Gatherings from Spain

m^ THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE EVERYMAN'S LI;BRARY EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS TRAVEL AND TOPOGRAPHY GATHERINGS FROM SPAIN WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS OKEY THE PUBLISHERS OF €F£'J\}'3I^I{?\IS LIB1\^PJ\r WILL BE PLEASED TO SEND FREELY TO ALL APPLICANTS A LIST OF THE PUBLISHED AND PROJECTED VOLUMES TO BE COMPRISED UNDER THE FOLLOWING TWELVE HEADINGS: TRAVEL ^ SCIENCE ^ FICTION THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY HISTORY ^ CLASSICAL CHILDREN'S BOOKS ESSAYS ^ ORATORY POETRY & DRAMA BIOGRAPHY ROMANCE IN TWO STYLES OF BINDING, CLOTH, FLAT BACK, COLOURED TOP, AND LEATHER, ROUND CORNERS, GILT TOP. London: J. M. DENT & CO. GATHERINGS From SPAIN fe^RICHARD FORD ^E^ 1 J)PHI Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, bread street hill, e.c., and bungay, sukfolk. INTRODUCTION Richard Ford, who, under the prosaic title of " A Hand- book for Travellers in Spain," composed one of the most entrancing itineraries ever written in the English tongue, was born at Chelsea in the year 1796. He was the eldest son of a distinguished father, Sir Richard Ford, the friend 01 Pitt, and sometime Under Secretary of State for the Home Department, but better known perhaps as the Bow Street magistrate who created the mounted police force of London. Ford underwent the approved training of a young English gentleman at public school and university, took his degree at Oxford, qualified for the bar, and in 1824 married the beautiful Harriet Capel, daughter of the Earl of Essex. Six years later, the delicate state of his wife's health made residence in a warmer climate imperative, and in the autumn of 1830 he took ship for Gibraltar, accompanied by " three children and four women." After twenty days' sail the family reached port, and soon were housed at Seville for the winter. From thence and from Granada (where he was lodged amid the ruined splendours of the Alhambra) he made those jour- neyings through the length and breadth of the peninsula, which bore fruit in the pages of the " Handbook " and of the " Gatherings from Spain." Ford was an ideal traveller. In his home an atmosphere of art and literature had surrounded him, for his mother. Lady Ford, was an excellent amateur painter, a lover of pictures, and of cultivated and catholic tastes. The family collection of pictures comprised good examples of the English, Italian, and Dutch masters, the joy and admiration of the young Richard, who in the course of his progress to manhood attained a standard of perfection in the limner's art which vii viii Introduction would have broui::;^ht him no mean reputation had he devoted his whole energies to its practice. Some of the best drawings in David Roberts' " Picturesque Sketches in Spain " were taken from Ford's portfolio; four of Telbin's pictures in the popular " Diorama of the Campaigns of the Duke of Wel- lington " were painted from Ford's originals; and scattered about the " Landscape Annals " of the period, and in editions of " Childe Harold," and of Lockhart's " Spanish Ballads," admirable drawings from his hand may be found. But beyond these accidents of education, F'ord was endowed by nature with certain substantive virtues which are essential to the perfect traveller : a quick ear and ready apprehension of languages and dialects; a firm and resolute, yet gentle and kindly, spirit; a body patient of hardship and fatigue; an even temperament. Ford, it is true, inherited the full-bodied social and religious prejudices of an English country gentleman of good family, but these he never exhibited in his intercourse with Spaniards, who, being peculiarly sensitive to pride of race, were charmed with his easy grace of manner and infallible courtesy. He was equally welcomed by peasant, grandee, or insurgent chief. No better proof of Ford's remarkable powers of observation and assimilation could be afforded than the fact that he passed but three years in Spain. In December 1833, he was again in England, and after a short residence in Exeter, where he began to write down his Spanish experiences, settled with his family in the summer of 1834 ^t Heavitree, a charming Elizabethan house, near that city. Here the superior attrac- tions of building and gardening caused him, for a while, " to give up the pen for the hoe and spade, and lead a humdrum life amid my flowers and books." 1 The literary work which was designed and begun at Exeter never saw the light. He submitted some chapters to Addington, whose severe and 1 See The Letters of Ricliard Ford by Rowland E. Prothero. His correspondent was Henry Unwin Addington, British envoy at Madrid from 1829 to 1833. ; Introduction ix adverse criticism profoundly disturbed him. " Your letter," he wrote, " has knocked the breath out of my body and the ink out of my pen," and he returned with renewed zest to his gardening. In 1838, an article in the Quarterly Review on " Spanish Bull-feasts and Bull-fights " brought Ford prominently before the literary world, and in the ensuing year he was invited to dine with John Murray, who, during the evening, requested him to suggest a writer for a Handbook to Spain. Ford answered in jest that he would do it himself, and dismissed the subject from his mind. In 1840, he was again approached by Murray, and on September 7 of that — ' year he writes to Addington " I am about to do a Handbook for Spain ' for Murray." The time of its completion was airily computed at six months, but for nearly five years the work proved alternately the joy and plague of his life. Mr. Prothero gives a vivid picture of the famous traveller, writing at an inky deal table in the myrtle and ivy-clad garden-house at Heavitree, dressed in a black sheepskin Spanish jacket, surrounded by shelves filled with parchment-bound folios and quartos, and pigeon-holes stuffed to repletion with piles of notes, which gradually overflowed the chairs and floor. On November 18, he writes to Addington—^" ' Handbook ' lingers I have made no progress, and am tempted to give it up." In February 1841, he writes—•" I am meditating a serious go at the ' Handbook,' and have got forty pages in print." On April 11, he complains of the "damnable print, and the enormous quantity it takes to a page." On November 3, his hopes rise, and he thinks it may be done in May or June. A fortnight later he was " sick of ' Handbook,' " and turned for refreshment to review Borrow's " Gypsies in Spain," and to help its author with counsel in the composition of " The Bible in Spain." Ford was an enthusiastic admirer of his brother traveller, and advised Murray that Borrow was a trutnp, and that if he would secure golden eggs he must put salt on Borrow's tail. Again Ford wrestled with his task, X Introduction and on July 30, 1843, was able to write to Addington—*' ' Hand- ' book ' is written;^' and on January 26, 1844—" * Handbook goes to press." Four months elapse, and the author's toils and anxieties have not seen their fruition; he complains that " the inanana of Spain has infected even Albemarle Street." The delay was not, however, due to Spanish procrastination. The book was found to be too discursive : on Addington's advice it was cancelled, and the unhappy Ford was mulcted in a financial loss of ^£^^500. On December 1844, he had already cancelled 64 pages, and on February 19, 1845, he writes to his friend and confidant—" I have quite determined on cancelling ' Handbook,' and re-writing it minus the political, military, and religious discussions, and to omit mention of disagreeables, and only make it smooth and charming." At length, in the summer of 1S45, the pains of delivery were over, and " A Handbook for Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home "was published in two volumes, i2mo., containing in all 1064 pages. Notwithstanding its bulk and high price, 1389 copies were sold in three months, and Borrow, Prescott, Lockhart, and other literary celebrities sang a chorus of eulogy. Some of the rejected matter was worked up in hot haste, together with passages from the " Handbook," hurried through the press, and published in 1846 under the title of " Gatherings from Spain, by the author of the Hand- book of Spain, chiefly selected from that work, with much new matter." It, too, was immediately successful,— and the triumphant Ford was able to write to Addington " so I have sacked ;!^2io by two months' literary work." The '* Hand- book " was then carefully remodelled, reduced to 645 pages, and published in one volume in 1847. A third edition, still fur- ther compressed, was published in 1855, three years before it« author's death. One copy of the abortive " Handbook " lies at the British Museum, thus inscribed in Ford's hand—" Of this cancelled edition only twenty copies exist, and I have only given away five, of which this is one. October 1846." The book ends abruptly in the middle of Section XI. at page Introduction xi 768 : the preliminary matter alone comprises no less than 207 pages. Since Ford rode his 2000 miles on the back of his favourite Haca Cordovese, the massive mountain barrier of the north of Spain has been pierced, and railways have been introduced without realizing- his fears or his prophecies of their far- reaching effects. For even the iron road has been subdued by the stubborn Iberian temperament, and, as certain exalted personages have recently learned, railways, too, are cosas de Espana. The northern traveller soon discovers that the Spaniard's imperturbable incuriousness, and oriental insensi- bility to the value of time, have infected railway administra- tion, and that the fact of having prepaid his fare by no means implies the right to travel by any definite train, or at any definite hour.

Load more