Familiar Spanish Travels | Page 2

the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason
with my infatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so
inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my journey must be
more or less autobiographical; and though I should decently endeavor
to keep my past out of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and should
not always succeed.
Just when this passion began in me I should not be able to say; but
probably it was with my first reading of Don Quixote in the later

eighteen-forties. I would then have been ten or twelve years old; and, of
course, I read that incomparable romance, not only greatest, but sole of
its kind, in English. The purpose of some time reading it in Spanish and
then the purpose of some time writing the author's life grew in me with
my growing years so strongly that, though I have never yet done either
and probably never shall, I should not despair of doing both if I lived to
be a hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had early chanced
upon a Spanish grammar, and I had begun those inquiries in it which
were based upon a total ignorance of English accidence. I do not
remember how I felt my way from it to such reading of the language as
has endeared Spanish literature to me. It embraced something of
everything: literary and political history, drama, poetry, fiction; but it
never condescended to the exigencies of common parlance. These
exigencies did not exist for me in my dreams of seeing Spain which
were not really expectations. It was not until half a century later, when
my longing became a hope and then a purpose, that I foreboded the
need of practicable Spanish. Then I invoked the help of a young
professor, who came to me for an hour each day of a week in London
and let me try to talk with him; but even then I accumulated so little
practicable Spanish that my first hour, almost my first moment in Spain,
exhausted my store. My professor was from Barcelona, but he
beautifully lisped his _c's_ and _z's_ like any old Castilian, when he
might have hissed them in the accent of his native Catalan; and there is
no telling how much I might have profited by his instruction if he had
not been such a charming intelligence that I liked to talk with him of
literature and philosophy and politics rather than the weather, or the
cost of things, or the question of how long the train stopped and when it
would start, or the dishes at table, or clothes at the tailor's, or the forms
of greeting and parting. If he did not equip me with the useful
colloquial phrases, the fault was mine; and the misfortune was doubly
mine when from my old acquaintance with Italian (glib half-sister of
the statelier Spanish) the Italian phrases would thrust forward as the
equivalent of the English words I could not always think of. The truth
is, then, that I was not perfect in my Spanish after quite six weeks in
Spain; and if in the course of his travels with me the reader finds me
flourishing Spanish idioms in his face he may safely attribute them less
to my speaking than my reading knowledge: probably I never

employed them in conversation. That reading was itself without order
or system, and I am not sure but it had better been less than more. Yet
who knows? The days, or the nights of the days, in the eighteen-fifties
went quickly, as quickly as the years go now, and it would have all
come to the present pass whether that blind devotion to an alien
literature had cloistered my youth or not.
I do not know how, with the merciful make I am of, I should then have
cared so little, or else ignored so largely the cruelties I certainly knew
that the Spaniards had practised in the conquests of Mexico and Peru. I
knew of these things, and my heart was with the Incas and the Aztecs,
and yet somehow I could not punish the Spaniards for their atrocious
destruction of the only American civilizations. As nearly as I can now
say, I was of both sides, and wistful to reconcile them, though I do not
see now how it could have been done; and in my later hopes for the
softening of the human conditions I have found it hard to forgive
Pizarro for the overthrow of the most perfectly socialized state known
to history. I scarcely realized the base ingratitude of the Spanish
sovereigns to Columbus, and there were vast regions of history that I
had not penetrated till long afterward in