one of the Christian kings leaves the stage, and presently appears above the curtain and speaks with Abraham. He represents the “Eternal Father.” The verses are spoken in a loud monotonous chant, each verse being literally measured out by motion up and down the stage, the only change being when the music becomes faster or slower. The music is composed of the two Basque instruments the _churula_, a shrill pipe, and the _tamboril_, a kind of guitar with six strings, played by the same person. The strangeness of the scene, the loud chanting of the actors as the tone rises and falls, the fantastic costumes, the dances of the “Satans,” the prayers of the Christians, and especially the slow march and action of the blues, dignified and majestic, and the turbulent, restless movements of the reds, are not soon forgotten.

The Basque language, _Eskuara_, was described by the Spanish historian, Mariana, as “coarse and barbarous,” and a traveller among the Basques in the Middle Ages recorded that to hear them speak one would say they were dogs barking. In English, the word “jingo” has been said to derive from the Basque _Jincoa_, “God,” introduced by Wellington’s troops after the Peninsular War. The Basque word is an abbreviation of _Jaungoicoa_, “the Lord on high,” _jauna_, “lord,” being the common form of greeting between peasant and peasant. It becomes more and more rare to hear pure Basque spoken; foreign words creep in and, with the definite article “_a_” suffixed, hide under a Basque form: _dembora_ (Lat. _tempus_) thus ousting the Basque word _eguraldia_ for “weather,” _gorphuntza_ (Lat. _corpus_) being “body,” and so on.[64] Pure Basque recedes to remote villages in the mountains, and there the Basque maintains his ancient customs, as averse from change to-day as when Horace described him as “Cantabrum indoctum juga ferre nostra.”[65]

II.--BASQUE CUSTOMS

An old Latin account speaks of the Basques as going nowhere--not even to church--without arms, usually a bow and arrows, and says that they are “gens affabilis, elegans et hilaris--courteous, graceful, and light-hearted;”[66] but, in spite of their known hospitality, their distrust of the foreigner and their hatred of intrusion are shown in more than one of their proverbs, as “The stranger-guest does not work himself, and prevents you from working.” The Basques are, indeed, the most energetic, as they are the most ancient people of the Peninsula. “Naguia bethi lansu--The idle man is ever busy,” says another of their proverbs; and, again, “Idle youth brings needy old age.”[67] Their fields are well and economically cultivated, and if their methods are antiquated, this is partly due to the mountainous nature of the country and the smallness of the holdings, making it simpler, _e.g._, to thresh corn by beating it sheaf by sheaf against a stone. Numerous small factories--of cloth as at Vergara, of paper at Tolosa, of iron and steel at Eibar and Elgoibar, of furniture at Azpeitia--and many quarries and tile-factories prove their industry; and entering a small Basque town such as Elgoibar, one may hear in tiny shops on all sides the sound of sandal-makers and workers in wood and leather. They know how to work, and they know how to enjoy themselves with thoroughness at the village fêtes. From dawn to dusk the ball is to be heard against the wall of the pelota court on Sundays, with intervals of dancing to the shrill pipe and drum of the _chunchunero_. Voltaire, thinking of their love of dancing, described them as “un petit peuple qui danse sur les Pyrénées,” and certain dances still survive. The sword-dance, _ezpata danza_, is one of the most remarkable, and has been described by Pierre Loti in “Figures et choses qui passaient;” and other dances are those representing the primitive methods of agriculture, the vintage, weaving, etc. The Basque pelota has, unfortunately, become, of recent years, a game of professionals, and as played, _e.g._, at Madrid, the interest is rather in the betting than in the play. The enthusiasm formerly excited among the Basques by the game is illustrated by the story that several Basque soldiers left the Army of the Rhine, returned to their country to play a game of ball, and, having played and won it, rejoined the army in time to take part in the battle of Austerlitz.[68] A game played in the immense court of a small Basque village is still a splendid sight, though it has lost much of its splendour, and the old Rebot is fast dying out. Pierre Loti has described a game of Blaid, as seen in a French-Basque village, in his novel of the Basque country, “Ramuntcho”; and this form of the game has been played in Paris and London. But old peasants will shake their heads and say it is no longer “as of old.” The expression “of old” is common on the lips of both French and Spanish Basques;[69] they willingly praise the past, and are intensely conservative of all their customs, their immemorial language, their games, privileges, religion. The ox-carts, with wheels of solid wood, to be seen under the vine-trellises of Basque farms, seem as old as the withered trunk of the oak of Guernica, and similarly many ancient customs have been retained. In some parts, at funerals, the men wear long cloaks reaching to the feet, the women also wearing long, full cloaks with hoods, that completely hide the face. The men go first, and then all the women--men and women in single file--the chief mourners coming last. Both at weddings and funerals, feasts were formerly given on such an extensive scale that the family was often nearly ruined, and a law (_fuero_) was passed forbidding to invite any but relations to the third degree. But the wedding-feast is still sufficiently imposing; it continues for many hours, and immediately afterwards the young begin dancing, while the old play cards. As to the offerings at funerals, “none but an eye-witness,” says Larramendi, in the eighteenth century, “could believe the quantity of bread and wax that is offered. Moreover, at these big funerals, in some places a live ox, and in others a sheep, is brought as an offering to the church door, and when the service is over it is taken away, and a fixed sum of money is given to the priest.”[70] This curious custom, a survival of the offerings to the dead and a trace of ancestor-worship, has not yet wholly died out. In one village at least (Arriba, on the borders of Navarre and Guipúzcoa) it is customary at funerals to offer bread and wax, and to bring to the church either a quarter of veal or a live sheep, which is afterwards given to the priest. The Basques are intensely religious, and it is characteristic of them that before they were converted to Christianity they were the terror of the Christians--indeed, the pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella at all times feared the passage through the Basque Provinces, the strange language adding to their difficulties (“La Biscaye,” they said, “où il y a d’étrange monde, où l’on n’entend pas les gens”). The Basques troop in to early Mass every Sunday, often by rough mountain paths, from farms lying a league away. Yet it must not be thought that the Basques are priest-ridden; the priests are respected, and often take part in their games or walk many miles across the hills to visit the sick. But though the Basques are often narrow and fanatical, they have far too much dignity and independence to be the blind followers of the priests. In the Carlist wars they fought chiefly for their old privileges, or _fueros_, and the result of the wars was that nearly all their _fueros_ were lost, in 1839 and 1876. “Nothing is so fair as liberty,” says one of their songs, and their national song, “Guernikako Arbola,”[71] with its stirring air, celebrates “the holy tree of Guernica, loved by all the Basques.” In the little green-set town of Guernica a fine new oak, some forty years old, has taken the place of the old tree, now a mere trunk protected by glass, while in the little pillared temple are still to be seen the seven marble seats on which assembled--

“Peasant and lord in their appointed seat,
Guardians of Biscay’s ancient liberty.”

These are the two last lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet to the

“Oak of Guernica! Tree of holier power
Than that which in Dodona did enshrine,
So faith too fondly deemed, a voice divine.”

Noble, handsome, graceful in all their movements, hardy and shrewd, the Basques are active and untiring whether as farmers, smugglers, soldiers, or _pelotaris_. They live aloof in scattered farms, a healthy open-air life (their word for rich is _aberatz_, from _abere_, head of cattle), and, indeed, in a town they tend to lose some of their good qualities. Their dress has always an air of careful neatness and distinction, with the _béret_, white shirt (without a tie), dark blue or black coat thrown over shoulder (or long blouse), silent sandals and the peculiar _makhila_, a stout iron-pointed stick of medlar. They are shrinking into their mountains, a race doomed to perish, “un peuple qui s’en va.” They have watched during thousands of years new races spring up and prosper around them, and in the twentieth century they see trains and motors penetrate to the inaccessible places where the Roman legions were checked, or Charlemagne with all his peerage fell. An inscription here and there shows them bowing to destiny and the relentless march of time in saddened resignation, or betaking themselves to the consolation of their religion--the following inscriptions, for instance, along the frontier: “Man is beaten by every hour, and the last leads him to the grave.”[72] “Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.”[73] “Ici fait l’home cequi pevt et fortune ce que elle vevt.”[74] “Post fata resurgo.”[75] “Deum time, Mariam invoca.”[76] “Orhoit hilcea.”[77] The privileges that remain to the Basques are few, consisting in a slightly less acute centralization than obtains in other provinces of Spain.[78] They have no _fueros_ left to make it worth their while to take up arms afresh, and they still have vivid memories of their wasted fields and desolate farms in the last Carlist war. But were their ancient religion to be really attacked, or were an attempt made to expel the monks from the Basque provinces, the peasants could be counted upon to make a desperate resistance, more in defence of their independence than on behalf of the monks themselves. Foreigners have often misunderstood the Basques,[79] for they are reserved and silent towards the new-comer (“Gizonciki arabotz andi,” they say--“Little man, much noise”; “the empty barrel makes the most noise,” and so on). But there is no suspicion of commercialism about their love of liberty such as has often been attributed to the Catalans: they love their beautiful land, the Eskual-erria, for its own sake and the religion and customs of their forefathers, and the strangers who visit their country soon learn to love and admire its broad healing power and spirit of ancient peace. It is a country of civilization without great cities, where exists an intimate and ennobling relation between the soil and the inhabitants.

V

IN REMOTE NAVARRE

Navarre is held to be one of the chief bulwarks of Clericalism in Spain, and so remote and isolated are its villages, so primitive its life and agriculture, so few its means of communication, that it might seem that no breath of modern times could have penetrated to this province. Lying on the frontier of France, it is defended from the inroads of civilization by its mountains and wide wastes of desert land. In those lonely groups of houses of massive yellow-brown stone, clustered around their church, and crowning rocky hills of the same colour, there is no room for differences of opinion, and he who does not attend Mass at least once in the year is forced to go and live elsewhere. Should you ask how he can be forced to go, the answer you will receive is, “By the law, by public opinion.” Quite recently a traveller, arriving famished at one of these villages of Navarre, with no smaller change than a French napoleon, went from door to door in vain. No one would accept this _doblón de oro_ (gold doubloon). Finally, a woman who had lived for a time at Salies de Béarn consented to receive it, and sent it later to be changed at the capital, Pamplona. Yet even here in Navarre there is an appreciable body of liberal opinion, and even in the heart of the Carlist country, at Estella, the Club Carlista is faced by the ensign of the Círculo Liberal; even here in all but the smaller villages opinion is divided, and the policy of Clericals and anti-Clericals discussed with animation. Those who served in the second Carlist war recognize that the times have altered, and that leaders, or _cabecillas_, are no longer forthcoming to lead them in swift night marches across the hills, willing though they might be to follow. At Estella a fort taken by the Carlists is now a peaceful covered market-place, and the palace where Don Carlos held his court is a pleasant _fonda_ with a cool _patio_ of flowers. Those who enter Navarre by the Convent of Roncesvalles and the Pass where Roland was slain, and which Byng a thousand years later, in 1813, was forced to evacuate with ten thousand troops, may be easily deceived into imagining that Navarre is a land of meadows and green woods and pleasant streams. The swift river Urrobi runs through passes of rugged hills, but overgrown with box and beech trees and pines. Steep walls of rock are in summer covered with foxgloves and bramble and broom, scabious, St. John’s wort, mallow, bell heather, and many other flowers and ferns, and in places the hills are red with wild strawberries. The Urrobi forces its way through barriers of grey rock and over ledges in green pools and white rushing torrents. But this is not the true Navarre. There no trees are to be seen, and one is perpetually in a wide circle of bare hills. The country is the most desolate imaginable, formed by bare, ashen-grey hills (scored and gashed by dry torrent-beds) and valleys equally barren. The wind hisses, and crickets chatter loudly in a few stunted elms by the roadside. All is greyness without colour, and in late summer the stubble-fields far and near add a new note of desolation, and it seems out of keeping with the character of the country that these fields should ever be a fresh green in spring. Indeed, the occasional hollows of olives and plots of vineyards have an air of unreality in the surrounding wilderness of crumbling dust and shale. Yet some welcome patches of colour are to be found, if it is only a line of chicory or of huge purple thistles along a stubble-field, or a blue-bloused peasant jogging down the dusty road on a mule with crimson trappings. And on the threshing-floors around the villages, where work is carried on far into the night, often by lightning flash, the white shirts and blue blouses of the men, and the pink and red dresses and long white headkerchiefs of the women form a picturesque and beautiful scene through the clouds of flying chaff and ruddy golden grain falling in heavier, more compact masses. For here the threshing is all done by hand with the help of mules, oxen, and horses, which are driven round and round, drawing all the children of the village on little wooden sledges. When the grain has been thus sifted, the process is completed by throwing it into the air from long wooden shovels and close-pronged wooden forks. The corn is grown on precipices and sheer mountain-sides, and is brought down to the threshing-floors on donkeys, which disappear beneath their rustling load. The men who live in this grim country are also stern and grim, harsh featured, hard, and strong; and, though hospitable and not unkindly, they are fierce and obstinate upon occasion, and sometimes cruel to their animals. Their food is rough, but not unplentiful; of wheat there is no lack, and with some vines and olives they are content to have the three necessities of a Spanish peasant’s life. The villages would often pass unnoticed on their rocky hills were it not for the outstanding feature of their grim, massive churches; the church of Gallipienzo dominates a mountain, and is so solid and fine that it seems to dwarf it. These churches are to be seen for very many miles across the completely bare country, and at night the lights of the village streets form, from long distances, strange, irregular letters on a mountain-side, making the village far more conspicuous than it would be by day. Sansol, a little village not far from Logroño, looks from some distance like a great fortress of brown stone with tiny black loop-holes (the glassless windows); behind is a long backbone of grey, rocky hill, and beyond the purple-black Monte Jura with a glimpse of white road. Bitter and fierce are the winters in Navarre, and pitiless the sun in summer; but for all its forbidding aspects it repays the discomforts of a visit to its remote districts. Lumbier is like a miniature Toledo, on its bare hill above the winding river, and Sanguesa, of brown yellow stone, on the Aragón, of the same colour, has its magnificently sculptured church of Santa María, and other beautiful carvings on private houses. And after a few weeks’ acquaintance with the harsh country and the proud inhabitants, the traveller will realize the possibility of those relentless Carlist wars which still send a thrill through those who recall them, and the difficulty of hunting down _cabecillas_ who knew the country and of bringing the war to an end.

VI

SPANISH CITIES

Spain is pre-eminently a land of cities. Often they stand conspicuous in an arid and treeless tract of country, glancing like jewels in a sunburnt land. The pleasant and fertile strip of country, on the French frontier is not properly Spanish, but Basque. On the other hand, nothing could be more Spanish than the little quaint old town of Fuenterrabía. The original name was Basque--Ondarrabia, “The two banks of sand.” The Romans, hearing the name, but ignorant of its meaning and seeing, moreover, the swift flow of the tide beneath the walls of the town, called it Unda Rapida.[80] From the Latin Unda Rapida or Fons Rapidus came the Spanish Fuenterrabía,[81] and the French in their turn, connecting it with the Arabs, called it Fontarabie. The Basque name is, however, still in use, and one of the streets of Irun where, as in many other towns and villages, the street names are written up both in Spanish and Basque, has the full-sounding name Ondarrabiko Karreka--the street of Ondarrabia. If one may compare small things with great, the cities of Northern Spain are like castles built by children in the sand, and left high and dry by the receding tide. City after city stood walled and bulwarked on the extreme fringe of the Christian territory, for a time the court and capital of Spain, till a fresh conquest drove back the Moors a lap further south. This in part accounts for the grim and wonderful Spanish cities, with their magnificent buildings and fortifications, that still exist, but exist with no longer the stir of a great destiny within their walls, but merely as it were the mighty shells of an extinct life. So Burgos, León, Toledo, were capital cities for a space, thronged with the busy traffic of courtiers and warriors, and Avila, the city of saints, has the great fortifications of a frontier town. It is difficult to believe that Toledo has at all changed since the Cid’s horse miraculously stayed before the burning light hidden in the wall of one of its streets, and the water-carriers to-day go leisurely down to the river, their donkeys’ panniers laden with earthen jars, as when Cervantes wrote “La Ilustre Fregona.” And, indeed, Spanish cities are little liable to change. The steep uneven ways of Toledo and Salamanca and Segovia scorn modern traffic. The passing of a carriage is possible in the main streets, but is a rare event that rattles and reverberates along the walls. More suitable are the stately processions, their banners showing brightly against the brown-yellow buildings. Segovia has been called the queen of Castilian cities, as Toledo is the king. And Segovia must ever remain mediæval, a city of a hundred levels, sinking by terraces of half-ruinous walls, tufted with grass and flowers, from the Cathedral down to the foot of its mighty Roman aqueduct. A Latin author three hundred years ago wrote that “in Segovia nemo otiosus, nemo mendicus”--there were no beggars at Segovia. It would be unsafe to assert this of any Spanish town to-day. Spain is no country of “neat cities and populous towns full of most industrious artificers.” Such towns--Barcelona,[82] Bilbao--there are, but mostly the cities are, in the words of Burton, “cities decayed,” which contain many “Spanish loiterers,” though they are not “base and poor towns,” nor are the people “squalid, ugly, uncivil.” The southern cities show a softer influence. The surrounding country is less abrupt and harsh, and the stern features of the north are forgotten. Cadiz lies out into the sea, a Spanish Venice, cut in straight white streets, like the slices of an iced cake. Seville is wonderful at all times, a _maravilla_ to foreigners and Spaniards. The Spanish novelist Palacio Valdés, in “La Hermana San Sulpicio,” has described it during nights of midsummer, when to go through the city was to visit the interior of the houses, for from the _patios_, where the families were assembled, great rays of light shot through the iron screen-doors into the dark and stifled streets, and guitar and song broke the stillness: “Seville at such an hour had a magical look, a charm that disturbed the mind.” But of all the cities of the south Granada has a peculiar fascination. This is largely due to its many contrasts. It is a city of orange groves and fountains, yet it lies over two thousand feet above sea-level, and is a summer rather than a winter city; the fiercest heat is relieved by cool air from the eternal snows of the Sierra Nevada, and the gardens of the Alhambra and the Generalife, with their myrtles, cypresses and cedars, give a delicious shade. In winter icy cold strikes through the marble halls of the Alhambra; yet it is never more beautiful than seen in February from San Cristobal, or from the cactus-covered hill beneath San Miguel, or from where the Darro flows rapidly far below. For it rises above the slender branches of elms and poplars, grey and in parts purple from their swelling buds--the red and yellow-brown towers, the crumbling walls of red earth and brick and large smooth rounded stones of white, or black, or red, the trailing ivy, the open white-pillared galleries. A few almond-trees are in flower, and above to the left stand the long lines of cypresses of the grey-white Generalife, where flower celandines and daffodils. Many of these Spanish cities are visited chiefly for their great ancient buildings and Cathedrals; yet the most part of them deserve a more patient study for their own sake, for their memories of old, and for the life of their narrow winding streets. The Spanish writer _Azorín_ (Martínez Ruiz), in a book of few pages,[83] conveys some wonderfully clear-cut impressions of Spain. He turns with preference to details of the centuries of Spain’s greatness, when Murcia, Valencia, and Seville were famous for their silks, Talavera for its earthenware, Toledo for its swords, when the gloves of Ocaña or the spurs of Ajofrín were unrivalled; or to the survival of old Spain in a picture, or a building, or a city. Thus he loves to wander through León with its spirit of ancient Spain and its classical street-names--here a cobbled grass-grown _plaza_ with pale acacias and ancient walls, the slow flight of doves and the wind rustling torn pieces of paper; there a quiet convent _patio_ with bays and rigid cypresses. For him the narrow streets of Córdoba have a deeper charm than those of any other Spanish city. He wanders through the labyrinth of intricate winding ways, with glimpses of small pillared _patios_ of flowers and fountains, and finds everywhere silence and a deep serene melancholy, restfulness, oblivion, and a harmony of soft shades, nowhere the light-hearted frivolity conventionally attributed to Andalucía. _Azorín’s_ originality consists in forcing a few apparently insignificant details to yield the whole spirit of a city, a country, a people. If he mentions the Mosque of Córdoba, it is but to note the beggars taking the sun in the _Patio de los Naranjos_, the sparrows twittering in the orange-trees, the sound of pitchers filling at the fountain. He gives us poignant descriptions of dead provincial cities and ruined ancestral houses. The decadence of Spain brought flourishing cities to low estate: Spain’s revival menaces them with a fresh ruin. Old narrow passages and intricate courts and sculptured houses make place for the introduction of tramways and broad asphalt streets. The old Santander described by Pereda survives only in his books, the old parts of Barcelona and Valencia are fast disappearing, and happy is the city such as Toledo whose position on abrupt rocks with no level spaces seems to promise an eternity of mediævalism and individuality.

VII

IN OLD CASTILLE

It is with astonishment and a kind of fear that the traveller passes through the high-lying plains of Old Castille, journeying swiftly from city to city, to

“Old towns whose history lies hid
In monkish chronicle or rhyme,
Burgos, the birthplace of the Cid,
Zamora and Valladolid....”

for in these intervening tracts, sun-parched and windswept, it seems scarcely possible that men should live. The villages are closely huddled together, little compact masses of low, unwhitewashed houses, without a tree or garden, so colourless, and clinging to the soil as sometimes to pass unnoticed. Rivers flow between low, bare banks without bush or tree, like streaks of mother-of-pearl inlaid in earthenware. And there are wide tracts of land without a house or boundary, a continuous desolation with no signs of life, except here and there a flock of sheep or herd of goats, or a line of peasants returning at sunset from their work. Surely life here can have but few attractions; there can be no joy of the soil, little temptation for Berceo’s “_mal labrador_” of the thirteenth century, who “loved the earth more than he loved the Creator,” and “would alter landmarks to enlarge his estate”--_cambiaba los mojones por ganar eredat_. Yet the slower trains are invaded by a merry throng of pleasant, courteous, good-looking peasants, oval-faced, with splendid teeth and eyelashes, who speed the journey with gay conversation and shrill singing, and pass constantly from one carriage to another to greet friends or to avoid the officials who inquire awkwardly after tickets. They have plenty of life and cheerfulness, and it is with renewed wonder that one looks at the dead, crumbling villages where they live, and remembers the piercing force of the Castilian sun in summer and the icy, penetrating winter winds. All day they must work without the shelter of a single hedge or tree in the searching wind[84] that sifts the soil, or under a sun that parches and shrivels it into dust. But a nearer acquaintance reveals a certain charm[85] about these villages of hard, clear names: Campillo, Cantalapedra, Pedroso, Madrigal--a charm of clean-swept spaces, and clear, luminous air and silent intensity; and the country ceases to be uniformly colourless. Here a woman in a dress of light-blue linen, with long flowing headkerchief of white, passes on a donkey through fields of golden ripe corn; there, from narrow windows in a street of yellow-brown houses, hang bright patches of geraniums and carnations in flower. And the doorways of square or round or pointed arches give entrance to cool, silent courts. _Azorín_ has described the old Castilian hidalgo, who has never left his ancestral house, with its large rooms, many of them unfurnished, and old portraits consigned to an attic and covered with the dust of centuries: “His lands have disappeared, his furniture has disappeared; he does nothing; he has a sad intensity of expression,” and when further misfortune befalls him he says, “There is no help for it--_qué le vamos á hacer_!” Everywhere is decay, and the trace of vanished splendour. So these old ruined hidalgos live out their grey, monotonous lives in some ancient town or village of Castille, amid the immense plains with “distances of radiant sky and faint blue lines of mountains.” The blue smoke rises from scented fires of rosemary, and, as the bells ring to Matins, the doves swerve and circle, the grey doves sweep slowly across the sky perpetually blue. And night and day the doors of the houses are kept continually closed, with a deserted air beneath the broad coats-of-arms carved in stone. _Azorín_ describes minutely a Castilian town, standing among cornfields and olives--one of those towns that the foreigner rarely has the courage to visit. Its streets are narrow and tortuous. It contains three ancient inns, four churches, three hermitages, two convents. It has no industries save a few ruined cloth manufactures, and only the usurer flourishes. It contains fourteen students (who have not taken their degree), four doctors, twelve lawyers (only six of whom earn a living, and this by slandering one another, and from time to time bringing a blackmail suit against some poor-spirited inhabitant). There is a Guild of the Christ of the Dying, and when a member dies a messenger goes through the streets ringing a bell and crying: “At such an hour the funeral of Don Fulano.” The summers are fiery, the winters are long and cruel. No visits are paid; doors and windows remain closed; few persons go through the streets, but in the _plazas_, on clear days of winter, dense groups of men may be seen taking the sun, wrapped in their brown plaids and _capas_. Nothing happens; the deep silence is broken by the clang of a forge-hammer or by the crowing of a cock. In time of Carnival a few “masks” pass, dressed up with mats and carrying old brooms. The labourers are poverty-stricken, and meat is the luxury of a few “rich” inhabitants. _Azorín_ notes the Castilian’s “fundamental energy, aloofness, indifference, and lofty disdain, with sudden inspirations of heroism”; and we may count it no small heroism to live on, proudly uncomplaining, in surroundings so harsh and discomfortable.

VIII

THE DESERT AND THE SOWN