Toledo. the Story of an Old Spanish Capital
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Toledo. The Story Of An Old Spanish Capital By Hannah Lynch Toledo.The Story Of An Old Spanish Capital CHAPTER I What is Known of Toledo’s earliest history WHAT more stupefying contrast than that of cheap commonplace Madrid (cheap alas! only in the artistic sense) and the legendary still visage of Toledo? The capital you leave abustle with modern movement, glaring, gesticulating, chattering, animated in its own empty and insignificant fashion, with its pleasant street of Alcala, so engagingly unhistoric, its shop-fronts full of expensive and second-rate articles from other capitals, the vulgar vivacity of the Puerta del Sol thronged with everlasting gossips in trousers and wide-brimmed hats; with its swindling hotel-keepers and insolent drivers. The train sweeps you past the wide empty bed of the Manzanares, covered here and there with a film you understand by courtesy to represent a river, and the city behind is a gay compact picture, slightly waving upward from its bridges, white and flourishing above the broad yellow plain. The tones of the land are rough and crude, red striking hotly against brown and greyish purple. Here and there a solitary hill, burnt and defoliaged, with a glimpse of ruined ramparts, a mule-path along which a file of peasants pass, the women lost in roomy saddles, with feet dangling in the air, and red or yellow handkerchiefs tied under their chins. Carts move slowly along the old diligence road, guided by heavy- browed males. The swallows’ flight reveals the exquisite limpidity of the air and the height of the unstained heaven, azure in the infinite depths of aërial sapphire, blue beyond blue, translucent almost to the furthest reach of vision. And the light shines broadly upon an incomparable mingling in landscape of insensate ardour and changeless moroseness. So still, so brilliant, so burnt and empty! revealing the national traits of mournful hopelessness and unembittered, unregretful resignation. The rays lie in a luminous quietude upon the red-brown land, while the breath of fresh day just touches the leaves of the scant olives and shows them silver. Then midway the desert swims behind, and the eye is mildly refreshed with little signs of pastoral life, ineffectual efforts at gaiety amid tyrannous sadness. Imagination leaps at sight of a cheering bit of verdure, not for the beauty of it, though beauty is not altogether absent, but for the old familiar eloquence of trees and grassy spaces, the twinkling brightness of rills and flashing water and wooded fringes, with a hint of shadow along the horizon. Between the poplared banks of the river, yellow and waveless as befits a river of dead romance, the eye lingers on glimpses of emerald islets, with reedy edges against the fuller foliage of elm. Above, exposed on a rocky throne, belted by the sombre Tagus, sits Toledo. “The landscape of Toledo and the banks of the Tagus,” writes M. Maurice Barrès, with singular felicity, “are amongst the saddest and most ardent things of this world. Whoever lives here has no need to consider the grave youth, the Penseroso, of the Medicis Chapel; he may also do without the biography and the Pensées of Blaise Pascal. With the very sentiment realised by these great solitary works, he will be filled, if he but give himself up to the tragic fierceness of the magnificences in ruins upon these high rocks. “Toledo, on its hillside, with the tawny half circle of the Tagus at its feet, has the colour, the roughness, the haughty poverty of the sierra on which it is built, and whose strong articulations from the very first produce an impression of energy and passion. It is less a town, a noisy affair yielding to the commodities of life, than a significant spot for the soul. Beneath a crude illumination, which gives to each line of its ruins a vigour, a clearness by which the least energetic characters acquire backbone, at the same time it is mysterious, with its cathedral springing towards the sky, its alcázars and palaces that only take sight from their invisible patios. Thus secret and inflexible, in this harsh overheated land, Toledo appears like an image of exaltation in solitude, a cry in the desert.” The train leaves you at the foot of the town before the quaint fortressed bridge of Alcántara. In these days of unpretentious exits and entrances, when we scarcely detect the outskirts of a city from the open way, or the suburbs from the heart of urban movement, these two castellated bridges, by which you enter and leave Toledo, have a strange and insistent air of feudality that at once captures fancy, and resembles the flourish of trumpets in martial dramas. Civilisation instantly waves backward, and leaves imagination thrilled upon the shores of legend. At a bound memory is at the core of troubled Spanish history, a sad and spectral ghost, in the thrall of wonderment and admiration. Surely never was town, with all our modern needs of bread-winning and competition, of commerce and politics, of cheap ambition and every-day social intercourse, so curiously, magnificently faithful to its past. So precisely must Toledo have looked, barring the electric light, when the last page of its intimate history was written. Just so brown and barren, with its front of unflinching austerity, its stern wealth of architecture, the air of romantic elegance and charmed slumber it breathes upon sadness, with its look of legendary musing and widowed remembrance. So, unchanged, must it have been in its great day of hieratic glory, of Gothic rule, of Saracen triumph and of feudal revolt. From the bridges, the road winds up the steep rock, upon whose summit this unique old city is built. The views at every turn of the winding path are entrancing. There is every strange effect to gratify the eager eye in search of the picturesque: an unsurpassed boldness of site, from the wide zone of the Tagus to the point of the Cathedral tower pinnacled against the upper arch of heaven. Project high rocks upon which odd and delightful passages, neither street nor lane, full of colour and curve and varied line, are cut like sharp upward and downward strokes, over frowning ravines, and swelling by swift ascent from the yellow band of water below, that imprisons the town like a moat, and along with the martial bridges, give the impression of being cut off from the big lively world, a prisoner in a city of dreamland. At once you yield yourself to the gracious grip of your enchanter and gaoler. The eye rests in ineffable contentment upon the violent line of empty hills, yellow and brown and rose, turned violet by the sun’s retreat, and you feel no longing for the vulgar and bustling present you have left behind. Here to sit awhile and dream, not days but unending months, in the shadow of a mighty cathedral, in what a Spanish writer with Iberian imagery, has called “a case of mediæval jewels.” It is a fitting note of environment that the landscape should be stamped by an ardent and ineffaceable desolation, incessantly exposed to devastating winds, swept by fierce rains and blinding dust and remorseless sunfire. Nature is neither instigated by contrast, nor softened by charm. Unsmiling in its arid austerity, it is grand by the magic of its simplicity. The audacity with which it reveals its nakedness in the glare of unshaded light that has burnt its flanks a peculiar reddish-brown hue, sinks all impression of crudity, and becomes the supreme effect of natural art. It makes no pretence to shield the peril of its broken precipices with the beguilement of verdure, but lets them hack their murderous way to the river-brim without shrub or any vigorous sign of vegetation. Heavy and still, like the glittering light that fatigues the eye, it has nevertheless its secret, matchless captivation, such as Venice, its sister-town in strangeness (though of softer and more alluring beauty, feminine to its stern masculine), and casts the mind, conquered, into the mazes of reverie. You may have come by a train into this mausoleum of petrified memories, you may sit at the usual table d’hôte, but you cannot feel modern: the present slips away, and forgotten is the march of centuries. Of the town’s earliest history knowledge is merely the wildest assumption, and we have no reason to believe any of the legends handed down to us by historians as tradition. For instance, that obscure if venerable voice, asserts, that when God made the sun he placed it over Toledo (previously made, of course) and planted the foot of Adam, first King, beneath it at that particular spot of the globe. This is at least a fine testimony of the Spaniard’s lofty faith in the antiquity of Toledo. A less sweeping assertion connects the first light of the town with Tubal, the grandson of Noah, who is supposed to have come hither after the deluge, and this view is naïvely supported by the verses of Gracia Dei, the chronicler of King Pedro: “Tubal, nieto de Noé, Alphonsus the Learned, in his Cronica General, maintains and is supported in his no less extravagant opinion by Diego Mossem Valera, Isabel the Catholic’s historian, that Toledo was founded by Pyrrhus, captain of the army of Cyrus, and son-in-law of King Hispan, father of Iberia. It is imagined that Iberia, Pyrrhus’s wife, was in need of the freshness and verdure of the leafy banks of the Tagus, and that her husband brought her hither to taste the air and delights of the gardens around.