The Alhambra. Washington IrvingЧитать онлайн книгу.
too often. Worse still, descriptions are duplicated, practically the same passage reappearing again and again, as if for the sake of padding, or else as the mere babble of the easy writer. Indeed, many of the purely historical chapters have been crowded in so obviously because they happened to be at hand, and he without better means to dispose of them, and then scattered discreetly, that there is less hesitation in omitting them altogether from the present edition. An edited Tom Jones, a bowdlerized Shakespeare may be an absurdity. But to drop certain chapters from The Alhambra is simply to anticipate the reader in the act of skipping. There is no loss, since all important facts and descriptions are given more graphically and entertainingly elsewhere in the book.
Perhaps it may seem injudicious to introduce a new edition of so popular a work by pointing out its defects. But one can afford to be honest about Irving. The Alhambra might have more serious blemishes, and its charm would still survive triumphantly the test of the harshest criticism. For, whatever subtlety, whatever elegance Irving's style may lack, it is always distinguished by that something which, for want of a better name, is called charm – a quality always as difficult to define as Lowell thought when he found it in verse or in perfume. But there it is in all Washington Irving wrote: a clue to the lavish praise of his contemporaries – of Coleridge, who pronounced The Conquest of Granada a chef d'œuvre, and Campbell, who believed he had added clarity to the English tongue; of Byron and Scott and Southey; of Dickens, whose pockets were at one time filled with Irving's books worn to tatters; of Thackeray, who likened the American to Goldsmith, describing him as "one of the most charming masters of our lighter language."
Much of this power to please is due, no doubt, to the simplicity and sincerity of Irving's style at its best. Despite a tendency to diffuseness, despite a fancy for the ornate, when there is a story to be told, he can be as simple and straightforward as the child's "Once upon a time," with which he begins many a tale: appropriately, since the legends of the Alhambra are but stories for grown-up children. And there is no question of the sincerity of his love for everything savouring of romance. For that matter, it is seldom that he does not mean what he says and does not say it so truly with his whole heart, that you are convinced, where you distrust the emotion of De Amicis, pumping up tears of admiration before the wrong thing, or of Maurice Barrès seeing all Spain through a haze of blood, voluptuousness, and death. It was the strength of his feeling for the Alhambra that led Irving to write in its praise, not the desire to write that manufactured the feeling. Humour and sentiment some of his critics have thought the predominant traits of his writing, as of his character. It is a fortunate combination: his sentiment, though it often threatens, seldom overflows into gush, kept within bounds as it is by the sense of humour that so rarely fails him. His power of observation was of still greater service. He could use his eyes. He could see things for himself. And he was quick to detect character. Occasionally one finds him slipping. In his landscape, the purple mountains of Alhama rise wherever he considers them most effective in the picture; and the snow considerately never melts from the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, which I have seen all brown at midsummer. He could look only through the magnifying glass of tradition at the hand and key on the Gate of Justice: symbols so gigantic in fiction, so insignificant in fact that one might miss them altogether, did not every book, paper, and paragraph, every cadging, swindling tout – I mean guide – in Granada bid one look for them. But these are minor discrepancies. In essentials, his observation never played him false. There may not be a single passage to equal in force and brilliance Gautier's wonderful description of the bull-fight at Malaga; but his impressions were so clear, his record of them so faithful, that the effect of his book remains, while the accomplishment of a finer artist in words may be remembered but vaguely. It is Irving who prepares one best for the stern grandeur and rugged solemnity of the country between Seville and Granada. The journey can now be made by rail. But to travel by road as he did – as we have done – is to know that his arid mountains and savage passes are no more exaggerated than the pleasant valleys and plains that lie between. For Spain is not all gaiety as most travellers would like to imagine it, as most painters have painted it, save Daumier in his pictures of Don Quixote among the barren hills of La Mancha. And if nothing in Granada and the Alhambra can be quite unexpected, it is because one has seen it all beforehand with Irving, from the high Tower of Comares and the windows of the Hall of Ambassadors, or else, following him through the baths and mosque and courts of the silent Palace, crossing the ravine to the cooler gardens of the Generalife, and climbing the Albaycin to the white church upon its summit.
There have been many changes in the Alhambra since Irving's day. The Court of Lions lost in loveliness when the roses with which he saw it filled were uprooted. The desertion he found had more picturesqueness than the present restoration and pretence of orderliness. Irving was struck with the efforts which the then Commander, Don Francisco de Serna, was making to keep the Palace in a state of repair and to arrest its too certain decay. Had the predecessors of De Serna, he thought, discharged the duties of their station with equal fidelity, the Alhambra might have been still almost as the Moor, or at least Spanish royalty had left it. What would he say, one wonders, to the Alhambra under its present management? Frank neglect is often less an evil than sham zeal. The student, watched, badgered, oppressed by red-tapeism, has not gained by official vigilance; nor is the Palace the more secure because responsibility has been transferred from a pleasant gossiping old woman to half a dozen indolent guides. The burnt roof in the ante-chamber to the Hall of Ambassadors shows the carelessness of which the new officers can be guilty; the matches and cigarette ends with which courts and halls are strewn explain that so eloquent a warning has been in vain. And if the restorer has been let loose in the Alhambra, at the Generalife there is an Italian proprietor, eager, it would seem, to initiate the somnolent Spaniard into the brisker ways of Young Italy. Cypresses, old as Zoraïde, have already been cut down ruthlessly along that once unrivalled avenue, and their destruction, one fears, is but the beginning of the end.
But whatever changes the past sixty years have brought about in Granada, the popularity of Irving's book has not weakened with time. Not Ford, nor Murray, nor Hare has been able to replace it. The tourist reads it within the walls it commemorates as conscientiously as the devout read Ruskin in Florence. It serves as text book in the Court of Lions and the Garden of Lindaraxa. It is the student's manual in the high mirador of the Sultanas and the court of the mosque where Fortuny painted. In a Spanish translation it is pressed upon you almost as you cross the threshold. Irving's rooms in the Palace are always locked, that the guide may get an extra fee for opening – as a special favour – an apartment which half the people ask to see. As the steamers "Rip Van Winkle" and "Knickerbocker" ply up and down the Hudson, so the Hotel Washington Irving rises under the shadow of the Alhambra. Even the spirits and spooks that haunt every grove and garden are all of his creation, as Spaniards themselves will be quick to tell you; though who Irving – or, in their familiar speech, "Vashington" – was, but very few of them could explain. And thus his name has become so closely associated with the place that, just as Diedrich Knickerbocker will be remembered while New York stands, so Washington Irving cannot be forgotten so long as the Red Palace looks down upon the Vega and the tradition of the Moor lingers in Granada.
THE JOURNEY
In the spring of 1829, the author of this work, whom curiosity had brought into Spain, made a rambling expedition from Seville to Granada in company with a friend, a member of the Russian Embassy at Madrid. Accident had thrown us together from distant regions of the globe and a similarity of taste led us to wander together among the romantic mountains of Andalusia.
And here, before setting forth, let me indulge in a few previous remarks on Spanish scenery and Spanish travelling. Many are apt to picture Spain to their imaginations as a soft southern region, decked out with the luxuriant charms of voluptuous Italy. On the contrary, though there are exceptions in some of the maritime provinces, yet, for the greater part, it is a stern, melancholy country, with rugged mountains, and long sweeping plains, destitute of trees, and indescribably silent and lonesome, partaking of the savage and solitary character of Africa. What adds to this silence and loneliness, is the absence of singing-birds, a natural consequence of the want of groves and hedges. The vulture and the eagle are seen wheeling about the mountain-cliffs, and soaring over the plains, and groups of shy bustards stalk about the heaths; but the myriads of smaller birds, which animate the whole face of other countries,