Chapter II: Valencia Del CID (3)

Thus in “Tipos Trashumantes” he pillories the _sabio_, the learned man, who allows that Cervantes was not an entirely common man, but regrets that neither Cervantes nor Calderón possessed the “philosophy of æsthetics,” or who despises the inhabitants of Santander because they have not heard of Jeeéguel (Hegel); the _literato_ or journalist who, because a speaker in Cortes had rendered Dante popular by a quotation, murmurs, “_come corpo morto cade_” if he drops his stick or cigar; the barber who misses in Santander that indefinable “air” of Madrid;--in fact, a procession of quacks and knaves, and fools and snobs: perhaps the only “sympathetic” figure is that of the Barón de la Rescoldera, who “has never a good word nor a bad deed.” It is pleasant to turn back to village scenes in “Tipos y Paisajes” (forming a second part of “Escenas montañesas,” 1871). Here we find the enriched “Indian” (that is a _montañés_ who has returned to his country after making a fortune in South America); the schoolmaster, in a serviceable coat of black, who writes letters for the whole village, and shuts himself up in his house to get, if not drunk, at least very intoxicated; the peasant Blas, who, after inheriting thirty thousand dollars, is miserable, but feels that he must live _como un señor_ now that he is rich, and dismisses as a temptation to be resisted the wish to go as of old, with goad on shoulder, along the high-road by the side of his oxen; the practical, rough, kindly priest, Don Perfecto; Don Robustiano, an old-fashioned _hidalgo_, who does not allow the modern use of matches in his household, and who, from the experiences of his own poverty, is not easily misled, when he visits a neighbouring _hidalgo_, by the excuses for “my wife and daughter at church.” “I see through you,” says Don Robustiano to himself, “no doubt they are hidden away in some corner of the house for lack of clothes.” But especially is the sketch entitled _El Amor de los tizones_ admirable and worthy of Cervantes. It is a description of a rustic gathering or _tertulia_ in the kitchen of one of the poor houses of a mountain village. The peasants--each of them a clearly defined character--enter one by one with the greeting, “Dios nos acompañe” or, “Dios sea aquí,” and round the log fire, the flicker of the flames lighting up their faces against the immense smoke-blackened chimney, they pray a _rosario_ for the dead, or tell stories of brigands, and witches, and enchantments. “Los hombres de pró” (originally published with “Bocetos al temple”) and “El Buey Suelto” (written in 1877) are still collections of sketches, the first of a canvassing for an election in rural parts of Spain, the second, of the miseries of bachelors, and the scenes in both are touched with Pereda’s vividness and humour. Pereda, as a novelist proper, begins with “Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera” (written in 1878), which describes the effects of the revolution of 1868 on a small village of the Mountain, with “De tal palo tal astilla” (1879), an answer to Pérez Galdós’ “Doña Perfecta,” “El Sabor de la Tierruca” (1882) and “Pedro Sánchez” (1883). “El Sabor de la Tierruca” (Savour of the Soil) is a whole-hearted book of the _Montaña_; its serenity is scarcely disturbed by the frequent village fights and rivalries in which the weapons are stout sticks cut from the mountain-side. The book is filled with a fresh and acrid smell of the earth and autumn scents, and has the peace of still days when not a leaf stirs, and there is no movement in the ripe and yellow maize-fields. It is a life lived and felt by the author and not superficially observed, so that there is no trace of artificiality or false sentiment in the descriptions. Cumbrales and Rinconeda are rival villages, Cumbrales lying high among orchards, Rinconeda lower down on the edge of the plain, in thick oak and chestnut woods. Rinconeda rejoices when the raging _ábrego_, the south wind, sweeps in furious gusts from the hills and ravages Cumbrales; Cumbrales rejoices when the rain turns every street of Rinconeda into a rushing torrent. The characters of the inhabitants of Cumbrales are drawn with all Pereda’s skill; Juanguirle, for instance, a rich, hard-working peasant, the simple, sensible Mayor of Cumbrales; Baldomero, who “cannot understand how doing nothing, thinking of nothing, troubling about nothing, can be unpleasant to any sensible person”; his father, Don Valentín, “hero of Luchana” and worshipper of Espartero, who, after a frugal meal, says to his son that it is not the part of good Liberals to be so indulging themselves when the Carlists are flaunting “the black flag of tyranny,” to which Baldomero answers laconically that it would have sounded more convincing before the meal. There is an epic fight between the two villages which rages so violently that the Mayor, Juanguirle, in vain attempts to stop it “in the name of _la Josticia_, in the name of the law, of _la Costitución_, of God Himself, if necessary, since, for lack of a better, I am now His representative here.” A few moments afterwards sad to relate, Juanguirle, stung by an insult hurled at Cumbrales, is in the very thickest of the fray. In “Escenas montañesas” Pereda had slightly sketched a _deshoja_, the harvest task of separating the ripe cob of maize from its sheath. A certain number of cobs (from two to six) are set aside from each large basketful for the poor, for the souls in purgatory, and other pious purposes. In “El Sabor de la Tierruca” the scene is described more fully. The workers, over fifty in number, sing songs and slow ballads as the heaps of shining yellow cobs and the heaps of crisp, white leaves grow and grow, and their singing is accompanied at intervals by the noise of torrents of maize-cobs emptied from the baskets. We have, too, a description of a _derrota_, when flocks and herds are turned out promiscuously to graze, of the game of _cachurra_, a kind of rustic hockey, and the simple feasts of roasted chestnuts with a _bota_ of wine. Yet all is not “jest and youthful jollity.” The peasants, in their prudent distrust, have a keen eye for witches, and a weak old woman, of few words, poor and lonely, and in league with the Devil, plays a sadly large part in the history of Cumbrales. So in “Tipos y Paisajes,” the witch is feared not only by the boys whom she surprises stealing the grapes in the garden of her hut, but by the whole village. If a cow dies, it is the fault of the witch; if a man spends his days drinking in the tavern, the misery of his family is traced, not to him, but to the witch.

II.--“ON THE HEIGHTS”

In “Pedro Sánchez” Pereda, not without trepidation, travelled outside his native region to Madrid, then, in 1854, “a large tumbledown village, parched, old, and dirty;”[112] but Pedro Sanchez is a _montañés_, and the first part of the book, before he leaves his native _Montaña_, in style far exceeds the rest. The chief[113] works of Pereda, after “El Sabor de la Tierruca” and “Pedro Sánchez,” were “Sotileza” (1885), “La Puchera” (1889), and “Peñas arriba” (1895). “Sotileza” is a novel of the old, now vanished, Santander. Both in the characters and the language it is the most local of Pereda’s novels, and it is perhaps the one which has become most famous. It has an atmosphere of pitch and tar and sea-weed, and in the _Calle Alta_ nets and tattered rags hang from the balconies, fishwives quarrel shrilly, and the strident, piercing cry of the sardine-seller rends the air. Andrés, Muergo, and Cleto are all in love with Silda, and Silda, growing up slight and graceful, and called _Sotileza_ from the name for the thin wire or gut to which the fish-hook is attached, is not naturally prone to let her feelings appear. But Andrés, the son of a prosperous captain in the merchant service, cannot marry beneath him; Muergo, the half-brutish, half-childish nephew of tío Mechelín and tía Sidora, with whom Sotileza, an orphan, lives, is conveniently drowned in a storm; and we leave Sotileza engaged to Cleto, the honest son of tío Mocejón, who, with his wife, la Sargüeta, and his daughter, Carpia, are the terror of the _Calle Alta_ and of _el pae Polinar_. El padre Apolinar is a charitable, homely priest who receives his poor petitioners with gruff words, but ends by giving them the little that he possesses. One night, as he is writing his important sermon, he is interrupted--not for the first time--by a poor woman whose husband is ill. “Let her go to the doctor,” he exclaims; but when he finds they are starving, “_Ave María Purísima_,” he cries twice, “and he has three children and a wife, and there is no more honest man.” He orders his old servant to bring the _puchero_ containing potatoes and a little meat--the priest’s evening meal. After sniffing it deliciously, he sends it off to the sick man, and as he resumes his sermon he says to himself: “I have certainly read somewhere that to keep in good health when engaged on so difficult a task as the one I now have in hand, there is nothing better than to go to bed hungry. Well, there is no doubt as to my being hungry, wolfishly hungry, to-night.” Sotileza leaves an impression of wind-driven spray and tossing seas, of manly courageous effort and vigour and zest of living; the difficulty of the language and the roughness of the life described alike contribute to the power and convincing character of the work. Pereda never showed more admirably his capacity to raise the commonest lives, the most vulgar incidents and the language of the street--of the strident _Calle Alta_ from which _pae Polinar_ fled in comical dismay--to the region of high art. There is something epical about his figures, in the clamorous feuds of the fishwives not less than in the serene heroism of the deep-sea fishermen. “La Puchera” is only half a sea-novel. The inhabitants of Robleces only go sea-fishing to eke out the miserable pittance won by cultivation of the soil. Thus in the house of Juan Pedro (called _El Lebrato_) and Pedro Juan, his son (nicknamed _El Josco_, from his ferocious shyness), fishing-tackle and oars mingle with agricultural tools. Juan Pedro is a widower, and father and son are entirely devoted to one another, but their house is untidy and uncomfortable for lack of a woman’s care. Pedro Juan is in love with Pilara, Pilara is in love with Pedro Juan, her family encourages the match, his father asks for nothing better, but Pedro Juan cannot break through his timidity and bring himself to speak. At last, however, he is emboldened when Pilara at the haymaking, in scarlet skirt, bodice of striped blue, and headkerchief of many colours, arranging the hay on the cart as he forks it up to her, leaps laughingly from the last hay-cart into his arms. “Pilara, from here to the Church for the señor priest to marry us. Will you agree to it?” And she answers, “We might have been back long ago, _hijo de mi alma_, if you had been different.” Though the miser of the book, Don Baltasar, is most skilfully drawn, its interest centres more especially in the life of Juan Pedro and Pedro Juan: Juan Pedro, gay and talkative, appearing on festival days with his famous sea-boots, his Cochin-China medal, and a silk necktie; Pedro Juan, who at his wedding, when asked by the priest, Don Alejo, if he will have Pilara to be his wife, answers: “And will I not indeed? She knows well I will, and you know it too.”

In 1895 appeared “Peñas arriba” (On the heights), the crown and masterpiece of Pereda’s work. It is a novel of the high mountain, as “Sotileza” is a novel of the sea. Don Celso lives in Tablanca in his ancestral house which holds lordship over a whole valley and has had the honour of lodging two prelates, the Bishops of León and Santander; but Don Celso is old and in failing health, and he so urgently begs his nephew Marcelo to come to him that, against his will, the latter leaves Madrid and his comfortable rooms in the _Calle del Arenal_. After a long ride on and on over high mountain passes and narrow, precipitous paths and haunts of bears, he reaches Tablanca after nightfall. A whistle from his attendant, Chisco, the barking of dogs, an uncertain light moving to and fro, black shapes round the light, a sound of voices, and Marcelo is received into his uncle’s arms. Next day, from the wide balconies, he discovers the mountains on one side nearly touching the house, on the other a chequer-work of green meadows and yellow stubble-fields of maize against a background of mountains green and brown and grey, and the village among rocks and brushwood and intricate paths. There is a saying in the village that the largest piece of flat ground is the floor of Don Celso’s dining-room. Of the characters of the book Don Sabas belongs to that noble army of humble parish priests described by Pereda--the village priest in “De tal palo tal astilla”; Don Frutos, discreet and talkative, in “Don Gonzalo”; the joyous priest of Robleces, _regocijado de humor_, in “La Puchera,” whose only vice is to go out to sea twice a week with the fishing-boats; and the incomparable _pae Polinar_ in “Sotileza.” Don Sabas has a passion for the mountain, and, once upon the heights, the exact word and the right phrase come to him in which to express his enthusiasm and his deep knowledge of their plants and animals. To have given him a bishopric in a flat country would have meant death to him. He is fearless and untiring whether he is tracking a bear, or out in a snow-blizzard on the heights to rescue some peasant or herdsman who has not returned to the village, or visiting the sick on a black night of storm. Don Celso is also a noble figure, practical and imposing, and in his immense kitchen of an evening he holds a patriarchal gathering of peasants. We have, too, the splendid Tolstoian figure of the _hidalgo_ of ancient race, Gómez de Pomar, the author of many books, unloading a cart of hay in his simple peasant’s dress. He is a model of noble courtesy--_hidalga cortesía_, his style is “spirited and vigorous, pure Castilian untainted, as the blood that flows in his veins.” Consciously or unconsciously, it is a self-portrait of Pereda. The book abounds in impressive scenes and characters; it was a subject dear to Pereda’s heart, and he produced a work which ranks among the great novels of the world. There is a certain solidity in Pereda’s writing well suited to describe the stern deep-shadowed mountain-country, while his unlatin love of the wild and desolate rejoices in the hurricanes that tear up trees and whirl the snow-drifts on the mountain-side. “Peñas arriba” represents the whole life and being of the author and gives us a full measure of the true _sabor de la tierruca_, the savour of the soil. In “Esbozos y Rasguños” Pereda ridicules those mad Cervantists who prove that Cervantes was omniscient, an excellent theologian, a cook, a sailor, a geographer, a freethinker, and who will soon prove that neither is Cervantes Cervantes, nor _Don Quixote Don Quixote_. But of the true spirit of Cervantes he had imbibed a large part, even though he never attained to his great-hearted tolerance and the wider outlook of those more spacious times. His prose[114] is robust and austerely free from foreign idioms, laden with dialect and phrases native to the soil. It has caught the vigorous freshness of the mountain air, and the scent of earth and woods and moors, the rush of the sea and the elemental simplicity of men ennobled by constant contact with earth and ocean. Pereda wrote out of the fulness of his heart, without seeking popularity. His rough grandeur, rugged as the country of “Peñas arriba,” his frequent use of dialect, his untranslatableness, make for few readers. But those who, like Don Sabas, care to leave the level country and climb the mountain height, will find in Pereda a classic, high and steadfast as the hills. Blindly though the iniquity of oblivion scattereth her poppy, it is perhaps not “prodigiously temerarious” to suspect that Pereda may still be read when Zola is forgotten.

XXII

CASTILIAN PROSE

“The Spanish language,” said an English writer in 1701, “is properly none at all, for if the Spaniards were to restore to the Egyptians, Grecians, Arabians, Moors, Jews, Romans, Vandals, Huns, Goths, French, and, lastly, Italians, the words they have taken from them, they must of necessity remain dumb.” And, again, the Spanish language “consists of a’s and o’s, and nothing else but mouthing and grimace.” Another Englishman, sixty years later, says of the Spanish language, that “As there is something pompous and magnificent in the length of its words and the sound of them, so there is also a peculiarity in the turn and manner of their phrases and expressions.” In the time of Spain’s greatness a larger measure of justice is bestowed on the Spanish language. “It is expressive, noble, and grave,” says Mme. d’Aulnoy; “it is only our own (_i.e._ French) which excels it.” But with the decay of Spain’s material prosperity the language seems to have fallen into a disrepute; can a nation that possesses no gold currency and no battleships possess a language or literature worthy of the name? It may be admitted that many modern Spaniards themselves do not write correct or idiomatic Spanish; the language has been crowded with foreign importations, and while it is the easiest language to learn superficially, it is, by reason of its immense wealth of words and baffling reserves of idioms, one of the most difficult to learn well. “The best Castilian is here spoken,” said Mme. d’Aulnoy of Burgos, and it is still in Castille that the purest Spanish is to be learnt, in regions, _i.e._ where, owing to the climate, the foreigner makes but a briefest stay. Toledo is more likely to be visited for two days to see its churches, than for two months to learn the language; it gives no inviting impression of comfort to the stranger. In “Don Quixote” we read that “They cannot speak so well who are brought up in the Zocodover as those who spend the day walking to and fro in the cloisters of the Cathedral, yet all are Toledans.” But although among the peasants of Spain there are many _prevaricadores del buen lenguaje_, with reckless transposition of consonants (such as _probe_ for _pobre_), their language is often essentially purer and more idiomatic, with “a peculiarity in the turn and manner of their phrases,” than that of the _reprochadores de voquibles_, who cast it in their teeth, and who would die rather than offend _la grammaire_, but allow themselves the constant use of foreign words and expressions in the construction of their sentences. True Castilian has a combined softness and vigour, enabling it to be at once impassioned and concise, a harmony and strength scarcely to be found in any other language, and a pithiness which springs from the soil and has not its origin in books. Many of Spain’s greatest writers have wielded lance and pen alternately; they are not “grammarians who hack and slash for the genitive case,” but in the clear shock and flow of vowels, scarcely interrupted by their setting of slurred consonants, we seem to hear a rumour of battle, and their words can be, like those of St. Francis of Assisi preaching, _a modo che saette acute_--very sharp arrows. This native vigour corrects the tendency to rich magnificence and trailing growth of words; while without this richness the Castilian language might be like staccato Catalan--a succession of quick pistol-shots, as it were, not the stately tones of an organ. It is not too much to say that Castilian--not the miserable Castilian of many of the newspapers and many modern authors, but Castilian at its best--has been excelled only by Greek. It is thus a language truly worth studying, and it is easily learnt; it has, next to English, the widest extension in the world, and it possesses a splendid literature of eight centuries, continued at the present day in a number of characteristic and fascinating novels. Yet the Castilian language, literarily, is so little studied that it seems to be considered to be “properly none at all;” and these novels when read in translations lose their savour. Cervantes prophesied that “Don Quixote” would be translated into all nations and languages, but, as Dante said that poetry cannot be translated “senza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia,” so Cervantes likens translations to the reverse side of Flemish tapestries--the figures still visible, but obscured by a crowd of thread-ends. The best Spanish is still to be found in the writers of the golden age of Spanish literature, and especially in the writings of the mystics.

The style of Cervantes changes with his characters, who are allowed to murder Castilian in Spanish-Basque or Gascon-Catalan, but he is a master at will of the purest Castilian, in him never divorced from the full flavour of life, and he refers scornfully to the spurious continuation of “Don Quixote” as “written in Aragonese.” Equally _castizo_, hardily idiomatic and flavoured pungently, is the style of Quevedo. Of modern writers, Valera and Pereda, differing so widely, are alike in this, that they are both masters of noble Castilian prose, and have nothing to say to the imported phraseologies which pervade a large proportion of modern Spanish writing. Pérez Galdós, too, has a thoroughly Spanish style, robust and vigorous, rich in words, idiomatic. The most recent Spanish writers in a novellizing spirit tread more delicately; they resemble Sancho Panza, who, “when he was Governor, learnt to eat fastidiously, _á lo melindroso_, so that he would eat grapes and even the seeds of a pomegranate with a fork.” The style of León, indeed, is full and fine-sounding, and, like that of Valera, carries us back to the writings of the mystics in the sixteenth century; but Valle-Inclán (guilty only very occasionally of words such as _madama_ or _dandy_) and _Azorín_ have a mastery of deliberately thin, exquisitely clear-cut prose.[115] “Llovía menudo y ligero en aquella fertil valle del Baztan....”; in this passage of Valle-Inclán’s “Gerifaltes de Antaño” (1909), as in so many others, we have a delicate finished picture, reached after much labour of rejection and compression, though he has the art to conceal his _affres du style_. In a language so inexhaustibly rich as the Spanish, and with the tendency of Spaniards to write in hurried, copious fashion, this choice and sifting of words is welcome, and is in no danger of being carried to excess.

XXIII

TOLEDO AND EL GRECO

The fame of El Greco[116] has of late years spread and deepened, although the full fascination of his pictures will perhaps never be understood, except by a few. Of his life we have but one or two threadbare details, and this is the more tantalizing because we feel that his life and character were of a strange, alluring interest. Before his coming to Spain, the most interesting fact we learn concerning him is contained in a letter of the artist Julio Clovio, written in November, 1570: “There has arrived in Rome a young Cretan, a disciple of Titian, and, in my opinion, an excellent painter--_parmi raro nella pittura_.” The date of El Greco’s birth is uncertain, but if he was a _giovine_ in 1570, he would hardly have been seventy-seven at the time of his death in 1614. This assertion as to his age was made when the date of his death was given as 1625. It has been conjectured that it arose from an easy confusion between _sesenta_ and _setenta_, and that he was not seventy-seven but sixty-seven; the year of his birth would then be 1547. The exact date of his arrival at Toledo is unknown, but it was about the year 1575; certainly in or before 1577. Toledo had ceased to be the capital and court of Spain, yet still remained the home not only of princes of the Church, but of many men of letters, and the Arabic MS. of “Don Quixote” was discovered in its market-place. Its cathedral was “the richest church in Christendom.” An Italian work published at Venice in 1563 records that “the priests reign triumphant in Toledo--_trionfano_--and give themselves up to good living, and no one reproves them.” The power of the Inquisition was at its height. From the gloom of the Escorial, Philip II.’s narrow, unbending spirit found many echoes in the stern cities of Castille. El Greco lived to see the expulsion of the Moriscos, and the utter decay of the trade and industry of Toledo and other cities. Antonelli’s project to make the Tagus navigable as far as Toledo was rejected scornfully: would not God have made it navigable had it been His will? Yet it was the golden age of Spanish letters, and during El Greco’s sojourn at Toledo the most humorous and broadly human figure of all literature was being elaborated in Cervantes’ brain. El Greco died at Toledo two years before the death of Cervantes and Shakespeare.

Pacheco says of El Greco that he was “in all things as singular as in his paintings.” Other stray notices represent him as “a great philosopher,” “eloquent in discourse,” a witty, acute speaker--_de agudos dichos_--a writer on painting, sculpture and architecture. We are further told that he earned many ducats but spent them in pomp and display, even keeping musicians to play to him during his meals. He would seem to have retained the soft atmosphere of Italian luxury amid the narrow, gloomy Toledo streets, and to have introduced an alien note of pleasure into the cold, intense existence of Castille. But if his life preserved about it a certain tinge of Venice (Venice that spent what Venice earned), his art was essentially Spanish. The mannerism of his painting might be deemed extravagant, as his caprices might not be understood, by many Spaniards. He was, they might say, “too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate.” They are the epithets of Holofernes describing a Spaniard; and what could be more Spanish than El Greco’s mingling of keen vision and realistic power as a portrait painter with an intense, unfailing spiritualism; than his vehement, almost tortured desire to shun the common and the vulgar--not the mere seeking after originality but a wish to be sincere, to express his own soul? His manner has not the sensuous richness of Italy but a Castilian, nay, a Toledan austerity. It is as “a sword of Spain, the ice-brook’s temper.” Already in his famous “Expolio” (in the Sacristy of Toledo Cathedral), painted not long after he had arrived in Spain, he had, as Señor Cossío says, abandoned the reds and golds of Italy for blue and carmine and ashen grey. As to the price of this picture he had a quarrel with the Chapter of Toledo Cathedral.[117] Assessors were appointed to value it and they found that, though the picture was beyond all price--_no tiene prescio ni estimación_--a verdict with which all who have seen the “Expolio” will readily agree, yet, having regard to “these poverty-stricken times,” they assessed it at nine hundred ducats, an extraordinarily high price for that period. The Chapter, on the other hand, offered a much smaller sum, and that under the condition that he should remove certain “improprieties”--_ynpropiedades_--from the picture, among them the figures of “the Virgin and the saints--_las marias y nuestra señora_--whose presence in the picture is contrary to the gospel, seeing that they were not actually present.” El Greco held out for his own price, but the Mayor, siding with the Chapter, decreed that he must either give up the picture or go to prison, and the painter submitted. The exquisitely beautiful figures that he was to have removed are, however, still in the picture, as well as the other _ynpropiedades_, so that he seems at least to have defied the narrow spirit of the letter in the priests who “reigned triumphant” at Toledo. Perhaps--in the temper of Alonso Cano towards the Chapter of Granada Cathedral--he threatened to destroy the “Expolio,” and the Chapter, having given him a hundred and fifty ducats on account, would be unwilling to lose their picture. Certainly El Greco would not say to himself with Frà Lippo Lippi--

“they must know!
Don’t you think they’re the likeliest to know,
They, with their Latin? so I swallow my rage,
Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint
To please them.”

El Greco painted to please no one but himself and his individual vision. His next great picture, the “San Mauricio,” was painted by command of Philip II., but it did not please the King and in his lifetime was not placed in the Escorial, where it now is. _No le contentó á su Magestad_, says Sigüenza, and he goes on to say, “and this is small wonder, since it pleases but few, though it is said that it shows much art, _aunque dizen es de mucho arte_.” It is conceivable that the picture as a whole might seem ugly, and repel, especially on a first view, before the eye had embraced its wealth of beautiful details. The real reason, however, of its “not pleasing” was not the exaggerated drawing nor the harsh colouring, the dominant note of yellow and blue, but the realistic portrayal of the group of martyrs in the foreground. “Saints,” proceeded Sigüenza, “should be painted in such a manner that they may not take away the desire to pray, but may rather incite to devotion.”

“‘Ay, but you don’t so instigate to prayer,’
Strikes in the Prior! ‘when your meaning’s plain
It does not say to folks--remember matins--
Or, mind you fast next Friday.’”

The Spanish Church would willingly have reduced art to skull and bones. But El Greco saw that his Saints must be human before they could be divine. He had now inaugurated that realism which was to find its highest expression in the art of Velázquez, but which is evident also in the Saints and Madonnas of Murillo.

El Greco has not the immediate attraction and universal appeal of Velázquez; some of his pictures may displease at first and only gradually make their charm felt. What, then, we may ask, is El Greco’s peculiar fascination, the dominating power to attract or to repel in his pictures so great that it is apt to become almost an obsession? Is it the truth to life, or the aloofness from life, the clear expression of character or the spiritual submission to divine will? Does it lie in his fondness for those cold, simple colours, the pale greens and lilacs, grey and the blue of hydrangeas or of the surface of ice, that delight the soul of “primitive” and “decadent” alike; in the pervading life and movement, the slender, lengthened limbs and tapering figures; in the subtle permanence of expressions and attitudes that were “so fugitive”? Is it the passionate sincerity and striving that disdains rest and mere complacency of work accomplished, the noble discontent with effects achieved, the ceaseless longing to reach yet higher levels, till ultimately, as in his “Asunción,” the whole picture is moulded to a perfect realization of the soul’s desire, a harmonious unity of aspiration, “toccando un poco la vita futura”? Or is it the exquisite sadness, the air of acquiescence in suffering and fate unshunnable, or the wonderful peace and serene joy of some of his faces? It is a rare combination of all this that gives the essence of El Greco’s potent charm; it is the richness of contrast so truly Spanish, the marvellous rendering alike of heavenly things and things terrestrial, the wild magic of his imagination, the sober individual alchemy of his style. In these delicate lines, thin faces, long white limbs and restrained colours there is a spiritual intensity that impassions and consumes with a light and fire reaching beyond dim mortal vision. But in the expression there is, moreover, a softness of lingering pity, of linked sweetness and tears for earthly sorrows, that makes his art not cold and distant, appealing merely to the intellect, but lovable and human; “a thing ensky’d and sainted,” yet still bound by gold chains about the feet of man.

The little church of Santo Tomé, with its beautiful old tower, stands but a few hundred yards from El Greco’s house at Toledo, and for this church he painted perhaps the most beautiful and certainly the most important of all his works--“El Entierro del Conde Orgaz.” For an artist the “Entierro” has almost as much interest and instruction as “Las Meninas” of Velázquez. The subject is a local legend. Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen come down to carry to burial the corpse of the charitable Conde de Orgaz--of whom we read that he “employed his life in holy works and so came to a holy death”--and the chief citizens of Toledo mourn him. In this long line of faces El Greco shows his full mastery as a portrait-painter. And we may see in them all the race of Castille--Castilian dignity, frankness, nobility, sadness, resignation, pride, haughtiness, intensity, ascetic mysticism. We seem, as we look, to hear the solemn rhythm of Jorge Manrique’s verses--[118]

“Este mundo es el camino
Para el otro, que es morada
Sin pesar;
Mas cumple tener buen tino
Para andar esta jornada
Sin errar.
Partimos cuando nacemos,
Andamos mientras vivimos,
Y llegamos
Al tiempo que fenecemos;
Así que cuando morimos
Descansamos.”

The light of the torches burning in long thin flame and the upward look of the priest in plain surplice draw the eye up to the second part of the picture, the _Gloria_, where the Conde de Orgaz appears before Christ and the Virgin in a heaven thronged with apostles and saints and supported by angels. The beauty of the lower part is as easily recognizable as that of a picture of Velázquez, but the _Gloria_ takes longer to appreciate, having a fuller measure of El Greco’s mannerism. Partly for this reason the picture may displease at first, permanently displease if seen once only in a cursory glance, but on a more leisured study it assumes its right place as one of the wonderful and most beautiful pictures of the world. It requires time, too, to realize the infinite beauty of detail, the figures on St. Augustine’s robe, the scene of St. Stephen’s stoning on that of St. Stephen, and the skill with which all monotony is avoided in the mourners, in spite of their being nearly all of the same height, and nearly all wearing white ruffs and pointed beards.

In his later pictures El Greco increased the mannerism of his style; the figures are longer, more angular, the intensity of expression becomes an obsession, a paroxysm: he paints as one for whom the whole world has ceased to exist. Sometimes, as in the “Baptism” at Toledo, these exaggerations seriously spoil the beauty of his work; but the “Asunción” of the church of San Vicente, at Toledo, also belongs to his later style, and is not the least beautiful of his pictures: in no other work of art has the sense of motion been so marvellously expressed--the Virgin, saints, and angels seem actually floating upwards before our eyes. El Greco’s mannerism, _jene unglaubliche Manier_, Herr Carl Justi calls it, is more evident in some of his pictures, in others less; but there is not a sufficiently wide gulf between them to justify the saying that “they are so different that they appear not to be painted by the same hand,”[119] nor to countenance Palomino’s statement that “What he did well no one did better, and what he did badly no one did worse.”

It was not carelessly nor ignorantly that El Greco drew his figures out of proportion, making them preternaturally long and thin. He did so deliberately, just as Bacon said deliberately that “In all beauty there is some strangeness of proportion,” and the effect in El Greco’s pictures often, indeed as a rule, justifies his boldness. We see him

“Pouring his soul ...
Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art--for it gives way;
That arm is wrongly put--and there again--
A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,
Its body, so to speak! its soul is right.”

Naturally the peculiarity of his style has at once struck all observers. So the French have spoken of his “maladresses enfantines, audaces troublantes,” his “attitudes strapassées,” his “draperies cassées et chiffonnées á plaisir,” his “dessin fantastique.” So Sir Edmund Head wrote of some of El Greco’s pictures as “extravagant in length, of an ashen-grey tone, most singular in so fine a colourist.” If only glanced at once, this is perhaps the impression that the majority of his pictures would leave, and he thus remains a sphinx to many. “He will always remain caviare to the multitude,” wrote Sir J. C. Robinson in 1868; “the uninitiated observer passes over [his pictures] with wonder and bewilderment, the grim angular figures and draperies and the flickering unrest of all the details affecting him as would a harsh tumult of discordant sounds.”

Palomino said of El Greco that “he ended by making his painting despicable and ridiculous alike by extravagance of drawing and harshness of colour.” His contemporaries explained the singularity of his work either as due to madness or to craving for effect, _por valentía, para salir del día_, or to a wish to prevent them from being confused with those of Titian!

Not less than his drawing, El Greco’s colouring has been a stumbling-block and an offence. We read of his “teintes presque cadavériques,” “coloris grisâtre, pâle blafard,” “symphonies en bleu mineur;” and Ford characteristically wrote that his pictures were often “as leaden as cholera morbus.” After the rich reds and golds of Italian painting, the subtler tints of El Greco, evolved by him partly under Tintoretto’s influence, partly under the influence of Toledo, could not please his contemporaries, but we feel now that they are no slight ingredient of his charm. In colouring El Greco largely influenced Velázquez, and through Velázquez all subsequent painting. Velázquez learnt from him, in the words of Señor Cossío, “his harmony of silver greys and the use of certain carmines.” But it was not only El Greco’s colouring that affected him. Señor Cossío sees in the construction of “The Surrender of Breda” vague reminiscences of the “San Mauricio,” and one may also see in it reminiscences of the “Expolio.” Palomino, in his Life of Velázquez, says that “in his portraits he imitated Domenico Greco, for he considered that his heads could not be sufficiently praised.” Velázquez rejected El Greco’s mystic intellectuality, but possibly without El Greco’s influence the realism of Velázquez might have been excessively exact and less inspired.

Toledo, in the words of a modern Spanish poet, stands “dark, ruinous, forgotten and alone;” but Domenico[120] Theotocopuli, who lay there unremembered for three centuries, now rises to spread his fame through the world--

“Tout passe. L’art robuste
Seul a l’éternité,
Le buste
Survit à la cité.”

Foreigners from many lands climb up and down the cobbled lanes and passages, in search of hidden churches here and there with pictures by El Greco--Santo Tomé, San José, San Vicente, Santa Leocadia, San Nicolás, and many more:

“The sanctuary’s gloom no longer wards
Vain tongues from where his pictures stand apart.”

He loved to paint the city, and, besides his famous view of it, we find it in the background of his pictures. The Cathedral and the Bridge of Alcántara and the Castle of San Servando are perfectly distinct in the “Asunción” of the Church of San Vicente. The city figures again, though less clearly, in the magnificent picture of St. Martin (of Tours) dividing his cloak, an act of charity that certainly receives a new significance in this bleak, unsheltered Toledo country. And Toledo, not Troy, appears in the “Laocoon,” the only picture by El Greco that has a classical subject. El Greco, the Cretan, lived at Toledo for some forty years, and the charm of Toledo seems to have entered into his soul. His house was not in one of the smothered streets, but in an open space high above the Tagus, opposite the Synagogue of the Jews.[121] It has a cool _patio_ with a floor of red bricks and glazed tiles, and four white pillars, with a tiny well near the entrance, and a grey wooden gallery above, resting on the pillars, and open on one side, so that in spring swallows occasionally enter and whirl round the court. To the right a door leads to a quaint, old-fashioned kitchen, with its immense open fireplace and seats on either side beneath the chimney. That El Greco, a foreigner, should have become the most Spanish of Spanish painters, was due no doubt to the influence exercised over him by this stern yet luring city of Castille. It is impossible to dissociate his colouring from the many greens and greys and browns of the city and surrounding country, the rust-coloured soil of the Cigarrales thinly covered with many greens that are not green, grey hill-plants, dull tints of thyme and olive, the shriller green of pomegranate and other fruit-trees, the grass sun-parched to patches of yellow. And perhaps it is not altogether fanciful to connect the metallic gleams visible in certain lights on the surface of the Tagus with the glazed effects so frequent in El Greco’s pictures, or even the ragged, wind-tormented elms by the river with some of his more extravagant figures. The city points upward like a grey sword; and whether seen in shafts and foils of orange light against a stormy sunset, or fainting and crumbling greyly beneath a relentless sun and sky of cloudless blue, it has the austere intensity that we find in El Greco’s work. Yet, as in the greyest pictures of El Greco occurs some relieving touch of colour, so Toledo is not merely a monotonous symmetry of brown or grey. A procession, white and gold and red and purple, passes through the narrow streets under a shower of roses from the balconies of houses gaily hung in white and red, red and yellow; or the bright colours of peasants’ dresses are to be seen against the ancient Alcántara bridge as they come in to market; or in some street of stifling, windowless walls that lead up to a line of blue sky by day, and at night to a ribbon of stars, comes a glimpse, through doors of massive ancient stone, of a _patio_ of bright flowers--carnations, nasturtiums, geraniums--as one may find a picture of El Greco in some old forgotten Church; and beneath the yellow-brown walls and grey rocks of the city are gardens of fruit-trees, where in spring nightingales sing from pomegranates in scarlet flower. It is a city of continual surprises, not to be understood or appreciated in a single day or a single visit; it gives, like El Greco’s pictures, a strong original impression at a first glance, but its inner being, its softer moments, its true significance and charm it reveals only to a patient study. Its attitude is indeed that of reserve; it seems to be holding judgment on modern civilization. It represents all that is noblest, most individual, and unbendingly austere in the spirit of Spain.

INDEX

A

Abenabet, _King of Seville_, 101

_Afforestation_, 99

_Agriculture_, 97, 203

Ajofrín, 90

Alarcón (Pedro Antonio de), 195

Alas (Leopoldo) _Clarín_, 150, 193, 196, 197

Alfonso, _el Sabio_, quoted, 98

_Alhambra, The_, 89

Alicante, 113, 114, 115

Almería, 57, 113

Altabiscar, Poem of, 62

Altamira (Rafael), quoted, 22, 25

Amadeo I., _King of Spain_, 43, 198-199

Andalucía, 103, 128, 134-141, 186, 195

_Andalusians_, 25, 26, 90, 140, 188, 190

André (E. L.), 39

Antequera, 137

_Anti-Clericals_, 39, 40, 81, 199, 200

Aragon, 26, 100

Arenys de Mar, 104

Arriba, 75

Asturians, 26, 196

Asturias, 196

Atchuria, 64, 65

Avila, 87

Augustinians, 166, 181

Aulnoy, Mme. d’, quoted, 20, 29, 52, 59, 60, 62, 239, 240

Azorín. _See_ Martínez Ruiz.

_Azulejos_, 132, 194

B

Bacon (Francis), quoted, xi, 33, 34, 41, 252

Barcelona, 88, 91, 104

Baroja (Pío), 27, 93, 208, 209

Basque Provinces, 50, 63, 66-79, 210-211

_Basques_, 25, 28, 61, 62, 66-79, 209, 225

Bayonne, 63

_Beggars_, 29, 87, 126

Béhobie, bridge of, 61

Benavente (Jacinto), 27, 41

Berceo (Gonzalo de), 39, 93

Berenger (Remont), _Count of Barcelona_, 159-160

_Betting_, 73, 74

Biarritz, 63

Bidasoa, 57-61, 65

Bilbao, 60, 88

Blasco Ibáñez (Vicente), 38, 123, 149, 152, 193, 205-208

Böhl von Faber (Cecilia). _See_ Fernán Caballero.

_Booksellers_, 172

Borrow (George), 53

_Brigands_, 47, 194

Browning (Robert), quoted, 248, 249, 253, 256

_Bullfights_, 38

Burgos, 87, 158, 240

Burton’s _Anatomy_, quoted, 88

Butler, _Bishop_, quoted, 35

C

_Caciquismo_, 23, 204

Cadiz, 88

Calderón de la Barca (Pedro), 32, 55, 227

Cambridge, 165

Camões (Luiz), quoted, 25, 26, 251

Cantabria, 63, 223-238

Cardeña, 139

_Carlists_, 76, 78, 81, 84, 210, 211, 223, 230

Carranza, _Archbishop_, 165, 169, 170

Cartagena, 116

Castejon, 158

Castelar (Emilio), 149, 198

_Castilian language_, viii, 24, 163, 181, 193, 202,
212, 221, 222, 237, 239-243, 245

_Castilians_, 26, 93, 94, 95, 96, 212 251

Castille, 48, 54, 66, 92-96, 232, 246

Castro (León de), 166, 167, 168, 173

_Catalan language_, 241

_Catalans_, 26, 34, 79

Catalonia, 104-107

_Celestina, La_, 144

Cervantes, 48, 146, 147, 182, 227, 237, 241, 242, 246
“Don Quixote,” 28, 88, 139, 146, 185, 240, 242, 245
Don Quixote, 30, 151, 207
Sancho, 27, 33, 40, 54, 242

Charlemagne, 62

_Church in Spain, the_, 39, 40, 200, 201, 245-246, 249

_Cid, Poema del_, 144, 150, 153-162

Cid, the, 87, 102, 144, 153-162

Clarín. _See_ Alas (L.)

Clarke (Edward), quoted, 21, 239

Clarke (Henry Butler), 79

Claudian, quoted, 48

_Climate_, viii, 37, 54, 93, 100

Clovio (Julio), 245

Coloma (Luis), 201

Córdoba, 90, 101, 103, 140

Cortese (Paolo), quoted, 18

Creighton (Mandell), _Bishop of London_, quoted, 44

Creixell, 106-107

D

_Dances, Basque_, 73

Dante, quoted, 26, 130, 241, 250

_Deshoja, A_, 230-231

Díaz de Bivar (Rodrigo). _See_ Cid.

_Diligencias_, 50, 51, 52

Dominicans, 166, 168

_Dress_, 53, 54, 77, 106, 135

E

Ebro, the, 100

_Education_, 140

Edward II., _King of England_, 63

Eibar, 73

Elgoibar, 73

Emigration, 100, 203, 225

England and Spain, 25, 63, 166

_Escorial, the_, 98

_Eskuara_, 59, 60, 62, 64, 68, 70-71, 76, 85-86

Espronceda (José de), 149

Estella, 81, 217

Estremadura, 98

F

Fernán Caballero, 185-191, 193

Fitzmaurice-Kelly (James), quoted, 142, 143, 146-147, 185, 195, 215, 227

Flaubert (Gustave), 192, 197

Ford (Richard), 25, 36, 47, 51, 53, 253

France (Anatole), quoted, 30

Francis of Assisi, Saint, 241

Francis I., King of France, 57

Fuenterrabía, 58, 62, 63, 85-86

_Fueros_, 76, 78, 79

_Funeral offerings_, 75

G

Galicia, 214-221

_Gallegos_, 25, 26, 214, 216, 220

Ganivet (Ángel), 22

Gallipienzo, 83

Gasset (Rafael), 99

Gautier (Théophile), quoted, 254, 256

_Generalife, the_, 89

Gibraltar, 207

_Giralda, the_, 126, 133, 188

Gómez de Baquero (E.), 201

Góngoray Argote (Luis), 148

Goya [Francisco Goya y Lucientes], 192

Granada, 88-89

_Grao, El_, 115, 205

Grazalema, 136, 137

Greco, El, 208, 243, 244-258

Guadalete, the, 137

Guadalquivir, the, 133, 140

Guernica, 76

_Guernicaco Arbola_, 76, 77

Guipúzcoa, 64, 67, 68, 78

H

Hendaye, 59

_Heresy_, 38, 172, 173

Horace, quoted, 71

_Houses_, 21

_Huerta, the Valencian_, 115-116, 121, 122, 124, 161, 205

Hugo (Victor), quoted, 47, 49, 57, 114, 115

Hurtado de Mendoza (Diego), 145

I

Ibiza, 205, 206

_Idearium Español_, 22

Île des Faisans, 60

_Inns_, 52, 140-141

_Inquisition, the_, 34, 38, 39, 147, 148, 168-184, 246

_Inscriptions_, 58, 60, 61, 64, 67, 77-78

_Irrigation_, 98, 99, 121-124

Irun, 62, 73, 198

Isabel II., _Queen of Spain_, 187, 188, 198

J

James I., _King of Aragon_, quoted, 26, 31

_Jews_, 167, 176

Jijona, 102

Jimena, wife of El Cid, 157, 158, 160

Johnson (Samuel), quoted, 47

Joseph, _King of Spain_, 42

Juan Manuel, _Infante_, quoted, 101

K

Kipling (Rudyard), quoted, 50

L

La Rhune, 64

Larramendi (Manuel de), 72, 74

_Lazarillo de Tormes_, 144, 145, 150, 202

León, 48, 87, 90

---- (Luis de), 148, 149, 151, 163-184

---- (Ricardo), 23, 24, 94, 211, 212, 242-243

Longfellow (H. W.), quoted, 52, 92

Loti (Pierre) [Julien Viaud], 73, 74

_Louis XIV._, _King of France_, 60, 64

Lumbier, 83

M

Madrid, 99, 198, 202, 203, 207, 228, 231, 232

Maeztu (Ramiro de), quoted, 36

_Makhilas_, 77

Málaga, 137, 138

Mallada (Lucas), quoted, 22

Manrique (Jorge), 251

Marbot, _General_, 61

----, quoted, 18

Mariana (Juan de), 37, 70

Martial, quoted, 26, 54, 100

Martínez Ruiz (J.), _Azorín_, 22, 89-90, 94-96, 193, 208, 209

Masdeu, quoted, 19

Menéndez y Pelayo (Marcelino), 151, 192

_Montaña, La_, 26, 223, 226, 228-238

Montano (Arias), 173

Montoro, 140

_Moors in Spain, the_, 26, 31, 86, 101, 161, 246

Murcia, 90, 114

Murillo (Bartolomé Esteban), 249

_Mystics_, 148, 149, 192, 193, 194, 242

N

Napier (Sir W.), _Lieut.-General_, quoted, 17, 18, 26, 64

Napoleon, 42, 61

Narváez (Ramón María), _General_, 30

Navarre, 80-84

_Navarrese_, 26, 83

_Norias_, 108-109

_Novels_, ix, 144, 151, 185-238, 241

O

Ocaña, 90

Ondarrabia, 85, 86

_Oranges, Court of_, 90, 126

Oropesa, 108-111

Oviedo, 197

_Ox-carts_, 74

Oxford, 165

P

Pacheco (Francisco), 245

Palacio Valdés (Armando), 88, 193, 195-196, 200

_Papal authority in Spain_, 146, 147, 183

Pardo Bazán (Emilia), 185, 205, 214-217, 222

_Parish Priests_, 76, 215, 233, 236

Pascal (Blaise), 148, 171

_Pastorales, Basque_, 69-70

_Patios_, viii, 54, 88, 90, 131, 133, 189, 256

_Peasants_, 71, 82, 83, 94, 100, 110, 120-124, 135,
140, 141, 205, 215-216, 226-227, 229-230, 240

_Pelota, Basque_, 73, 74

_Peninsular War, the_, 17, 64, 65, 81

Pepys (Samuel), quoted, 19, 25, 39, 44

Pereda (José María de), 40, 91, 151, 152, 189, 190, 191, 193, 222-238, 242

Pérez Galdós (Benito), 24, 29, 30, 35, 37, 150, 191,
192, 193, 197, 204, 223, 242

Péroz, _Colonel_, 61

Philip II., _King of Spain_, 165, 246, 248

Philip IV., _King of Spain_, 60

Picón (Jacinto Octavio), 201-202

_Pilgrims_, 61, 62, 76, 147

Pino, 138

Place-names, 64, 65, 68, 78, 85, 86

_Politics_, 28, 35, 212

Pomponius Mela, quoted, 86

_Post_, 56, 59

Prim (Juan), _General_, _Conde de Reus_, 198

_Processions_, 87, 127, 133

_Proverbs_, ix, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39,
40, 63, 69, 72, 79, 93, 121, 145

Q

Quevedo [Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas], 29, 39, 144, 148, 150, 242

R

Reclus (Elisée), quoted, 21

_Religion_, 38, 39, 40, 44, 76, 80, 147, 200

_Roads_, 50, 51, 52

Romayquia, _Queen_, 101

Roncesvalles, 62

Ruiz (Juan), 39, 142, 150

S

Sagunto, 160

Saint-Jean-de-Luz, 57, 60, 62, 64, 78

Saint-Pée, 78

Salamanca, 87, 164-168, 173-175, 181-183

Sánchez (Tomás Antonio), 154

San Feliú de Guixols, 104

Sanguesa, 84

San Sebastian, 63

Sansol, 83

Santa Cruz (Manuel), 210, 211

Santander, 91, 224, 232-233

Santiago de Compostella, 61, 62

Santillana, _Marqués de_ [Iñigo López de Mendoza], 142, 143

San Vicente, 107

Sare, 64, 78

Scaliger, quoted, 60

Scott (_Sir_ Walter), 185

Segovia, 87

_Serenos_, 111, 188

Seville, 88, 90, 125-133, 187, 188

Shakespeare, quoted, 29, 41, 149, 246

Sierra de Jaen, 139

Sierra Nevada, 117, 118, 138, 139, 141

Sitges, 106

_Smuggling_, 57, 58, 77, 205

_Socialism_, 27

Socoa, 65

_Song of Solomon, the_, 166, 175

Sorolla (Joaquín), 205

Stendhal [Henri Beyle], 189, 192

Strabo, quoted, 98

T

Tagus, the, 54, 161, 202-203

Talavera, 90

Tannenberg (Boris de), 151, 223, 237

Tarifa, 118

Tarragona, 107

Teresa, Santa, 25, 148, 183

Theotocopuli (Dominico). _See_ Greco.

_Threshing_, 72, 82

Ticknor (George), quoted, 52 149, 163

Tiepolo (Paolo), quoted, 19

Tintoretto, 255

Titian, 245, 254

Toledo, 87, 90, 91, 155, 240, 244-258

Torrevieja, 113-114

Townsend (Joseph), quoted, 31

_Translations_, 241-242

_Travelling_, 47-56

_Turroneros_, 102

U

Unamuno (Miguel de), 212

Urrobi, 81

Urrugne, 61

_Usury_, 95, 100, 203, 217

V

Valencia, 90, 91, 115, 120, 160, 161, 205, 206

Valencia Island, 86

_Valencians_, 25, 26, 122

Valera (Juan), 150, 191, 193-195, 212, 242

Valle-Inclán (Ramón del), 205, 208, 210, 211, 217-221, 242-243

Vega (Lope Félix de), 33, 149

Velázquez [Diego Velázquez de Silva], 60, 144, 248, 253, 254

Vera, 58, 64, 78

Vézinet (F.), 214

_Villages_, 48, 80, 83, 92, 94, 100, 107, 135, 138, 229

Villanueva y Geltrú, 106

Vinson (Julien), 71

Vizcaya, 60, 63, 68, 76, 78

Voltaire, quoted, 73

_Vulgate, the_, 166, 167, 176-177

W

Webster (Wentworth), 71

Wellington, _the Duke of_, 17, 78

_Whale-fishing_, 63, 225

_Witches_, 231

_Women, influence of_, 40

Wordsworth (William), quoted, 76, 77

Wynn (Sir R.), quoted, 30, 60

Z

_Zagal, the_, 51

Zola (Émile), 207, 222, 238

* * * * *

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