Familiar Spanish Travels | Page 3

pursuit of Spanish perfidy and
inhumanity, as in their monstrous misrule of Holland. When it came in
those earlier days to a question of sides between the Spaniards and the
Moors, as Washington Irving invited my boyhood to take it in his
chronicle of the conquest of Granada, I experienced on a larger scale
my difficulty in the case of the Mexicans and Peruvians. The case of
these had been reported to me in the school-readers, but here, now, was
an affair submitted to the mature judgment of a boy of twelve, and yet I
felt as helpless as I was at ten. Will it be credited that at seventy-four I
am still often in doubt which side I should have had win, though I used
to fight on both? Since the matter was settled more than four hundred
years ago, I will not give the reasons for my divided allegiance. They
would hardly avail now to reverse the tragic fate of the Moors, and if I
try I cannot altogether wish to reverse it. Whatever Spanish misrule has
been since Islam was overthrown in Granada, it has been the error of
law, and the rule of Islam at the best had always been the effect of
personal will, the caprice of despots high and low, the unstatuted
sufferance of slaves, high and low. The gloomiest and cruelest error of

Inquisitional Spain was nobler, with its adoration of ideal womanhood,
than the Mohammedan state with its sensual dreams of Paradise. I will
not pretend (as I very well might, and as I perhaps ought) that I thought
of these things, all or any, as our train began to slope rather more
rapidly toward Granada, and to find its way under the rising moon over
the storied Vega. I will as little pretend that my attitude toward Spain
was ever that of the impartial observer after I crossed the border of that
enchanted realm where we all have our castles. I have thought it best to
be open with the reader here at the beginning, and I would not, if I
could, deny him the pleasure of doubting my word or disabling my
judgment at any point he likes. In return I shall only ask his patience
when I strike too persistently the chord of autobiography. That chord is
part of the harmony between the boy and the old man who made my
Spanish journey together, and were always accusing themselves, the
first of dreaming and the last of doddering: perhaps with equal justice.
Is there really much difference between the two?

II
It was fully a month before that first night in Granada that I arrived in
Spain after some sixty years' delay. During this period I had seen
almost every other interesting country in Europe. I had lived five or six
years in Italy; I had been several months in Germany; and a fortnight in
Holland; I had sojourned often in Paris; I had come and gone a dozen
times in England and lingered long each time; and yet I had never once
visited the land of my devotion. I had often wondered at this, it was so
wholly involuntary, and I had sometimes suffered from the surprise of
those who knew of my passion for Spain, and kept finding out my
dereliction, alleging the Sud-Express to Madrid as something that left
me without excuse. The very summer before last I got so far on the way
in London as to buy a Spanish phrase-book full of those inopportune
conversations with landlords, tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual
acquaintance or agreeable strangers. Yet I returned once more to
America with my desire, which was turning into a duty, unfulfilled; and
when once more I sailed for Europe in 1911 it was more with
foreboding of another failure than a prescience of fruition in my

inveterate longing. Even after that boldly decisive week of the
professor in London I had my doubts and my self-doubts. There were
delays at London, delays at Paris, delays at Tours; and when at last we
crossed the Pyrenees and I found myself in Spain, it was with an
incredulity which followed me throughout and lingered with me to the
end. "Is this truly Spain, and am I actually there?" the thing kept asking
itself; and it asks itself still, in terms that fit the accomplished fact.

II
SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
Even at Irun, where we arrived in Spain from Bayonne, there began at
once to be temperamental differences which ought to have wrought
against my weird misgivings of my whereabouts. Only in Spain could a
customs inspector have felt of one tray in our trunks and then passed
them all with an air of such jaded aversion from an employ uncongenial
to a gentleman.