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 Each chapter of Nuevos mundos contains a brief «warm up», Para entrar
en onda, followed by five sections: Conversación y cultura, Lectura, Mundos
hispanos, El arte de ser bilingüe, and Unos pasos más: fuentes y recursos.
Conversación y cultura is a short, easy-to-understand essay that introduces
the chapter theme and offers some activities for class conversation and
small-group work. The Lectura section presents students with a selection
of readings including poetry, short stories, selections from novels,
autobiographies and biographies, and journalistic pieces. Mundos hispanos
is a short section about a particular person or a topic of interest related to
the reading selections or the chapter theme. El arte de ser bilingüe provides
an extended activity requiring that students use their communication
skills, either orally or in writing, or both. Sample activities include writing
a short autobiographical composition, translating a short narrative, role-
playing, writing an editorial for a newspaper, preparing a resumé, and
preparing for a job interview.
Finally, Unos pasos más should be thought of as a brief resource section
providing a starting point for further full-class, small-group, or individual
activities that may be given as supplementary or extra-credit assignments
and practice. This section provides projects based on film review and
interpretation, out-of-class readings, library research, community
involvement (conducting interviews in Spanish, for example), reporting,
and exploration and research through Web sites easily found via links in the
Nuevos mundos home page (www.wiley.com/college/nuevosmundos). The
text also offers useful appendixes. These include maps, a list of dictionaries,
cultural and media resources (films, video, slides, recordings), and useful
Web sites in Spanish and English.
It is my hope that instructors will be creative and flexible in using this text,
and will incorporate a variety of pedagogical strategies and techniques.
There are several models or approaches that I think go well with these
materials. Among these are (1) content-based language instruction,
also known as integrated language instruction; (2) the theme-based
approach (sections evolve around carefully selected topics that should
be interesting and relevant to the target audience); and (3) language
across the curriculum, since an effort has been made to include subject
matter that directly relates to other fields of study, such as political science,
history, feminism, anthropology, communications, computer science, and
literature.
Cooperative learning, involving group work and interpersonal
communication skills, sharing information, and working as a team,
is an integral part of the text. Strategies that emphasize meaningful
communication (for example, exchanging information, explaining and
defending opinions, debating a point or a position, defending one’s stance
on an issue in a formal or informal context, writing reading-response
journal entries) would be worth experimenting with in multiple ways.
In the last decade we have seen a proliferation of articles and books on
theories, approaches, strategies, and techniques, mostly aimed at the
second-language learner. And while we have also made significant progress

vi PREFACE
with regard to teaching Spanish as a heritage language, we still have much
to explore both as classroom practitioners and researchers in developing
bilingual literacy.1 It is my sincere wish that you find this textbook useful
and enjoyable as a starting point from which your students can learn about
their cultural and literary heritage, while expanding their bilingual range
and their interest in the Spanish language itself.
Ana Roca
Department of Modern Languages
Florida International University
Miami, Florida 33199
Rocaa@fiu.edu

1
For recommended readings on teaching Spanish to bilingual students, see Apéndice D.

PREFACE vii
This page intentionally left blank
 To the Student

Welcome to Nuevos mundos, where to read is to enter new worlds and

where Spanish is your visa.
If you learned Spanish at home—perhaps because that was the only
language you could use to communicate with your grandparents, or
perhaps because your parents insisted on speaking to you in Spanish (just
as you may have sometimes insisted on responding to them in English)—
then this might be among the first formal courses that you will take in
Spanish. Or perhaps you and your family immigrated to the United States,
and Spanish is your mother tongue. Indeed, some of your schooling may
have been in Spanish when you were young, and you may now want to
brush up on the skills you learned in grade school. In any of these cases,
while you probably understand and speak Spanish, you likely have not had
an opportunity to develop your academic skills in this language on a par
with your academic skills in English.
Your class, if it is like many Spanish classes for native speakers, consists
of students with a wide range of language abilities and life experiences.
You and your classmates may also believe that certain types of Spanish
are somehow «better» than others, or that you don’t really know how to
speak Spanish because you sometimes mix English words into your own
speech. Well, this is simply not true. Linguists, the scientists who study
language, will tell you that all languages are created equal and that the
mixing of languages has likely taken place since human beings first began
speaking them.
Whether you are a Hispanic bilingual student or an advanced non-
native speaker of Spanish, this text is designed to provide you with
opportunities to develop your academic and communicative skills. In
one-to-one conversations with peers, in small discussion groups, as well
as in interactions with your instructor and with the entire class, you will
practice using and building on your interpersonal language skills. You
will also practice writing, as well as prepare for and present formal class
presentations in Spanish. Finally, you will discuss films, literature, ideas,
and current events and issues, so that you can convey and defend your
point of view, and perhaps even win more than an argument or two in

ix
 Spanish. This exposure to and practice with more formal registers of
Spanish will give you new abilities and confidence with the language,
honing a very marketable skill that may come in handy in your chosen
career or profession.
Building and maintaining such mastery takes time and study—indeed, it is
a lifelong task. As a bilingual speaker, you should congratulate yourself on
how far you have already come. The purpose of expanding your bilingual
repertoire and cultural horizons is to help you to communicate more
effectively and with more confidence with others—be they from Spain,
Latin America, or the United States. I hope that this text will help you
to do just that, and that you enjoy your journey into new worlds through
literature, culture, films, discussion, and an exploration of the vast territories
of the Spanish-language Internet. I hope, too, that it will encourage you to
explore and observe other corners or your own community, and perhaps
to see your own world in a different light.

x TO THE STUDENT
 Acknowledgments
First Edition

The work of the following scholars has been a beacon for me as I

developed the ideas about bilingualism, pedagogy, and heritage language
learners that guided me in writing this text: Guadalupe Valdés, Stephen
Krashen, Richard V. Teschner, Frances Aparicio, and John M. Lipski.
I am particularly grateful to the colleagues and friends who gave me
advice and offered their ideas at various stages of this book’s development:
Cecilia Colombi, Isabel Campoy, Librada Hernández, Sandy Guadano,
Lucía Caycedo Garner, Claire Martin, María Carreira, Nora Erro-Peralta,
Margaret Haun, Reinaldo Sánchez, and Isabel Castellanos. I must also
thank my students at Florida International University, who unfailingly
provided me with a realistic gauge for registering interest level in the many
topics and readings I considered for inclusion in this text.
I am delighted to have had the opportunity to work with the eminently
professional and capable staff at John Wiley and Sons: my editor, Lyn McLean,
assistant editor Valerie Dumova, photo editor Hilary Newman, photo
researcher Ramón Rivera Moret, Karin Holms and the staff in the permissions
department, senior production editor Christine Cervoni, copy editor Luz
Garcés-Galante, and last, but by no means least, developmental editor Madela
Ezcurra, whose dedication, creativity, and eye for detail were invaluable.
I am indebted also to my former graduate assistant, Eloy E. Merino, for
his contributions and his assistance with most of the preliminary version
of the manuscript. My most heartfelt gratitude goes to Helena Alonso, not
only for her work on the text, but for serving as my sounding board and
rock of Gibraltar throughout the book’s development.
I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the following colleagues
who served as anonymous reviewers, offering valuable and constructive
suggestions that I have tried to incorporate in the final version: Gabriel
Blanco, La Salle University; Maria Cecilia Colombi, University of California
at Davis; María C. Dominicis, St. John’s University; Nora Erro-Peralta, Florida
Atlantic University; Barbara Gonzalez Pino, University of Texas at San Antonio;
Librada Hernández, Los Angeles Valley College; Lillian Manzor,University of
Miami; Ximena Moors, University of Florida; Cheryl L. Phelps, University of
Texas at Brownsville; and Lourdes Torres, University of Kentucky.

xi
 Finally, to my mother, María Luisa Roca, who gave me the gift of Spanish and
made sure that I valued, developed, and preserved it, un millón de gracias.

About the Third Edition

Much has happened in the Spanish teaching profession in both heritage
and second-language learning at the intermediate and advanced levels of
instruction since the publication of the second edition of Nuevos mundos. The
teaching of Spanish as a heritage language, for example, has become more
visible in our nation’s secondary schools, colleges, and universities as the U.S.
Hispanic population also increased significantly since the last Census.
We can point to many endeavors demonstrating how the field has grown,
notably: the addition of more academic tracks or programs of Spanish
for native speaker courses at many campuses; many more conference
presentations at major professional meetings, on topics related to advanced
levels of L2 development and heritage instruction pedagogies; a steady and
significant number of publications in recognized linguistic and pedagogical
journals; special sessions, national surveys, and teacher training activities and
institutes, be these through the Center for Applied Linguistics, conferences,
or the AATSP, or through publisher professional development workshops,
like those John Wiley & Sons organizes for language faculty.
In this third edition, we attempt to take in and implement as much as
possible what we have been learning about best practices in the teaching
of Spanish to U.S. Latino students, keeping in mind that both students
and instructors need to find and select strategies to become even more
engaged in the learning and teaching process itself, and in becoming even
better at integrating a content-based approach that works well for both L2
learners and heritage students.
New readings selections and activities in the third edition continue to
encourage students to explore, describe, analyze, interpret ideas, debate,
and convince another person of a different point of view, doing this in
a manner that is informed through considered exercises and activities,
class discussions, and suggested resources in Spanish about chapter topics.
Content-based instruction and cooperative learning, in a student-centered
environment where a classroom community is nurtured and developed
during the semester, works best with the ideas behind Nuevos mundos. In
sum, in this new edition, more than ever, we hope that the material, and
instructors as facilitators, will encourage students to learn to enjoy their new
journey, examining aspects of Spanish and Hispanic cultures. In this way, we
hope they will read for pleasure and enjoy the power and satisfaction that
come with their own expansion of their bilingual range through familiarity
with a number of topics related to Hispanic cultures. Through readings,
resources, and class activities, we continue to emphasize that students learn
while forming and voicing their own opinions in Spanish, on topics that
are close to them. Those topics in Chapters 1–4 deal with U.S. Latinos.
In Chapters 5–8 we have selected and updated high-interest topics that
deal with a wide variety of issues such as the women’s movement, violation
of human rights, the environment, refugees and mass immigrations, and

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
cruelty to animals, as well as language, bilingualism and crossover bilingual
artists—and the hope for a better world in future nuevos mundos.
Introductory essays have been updated where necessary, as have the resource
materials at the end of each chapter, called Unos pasos más: Fuentes y recursos.
This feature serves as a reference tool for both instructors and students
within and outside the classroom. We have added an intergenerational
individual and class project that students can work on during the first half
of the book: In The Abuelos/Abuelas Project, students prepare and conduct
an interview of one of their grandparents—or if their own grandfather or
grandmother is not available for the multifaceted interview assignment,
they «borrow» a senior citizen from a senior activity center, a nursing
home, or through a friend or neighbor. New exercises and activities have
of course been created for all new reading selections for this edition.
We have replaced many photos and also updated the Apéndices. The same
general format and structure for the book have been maintained since
it has worked well for the previous editions. We feel that sometimes new
editions are changed so much that the book doesn’t seem like the same
book anymore. We wanted to maintain the essence of a text that has
worked well and enables instructors to use the material in a flexible and
creative manner.
I would like to thank my editor, Magali Iglesias, as well as Pepe del Valle,
project manager and developmental editor, Lisha Pérez and Leslie Baez,
assistant editors, Elena Herrero, our senior developmental editor, MaryAnn
Price, my photo editor, Lisa Passmore, for the photo research and everyone
else at Wiley associated with the development and production of the third
edition. Thanks to Assunta Petrone and the whole Preparé team for their
hard work. Thank you also to José Ángel Gonzalo García, of Punto y coma
magazine who was so helpful in finding interesting articles for this edition;
many thanks to the reviewers who offered their thoughtful comments and
suggestions: Ana Ameal-Guerra, University of California, Berkeley; Mónica
Cabrera, Loyola Marymount University; Mónica Cantero-Exojo, Drew
University; Anne Lombardi Cantu, Tufts University; Roxanne Dávila, Brandeis
University; Héctor Enríquez, University of Texas at El Paso; Ronna Feit,
Nassau Community College, The State University of New York; Elena García
Frazier, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; María Gillman, University of
Washington, Seattle; Elena González-Muntaner, University of Wisconsin,
Oshkosh; Ornella L. Mazzuca, Dutchess Community College, The State
University of New York; Mercedes Palomino, Florida Atlantic University; Rosa
Alicia Ramos, Hunter College, The City University of New York; Lourdes
Torres, DePaul University; and Celinés Villalba-Rosado, Rutgers University,
New Brunswick. I also want to take this oportunity to thank María Carreira,
of California State University-Long Beach, and M. Cecilia Colombi, of the
University of California, Davis, for everyting they have taught me throughout
the years, and for their continued support.
I always welcome ideas, thoughts, corrections, and suggestions from both
students and instructors, to take into consideration for future editions. So
please feel free to write to me at: rocaa@fiu.edu. Many, many thanks, and
enjoy discovering new worlds in Spanish and bilingually!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
This page intentionally left blank
 Índice

Capítulo Uno
La presencia hispana en los Estados Unidos, 1
Para entrar en onda, 2
I. Conversación y cultura, 3
Hispanos en los Estados Unidos, 3
II. Lectura, 9
En un barrio de Los Ángeles, Francisco X. Alarcón, 10
La hispanidad norteamericana, de El espejo enterrado:
Reflexiones sobre España y el Nuevo Mundo,
Carlos Fuentes, 14
Mi nombre, Sandra Cisneros, 22
Un sándwich de arroz, Sandra Cisneros, 23
Ritmo al éxito: Cómo un inmigrante hizo su propio sueño
americano, Emilio Estefan, 27
El futuro del español en Estados Unidos, Jorge Ramos, 35
III. Mundos hispanos, 37
Celia Cruz: ¡Azúcar!, 37
Latinos en Estados Unidos, Titti Sotto, 39
La latinización de Estados Unidos, Jorge Ramos, 42
IV. El arte de ser bilingüe, 45
Composición autobiográfica dirigida, 45
El arte de hacer una entrevista, 45
V. Unos pasos más: fuentes y recursos, 47

Capítulo Dos
Los mexicanoamericanos, 53
Para entrar en onda, 54
I. Conversación y cultura, 55
Las raíces de los mexicanoamericanos, 55

xv
 II. Lectura, 58
Se arremangó las mangas, Rosaura Sánchez, 59
Mi acento (Living with an Accent), Jorge Ramos, 65
Homenaje a los padres chicanos, Abelardo Delgado, 75
Mareo escolar, José Antonio Burciaga, 77
México Cinema: Chiles rojos picantes, Rueda Duque, 81
III. Mundos hispanos, 85
César Chávez, 85
Edward James Olmos, 85
Gael García Bernal, 86
IV. El arte de ser bilingüe, 87
Leer en inglés e interpretar en español, 87
Interpretar en inglés y en español, 88
V. Unos pasos más: fuentes y recursos, 89

Capítulo Tres
Los puertorriqueños, 95
Para entrar en onda, 96
I. Conversación y cultura, 97
Los puertorriqueños de aquí y de allá, 97
II. Lectura, 104
La carta, José Luis González, 105
A José Martí, Julia de Burgos, 107
Prólogo: cómo se come una guayaba, de Cuando era puertorriqueña,
Esmeralda Santiago, 109
Ni te lo imagines, de Cuando era puertorriqueña, Esmeralda Santiago, 111
Un, dos, tres: Ricky Martin, Francisco M. Rodríguez, 115
III. Mundos hispanos, 118
Recordando a Raúl Juliá, actor de teatro y cine, 118
La plena: Linda música puertorriqueña, 120
La primera mujer puertorriqueña elegida al congreso,
Nydia M. Velázquez, 121
Sonia Sotomayor: el sueño americano, Santos Jiménez, 121
IV. El arte de ser bilingüe, 124
¿Debe ser el inglés el idioma oficial de los Estados Unidos?, 124
V. Unos pasos más: fuentes y recursos, 126

Capítulo Cuatro
Los cubanos y los cubanoamericanos, 131
Para entrar en onda, 132
I. Conversación y cultura, 133
Los cubanos y cubanoamericanos, 133
xvi ÍNDICE
 II. Lectura, 139
Mi raza, José Martí, 140
Balada de los dos abuelos, Nicolás Guillén, 142
Selecciones de Antes que anochezca, Reinaldo Arenas
La cosecha, 145
El mar, 145
Mariel, 146
Introducción. El fin, 148
Daína Chaviano: Al principio fue la fantasía…,
Reinaldo Escobar, 152
III. Mundos hispanos, 156
Pedro Zamora, 156
Pedro José Greer, 159
Yoani Sánchez, 161
IV. El arte de ser bilingüe, 164
Opinión editorial: La Torre de Babel, Belkis Cuza Malé, 164
Espanglish o spanglish: Producto de una nueva realidad,
Clara de la Flor, 166
V. Unos pasos más: fuentes y recursos, 170

Capítulo Cinco
La herencia multicultural de España, 177
Para entrar en onda, 178
I. Conversación y cultura, 179
España ayer y hoy, 179
II. Lectura, 189
Calés y payos, Juan de Dios Ramírez Heredia, 189
Ay, torito bueno: La abolición de los toros a debate, Lázaro Echegaray, 193
Pamplona, Hemingway y PETA, José Angel Gonzalo, 196
“Poema XXIX” de Proverbios y cantares, Antonio Machado, 200
La guitarra, Federico García Lorca, 202
Canción del jinete, Federico García Lorca, 202
III. Mundos hispanos, 204
El flamenco, 204
IV. El arte de ser bilingüe, 210
La traducción y la interpretación, 210
V. Unos pasos más: fuentes y recursos, 213

Capítulo Seis
Los derechos humanos, 219
Para entrar en onda, 220
I. Conversación y cultura, 221

ÍNDICE xvii
 Violaciones de los derechos humanos en Latinoamérica:
Violencia e injusticia, 221
II. Lectura, 225
Esperanza, Ariel Dorfman, 226
Pastel de choclo, Ariel Dorfman, 228
Dos más dos, Ariel Dorfman, 229
Esa tristeza que nos inunda, Ángel Cuadra Landrove, 230
Canción del presidio político, Ángel Cuadra Landrove, 231
Cuba y los derechos humanos, 231
La escuelita de Bahía Blanca, Alicia Partnoy, 239
Busco a mi hermano, Astrid Riehn, 248
Los mejor calzados, Luisa Valenzuela, 252
Espuma y nada más, Hernando Téllez, 254
La ruta de la muerte, Aroa Moreno, 258
III. Mundos hispanos, 263
Caña amarga: Explotación infantil en México, Samuel Mayo, 263
Javier de Nicoló: Padre que ayuda a los gamines de Bogotá, 267
La pobreza y las más de 4,000 maquiladoras en la frontera, 268
IV. El arte de ser bilingüe, 270
La Argentina y el matrimonio homosexual: Una sociedad
más igualitaria, Luciana Ferrando, 270
Proclama sobre los derechos humanos, 272
V. Unos pasos más: fuentes y recursos, 274

Capítulo Siete
La mujer y la cultura, 279
Para entrar en onda, 280
I. Conversación y cultura, 281
La mujer y la sociedad en el mundo hispano, 281
II. Lectura, 283
¿Iguales o diferentes? El feminismo que viene,
Amanda Paltrinieri, 283
La revolución inacabada, Susana Santolaria, 288
Nosotras, Rosa Olivares, 291
Redondillas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 295
Selecciones de El dulce daño, Alfonsina Storni
Tú me quieres blanca, 297
Peso ancestral, 298
Hombre pequeñito, 299
Kinsey Report No. 6, Rosario Castellanos, 300
Mujer y literatura en América Latina (fragmento), Elena
Poniatowska, 302
La mujer y los libros, Mercedes Ballesteros, 308
Entrevista: Rosa Montero, Carmen Aguirre y José Ángel Gonzalo, 310

xviii ÍNDICE
III. Mundos hispanos, 313
Michelle Bachelet, 313
Mercedes Sosa, 316
IV. El arte de ser bilingüe, 318
Breves representaciones teatrales, 318
V. Unos pasos más: fuentes y recursos, 320

Capítulo Ocho
Cruzando puentes: El poder de la palabra,
la imagen y la música, 327
Para entrar en onda, 328
I. Conversación y cultura, 329
¡Extra! ¡Palabras, imágenes y música por el Internet!, 329
II. Lectura, 331
Biografía: Chayanne, 332
El futuro del periodismo, John Virtue, 335
Vive tu vida al rojo vivo (fragmento), María Celeste Arrarás, 340
Dos palabras, Isabelle Allende, 347
Botella al mar para el dios de las palabras, Gabriel García
Márquez, 355
La lengua común, Mario Vargas Llosa, 357
III. Mundos hispanos, 363
Música sin fronteras, 363
¡Cristina! Confidencias de una rubia, Cristina Saralegui, 366
IV. El arte de ser bilingüe, 368
Cómo preparar una hoja de vida en español, 368
Las librerías y las bibliotecas de su comunidad, 370
V. Unos pasos más: fuentes y recursos, 371

Apéndices
Apéndice A: Recursos del español para profesores y estudiantes, 375
Apéndice B: La red en español y otras direcciones útiles, 379
Apéndice C: Otros recursos: películas, videos y audiovisuales, 381
Apéndice D: Teaching Spanish as a Heritage Language:
Recommended Readings, 383
Mapas, 387
Créditos de fotos, 391
Créditos, 393
Índice, 397

ÍNDICE xix
This page intentionally left blank
 Capítulo Uno
La presencia hispana
en los Estados Unidos
«La historia más antigua de los Estados Unidos está
escrita en español». [Traducción]
—Thomas Jefferson

Grupo de estudiantes universitarios hispanos en los Estados Unidos

 PARA ENTRAR EN ONDA
Para ver cuánto sabe del tema del capítulo, responda a este cuestionario lo mejor
que pueda. Escoja la respuesta apropiada. Luego compruebe sus conocimientos
consultando la lista de respuestas invertidas al pie de la página.
1. Se calcula que para el año 2050, los latinos formarán
aproximadamente el 25% de la población de los Estados Unidos.
a. verdadero b. falso

2. La ciudad más antigua de los Estados Unidos es:

a. Boston, MA. c. San Diego, CA.
b. Nueva York, NY. d. San Agustín, FL.

3. ¿Cuál de estas palabras en inglés no viene del español?

a. pueblo c. yard
b. ranch d. barbecue

4. ¿Cuál de los siguientes alimentos se conocía en Europa antes de la

colonización de las Américas?
a. el chocolate c. la papa
b. el trigo d. el tomate

5. Los conquistadores españoles trajeron el tabaco a las Américas,

donde lo intercambiaban con los indígenas por oro y joyas.
a. verdadero b. falso

6. ¿Cuál de estos presidentes se negó a servir como soldado en la

guerra entre los Estados Unidos y México?
a. Andrew Jackson c. Theodore Roosevelt
b. Abraham Lincoln d. Ulysses S. Grant

7. ¿De dónde son los músicos de la popular banda de salsa Orquesta

de la Luz?
a. Puerto Rico c. Japón
b. Nueva York d. Miami

8. ¿Quién no tiene descendencia hispana?

a. la cantante Mariah Carey c. la actriz Raquel Welch
b. el actor Charlie Sheen d. el actor Tom Cruise

9. Los españoles llegaron al territorio que hoy día es los Estados

Unidos mucho antes que los franceses y los ingleses.
a. verdadero b. falso

10. El idioma más hablado en los Estados Unidos después del inglés es:
a. chino. c. español.
b. alemán. d. italiano.

Respuestas: 1a, 2d , 3c, 4b, 5b, 6b, 7c, 8d, 9a, 10c

2 CAPÍTULO UNO LA PRESENCIA HISPANA EN LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS

 I. Conversación y cultura
Hispanos en los Estados Unidos
Las raíces de los hispanos del suroeste de los Estados Unidos se
remontan al siglo XVI, cuando las tierras de la región fueron exploradas,
colonizadas y pobladas por los españoles. Es de señalar que ya se hablaba
español en el siglo XVI en lo que son hoy día los Estados Unidos—
5 decenios antes de que los primeros peregrinos de habla inglesa llegaran
y establecieran el poblado de Jamestown (1607), y luego desembarcaran
del Mayflower y fundaran la colonia de Plymouth Rock en Massachusetts
(1620). Desde esa época, el español no ha dejado de usarse en lo que
actualmente es los Estados Unidos. Es importante también recordar que
10 durante aquella época de «descubrimientos» del Imperio Español, los
españoles exploraron gran parte del continente, fundaron misiones,
pueblos y ciudades, y se establecieron en la Florida y por toda la región
del suroeste desde Texas hasta California. En 1512 Juan Ponce de León
llega a la Florida y para 1521 ya había fundado San Juan, en Puerto Rico;
15 para 1542 los españoles habían llegado a lo que en la actualidad es la
zona de San Diego. La ciudad más antigua de los Estados Unidos, San
Agustín (en la Florida), fue fundada por Pedro Menéndez de Avilés
en 1565. En lo que hoy es el estado de Nuevo México, Juan de Oñate
declara Nuevo México como tierras de la Corona, funda la Misión de San
20 Gabriel en 1598, y la ciudad de Santa Fe en 1609. Nuevo México estuvo
bajo el poder de España hasta 1821. El estado de la Florida, recordemos,
también fue territorio español desde el siglo XVI hasta el siglo XIX, que

El descubrimiento del
Mississippi por de Soto,
de William Powell (1853).
Se encuentra en la rotonda del
Capitolio en Washington, D.C.

CAPÍTULO UNO LA PRESENCIA HISPANA EN LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS 3

Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
highly organised creatures of curious conformation, one having no
resemblance to another. Some are annular and some are cubical,
some have wheels of letters, some have letters that fly singly. ’Tis
scarcely credible that they all do the same work. Are not animals
machines? said Descartes. But I ask, Are not machines animals? A
vision surges up of Venice at night—out of the darkness of the Grand
Canal comes throbbing a creature of the Naples Aquarium—all
scattered blobs of flame, cohering through a spidery framework.
Through the still, dark water it glides, under the still, starry sky, with
San Giorgio for solemn background, and only from the voices of
Venetians singing as they float past—an impassioned, sad memory, a
trilled and fluted song—could one divine behind the fiery sea-dragon
the mere steam-launch. Between the laws that fashioned
steamboats and those that fashioned the animate world there is no
essential difference. The steamboat is not even inanimate, for at the
back of it burrows man like a nautilus in its shell, and his living will
has had to fight with the same shaping forces as those which mould
the entities of the water. The saurian age of the steamboat was the
uncouth hollowed trunk, and by slow, patient evolutions and infinite
tackings to meet winds and tides, it has come to this graceful,
gliding creature that skims in the teeth of the tempest. Denied the
mastery of water, man adds a floating form to his own; forbidden
the sky, he projects from himself a monstrous aery sac or winged
engine; condemned to crawl the earth, he supplements his nerves
with an electric motor apparatus. Thus endlessly transformed, Man
the Prometheus is also Man the Proteus. Dante praised Nature for
having ceased to frame monsters, save the whale and the elephant;
he did not remark that Man had continued her work on a substratum
of himself.
The forms of the typewriters are even more clearly conditioned
by the struggle for life. The early patents are the creatures in
possession, and to develop a new type without infringing on their
pastures, and risking their claws, a machine is driven into ever-odder
contrivances, like creatures that can only exist in an over-crowded
milieu by wriggling into some curious shape and filling some
forgotten niche. The lust of life that runs through Nature transforms
the very dust to a creeping palpitation, fills every leaf and drop of
water with pullulating populations. ’Tis an eternal exuberance, a
riotous extravagance, an ecstasy of creation. Great is Diana of the
Ephesians, for this Diana, as you may see her figured in the Naples
Museum, black but comely, is a goddess of many breasts, a teeming
mother of generations, the swart, sun-kissed Natura Nutrix, who
ranges recklessly from man to the guinea-pig, from the earwig to the
giraffe, from the ostrich to the tortoise, from the butterfly to the
lizard, from the glued barnacle timidly extending its tentacles when
the tide washes food towards its rock, to the ravenous shark darting
fiercely through the waters and seizing even man in its iron jaws. Yet
they are at best mere variations on the primal theme of heart, brain,
lungs, and stomach, now with enchanting grace as in the gazelle,
now with barbaric splendour as in the peacock, now with a touch of
grotesque genius as in the porcupine. And directly or indirectly all of
them pass into one another—in the most literal of senses—as they
range the mutual larder of the globe.
’Tis well to remember sometimes that this globe is not obviously
constructed for man, since only one-fourth of it is even land, and
that in a census of the planet, which nobody has ever thought of
taking, man’s poor thousand millions would be out-numbered by the
mere ant-hills. And since the preponderating interests numerically of
this sphere of ours are piscine, and in a truly democratic world a Fish
President would reign, elected by the vast majority of voters, and we
should all be bowing down to Dagon, the Aquarium acquires an
added dignity, and I gaze with fresh eyes at the lustrous emerald
tanks.
Ah, here is indeed a Fish President, the shell-fish that presided
over the world’s destinies; the little murex that was the source of the
greatness of Tyre, and the weaver of its purpureal robes of empire.
Hence the Phœnician commerce, Carthage, the Punic Wars, and the
alphabet in which I write.
Not only is colour softened by a sea change, but in this cool,
glooming, and glittering world the earth-creatures seem to have
been sucked down and transformed into water-creatures. There are
flowers and twigs and green waving grass that seem earth-flowers
and twigs and grass transposed into the key of water.
Only, these flowers and grasses are animal, these coralline twigs
are conscious; as if water, emulous of the creations of earth and air,
strove after their loveliness of curve and line, or as if the
mermaidens coveted them for their gardens. And there are gemmed
fishes, as though the mines of Ind had their counterpart in the
forces producing these living jewels. And there are bird-like fishes
with feathery forms, that one might expect to sing as they cleave
the firmament of water: some song less troubling than the Lorelei’s,
with liquid gurgles and notes of bubbling joy. And the sea, not
content to be imitative, has added—over and above its invention of
the fish—to the great palpitation of life; priestly forms, robed and
cowled, silver-dusty pillars, half-shut parasols. Even the common
crab is an original; a homely grotesque with no terraceous or aerial
analogue, particularly as it floats in a happy colour-harmony with a
brown or red sponge on its back, a parasite literally sponging upon
it. But though you may look in vain for mermaid or Lorelei, naiad or
nymph, there is no reason in Nature why all that poets feigned
should not come into being. The water-babe might have been as
easily evolved as the earth-man, the hegemony of creation might
have been won by an aquatic creature with an accidental spurt of
grey matter, and the history of civilisation might have been writ in
water. The merman is a mere amphibian, not arrived. The gryphon
and the centaur are hybrids unborn. ’Tis just a fluke that these
particular patterns of the kaleidoscope have not been thrown. We
may safely await evolutions. The winged genius of the Romans,
frequent enough on Pompeian frescoes, may even be developed on
this side of the skies, and we may fly with sprouted wings and not
merely with detachable. Puck and Ariel perchance already frisk in
some Patagonian forest, Caliban may be basking in forgotten mud.
Therefore, poets, trust yourself to life and the fulness thereof.
Whether you follow Nature’s combinations or precede them, you
may create fearlessly. From the imitatio Naturæ you cannot escape,
whether you steal her combinations or her elements.
 Shelley sings of “Death and his brother Sleep,” but gazing at this
mystic marine underworld of the Naples Aquarium, I would sing of
Life and his brother Sleep. For here are shown the strange
beginnings of things, half sleep, half waking: organisms rooted at
one point like flowers, yet groping out with tendrils towards life and
consciousness—the not missing link between animal and vegetable
life. What feeling comes to trouble this mystic doze, stir this
comatose consciousness? The jelly-fish that seems a mere embodied
pulse—a single note replacing the quadruple chord of life—is yet a
complex organism compared with some that flit and flitter half
invisibly in this green universe of theirs: threads, insubstantialities,
smoke spirals, shadowy filaments on the threshold of existence,
ghostly fibres, flashing films, visible only by the beating of their
white corpuscles. ’Tis reading the Book of Genesis, verse by verse.
And then suddenly a hitherto unseen entity, the octopus, looses its
sinuous suckers from the rock to which its hue protectively
assimilates—a Darwinian observation Lucian anticipated in his
“Dialogue of Proteus”—and unfolding itself in all its manifold horror,
steals upon its prey with swift, melodramatic strides.
From the phantasmal polyzoa to these creatures of violent
volition how great the jump! Natura non facit saltum, forsooth! She
is a veritable kangaroo. From the unconscious to the conscious, from
the conscious to the self-conscious, from the self-conscious to the
over-conscious, there’s a jump at every stage, as between ice and
water, water and steam. Continuous as are her phases, a
mysteriously new set of conditions emerges with every crossed
Rubicon. Dante, in making the human embryo pass through the
earlier genetic stages (“Purgatory,” Canto XXV), seems curiously in
harmony with modern thought, though he was but reproducing
Averroes.
But mankind has never forgotten its long siesta as a vegetable.
Still linked with the world of sleep through the mechanic processes
of nutrition, respiration, circulation, consciously alive only in his
higher centres, man tends ever to drowse back to the primal
somnolence. Moving along the lines of least resistance and largest
comfort, he steeps himself in the poppies of custom, drinks the
mandragora of ready-made morals, and sips the drowsy syrups of
domesticity, till he has nigh lapsed back to the automaton. But ever
and anon through the sluggish doze stirs the elemental dream, leaps
the primeval fire, and man is awake and astir and athrill for
crusades, wars, martyrdoms, revolutions, reformations, and back in
his true biological genus.
Not only in man appears this contest of life and sleep: it runs
through the cosmos. There is a drag-back: the ebb of the flowing
tide. How soon the forsaken town returns to forest! Near the Roman
Ghetto you may note how the brickwork of the wall of the ancient
Theatre of Marcellus has relapsed to rock; man’s touch swallowed up
in the mouldering ruggedness, the houses at the base merely
burrowed, the abodes of cave-dwellers.

II
I saw the sea-serpent at Naples, though not in the Aquarium. Its
colossal bulk was humped sinuously along the bay. ’Twas the
Vesuvius range, stretching mistily. Mariners have perchance
constructed the monster from such hazy glimpses of distant reefs.
Still, no dragon has wrought more havoc than this mountain, which
smokes imperturbably while the generations rise and fall. Beautiful
the smoke, too, when it grows golden in the setting sun, and the
monstrous mass turns a marvellous purple. We wonder men should
still build on Vesuvius—betwixt the devil and the deep sea—yet the
chances of eruption are no greater than the chances of epidemic in
less salubrious places, as the plague-churches of Italy testify.
But should a new eruption overwhelm Pompeii, and its first
record be lost, there were a strange puzzle for the antiquarians of
the fiftieth century exhuming its cosmopolitan population; blonde
German savages in white pot-hats, ancient Britons in tweeds, extinct
American cycle-centaurs; incongruously resident amid the narrow
streets and wide public buildings of a prehistoric Roman civilisation.
Pompeii is buried some twenty feet deep. The Middle Ages
walked over these entombed streets and temples and suspected
nothing. But all towns are built on their dead past, for earth’s crust
renews itself as incessantly as our own skin. We walk over our
ancestors. There are twenty-seven layers of human life at Rome.
It needs no earth-convulsions, no miracles of lava. One
generation of cities succeeds another. Nature, a pious Andromache,
covers up their remains as softly as the snow falls or the grass
grows. When man uncovers them again, he finds stratum below
stratum, city below city, as though the whole were some quaint
American structure of many storeys which the earth had swallowed
at a single gulp, and not with her stately deglutition. At Gezer in
Palestine Macalister has been dissecting a tumulus which holds
layers of human history as the rocks hold layers of earth-history.
Scratch the mound and you find the traces of an Arab city, slice
deeper and ’tis a Crusaders’ city; an undercut brings you to the
Roman city whence—by another short cut—you descend to the Old
Testament; to the city that was dowered to Solomon’s Egyptian
Queen, to the Philistine city, and so to the Canaanite city. But even
here Gezer is but at its prime. You have sunk through all the
Christian era, through all the Jewish era, but fifteen centuries still
await your descent. Down you delve—through the city captured by
Thotmes III, through the city of the early Semites, till at last your
pick strikes the Hivites and the Amorites, the cave-men of the
primitive Gezer. Infinitely solemn such a tumulus in its imperturbable
chronicling, with its scarabs and altars, its spear-heads and its gods,
the bones of its foundation-sacrifices yet undecayed. The Judgment
Books need no celestial clerks, no recording angels; earth keeps
them as she rolls. In our eyes, too, as we gaze upon this ant-heap of
our breed, a thousand years are but as a day—nay, as a dream that
passeth in the night. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and
our little life is rounded with a mound. Beside Gezer, Pompeii and
Herculaneum are theatrical, flamboyant, the creatures of a day, the
parvenus of the underworld.
Mentally, too, strange ancestral strata lie in our deeps, even as
the remains of an alimentary canal run through our spine and a
primitive eye lies in the middle of our brain—that pineal gland in
which Descartes located the soul. Sometimes we stumble over an
old prejudice or a primitive emotion, prick ourselves with an arrow of
ancestral conscience, and tremble with an ancient fear. Mayhap in
slumber we descend to these regions, exploring below our
consciousness and delving in the catacombs of antiquity.
The destruction of Pompeii was effected, however, not by
Vesuvius, but by the antiquarian. He it was to whom Pompeii fell as
a spoil, he who turned Pompeii from a piece of life to a piece of
learning, by transporting most of its treasures to a museum. The
word is surely short for mausoleum. For objects in a museum are
dead, their relations with life ended. Objects partake of the lives of
their possessors, and when cut off are as dead as finger-nails. A
vase dominating the court of a Pompeian house and a vase in the
Naples Museum are as a creature to its skeleton. What a stimulation
in the one or two houses left with their living reality—their frescoes
and their furniture, their kitchens and middens! ’Tis statues that
suffer most from their arrangement in ghostly rows. A statue is an
æsthetic climax, the crown of a summit, the close of a vista. See
that sunlit statue of Meleager in the grounds of the Villa Medici, at
the end of a green avenue, with pillar and architrave for background,
and red and white roses climbing around it, and imagine how its
glory would be shorn in a gallery. The French have remembered to
put the Venus of Milo at the end of a long Louvre corridor, which she
fills with her far-seen radiance. These collections of Capolavori—
these Apollos and Jupiters, and Venuses and Muses, dumped as
close as cemetery monuments—are indeed petrified. The fancy must
resurrect them into their living relations with halls and courtyards,
temples and piazzas, shrines and loggias. The learned begin to
suspect that the polytheism of Greece and Rome is due to the
analogous aggregation of local gods, each a self-sufficing and all-
powerful divinity in its own district. When there were so many
deities, their functions had to be differentiated, as we give a
different shade of meaning to two words for the same thing. Were
one to collect the many Madonnas in Italy, one might imagine
Christianity as polytheistic as Paganism.
But the most perfect visualising of a god’s statue in its local
setting will not annul that half-death which sets in with the statue’s
loss of worship. These fair visions of Pallas and Juno, shall they ever
touch us as they touched the pious Pagan? Nay, not all our sense of
lovely line and spiritual grace can replace that departed touch of
divinity.
The past has indeed its glamour for us, which serves perhaps as
compensation for what we lose of the hot reality, but an inevitable
impiety clings to our inquisitive regard, to our anxious exhumation of
its secrets. Unless we go to it with our emotions as well as our
intellect, prepared to extract its spiritual significance and to warm
ourselves at the fire of its life and pour a libation to the gods of its
hearth, a wilderness of archæological lore will profit us little. A man
is other than his garments and a people than its outworn shell.
There is perhaps more method than appears at first sight in the
madness of the Turk, who reluctantly permits the scientific explorer
to dig up the past but insists that once he has unearthed his historic
treasure, his buried streets and temples, ay, of old Jerusalem itself,
he shall cover them up again. The dead past is to bury its dead.
Death, whether in citizens or their cities, is sacred. Cursed be he
who turns up their bones to the sun. And who will not sigh over the
mummies, doomed to be served up in museums after five thousand
years of dignified death? Princesses and potentates were they in
their lives; how could they dream, as they were borne in their
purpureal litters through the streets of the Pharaohs, that they
would make a spectacle for barbarians on wet half-holidays? And
thou, Timhotpu, prefect of the very Necropolis of Thebes in the
eighteenth dynasty, how couldst thou suspect that even thy gilded
sarcophagus would be violated, thy golden earrings wrenched off,
thy mortuary furniture stolen, and thy fine figure exhibited to me in
the Turin Museum, turned into a grey char under thy winding-sheet!
The very eggs placed in the tombs of thy cemetery have kept their
colour better: one feels that under heat they might still hatch a
hieroglyphic chicken. But thou art for evermore desiccated and done
with.
Saddest of all is the fate of the immortals: goddesses of the
hearth and gods of the heaven are alike swept into the museum-
limbo. They are shrunk to mythology, they who once charioted the
constellations. For mythology dogs all theologies, and one god after
another is put on the bookshelf.
All roads lead to the museum. Thither go our old clothes, our old
coins, our old creeds, and we wonder that men should ever have
worn steel armour or cast-iron dogmas. Gazing at the Pompeian
man, that “cunning cast in clay,” whose clutch at his money-bags
survives his bodily investiture, who does not feel as one from
another planet surveying an earth pygmy? What strange limited
thoughts were thine, O Pompeian of the first century! I warrant thou
hadst not even heard of the Man of Nazareth: how small thine atlas
of the world, not to say thy chart of the heavens! Poor ignoramus—
so unacquainted with all that hath happened since thy death! How
wise and weighty thou wast at thy table, recumbent amidst thy
roses, surrounded by those gay frescoes of Cupids and Venuses;
with what self-satisfaction thou didst lay down the Roman law,
garlanded as to thy narrow forehead!
But if ’tis easy to play the Superman with this fusty provincial, ’tis
not hard to smell the museum must in our own living world. Too
many people and things do not know they are essentially of the
museum: have the arrogance to imagine they are contemporary.
How full of life seems the cannon as it belches death! Yet ’tis but an
uncouth, noisy creature, long since outgrown and outmoded among
the humanised citizens of the planet; some day it will be hunted out
like the wolf and the boar, with a price upon its mouth.
’Tis to the stage that extinct human types betake themselves by
way of after-life—the theatre serving as the anthropological museum
—but there are some that linger unconscionably on this side of the
footlights. Bigots, for example, have an air of antediluvian bipeds,
monstrous wildfowl that flap and shriek. I even gaze curiously at
Gold Sticks and pages of the Presence. They are become
spectacular, and to be spectacular is to be well on the way to the
museum. Mistrust the spasmodic splendour—leap of the dying flame.
Where traditions must be pored over, and performers rehearsed, it
has become a play; is propped on precedent instead of uplifted by
sap. The passion for ritual is one of the master-passions of
humanity. Yet stage properties can never return to the world of
reality. The profession will tell you that they are sold off to inferior
theatres, never to the real world outside. What passes into the
museum can never repass the janitor.
On the leaders of life lies in each generation the duty of
establishing the museum-point. The museum-point in thought, art,
morals. No matter that obsolete modes prevail in the vulgar world:
do the ladies allow the mob to dictate their fashions? Hath a bonnet
existence because it survives in Seven Dials or the Bowery? Is a
creed alive because it flourishes in Little Bethel? Man is one vast
being, and the thought of his higher nerve-centres alone counts:
generation hands the torch to generation. Doubtless the lower
ganglia are not always ready for the new conception. But such
considerations belong to Politics, not to Truth. At the worst the map
must be made while the march is preparing.

III
No object in the Naples Museum fascinates the philosophic mind
more than Salpion’s vase. Who was Salpion? I know not, though his
once living hand signed his work, in bold sprawling letters,

ΣAΛΠIΩN AΘHNAIOΣ EΠOIHΣE

An Athenian made you, then, I muse, gazing upon its beautiful

marble impassivity, and studying the alto-relievo of Mercury with his
dancing train giving over the infant Bacchus to a seated nymph of
Nysa. He who conceived you made you for sacrifices to Bacchus,
lived among those white temples which the Greeks built for the
adoration of their gods, but which remain for our adoration. He
mounted that hill agleam with the marble pillars of immortal shrines,
he passed the Areopagus, and the altar “to the unknown God”; he
entered the Propylæa and gazed through the columns of the
Acropolis upon the blue Ægean. He sat in that marmoreal
amphitheatre and saw the mimes in sock and buskin take the
proscenium to the sound of lyres and flutes. Perchance ’twas while
seeing the Mercury fable treated in a choric dance in the sanded
orchestra that he composed this grouping. Perhaps he but copied it
from some play lost to us, for the Greek theatre, with its long
declamations, had more analogy with sculpture than with our
agitated drama of to-day. The legend itself is in Lucian and
Apollonius. But Salpion is not the beginning of this vase’s story. For
the artist himself belonged to the Renaissance, the scholars say; not
our Renaissance, but a neo-Attic. Salpion did but deftly reproduce
the archaic traditions of the first great period of Greek sculpture.
Even in those days men’s thoughts turned yearningly to a nobler
past, and the young prix de Rome who should find inspiration in
Salpion would be but imitating an imitation. Nor is Athenian all the
history this fair Attic shape has held. Much more we know, yet much
is dim. In what palace or private atrium did it pass its first years?
How did it travel to Italy? Was it exported thither by a Greek
merchant to adorn the house of some rich provincial, or—more
probably—the country seat of a noble Roman? For the ruins of
Formiæ were the place of its discovery, and mayhap Cicero himself—
the baths of whose villa some think to trace in the grounds of the
Villa Caposele—was its whilom proprietor.
But, once recovered from the wrack of the antique world, it falls
into indignity, more grievous than its long inhumation through the
rise and fall of the mediæval world. It drifts, across fields of
asphodel, to the neighbouring Gaeta—the Gibraltar of Italy, the
ancient Portus Caeta, itself a town-republic of as many mutations
and glories—and there, stuck in the harbour mud, performs the
function of a post to which boats are fastened. Stalwart fishermen,
wearing gold earrings, push off from it with swarthy hands; bronzed
women, with silver bodkins pinning in their black hair with long coils
of many-coloured linen, throw their ropes over its pedestal. Year
after year it lies in its ooze while the sun rises and sets in glory on
the promontory of Gaeta: it reeks of tar and the smell of fishing-
nets; brine encrusts its high-reliefs. The clatter of the port drowns
the hollow cry of memory that comes when it is struck by an oar:
there is the noise of shipping bales; the crews of forth-faring
argosies heave anchor with their ancient chant; the sails of the
galleons flap; the windlasses creak. Perchance a galley-slave, flayed
and fretted by chain and lash, draws up with grappled boat-hook,
and his blood flows over into Salpion’s vase.
And then a tide of happier fortune—perhaps the same that bore
the Sardinians to the conquest of Gaeta and the end of the war for
Italian independence—washes the vase from its harbour mud and
deposits it in the cathedral of Gaeta. The altar of Bacchus returns to
sacerdotal uses: only now it is a font, and brown Italian babies are
soused in it, while nurses in gilt coronets with trailing orange ribbons
stand by, radiant. Doubtless the priests and the simple alike read an
angel into Mercury, the infant Jesus into the child of Jupiter and
Semele, and into the nymph of Nysa the Madonna whose
Immaculate Conception Pio Nono proclaimed from this very Gaeta.
Its Bacchantes are now joyous saints, divinely uplifted. And why
not? Is not the Church of Santa Costanza at Rome the very Temple
of Bacchus, its Bacchic processions in mosaic and fresco unchanged?
Did not the early Church make the Bacchic rites symbolic of the
vineyard of the faith, and turn to angels the sportive genii? Assuredly
Salpion’s vase is as Christian as the toe of Jupiter in St. Peter’s, as
the Roman basilicæ where altars have usurped the ancient
judgment-seat, as the Pantheon wrested from the gods by the
saints. Nay, its Bacchic relief might have been the very design of a
Cinquecento artist for a papal patron, the figures serving for saints,
even as the Venetian ladies in all their debonair beauty supplied
Tintoretto and Titian with martyrs and holy virgins, or as the
beautiful, solemn-robed, venerable-bearded Bacchus on another
ancient vase, which stands in the Campo Santo of Pisa, served
Niccolo Pisano for the High Priest of his pulpit reliefs.
Outside Or San Michele in Florence you may admire the Four
Holy Craftsmen, early Roman Christians martyred for refusing to
make Pagan deities. They had not yet learned to baptize them by
other names.
And now Salpion’s vase has reached the Museum, that cynosure
of wandering tourists. But it belongs not truly to the world of glass
cases: it has not yet reached museum-point. It is of the Exhibition:
not of the Museum proper, which should be a collection of
antiquities. Other adventures await it, dignified or sordid. For
museums themselves die and are broken up. Proteus had to change
his shape; Salpion’s vase has no need of external transformations.
Will it fume with incense to some yet unknown divinity in the United
States of Africa, or serve as a spittoon for the Fifth President of the
Third World-Republic?
O the passing, the mutations, the lapse, the decay and fall, and
the tears of things! Yet Salpion’s vase remains as beautiful for
baptism as for Pagan ritual; symbol of art which persists, stable and
sure as the sky, while thoughts and faiths pass and re-form, like
clouds on the blue.
And out of this flux man has dared to make a legend of
changelessness, when at most he may one day determine the law of
the flux.
Everything changes but change. Yet man’s heart demands
perfections—I had almost said petrifactions—perfect laws, perfect
truths, dogmas beyond obsolescence, flawless leaders, unsullied
saints, knights without fear or reproach; throws over its idols for the
least speck of clay, and loses all sense of sanctity in a truth whose
absoluteness for all time and place is surrendered.
Yet is there something touching and significant in this clinging of
man to Platonic ideals: the ruder and simpler he, the more
indefectible his blessed vision, the more shining his imaged grail.
And so in this shifting world of eternal flux his greatest emotions and
cravings have gathered round that ideal of eternal persistence that is
named God.

IV
There are two torrents that amaze me to consider—the one is
Niagara, and the other the stream of prayer falling perpetually in the
Roman Catholic Church. What with masses and the circulating
exposition of the Host, there is no day nor moment of the day in
which the praises of God are not being sung somewhere: in noble
churches, in dim crypts and underground chapels, in cells and
oratories. I have been in a great cathedral, sole congregant, and, lo!
the tall wax candles were lit, the carven stalls were full of robed
choristers, the organ rolled out its sonorous phrases, the priests
chaunted, marching and bowing, the censer swung its incense, the
bell tinkled. Niagara is indifferent to spectators, and so the ever-
falling stream of prayer. As steadfastly and unremittingly as God
sustains the universe, so steadfastly and unremittingly is He
acknowledged, the human antiphony answering the divine strophe.
There be those who cannot bear that Niagara should fall and
thunder in mere sublimity, but only to such will this falling thunder of
prayer seem waste.
Yet as I go through these innumerable dark churches of Italy,
these heavy, airless glooms, heavier with the sense of faded frescoes
and worm-eaten pictures, and vaults and crypts, and mouldering
frippery and mildewed relics, and saintly bones mocked by jewelled
shroudings, and dim-burning oil-lamps—the blue sky of Italy shut
out as in a pious perversity—and more, when I see the subjects of
the paintings and gravings, these Crucifixions and Entombments and
Descents from the Cross, varied by the mimetic martyrdoms of the
first believers, it is borne in on me depressingly how the secret of
Jesus has been darkened, and a doctrine of life—“Walk while ye
have the light . . . that ye may be the children of light”—has been
turned to a doctrine of death. St. Sebastian with his arrows, St.
Lawrence with his gridiron, are, no doubt, sublime spectacles; but
had not the martyr’s life been noble, and had he not died for the
right to live it, his death would have been merely ignominious. The
death of Socrates owes its value to the life of Socrates. Many a
murderer dies as staunchly, not to speak of the noble experimenters
with Röntgen rays, or the explorers who perish in polar wastes,
recording with freezing fingers the latitude of their death.
Painting half obeyed, half fostered this concentration on the
Passion, with its strong lights and shadows. Indeed, the artistic
strength of the mere story is so tremendous that it has wiped out
the message of the Master and thrown Christianity quite out of
perspective. Tintoretto’s frescoes in San Rocco—indeed, most sacred
pictures—are like a picture-book for the primitive. (Picturæ sunt
idiotarum libri.) The anecdotal Christ alone survives. And the
painters were the journalists, the diffusers and interpreters of ideas.
The true Christ was crucified afresh in the interests of romance
and the pictorial nude. Crivelli painted with unction the fine wood
and the decorative nails of the Cross; even the winding-sheet is
treated by Giulio Clovio for its decorative value. Where in all these
galleries and legends shall we find the living Christ, the Christ of the
parables and the paradoxes, the caustic satirist, the prophet of
righteousness, the lover of little children? The living Christ was
overcast by the livid light of the tomb. He was buried in the Latin of
the Church, while every chapel and cloister taught in glaring colour
the superficial dramatic elements, and Calvaries were built to
accentuate it, and men fought for the Cross and swore by the Holy
Rood, and collected the sacred nails and fragments of the wood and
thorns of the crown.
The Sacro Catino of Genoa Cathedral once held drops of the
blood; a chapel of marble and gold at Turin still preserves in the
glow of ever-burning lamps the Santo Sudario, or Holy Winding-
sheet. Strange mementoes of the plein air Prophet who drew his
parables and metaphors from the vineyard and the sheepfold! The
Santo Volto for which pilgrims stream to Lucca is not the holy face of
loving righteousness, but a crucifix miraculously migrated from the
Holy Land and preserved in a toy tempietto. Of the fifteen mysteries
of the Roman Catholic Rosary, five are of Birth, five of Death, five of
Glory. But none are of Life. There are also the rosaries of the Five
Wounds and the Seven Dolors.
No doubt the majestic and sombre symbolism of the Cross owed
its power over gross minds to its very repudiation of the joy of life,
but the soul cannot healthily concentrate on death, nor can “Holy
Dying” replace “Holy Living.” Those early purple and gold mosaics of
the Master with His hand on the Book of Life, placed over altars—as
in the cathedral of Pisa—taught, for all their naïveté, the deeper
lesson: “Ego sum lux mundi.” The rude stone sculptures on the
portals of Parma Baptistery depict a Christ grotesque in a skull-cap,
yet active in works and words of love, and Duccio’s panels on that
reredos in Siena in the dawn of Italian art equally emphasise the life
of Christ, and not its mere ending. In fact, the earlier the art the less
the insistence on darkness and death. The Christians of the
Catacombs, for whom death and darkness were daily realities,
turned all their thoughts to light and life. They enjoyed their crypts
more than the Christians of to-day enjoy their cathedrals. “The Acts
of the Apostles,” says Renan in his St. Paul, “are a book of joy.” It
was the later ages, which found the battle won, that took an artistic
and morbid pleasure in depicting martyrdoms and created those
pictorial concepts that tend to caricature Christianity. It is worth
remarking that Tempesta, who brought pictorial martyrology to its
disgusting climax in S. Stefano Rotondo at Rome, came so late that
he lived to see the eighteenth century in. A pity that temporary
necessities of martyrdom among the early Christians lent colour to
the misconception of Christianity as a religion of death. Toleration or
triumph robbed the saint of his stake, and left to him a subtler and
severer imitatio Christi. Buried so long beneath his own Cross, the
true Christ will rise again—to the cry of “Ecce Homo!”
On that day the teaching of Arius as to the originate nature of
Christ, or the modal trinitarianism of Sabellius by which the same
God manifested Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, may cease
to be a heresy, or Joachim of Flora’s expectation of a Super-Gospel
of the Spirit may find transformed fulfilment. For if Christianity has a
future, that future belongs, not to its dogmas, but to its heresies,
the thought of the great souls who, instead of receiving it passively,
wrestled for themselves with its metaphysical and spiritual problems,
and passed through the white fires and deep waters of the cosmic
mystery. There is scarcely a heresy but will better repay study than
the acrid certainties of St. Bernard or the word-spinnings of
Athanasius triumphant contra mundum.
Art is, indeed, not sparing of the resurrected Christ who rules in
glory, such as He whose majestic figure dominates and pervades St.
Mark’s; but this Christ who presides in so many pictures at the Last
Judgment, His foot on the earth-ball, His angel-legions round Him,
and who, indeed, in some is actually represented as creating Adam
or giving Moses the Law; this Christ who—by a paradoxical reversion
to the Pagan need for a human God—has superseded His Father
with even retrospective rights, is still further removed than the
crucified Christ from the Christ of life.
This apotheosis, how inferior in grandeur to his true presidence
over the centuries that followed his death! And this death, how
infinitely more tragic than the conventional theory of it! Naught that
man has suffered or man imagined, no Dantesque torture nor
Promethean agony, can equal the blackness of that ninth hour when
“Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”
Where be the twelve legions of angels, where the seat for the Son of
Man at the right hand of power? Why this mockery, this
excruciation?
Purblind must be the dry-as-dust who can read this passage and
doubt that Jesus was an historical person. As if, despite Psalm xxii,
the writers of Matthew and Mark could have invented so wonderful a
touch, or would, had they understood its full import, have inserted
so flagrant a contradiction of the Christian concept—a contradiction
that can only be counteracted by an elaborate theory of kenosis. The
dying cry of Jesus stamps him with authenticity, as the complaints of
the Israelites against their leader guarantee Moses and the Exodus.
What a colossal theme—Ormuzd broken by Ahriman, the
incarnation of light and love agonising beneath the heel of the
powers of darkness and goaded into the supreme cry: “My God, my
God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” I have seen only one Crucifixion
that adequately renders this dreadful moment—the supreme
loneliness, the unrayed blackness—for most Crucifixions are
populated and bustling, like Tintoretto’s or Altichieri’s or Foppa’s or
Spinello Aretino’s, or that congested canvas of the brothers San
Severino, when they are not also like Michele da Verona’s, a
translation of the tragedy into a Carpaccio romance of trumpeters
and horsemen and dogs and lovely towered cities and mountain
bridges, not to mention the arms of the magnificent Conte di
Pitigliano. But what painter it is who has caught the true essence
and quiddity of the Crucifixion I cannot remember, nor haply if I saw
his picture in Spain and not in Italy, nor even if I dreamed it.
Lucas Van der Leyden and Van Dyck give us the lonely figure, but
in Italian art before our own day I can only recall it in an obscure
picture of the Parmese school, and in a small painting of the
eighteenth-century Venetian, Piazzetta. Tura’s impressive, sombre
study is only a fragment of a stigmata picture. Guido Reni suggests
the loneliness, but he leaves the head haloed and melodramatic,
besides sketching in shadowy accessories. A nineteenth-century
Italian, Giocondo Viglioli, places the lonely Christ against the
shadowy background of the roofs and towers of Jerusalem. But the
picture I have in my mind is Rembrandtesque, the blacks heaviest at
the figure in the centre, who, unillumined even by a halo,
uncompanioned even of thieves, hangs nailed upon a lonely cross in
a vast deserted landscape. For Jesus at this tremendous moment is
alone—however vast the crowd—alone against the universe, and this
universe has turned into a darkness that can be felt; felt as a
torment of body as well as a shattering of the spirit.
When I looked upon the myth of Psyche in the Villa Farnesina at
Rome as designed by Raphael, it was borne in on me how the
primitive Greek, penetrated by the certainty and beauty of his body,
had made the world and the gods in its image. But the race of
Jesus, evolved to a higher thought, had demanded that the universe
should answer to its soul. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do
right?” asks Abraham severely of God in another epochal passage of
the Bible. And now here is a scion of Abraham who has staked his all
upon the innermost nature of things being one with his own, upon a
universe aflame with love and righteousness and pity, and lo! in this
awful hour it seems to reveal itself as a universe full of mocking
forces, grim, imperturbable, alien. It is an epic moment—the tragedy
not only of Jesus, but of man soaring upwards from the slime⁠—

“Such splendid purpose in his eyes”

—and finding in the cosmos no correspondence with his vision. Nor

could Jesus, who had outgrown the notion of a heavenly despot,
even find the satisfaction of the Prometheus of Æschylus:
 “You see me fettered here, a god ill-starred,
The enemy of Zeus, abhorred of all
That tread the courts of his omnipotence,
Because of mine exceeding love for men.”

Yet in a sense the despair of Jesus was unwarranted. The

universe had not forsaken him; it contained, on the contrary, the
media for his eternal influence. On the physical plane, indeed, it
could do nothing for him; crucifixion must kill or the cosmos must
change to chaos. But on the spiritual plane he could neither be killed
nor forsaken. Infinitely less tragic his death than that of Napoleon, of
whom we might say, in the words of Sannazaro,

“Omnia vincebas, superabas omnia Cæsar,

Omnia deficiunt, incipis esse nihil.”

It was Moses who more voluntarily than Jesus offered his life that
the equilibrium of this righteous universe should not be shaken. “Ye
have sinned a great sin; and now I will go up unto the Lord;
peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.” And the
atonement offered ran: “Blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book
which Thou hast written.” Here, then, in the Old Testament, and not
in the New, first appears the notion of vicarious atonement. But the
Old Testament sternly rejects it; “Whoever hath sinned against Me,
him will I blot out of My book.” Beside which trenchant repudiation
the Christian reading of the Old Testament as a mere prolegomenon
to the Crucifixion, an avenue to Calvary strewn with textual finger-
posts, appears a more than usually futile word-play of the
theological mind. One might, indeed, more easily discover the germ
of the atonement idea in Iphigenia. And that the Greek mind had
spiritualised itself—even before it contributed the logos to
Christianity—is obvious not only from its literature and its Orphic and
Eleusinian mysteries, but from its art. For the Hellenic art of Raphael
was, after all, only the Renaissance view of Hellas, and the Greek
myths in his hands were merely a charming Pagan poetry, no truer
to the Hellenism of the great period than was the “Endymion” or
“Hyperion” of Keats. How can I look at the statue of Apollo in this
same Museum of Naples and not see that the very type of Christ had
been pre-figured? I mean the Christ with the haunting eyes and the
long ringlets, for this Apollo is a nobler figure by far than the Christ
of the Byzantine mosaics. And I am not the first to remember that
Apollo is the Son of Zeus the Father.
It is very strange. The Greeks, beginning with a Nature-religion,
come in the course of the centuries to find it inadequate and to
yearn for something beyond—

“Tendebantque manus ulterioris ripæ amore.”

The Nature-religion, therefore, gradually replaces itself by a Jewish

heresy, expounded in Greek, largely influenced by Greek Alexandrian
philosophy, and organised by a Greek-speaking tent-maker of
Jerusalem named Saul or Paul, who, shutting out infinity with a tent,
after the fashion of his craft, left a Church where he had found a
Christ. Some fourteen centuries later old Greek thought is
rediscovered, and operates as the great liberator of the mind from
the constriction of this Church which has obscured and overgloomed
Nature. But only subconscious of itself, this movement back to
Nature, this renewed joie de vivre, finds its expression in the
adornment of altars for the worship of sorrow, and under the ribs of
death a new soul of loveliness is created that can vie with the art of
the Greeks. And finally this new Nature-worship grows conscious
again of its inadequacy to the soul of man, there is a Reformation
and a Counter-Reformation, and then both are outgrown and
humanity stands to-day where the old Greeks stood at the dawn of
Christianity. The wheel has come full circle. And meantime the
original Mosaic cult stands unmoved by these two millenniums of
heresy, unbroken by the persecution, still patiently awaiting the day
when “God shall be One and His Name One.” What are the fantasies
of literature to the freaks and paradoxes of the World-Spirit?

V
 It is as the Bambino that Christ chiefly lives in Art, and at this
extreme, too, we miss his true inwardness. Yet the tenderness of the
conception of the Christ-babe makes atonement. What can be more
touching than Gentile da Fabriano’s enchanting altar-piece of the
Adoration of the Magi, in which—even as the glamorous procession
of the Three Kings resteeps the earth in the freshness and dew of
the morning—the dominance of holy innocence seems to bathe the
tired world in a wistful tenderness that links the naïve ox and ass
with the human soul and all the great chain of divine life.
The Christ-child, held in his mother’s arms, lays his hand upon
the kneeling Magi’s head, yet not as with conscious divinity: ’tis
merely the errant touch of baby fingers groping out towards the feel
of things. No lesson could be more emollient to rude ages, none
could better serve to break the pride and harshness of the lords of
the earth. “A slave might be elder, priest, or bishop while his master
was catechumen,” says Hausrath of the early days of Christianity. Yet
this delicious and yearning vision of a sanctified and unified cosmos
remains a dream; futile as a Christmas carol that breaks sweetly on
the ear and dies away, leaving the cry of the world’s pain
undispossessed. It was precisely in Christian Rome that slavery
endured after all the other Great Powers of Europe had abolished it.
Nay, were the dream fulfilled it could not undo the centuries of
harsh reality. Here in Naples, under the providence of a kindly
English society, the wretched breed of horses, whose backs were full
of sores, whose ribs were numerable, have been replaced by a sleek
stock, themselves perhaps soon to be replaced by the unsentient
motor. But what Motor Millennium can wipe out the ages of equine
agony?
And despite the Christ-child and the Christ crucified, nowhere
does the triumph of life run higher than in this sunny land of
religious gloom, Mantegna’s conversion of the babe into a young
Cæsar being a true if unconscious symbol of what happened to the
infant. Flourishing the forged Donation of Constantine to prove its
claim to the things that were Cæsar’s, it grew up into that “Terrible
Pontiff” whose bronze effigy by Michelangelo was so aptly cast into a
cannon, and whose Christian countenance you may see in the Doria
Gallery at Rome; or into that Borgian monster who was to bombard
a fortress on Christmas Day, and who, crying joyfully, “We are Pope
and Vicar of Christ,” hastened to don the habit of white taffeta, the
embroidered crimson stola, the shoes of ermine and crimson velvet.
God might choose to be born in the poorest and worst-dressed
circles of the most unpopular People, but the lesson was lost. His
worshippers insisted on thrusting Magnificence back upon Him. Or
perhaps it was their own Magnificence that they were protecting
against His insidious teaching. Consider their cathedrals, built less in
humility than in urban emulation—the Duomo of Florence to be
worthy of the greatness, not of God, but of the Florentines; S.
Petronio to eclipse it to the greater glory of Bologna; Milan Cathedral
to surpass all the churches in Christendom, as Giangaleazzo’s palace
surpassed all its princely dwellings. In whose honour did the Pisans
encircle their cathedral with a silver girdle, or the Venetians offer ten
thousand ducats for the seamless coat? Poor Babe, vainly didst thou
preach to Italy’s great families, when in humble adoration of thee
they had themselves painted in thy blessed society, the Medici even
posing to Botticelli as the Three Magi, and thrusting their
magnificence into thy very manger.
And in our own northern land the ox, companion of the manger,
for whose fattening at Christmastide St. Francis said he would beg
for an imperial edict, is fattened indeed, but merely for the
Christmas market, stands with the same pathetic eye outside the
butcher’s shop, labelled “Choose your Christmas joint,” and the
clown and pantaloon come tumbling on to crown the sacred
birthday.
Alas! history knows no miracles of transformation. Evolution, not
revolution, is the law of human life. In Santa Claus’s stocking what
you shall truly find is traces of earlier feasts. The Christian festival
took over, if it transformed to higher import, the Saturnalia of earlier
religions and natural celebrations of the winter solstice. Holly does
not grow in Palestine; the snowy landscapes of our Christmas cards
are scarcely known of Nazareth or Bethlehem; mince-pie was not on
the menu of the Magian kings; and the Christmas tree has its roots
in Teutonic soil. But even as the painters of each race conceived
Christ in their own image, so does each nation unthinkingly figure
his activities in its own climatic setting. And perhaps in thus
universalising the Master the peoples obeyed a true instinct, for no
race is able to receive lessons from “foreigners.” The message, as
well as the man, must be translated into native terms—a
psychological fact which missionaries should understand.
Nor is it in the Palestine of to-day that the true environment of
the Gospels can best be recovered, for, though one may still meet
the shepherd leading his flock, the merchant dangling sideways from
his ass, or Rebeccah carrying her pitcher on her shoulder, that is not
the Palestine of the Apostolic period, but the Palestine of the
patriarchs, reproduced by decay and desolation. The Palestine
through which the Galilæan peasant wandered was a developed
kingdom of thriving cities and opulent citizens, of Roman roads and
Roman pomp. Upon those bleak hill-sides, where to-day only the
terraces survive—the funereal monuments of fertility—the tangled
branchery of olive groves lent magic to the air. That sea of Galilee,
down which I have sailed in one of the only two smacks, was alive
with a fleet of fishing vessels. Yes, in the palimpsest of Palestine ’tis
an earlier writing than the Christian that has been revealed by the
fading of the later inscriptions of her civilisation. And even where, in
some mountain village, the rainbow-hued crowd may still preserve
for us the chronology of Christ, a bazaar of mother-o’-pearl
mementoes will jerk us rudely back into our own era. But—saddest
of all!—the hands of Philistine piety have raised churches over all the
spots of sacred story. Even Jacob’s well is roofed over with
ecclesiastic plaster; incongruous images of camels getting through
church porches to drink confuse the historic imagination. Churches
are after all a way of shutting out the heavens, and the great open-
air story of the Gospels seems rather to suffer asphyxiation, overlaid
by these countless chapels and convents. Is it, perhaps, allegorical
of the perversion of the Christ-teaching?
The humanitarian turn given to Yuletide by the genius of Dickens
was at bottom a return from the caricature to the true concept.
Dickens converted Christmas to Christianity. But over large stretches
of the planet and of history it is Christianity that has been converted
to Paganism, as the condition of its existence. Russia was baptized a
thousand years ago, but she seems to have a duck’s back for holy
water. And even in the rest of Europe upon what parlous terms the
Church still holds its tenure of nominal power! What parson dares
speak out in a crisis, what bishop dares flourish the logia of Christ in
the face of a heathen world? The old gods still govern—if they do
not rule. Thor and Odin, Mars and Venus—who knows that they do
not dream of a return to their ancient thrones, if, indeed, they are
aware of their exile. Their shrines still await them in the forests and
glades; every rock still holds an altar. And do they demand their
human temples, lo! the Pantheon stands stable in Rome, the Temple
of Minerva in Assisi, Paestum holds the Temples of Ceres and
Minerva, and on the hill of Athens the Parthenon shines in immortal
marble. Their statues are still in adoration, and how should a poor
outmoded deity understand that we worship him as art, not as
divinity? It does but add to his confusion that now and anon prayers
ascend to him as of yore, for can a poor Olympian, whose toe has
been faith-bitten, comprehend that he has been catalogued as pope
or saint? Perchance some drowsing Druid god, as he perceives our
scrupulous ritual of holly and fir-branch, imagines his worship
unchanged, and glads to see the vestal led under the mistletoe by
his officiating priest. Perchance in the blaze of snapdragon some
purblind deity beholds his old fire-offerings, and the savour of turkey
mounts as incense to his Norse nostrils. Shall we rudely arouse him
from his dream of dominion, shall we tell him that he and his gross
ideas were banished two millenniums ago, and that the world is now
under the sway of gentleness and love? Nay, let him dream his
happy dream; let sleeping gods lie. For who knows how vigorously
his old lustfulness and blood-thirst might revive; who knows what
new victims he might claim at his pyres, were he clearly to behold
his power still unusurped, his empire still the kingdom of the world?
 THE CARPENTER’S WIFE: A CAPRICCIO
“Habent sua fata—feminæ.”

Although the Pilgrims’ Way is a shady arcade, yet the ascent from
Vicenza was steep enough to be something of a penance that sultry
spring evening, and I was weary of the unending pillars and the
modern yet already fading New Testament frescoes between them.
But I was interested to see which parish or family had paid for each
successive section, and what new name for the Madonna would be
left to inscribe upon it. For even the Litany of Loreto seemed
exhausted, and still the epithets poured out—“Lumen Confessorum,”
“Consolatrix Viduarum,” “Radix Jesse,” “Stella Matutina,” “Fons
Lachrymarum,” “Clypeus Oppressorum”—a very torrent of love and
longing.
At last as I neared the summit of the Way, a fresco flashed upon
me the meaning of it all—an “Apparitio B.M.V. in Monte Berico,
1428,” representing the Virgin in all her radiant beauty appearing to
an old peasant-woman. So this it was that had raised this long
religious road to the Church of Our Lady of the Mountain! I
remembered the inscription in S. Rocco, telling how 30,000 men had
pilgrimed here in 1875—“spectaculum mirum visu.”
But where was the church that had been built over the spot of
the Madonna’s appearance? I looked up and sighed wearily. I was
only half-way up, I saw, for the road turned sharply to the right, and
a new set of names began, and a new set of frescoes—still cruder,
for I caught sight of nails driven into the Cross through the writhing
frame of the Christ. But even my curiosity in the cornucopia of
epithets was worn out. The corner had a picturesque outlook, and
on the hill-side a bench stood waiting. Vicenza stretched below me, I
could see the Palladian palaces admired of Goethe, the Greek
theatre, the Colonnades, the Palace of Reason with its long turtle-
back roof; and, beyond the spires and campaniles, the gleam of the
Venetian Alps. A church-bell from below sounded for “Ave Maria.” I
sat down upon the bench and abandoned myself to reverie. Why
should not the Madonna appear to me? I thought. Why this
preference for the illiterate? And then I remembered that this very
Pilgrims’ Way had served as a battle-ground for the Austrians and
the poor Italians of ’48. How these Christians love one another! I
mused. And so my mind’s eye flitted from point to point, seeing
again things seen or read—in that inconsequent phantasmagoria of
reverie—to the pleasant droning of the vesper bell. Presently, telling
myself it was getting late, I arose and continued my ascent to the
Church of Our Lady of the Mountain.

But I looked in vain, as I came up the hill, for the inscriptions and
the frescoes. The sun was lower in the west, but the sunshine had
grown even sultrier, the sky even bluer, the road even steeper and
rougher, and it was leading me on to a gay-flowering plain lying in a
ring of green hills amid the singing of larks and the cooing of turtle-
doves. And on this plain I saw arising, not the church of my quest,
but a far-scattered village, whose small square, primitive houses
would have seemed ugly had their roofs not been picturesque with
storks and pigeons and their walls embowered in their own vines
and fig-trees and absorbed into the pervasive suggestion of
threshing-floors and wine-presses and rural felicity. By a central
fountain I could perceive a group of barefoot maidens, each waiting
her turn with her water-jar. They seemed gaily but lightly clad, in
blue and red robes, with bracelets gleaming at their wrists and
strings of coins shining from their faces.
Anxious to learn my whereabouts, yet shy of intruding upon this
girlish group, I steered my footsteps towards one who, her urn on
her shoulder, seemed making her way by a side-track towards a
somewhat lonely house on the outskirts, overbrooded by the brow of
a hill. She was brown-skinned, I saw as I came near, very young, but
of no great beauty save for her girlish grace and the large lambent
eyes under the arched black eyebrows.
“Di grazia?” I began inquiringly.
 “Aleikhem shalôm,” tripped off her tongue in heedless answer.
Then, as if grown conscious I had said something strange, she
paused and looked at me, and I instinctively became aware she was
a Hebrew maiden. Yet I had still the feeling that I must get back to
Vicenza.
“How far is thy servant from the city?” I asked in my best
Hebrew.
“From Yerushalaim?” she asked in surprise. “But it is many
parasangs. Impossible that thou shouldst arrive at Yerushalaim
before the Passover, even borne upon eagles’ wings. Behold the sun
—the Sabbath-Passover is nigh upon us.”
Ere she ended I had divined by her mispronunciation of the
gutturals and by the Aramaic flavour of her phrases that she was a
provincial and that I was come into the land of Canaan.
“What is this place?” I inquired, no less astonished than she.
“This is Nazara.”
“Nazara? Then am I in Galila?”
“Assuredly. Doubtless thou comest from the great wedding at
Cana. But thou shouldst have returned by way of Mount Tabor and
the town of Endor. Didst thou perchance see my mother at Cana?”
“Nay; how should I know thy mother?” I replied evasively.
She smiled. “Am I not made in her image? But overlong,
meseems, have ye all feasted, for it is two days since we expect my
mother and brothers.”
“Shall thy servant not carry thine urn?” I answered uneasily.
“Nay, I thank thee. It is not a bowshot to my door. And,” she
added with a gentle smile, “my brothers do not carry my burdens;
why should a stranger?”
“And how many brothers hast thou?” I asked.
“Some are dead—peace be upon them. But there are four yet left
alive—nay,” she hesitated, “five. But our eldest hath left us.”
“Ah, he hath married a wife.”
She flushed. “Nay, but we speak not of him.”
“There must ever be one black sheep in a flock,” I murmured
consolingly.
She brightened up. “So my brother Yakob always says.”
 “And Yakob should speak with authority on the colour of sheep,
and not as the scribes.” I laughed with forced levity.
Her brow wrinkled thoughtfully. “Doubtless Yeshua is possessed
of a demon,” she said. “One of our sisters, Deborah, was likewise a
Sabbath-breaker, but now that she is old, having nineteen years and
three strong sons, she is grown more pious than even our uncle
Yehoshuah the Pharisee.”
“Lives she here?”
“Ay, yonder, near my mother’s sister, the wife of Halphaï.”
She pointed towards a battlemented roof, but my eyes were
more concerned with her own house, at which we were just arriving.
It was a one-storey house, square and ugly like the others,
redeemed by its little garden with its hedge of prickly pear, though
even this garden was littered with new-made wheels and stools and
an olive-wood table.
“Halphaï is gone up for the Passover,” she added. She stopped
abruptly. The tinkle of mule-bells was borne to us from a steep track
that came to join our slower pathway.
“Lo, my mother!” she cried joyfully; and placing her urn upon the
ground, she hastened down the narrow track. I moved delicately, yet
not without curiosity, to the flank of the hedge, and presently a little
caravan appeared, ambling gently, with the girl walking and
chattering happily by the side of her mother, who rode upon an ass.
I noticed that the woman, who was small and spare, listened but
little to her daughter’s eager talk, and seemed deaf to the home-
coming laughter of her four curly-headed sons, who rode their mules
sideways, with their legs dangling down like the fringes of their
garments. Her shoulders were sunk in bitter brooding, and when a
sudden stumbling of her ass made her raise her head mechanically
to pull him up, I saw the shimmer of tears in her large olive-tinted
eyes. Certainly I should not have called her made in the image of
her daughter, I thought at that moment, for the face was sorely
lined, and under the cheap black head-shawl I saw the greying hair
that was still raven on her arched eyebrows. But doubtless the
burden of much child-bearing had worn her out, after the sad
fashion of Eastern women.
 These reflections were, however, dissipated as soon as born, for
a little cry of dismay from the girl brought to my perception that it
was the forgotten water-jar that had caused the ass’s stumble, and
that the urn now lay overturned, if not shattered, amid a fast-
vanishing pool.
The little mishap made her brothers smile. “Courage!” cried the
eldest. “Yeshua will fill it with wine instead.” At this all the four
rustics broke into a roar of merriment. The youngest, a mere
beardless youth, added in his vulgar Aramaic, “What one ass hath
destroyed another will make good.”
The little woman turned on him passionately. “Hold thy peace,
Yehudah. Who knows but that he did change the water into wine?”
“Let him come and do it here,” retorted the eldest. “Thou hast
not forgotten what befell when he essayed his marvels in Nazara. No
mighty works could he do here, albeit Shimeon and Yosé, inclining
their ears to Zebedee’s foolish wife, were ready to sit on his right
and left hand in the Kingdom.”
The two young men who had not yet spoken looked somewhat
foolish.
“He laid his hand upon sick folk and healed them,” one said in
apology.
“How many?” queried young Yehudah scornfully. “And how many
are alive to-day? Nay, Shimeon, if he be Messhiach let him heal us of
these Roman tyrants—not go about with their tax-farmers!”
“Peace, Yehudah!” The little mother looked round nervously, and
a fresh terror came into those tragic eyes. There was something to
me deeply moving in the sight of that shrinking little peasant-woman
surrounded by these strong, tall rustics whom she had borne and
suckled.
“Let Yeshua hold his peace!” answered the lad angrily, “and not
prate about rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. But,
God be thanked, a greater Yeshua hath arisen—Ben Abbas—a true
patriot, who one day——”
“Aha! Behold my flock at last!” Startled by this sudden new angry
voice, I glanced over the hedge, and saw standing on the doorstep
cut in the rock, with a hammer in his horny hand, a big red-bearded
peasant with bushy eyebrows. “These two days, Miriam, have I
awaited thee.”
The little woman slid meekly off her ass. “But, Yussef,” she said
mildly, “thou saidst thou wouldst go up for the Paschal sacrifice!”
“And how could I go up to the Holy City with all this work to
finish, and not one of my four sons to carry my work to Sepphoris
before the Sabbath!” He glared at them as they began to lead their
beasts behind the garden. “Halphaï was sorely vexed that I did not
company him and join in his lamb-group. And the house is not even
ready for Passover at home; I shall be liable to the penalty of
stripes.”
“I baked the mazzoth ere I departed,” his wife protested, “and
Sarah hath purged the house of leaven.” She patted her daughter’s
head.
“Sarah?” he growled, reminded of a fresh grievance. “Sarah
should have had a husband of her own. But with these idle sons of
mine, feasting and merrymaking while I saw and plane, I cannot
even save fifty zuzim for her dowry.”
Sarah blushed and hastened to pick up her urn and carry it back
to the fountain.
“Nay, but we have tarried at Kephar Nahum,” said Yakob
defensively, as he disappeared.
The carpenter turned on his wife, his eyes blazing almost like his
beard. His hammer struck the table in the garden, denting it. “’Twas
to see thy loveling thou leftest home!”
The little mother went red and white by turns. “As my soul liveth,
Yussef, I knew not he would be at the wedding.”
“He was at the wedding?” he asked, softened by his surprise.
“Ay, he and his disciples.”
“Disciples!” The carpenter sniffed wrathfully. “A pack of fishers
and women, and that yellow-veiled Miriam from Magdala.”
“The Magdala woman was not there!” she murmured, with
lowered eyes.
“She knew thy kinsman would not suffer her pollution. Ah,
Miriam, what a son thou hast brought into the world!”
 Her eyes filled with tears. “Thou must not pay such heed to the
Sanhedrim messengers. In their circuit to announce the time of the
New Moon they gather up all the evil rumours of Galila. This
Magdala woman is repentant; her seven devils are cast out.”
“Miriam defends Miriam,” he said sarcastically. “But thou canst
not say I trained him not up in the way he should go. Learning could
we not afford to give him, but did not thine own brother, Jehoshuah
ben Perachyah, teach him Torah, and did I not teach him his trade?
His ploughs and yokes were the best in all Galila.”
“And now his followers say his homilies are the best,” urged the
poor mother.
“Homilies?” he roared. “Blasphemies! But were his Midraschim
Holy Writ itself, I agree with Ben Sameos (his memory for a
blessing!) greater is the merit of industry than of idle piety.”
“But why should he work?” cried Yakob, who with Yehudah now
reappeared from the stable. “Would that the wife of Herod’s steward
followed me!”
“Or even that Susannah ministered to us with her substance!”
added Yehudah. “Then I too would teach, take no thought for the
morrow!” And he laughed derisively.
“He never took thought for anything save himself,” said Yussef,
shaking his head. “Dost thou not remember, Miriam, those three
dreadful days when he was lost, as we were returning from his Bar-
Mitzvah in Yerushalaim! God of Abraham, shall I ever forget thy
heart-sickness! And what was it he answered when we at length
found him in the Temple with the doctors? He was about his father’s
business! He was assuredly not about my business.”
“The Sabbath and Passover are drawing nigh,” she murmured,
and slipped past her sons into the house.
“And what did he answer thee at Kephar Nahum?” her husband
called after her. “ ‘Who is my mother?’ The godless scoffer! The
Jeroboam ben Nebat! I thank the Lord I did not try to bring him
back home. He might have asked, ‘Who is my father?’ ”
There was no reply, but I heard the nervous bustling of a broom.
The carpenter turned to Yakob.
“And what said he at Cana?”
 “He demanded wine, he and his disciples!”
“Methought he was an Ebionite or an Essene!”
“Nay, as thou saidst, Yeshua was ever a law unto himself. But
there was no wine.”
“No wine?” cried Yussef. “So great a wedding company and no
wine? Methought the Chosan was rich enough to plant wine-booths
all the way from Cana to Nazara, like the Parnass of Sepphoris, and
had as many gold and silver vessels as the priests in the Temple.”
“True, my father, but Yeshua had brought with him that vile tax-
farmer Levi, who grinds the faces both of rich and poor, and, seeing
the spying publican, the bridegroom straightway bade the servants
hide the precious flagons and goblets, lest more taxes be squeezed
out for the Romans.”
Yussef grinned knowingly. “And so poor Yeshua must go athirst.”
“Nay, but hear. When he clamoured for wine the servants wist
not what to do, and my mother said gently to him, ‘They have no
wine.’ But Yeshua turned upon her like a lion of Mount Yehudah
upon a lamb, and he roared, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?
My hour is not yet come to be a Nazarite.’ ”
The carpenter chuckled. “Now she will know to stay at home.
‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ ” he repeated with unction.
“Howbeit, my mother feared that his demon again possessed
him, and she besought the servants to do whatsoever he said unto
them. But they still held back. Then Yeshua, understanding what it
was they feared, said, ‘Bring the water-pots.’ So they went out and
brought the earthen pots wherewith we had washed our hands for
the meal—albeit Yeshua would not wash his—and lo! they were full
of wine.”
The carpenter repeated his knowing grin. “And Levi the publican
—what said he?”
“He was the first to cry ‘A miracle!’ ” laughed Yakob, “and
Shimeon-bar-Yonah held up his hands and cried, ‘Master of the
Universe! Now is Thy glory manifest!’ ”
Yussef joined in his son’s laugh. “Is not Shimeon the lake
fisherman?”
“Yea, my father; him whom Yeshua calls the Rock.”
 “The Rock, in sooth!” broke in fiery young Yehudah. “Say rather,
the Shifting Sand. It was from Shimeon I learned to be a Zealot, and
now this recreant Maccabæan is bosom friend of Roman tax-
gatherers and babbles of the keys of Heaven.”
“Babble not thyself, little one,” the father rebuked him. He turned
to Yakob. “And what said Yeshua after the wine?”
“When he beheld his disciples had drunk new faith in him, he too
was flown, and prophesied darkly that he would appear on the right
hand of power, with clouds of glory and twelve legions of angels,
whereat my mother feared that his madness was come upon him as
of yore, and she made us follow in his train as far as his lodging in
Kephar Nahum. And we spake privily to Yudas that he should watch
over him till his unclean spirit was exorcised.”
“Yudas!” cried Yussef. “What doth an honest Israelite like Yudas
in such company? But did I not foretell what would come of all these
baptizings of Rabbi Jochanan, all these new foolish sects with their
white garments and paddles and ablutions? Canaan is full of
wandering madmen. The Torah I had from my father, Eli—peace be
upon him!—is holy enough for me, and may God forgive me that I
have not gone up to kill the Paschal lamb.”
Yakob lowered his voice. “Thou wouldst have met the madman.”
“What! Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim?”
“Sh! My mother knoweth naught. We spake him secretly as
though converted, saying, ‘Lo! we have seen this day how thou
workest miracles. But if thou do these things, show thyself to the
world. Depart hence and go into Yudæa, that men may see the
works that thou doest.’ For there is no man that doeth anything in
secret, and he himself seeketh to be known openly. So he is gone up
to Yerushalaim!”
The malicious glee on Yakob’s face was reflected in his father’s.
“Now shall the mocker be mocked! Even thy learned uncle, Ben
Perachyah, they scoff at for his accent, nor will they let him read the
prayers. How much less, then, will they listen to Yeshua!”
“And the Pharisees hate him,” said Yakob, “because he hath
called them vipers, and the Shammaites for profaning the Sabbath;
even the Essenes for not washing his hands before meals.”
 “And all the Zealots hold him a traitor!” cried Yehudah with
flashing eyes.
“Nor will the Sadducees or the Bœthusians listen to a carpenter’s
son,” added Yakob laughingly.
“Shame on thee, Yakob, for fouling thine own well!” And Sarah,
returning with her pitcher on her shoulder, went angrily within.
Yakob grew red. “And dost thou think the nobles of Yerushalaim
who eat off gold and silver will follow him like fishers?” he called
after her. “Say they not already, ‘Can anything good come out of
Nazara?’ ”
“Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim?” The little mother had dashed to
the door, her eyes wide with terror. The urn she had just taken from
her daughter fell from her trembling hand and shattered itself on the
rocky doorstep, splashing husband and son.
“Woman!” cried the carpenter angrily, “have more care of my
substance!”
“Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim!” she repeated frenziedly.
“Ay, like a good son of Israel. He hath gone up for the Paschal
sacrifice. Mayhap,” he added with his chuckle, “he will do wonders
with the blood of the lamb. Come, Miriam, let us change our
garments and anoint ourselves for the festival.”
He pushed the woman gently within the room, but she stood
there as one turned into a pillar of salt, and with an Eastern shrug
he went in.
Presently Sarah came and wiped the steps with a clout and
gathered up the shards, and then, with a new pitcher on her
shoulder, she bent her steps towards the fountain.
I skirted round to meet her on her return, not a little to her
amazement; but this time she surrendered her burden to my
entreaty, though the ungainly manner in which I poised the pitcher
lightened her clouded brow with inner laughter.
“This wandering brother of thine,” I ventured to ask at length,
“dost thou think harm will befall him in Yerushalaim?”
Her brow puckered thoughtfully. “Perchance these strangers will
believe on him, not knowing as we do that he hath a demon. Yeshua
was wroth with us when he came, crying out that a man’s foes are
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