The Alhambra. Washington Irving
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The Alhambra
INTRODUCTION
It is not possible to forget Washington Irving in the Alhambra. With a single volume, the simple, gentle, kindly American man of letters became no less a figure in the Moor's Red Palace than Boabdil and Lindaraxa of whom he wrote. And yet, never perhaps did a book make so unconscious a bid for popularity. Irving visited Granada in 1828. He returned the following year, when the Governor's apartments in the Alhambra were lent to him as lodgings. There he spent several weeks, his love for the place growing with every day and hour. It was this affection, and no more complex motive, that prompted him to describe its courts and gardens and to record its legends. The work was the amusement of his leisure moments, filling the interval between the completion of one serious, and now all but unknown, history and the beginning of the next.
Not many other men just then could write about Spain or anything Spanish so naturally. For, in 1829, while, within the walls of Alhamar and Yusef, he was listening to the prattle of Mateo and Dolores, in Paris, Alfred de Musset was writing his Contes d'Espagne, and Victor Hugo was publishing a new edition of his Orientales. A year later and the battle of Hernani was to be fought at the Comédie Française; a few more, and Théophile Gautier would be on his way across the Pyrenees. Time had passed since Châteaubriand, the pioneer of romance, could dismiss the Alhambra with a word. Hugo, in turning all eyes to the East, had declared that Spain also was Oriental, and to his disciples the journey, dreamed or made, through the land where Irving travelled in single-minded enjoyment, was an excuse for the profession of their literary faith. Irving, whatever his accomplishments, was unencumbered with a mission and innocent of pose. There is no reason to believe that he had ever heard of the Romanticists, or the part Spain was playing in the revolution; though he had been in Paris when the storm was brewing; though he returned after the famous red waistcoat had been sported in the public's face. At any rate, like the original genius of to-day, he kept his knowledge to himself.
Literary work took Irving to Spain. Several years before, in 1818, he had watched the total wreck of his brother's business. This was the second event of importance in his hitherto mild and colourless existence. The first had been the death of the girl he was to marry, a loss which left him without interest or ambition. There was then no need for him to work, and his health was delicate. He travelled a little: an intelligent, sympathetic and observant tourist. He wrote a little, discovering that he was an author with Knickerbocker. But his writing was of the desultory sort until, when he was thirty-five years old, his brother's failure forced him to make literature his profession. It was after he had published his Sketch-Book and Bracebridge Hall and Old Christmas, after their reception had been of the kind to satisfy even the present generation of writers who measure the excellence of work by the price paid for it, that some one suggested he should translate the journeys of Columbus, which Navarrete, a Spanish author, had in hand. Murray, it was thought, would give a handsome sum down for the translation. Murray himself, however, was not so sure: wanted, wise man, first to see a portion of the manuscript. This was just what could not be until Irving had begun his task. But already in Madrid, and assured of nothing, he found the rôle of translator less congenial than that of historian, and the Spanish work eventually resolved itself into his Life of Columbus. "Delving in the rich ore" of the old chronicles in the Jesuits' Library of St. Isidoro, there was one side issue in the history he was studying that enchanted him above all else. This was the Conquest of Granada, the brilliant episode which had fascinated him ever since, as a boy at play on the banks of the Hudson, his allegiance had been divided between the Spanish cavalier, in gold and silver armour, prancing over the Vega, and the Red Indian brandishing his tomahawk on the war-path. Now, occasionally, Columbus was forgotten that he might collect the materials for a new story of the Conquest to be told by himself. To consult further documents he started one spring (1828), when the almond trees were blossoming, for Andalusia; and Granada, of course, came into his journey. Thus chance brought him to the Alhambra, while (1829) the courtesy of the Governor and the kindness of old Tia Antonia put him in possession of the rooms of the beautiful Elizabeth of Parma, overlooking the oranges and fountains of the Garden of Lindaraxa.
The Alhambra reveals but half its charm to the casual visitor. I know, of my own experience, how far custom is from staling its infinite variety, how its beauty increases as day by day one watches the play of light and shadow on its walls, as day by day one yields to the indolent dreams for which it was built. There was one summer when, all through July and August, its halls and courts gave me shelter from the burning, blinding sunshine of Andalusia, and the weeks in passing strengthened the spell that held me there. For Gautier, the place borrowed new loveliness from the one night he slept in the Court of Lions. But by day and night alike, it belonged to Irving; he saw it before it had degenerated into a disgracefully managed museum and annex to a bric-à-brac shop for the tourist; and he had heard all its stories, or had had time to invent them, before he was called away by his appointment to some useless and unnecessary diplomatic post at the American Legation in London.
The book was not published until more than two years later (1832). Irving, though a hack in a manner, had too much self-respect to rush into print on the slightest provocation. Colburn and Bentley were his English publishers, their edition preceding by a few months the American, brought out by Lea and Carey of Philadelphia. The same year saw two further issues in Paris, one by Galignani, and the other in Baudry's Foreign Library, as well as a French translation from the house of Fournier. The success of The Alhambra was immediate. De Musset and Victor Hugo had left the great public in France as indifferent as ever to the land beyond the Pyrenees. Irving raised a storm of popular applause in England and America, where, of a sudden, he made Spain, which the Romanticists would have snatched as their spoils, the prey of the "bourgeois" they despised. Nor was it the general public only that applauded. There were few literary men in England who did not welcome the book with delight.
I think to-day, without suspicion of disloyalty, one may wonder a little at this success. Certainly, in its first edition, The Alhambra is crude and stilted, though, to compare it with the pompous trash which Roscoe published three years afterward, as text for the drawings of David Roberts, is to see in it a masterpiece. Irving, more critical than his readers, knew it needed revision. "It is generally labour lost," he said once in a letter to Alexander Everett, "to attempt to improve a book that has already made its impression on the public." Nevertheless, The Alhambra was all but re-written in 1857, when he was preparing a complete edition of his works for Putnam, the New York publisher, and it gained enormously in the process. It was not so much by the addition of new chapters, or the re-arrangement of the old; but rather by the changes made in the actual text – the light touch of local colour here, and there the rounding of a period, the developing of an incident. For example "The Journey," so gay and vivacious in the final version, was, at first, but a bare statement of facts, with no space for the little adventures by the way: the rest at the old mill near Seville; the glimpses of Archidona, Antiquero, Osuna, names that lend picturesque value to the ride; the talk and story-telling in the inn at Loxa. Another change, less commendable, is the omission from the late editions of the dedication to Wilkie. It was a pleasant tribute to the British painter, who, with several of his fellows – Lewis and Roberts – was carried away by that wave of Orientalism which sent the French Marilhat and Decamps, Fromentin and Delacroix to the East, and had not yet spent its force in the time of Regnault. The dedication was well-written, kindly, appreciative: an amiable reminder of the rambles the two men had taken together in Toledo and Seville, and the interest they had shared in the beauty left by the Moor to mark his passage through the land both were learning to love. As a memorial to the friendship between author and artist, it could less well have been spared than any one of the historical chapters that go to swell the volume.
Even in the revised edition it would be easy to belittle Irving's achievement, now that it is the fashion to disparage him as author. Certainly, The Alhambra has none of the splendid melodrama of Borrow's Bible in Spain, none of the picturesqueness of Gautier's record. It is very far from being that "something in the Haroun Alraschid style," with dash of Arabian spice, which Wilkie had urged him to make it. Nor are its faults wholly negative. It has its moments of dulness. It abounds in repetitions. Certain adjectives recur with a pertinacity that irritates. The Vega is blooming, the battle is bloody, the Moorish maiden is beauteous