Hannah Lynch

“ 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. ”

“ No Roman soldier this conception of Martin of Tours, making a gift of half of his single cloak, but a charming youth who is playing at charity as he rides out beyond the town, while above the river, in some Gothic-Arabian palace, he has his choice of variously-hued satin cloaks as well as damascene armour, and as he cuts his mantle, he has the dainty and sentimental air of one who muses tristefully on the absent or perfidious beloved, and hugs despair as the more graceful part of passion, the while anxiously asking himself if he shall meet her glance as he rides past her lattice. ”

“ Toledo’s finest hour is at sunset, especially in the month of October. Nowhere have I seen the setting sun cast such a rich and lovely flush over the earth. The brown visage of the town for one intense moment is made radiant by the deep crimson flames, and the red light sheds a glorious beauty upon empty hill-sides and river-washed plains. Magic enfolds city and land, and space is so abridged by the matchless purity of the atmosphere that the eye is tricked into the belief that distant objects are quite close. ”

“ It totally lacks the essential quality of reverence, that elusive and unanalysable suggestion of the beyond, the supreme, the intangible, of that inexplicable aspiration that ever stirs the soul of primitive and civilised man, and has taught him to seek its expression in the building of church and temple; in the white splendour of the Parthenon, the very soul of Greek genius in stone, in the grey dimness of Gothic cathedral, in which Christian fervour finds almost an immaterial beauty of definition, the quality of lofty distinction which belongs to the highest poetry and eloquence. ”

“ Mount the steps beside this marble tomb, and you will look on such a picture of death in all its restful sublimity as the hand, the imagination of man have rarely seized. Nothing like that old man’s head under the mitre has Berruguete himself ever done. It is the supreme attainment of genius on the eve of eternal night, the culmination of a magnificent art, when the great strong hand is about to lay down the chisel forever, and gathers in a supreme moment all that is best in a life’s work, to give it a noble ending. ”

“ Nothing more graceful could be imagined than this light foreign touch in the sombre austerity of Gothic art. Again you are reminded of the Moors by a rich arch covered with lace-work in the chapel of Santa Lucia, mudejar rather than wholly Moorish, which looks quite oriental in front of the Renaissance arch of the other side of the chapel. It is such a variety in beauty that lends perpetual freshness to this monumental glory of Toledo. It has a face for every tone of reverie and musing. The light is always softly brilliant, and shadow not dense but suggestive ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now Don Alvaro and Doña Juana repose in sculptured marble between life-size kneeling figures of singular impressiveness. Nothing could be grander and more massive than the simple effect of both tombs. There are more beautiful ones, even in Spain—the splendid Italian tomb of Cisneros at Alcala de Henares, tombs in the Cathedral and Cartuja of Burgos, the grand and lovely tomb of Tavera, Berruguete’s last work, in the Hospital de Afuera—but, nevertheless, these great sculptures of an obscure artist, Pablo Ortiz, are worthy of the crowned and castellated mausoleum built for them. ”

“ The mystery of this Arabian genius is forever sealed. Nothing we can strive, nothing we can hope to do, will reveal it to us, will unlock the doors of an enchanted past. Whence it sprung is just as inexplicable to us as how it vanished, but alas! vanished it is like the mysterious city of enchantment and of a civilisation that since has never been equalled—the outlying town of Cordova, built by a mighty Moorish emperor in honour of a loved wife, and but a memory of superlative witchery and delight. ”

“ At either end, like the Alcántara Bridge, there is a tower and gateway, with Moorish arches and battlements, and vaulted arches for the passengers; inscriptions and reliefs abound, a statue of St Julian by Monegro and of Alfonso VII. the Emperor. Across the southern hills, among their bare scented folds, beyond silent gorge and wild waterway, lie the famous Cigarrales, the villas, the gardens, the orchards, where the apricots grow as they grow nowhere else. Tirso de Molina sings their charms, and the aubergines of the Cigarrales were famous even in the days of Guzman de Alfarache. ”

“ For foreign nations wilt thou be dispossessed, and thy people will be heavily punished. Behind the statue they read: I call upon the Moors, and on its breast was written: I fulfil my task. That same night in the roar of many voices and loud battle cries, the earth opened and swallowed up in a clap of thunder the enchanted palace and every vestige of it. The legend is an excellent one, and has well served the poets, but unhappily it is only a legend of no historic value whatever. Rodrigo no more penetrated this mythical cave than he kissed Florinda, who never existed. ”

“ You follow the steep Calle de la Barca behind the Cathedral down to the ferry, where a few lazy oar strokes take you across the narrow Tagus. The effect midway is surprising. Looking towards the bridge of Alcántara and San Servando, the waters seem to force their way between the immense brown rocks from the castle ruins, and lie steep and still like a mountain tarn. Little splashes of green and flowery bloom high up among the rocks give a pretty touch to the grim picture, and over the harsh remains of the city walls you will note a common but bright little suggestion of garden life. ”

“ It was after his day that the family was honoured with the significant private name of Toledo, the present family name of the house of Alva. The palace of the Toledos was like that of Villena, an immense edifice covering all the square. Now only the façade remains as a triumphal assertion of vanished splendour; a disfigured Gothic porch and a couple of ajimez windows in the north wall in front of Santa Ursula. Time has laid a heavy hand on the arches, the slim columns, the cornices, the shields, the stone sculptures and friezes ”

“ Other Spanish towns are proud and noble in their decay, Toledo is unhappily degraded and brutalised. She has no commerce, no stir, no money. She has no communication with the outer world except through the travellers who briefly pass her way, and upon whose exploitation she lives. She has no standard of civilisation. Her object is to make every foreigner pay for every step he takes along her rude and inhospitable pavements. The people have no desire whatever to make a good impression, no pride in the hope that the stranger shall go away and speak them fair in remote parts. ”

“ The cloisters are composed of four double galleries, supported on twenty-four vaults between the upper and lower cloisters and a flat roof above. The pillars, like those of the church, are miraculously sculptured; not a space an inch big, without its Gothic fancy of animal and leaf, its finely-wrought crowd in flowing fold, grotesque and lovely forms and multiplied foliage of every kind. The pillars spread like palms above to sustain the arches that divide the vaults, with an indescribable grace of effect. Inscriptions vary the legend of frieze and ornament. ”

“ It is good to breathe a moment in so exalted an atmosphere, to behold so vast and wonderful a scene, in which all remembrance of human miseries vanishes, and our very joys drop into relative significance. Nature has nowhere else attained a note of beauty harsher, more intense, more indifferently sublime. Elsewhere you feel that an effort has been made to captivate you, a deliberate combination of effects to win your admiration. Not so here. The Moors never succeeded, during their long sovereignty, in stamping the place with their voluptuous charm, as they did in Granada, Cordova, and Valencia. ”