Kitabı oku: «A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain», sayfa 4

What to observe in Spain

Before we proceed to point out the objects best worth seeing in the Peninsula, many of which are to be seen there only, it may be as well to mention what is not to be seen: there is no such loss of time as finding this out oneself, after weary chace and wasted hour. Those who expect to find well-garnished arsenals, libraries, restaurants, charitable or literary institutions, canals, railroads, tunnels, suspension-bridges, steam-engines, omnibuses, manufactories, polytechnic galleries, pale-ale breweries, and similar appliances and appurtenances of a high state of political, social, and commercial civilisation, had better stay at home. In Spain there are no turnpike-trust meetings, no quarter-sessions, no courts of justice, according to the real meaning of that word, no treadmills, no boards of guardians, no chairmen, directors, masters-extraordinary of the court of chancery, no assistant poor-law commissioners. There are no anti-tobacco-teetotal-temperance meetings, no auxiliary missionary propagating societies, nothing in the blanket and lying-in asylum line, nothing, in short, worth a revising barrister of three years’ standing’s notice. Spain is no country for the political economist, beyond affording an example of the decline of the wealth of nations, and offering a wide topic on errors to be avoided, as well as for experimental theories, plans of reform and amelioration. In Spain, Nature reigns; she has there lavished her utmost prodigality of soil and climate which a bad government has for the last three centuries been endeavouring to counteract. El cielo y suelo es bueno, el entresuelo malo, and man, the occupier of the Peninsula entresol, uses, or rather abuses, with incurious apathy the goods with which the gods have provided him. Spain is a terra incognita to naturalists, geologists, and every branch of ists and ologists. The material is as superabundant as native labourers and operatives are deficient. All these interesting branches of inquiry, healthful and agreeable, as being out-of-door pursuits, and bringing the amateur in close contact with nature, offer to embryo authors, who are ambitious to book something new, a more worthy subject than the decies repetita descriptions of bull-fights and the natural history of ollas and ventas. Those who aspire to the romantic, the poetical, the sentimental, the artistical, the antiquarian, the classical, in short, to any of the sublime and beautiful lines, will find both in the past and present state of Spain subjects enough, in wandering with lead-pencil and note-book through this singular country, which hovers between Europe and Africa, between civilisation and barbarism; this is the land of the green valley and barren mountain, of the boundless plain and the broken sierra, now of Elysian gardens of the vine, the olive, the orange, and the aloe, then of trackless, vast, silent, uncultivated wastes, the heritage of the wild bee. Here we fly from the dull uniformity, the polished monotony of Europe, to the racy freshness of an original, unchanged country, where antiquity treads on the heels of to-day, where Paganism disputes the very altar with Christianity, where indulgence and luxury contend with privation and poverty, where a want of all that is generous or merciful is blended with the most devoted heroic virtues, where the most cold-blooded cruelty is linked with the fiery passions of Africa, where ignorance and erudition stand in violent and striking contrast.

Here let the antiquarian pore over the stirring memorials of many thousand years, the vestiges of Phœnician enterprise, of Roman magnificence, of Moorish elegance, in that storehouse of ancient customs, that repository of all elsewhere long forgotten and passed by; here let him gaze upon those classical monuments, unequalled almost in Greece or Italy, and on those fairy Aladdin palaces, the creatures of Oriental gorgeousness and imagination, with which Spain alone can enchant the dull European; here let the man of feeling dwell on the poetry of her envy-disarming decay, fallen from her high estate, the dignity of a dethroned monarch, borne with unrepining self-respect, the last consolation of the innately noble, which no adversity can take away; here let the lover of art feed his eyes with the mighty masterpieces of Italian art, when Raphael and Titian strove to decorate the palaces of Charles, the great emperor of the age of Leo X., or with the living nature of Velazquez and Murillo, whose paintings are truly to be seen in Spain alone; here let the artist sketch the lowly mosque of the Moor, the lofty cathedral of the Christian, in which God is worshipped in a manner as nearly befitting His glory as the power and wealth of finite man can reach; art and nature here offer subjects, from the feudal castle, the vasty Escorial, the rock-built alcazar of imperial Toledo, the sunny towers of stately Seville, to the eternal snows and lovely vega of Granada: let the geologist clamber over mountains of marble, and metal-pregnant sierras, let the botanist cull from the wild hothouse of nature plants unknown, unnumbered, matchless in colour, and breathing the aroma of the sweet south; let all, learned or unlearned, listen to the song, the guitar, the Castanet; let all mingle with the gay, good-humoured, temperate peasantry, the finest in the world, free, manly, and independent, yet courteous and respectful; let all live with the noble, dignified, high-bred, self-respecting Spaniard; let all share in their easy, courteous society; let all admire their dark-eyed women, so frank and natural, to whom the voice of all ages and nations has conceded the palm of attraction, to whom Venus has bequeathed her magic girdle of grace and fascination; let all —sed ohe! jam satis– enough for starting on this expedition, where, as Don Quixote said, there are opportunities for what are called adventures elbow deep.

The following account of the rivers of Spain would do credit to the pen of Robertson: —

‘There are six great rivers in Spain, – the arteries which run between the seven mountain chains, the vertebras of the geological skeleton. These six watersheds are each intersected in their extent by others on a minor scale, by valleys and indentations, in each of which runs its own stream. Thus the rains and melted snows are all collected in an infinity of ramifications, and carried by these tributary conduits into one of the six main trunks, or great rivers: all these, with the exception of the Ebro, empty themselves into the Atlantic. The Duero and Tagus, unfortunately for Spain, disembogue in Portugal, thus becoming a portion of a foreign dominion exactly where their commercial importance is the greatest. Philip II. saw the true value of the possession of Portugal, which rounded and consolidated Spain, and insured to her the possession of these valuable outlets of internal produce, and inlets for external commerce. Portugal annexed to Spain gave more real power to his throne than the dominion of entire continents across the Atlantic. The Miño, which is the shortest of these rivers, runs through a bosom of fertility. The Tajo, Tagus, which the fancy of poets has sanded with gold and embanked with roses, tracks much of its dreary way through rocks and comparative barrenness. The Guadiana creeps through lonely Estremadura, infecting the low plains with miasma. The Guadalquivir eats out its deep banks amid the sunny olive-clad regions of Andalucia, as the Ebro divides the levels of Arragon. Spain abounds with brackish streams, Salados, and with salt-mines, or saline deposits, after the evaporation of the sea-waters. The central soil is strongly impregnated with saltpetre: always arid, it every day is becoming more so, from the singular antipathy which the inhabitants of the interior have against trees. There is nothing to check the power of evaporation, no shelter to protect or preserve moisture. The soil becomes more and more baked and calcined; in some parts it has almost ceased to be available for cultivation: another serious evil, which arises from want of plantations, is, that the slopes of hills are everywhere liable to constant denudation of soil after heavy rain. There is nothing to break the descent of the water; hence the naked, barren stone summits of many of the sierras, which have been pared and peeled of every particle capable of nourishing vegetation; they are skeletons where life is extinct. Not only is the soil thus lost, but the detritus washed down either forms bars at the mouths of rivers, or chokes up and raises their beds; they are thus rendered liable to overflow their banks, and convert the adjoining plains into pestilential swamps. The supply of water, which is afforded by periodical rains, and which ought to support the reservoirs of rivers, is carried off at once in violent floods, rather than in a gentle gradual disembocation. The volume in the principal rivers of Spain has diminished, and is diminishing. Rivers which were navigable are so no longer; the artificial canals which were to have been substituted remain unfinished: the progress of deterioration advances, while little is done to counteract or amend what every year must render more difficult and expensive, while the means of repair and correction will diminish in equal proportion, from the poverty occasioned by the evil, and by the fearful extent which it will be allowed to attain. The rivers which are really adapted to navigation are, however, only those which are perpetually fed by those tributary streams that flow down from mountains which are covered with snow all the year, and these are not many. The majority of Spanish rivers are very scanty of water during the summer time, and very rapid in their flow when filled by rains or melting snow: during these periods they are impracticable for boats. They are, moreover, much exhausted by being drained off, bled, for the purposes of artificial irrigation. The scarcity of rain in the central table-lands is much against a regular supply of water to the springs of the rivers: the water is soon sucked up by a parched, dusty, and thirsty soil, or evaporated by the dryness of the atmosphere. Many of the sierras are indeed covered with snow, but to no great depth, and the coating soon melts under the summer suns, and passes rapidly away.’

Here we have a sunny little sketch of a certain locality at Seville; it is too life-like not to have been taken on the spot: —