16 FEBRUARY 1867, Page 20

IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN IN 1866.* Tins book is interesting only

from one point of view : it is a curious psychological study, another of the strange proofs always crop- ping up of the power of the Roman Catholic Church to drug the imagination as well as the conscience. Lady Herbert, kindly natured and devote, hungering for the sunshine which visits us so rarely, set out for a winter tour through Spain, and gives us now her impressions of the country. The accidental advantages of birth, position, and creed were all in her favour, had she chosen to pene- trate into the innermost heart of that most impenetrable of people ; and we might have had a valuable record of facts from her pen ; as it is, we close the book feeling that concerning Spanish legends, Spanish monks, and Spanish sisterhoods we are possibly some- what wiser, but that of Spain and the Spaniards we have learnt nothing, or the reverse of the lesson Lady Herbert intended to teach. For her Spain is a laud of women and priests, all the history of the past is lost upon her, she is blind to the most obvious symp- toms of approaching storm, deaf to the rumblings that precede the earthquake. Everything, from the lowest to the highest, is viewed through the windows of an infallible Church ; the chocolate must be good that is offered by Catholic hands, the words must be words of truth and wisdom that come from the lips of a Catholic priest.

The woman who has perhaps more than any other of her race made the name of Bourbon hated, and certainly done her utmost to degrade the laud she rules, as well as the name she bears, " has a frank and kind manner, which is an indication of her good and simple nature ;" while one interview with the Queen's con- fessor is quite sufficient to impress Lady Herbert with " his extreme personal holiness," and convince her that he never interferes with the affairs of the nation I " Contrary to the generally received idea, he never meddles in politics, and occupies himself entirely in devotional and literary works." How not so? Did Lady Herbert expect Father Claret to give her his views on the future of Spain, or reveal the secrets of his own confessional? " One of his books, she writes, Camino recto y Sequro para Ilegar ab Cielo, would rank with Thomas it Kempis's Imitation in suggestive and practical devotion." Possibly Thomas a Kempis lay on his table ; we doubt not his surroundings were unexceptionable enough, and "there is a veneer of obviousness which covers many a false- hood."

There are some good notices of the pictures in which Spain is rich, and with which the world at present is blit little acquainted, and the gallery at Madrid compensated the travellers for discomforts which have proved intolerable ere now to people of less refined taste and determined purpose. Perhaps one of the pleasantest features in the book is the light touch with which Lady Herbert paints annoyances which indicate a state of semi-barbarism. We only wish, with her capacity for surmount- ing difficulties, she had achieved something worthy of the effort. But with regard to the pictures, we are told no one out of Spain can so much as imagine what Murillo is, namely, the great mystical religious painter of the seventeenth century, embodying in his wonderful conceptions all that is most sublime and ecstatic in devotion and in the representation of divine love." To account for our non-possession of some of these higher marvels of Marino's

as ions of Spain its 1864. By Lady Herbert. Londun: Richard Bantley. 186:. genius, our authoress accepts the explanation of the English Minister, who told her "the English generally carried off only those of Marino's works in which the Catholic feeling was not so strongly displayed." This is certainly very humiliating, but lest we should. over-estimate our loss we will look at one of Velasquez's " inimitable- portraits," described as full of sublime piety, namely, his " Cruel- fixiou," " with the hair falling over one side of the Saviour's face,. which the pierced and fastened hands cannot put aside." The mind: that could enjoy that picture must indeed have drank deeply of the- spirit of asceticism, and we are thankful even for the bad taste which has failed to appreciate the sublimity of the very refinement of imaginary torture.

From the galleries of Madrid, its convents, and its hospitals, the party passed on to Cordova, and we have a beautiful engraving of the Mosque, now used as a cathedral, and a very perfect descrip- tion of its architecture. Through a beautiful Oriental Court, from which all entrances are closed except the centre, they passed: into the mosque, "a whole forest of pillars" bursting upon them,. " with horse-shoe arches interlacing one another." "The Moors collected these pillars, of which there are upwards of a thousand, from the temples of Carthage, Nismes, and Rome ; some are of jasper, some of verde antique, some of porphyry, no two alike.. The roof is in the form of a shell, exquisitely wrought out of one single piece of marble." But the neighbourhood of this monu- ment of a power which has passed away is a scene of deso- lation, broken walls, ruined gardens, and dry fountains. And in strict keeping with the whole is the Hermitage, where seventeen men of high birth and goad fortune enjoy the onesided, stunted. life which Catholicism has pronounced holy. These men keep " a perpetual fast," " are not allowed to write or receive letters, to. go into one another's cells, or go out of the enclosure except once a month, when they may walk in the mountains round, which they generally do together, reciting litanies." Lady Herbert is loud in her admiration of these ascetic forms of life, delighting in them as in the perfect shading of a picture, which else would prove too dazzling in its brightness ; but her enthusiasm reaches its climax. when visiting the Sisters of the Order of St. Theresa. To visit their great convent in Seville " the English lady had obtained special Papal permission." This, indeed, was the key to many an open door which ordinary travellers would find closed against them. If the Papal authorities had any misgivings about ad- mitting an Englishwoman, still, as might be supposed, having possession of her reasoning faculties, into the gloomy recesses of this most austere of Orders, they were amply rewarded for their confidence is their own controlling power. The book itself might have been written to magnify this saintly order, to whom the English traveller was the first person they had seen face to face, or with lifted veils, for twelve years. Their- convent is "like a cellar—cold and damp, and they have no fires." "They maintain a perpetual fast, living on the dried stockfish of the country, are not allowed to sit except on the floor, and rarely to walk in the garden or go even into the corridors to warm themselves in the sun." And yet this cheerless, miserable death- in-life finds a strange beauty in our traveller's eyes, " our self- indulgence being, as it were, atoned by their self-denial, our- pampered appetites by their fasts and vigils." Confidently she predicts the day when, "our eyes being opened like the eyes of the prophet's servant [who was he ?j we shall see from what miseries, from what sorrows we and our country have been pre- served by lives like these, which save our Sodom, and avert God's righteous auger from His people." In congruity with this, we find the terrible Being who is propitiated by lives like these is wor- shipped best in darkness and gloom. The women all wear black in Spain, and "the absence of all colours to distract attention in the house of God, made the English lady sigh more eagerly than ever for a similar reverent and decent fashion to be adopted at home." Did she ever contemplate the light embodied in the colouring of a single leaf, and exclude the thought as sinful? or chant, "The sea is His, and He made it," without a slight misgiving, lest into the deep darkness of spirituality some faint reminiscence of coral or of pearl should enter?

" Holy Week" was spent in Seville in the midst of services in which admiration for the skill of the "maestro de ceremonias " and delight in the wailing minor music, " the lament of angels. over the lost, in spite of the tremendous sacrifice," are strangely blended. Nothing dwarfs the intellect like materialized theology,. and in her worship of black drapery, and pictures, and images. shrouded in black, as is the universal custom in the days preceding Easter, Lady Herbert clearly does not perceive the force of the passage she quotes, " Passion-Tide veils the face of the Crucifix, only that it may be more vivid in our hearts." It seems scarcely

credible that she could so utterly miss the truth underlying that statement.

But the gaudy, barbaric processions which distinguished Easter in Seville were too glaringly absurd even for Lady Herbert's most pliable code of a3sthetics. She doubts not but they were good for the pdople themselves, but is evidently glad when the great unwieldy catafalque " is hidden from the light of the sun, and she can record the effect of the brilliant mass of light thrown upon it from the tapers, as it was borne through the profound darkness of the aisles, as beautiful in the extreme, though even then she has some slight misgiving as to the propriety of " a Blessed Virgin decked out in all the paraphernalia of a fine lady of the nineteenth century." We must combine this with sentences like the following :—" By his energy and perseverance this monthly periodical [the Crux] has been started in Seville, which is an event in this non-literary country ;" or, " Ah, the misery of those wayside stations in Spain ! one long, low room, filled with smokers and passengers of every class, struggling for chocolate served in dirty cups by uncivil waiters." " The dirty, lumbering diligences," the mules every- where flogged unmercifully, the perpetual, though most unin- tentional, admission that for all the intolerable bad management of Spanish officials "there is no redress in Spain ;" the exorbitant prices paid for "rancid oil, stale eggs, and birds that seemed to have died a natural death ;" the bull-fights, which even this most lenient of eye-witnesses is compelled to admit to be, " as at present conducted, simply horrible and inexcusably cruel and revolting." Through chinks like these we get glimpses of the actual state of civilization in Spain more clearly than from the testimony of twenty enemies. The beauty of the sepulchre, even seen through the eyes of a devotee, does not wholly conceal the rottenness within. We are grateful to Lady Herbert for the unconscious service she has rendered to the cause of progress.