Barcelona"s position as an industrial force cannot be called unexpected.
She has ever been in the stir of big events, Italy"s rival in commerce through the Middle Ages, when she served as the port of entry and exit for the armies and fleets. In all times she has enjoyed a climate that may well be the despair of commercial cities of the north; the summer heats are tempered by sea-breezes, the winters are warmer than at Naples. Hearing reports of roses in bloom there in January, we had dreaded the heat of a May in the city, but during the five weeks of our stay, the bracing spring air was like that of New England. Her natural setting, too, is good; the harbor guarded by the lofty fort of Monjuich, while behind stretch mountains which lay far from the mediaeval town, but to-day, when Barcelona covers an area twelve times as large, they are immediate suburbs and their names are familiar signs on the tramcars.
The province of Catalonia is perhaps the most individual of the thirteen strikingly different provinces of the Peninsula. The Catalan is more Spanish than French certainly, but he is always more Catalan than Spanish. Independent, self-interested, intractable, strong-headed as an Aragonese, industrious, successful, in him is found slight trace of the hidalgo of Castile. It is hard to believe that this hive of born business men is in a land whose ideal of happiness is to do nothing. The idleness, the high-bred courtesy of the Castilian, are as unfamiliar here as in the Stock Exchange of New York; indeed Barcelona, with her streets filled with well-dressed, briskly-moving crowds, each intent on his own business, is more allied to the new world than to the old.
Adieu, indeed, to the toga-like capes, to mantillas, to midnight serenades. A Catalan has no time to waste chatting by alluring _rejas_.
Catalonia has been called the Lancashire of Spain, and Barcelona its Manchester. If the comparison is fit in regard to commercial success, it is inappropriate in one respect, for, built by a Latin race, to whom is natural a sense of beauty, Barcelona, though as keen after money as the English town, has cared better for her interests. The sunlight is not darkened by the miles of factory chimneys that so oppress the heart in the black country. There are hundreds of belching chimneys, but they are kept out of sight in the valleys behind, where each factory stands isolated in the fields, often in a planted enclosure: this leaves the city proper free of traffic, smoke, and the whirr of machinery. The gay Rambla is edged with shops, and handsome apartment houses line the tree-planted avenues. Few towns have the force of will and continued patience to build themselves symmetrically; they are generally the result of hap-hazard, and only when too late the possibility of some river or sea front is discerned. Barcelona realized some fifty years ago that she was to be one of the conglomerations that modern cities tend to become, so she called on her engineers for plans, and from one of those submitted she chose an able design; _Ensanche_, extension, is the name for the new districts. Of course if a whole city consisted of these wide, regular streets, it would be monotonous, but here was already enough of narrow-lane picturesqueness to satisfy the artist. The walls that encircle the congested older town were pulled down, the opened s.p.a.ce was turned into an esplanade, and radiating from this nucleus, streets two hundred feet wide were laid and were immediately planted with double rows of plane trees. To-day the vistas down these far-stretching avenues, the sunlight filtering through the leaves on groups of nurses and children, the rapidly-moving crowds, the smart two-wheeled Catalan carts, the whirling automobiles, give the city an air of joyous prosperity. Behind the big apartment houses, the law requires a planted s.p.a.ce to be kept open, so that people of very mediocre income live in houses and in districts that only the rich of other towns can command.
The material success of the people has found an outlet in their architecture: Poblet, school for the builder, is not far away. Since some of the houses were put up during the exaggerated phase of _l"art nouveau_, they are overloaded with whirling ornament, quite as bad as Karlsruhe, but the majority are in dignified good taste: take, for instance, the new University buildings, or that brown stone block near the beginning of the beautiful Paseo Garcia, Nos. 2 and 4, if I remember rightly. The sculptors too have inherited the skill of the early masters of Catalonia. Most of the modern churches (not Senor Gaudi"s curious experiment, the Church of the Holy Family!) are built consistently in one style, the walls carved _in situ_ as in old times; the effect is such that one prays the days of painted plaster may never return. It was good to notice, too, that the new churches discarded the tinsel-decked altars of the eighteenth century, the bane of Peninsula shrines.
Barcelona builds as a rule in the Catalan manner; the early architects of the province, though influenced by Lombard and French masters, may be said to have achieved a national style. It is worthy of enthusiasm with its singular purity of line, a proportion that is hardly Spanish. Like Chartres, it has "the distinguished slenderness of an eternal adolescence." In nothing is it akin to Isabella"s efflorescent Plateresque-Gothic. Its cl.u.s.tered piers, and arches carried high aloft, have been used as successfully in civil as in religious architecture, witness the Lonja, or Exchange.
The new town, with its prosperous homes and shady avenues, tended to make us overlook old Barcelona, yet we only had to step aside from the thronged Rambla and we found ourselves in dark, narrow streets, that at dusk especially made us shiver with apprehension. Forcibly they warned us that this was one of the most turbulent cities in Europe, where lawless socialists gather and plot, where some recent bomb-throwing outrages were the reason for groups of the _Guardias Civiles_ on every corner. The red _gorro_, the Phrygian cap worn by the city porters, seemed too realistic when met in dark lanes, where the men pushed rudely by, your s.e.x here no prerogative. With Philistine relief we used to return to the sanitary, orderly avenues of the _Ensanche_, patrolled by placid policemen in crimson broadcloth coats. A word of praise must be given to some of the munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions of Barcelona, such as the corps of city porters, each with a small district in which to render help. The _hospicio_, or work-house, is considered one of the best organized in Europe. As long ago as 1786 an English traveler, the Rev.
Joseph Townsend, wrote of another of Barcelona"s inst.i.tutions: "No hospital that I have seen upon the continent is so well administered as the general hospital of this city. It is peculiar in its attention to convalescents, for whom a separate habitation is provided, that after they are dismissed from the sick wards they may have time to recover their strength." Also her excellent city police are worthy of praise.
The rest of Spain could emulate them, for it was our experience that the local police were an incompetent set; we soon learned never to apply to them in case of difficulty, but to wait till an alert Civil Guard[37]
pa.s.sed, when we were sure of intelligent help.
[Ill.u.s.tration: CLOISTERS OF SAN PABLO DEL CAMPO, BARCELONA]
It is the old town, congested and gloomy though it is, that, set side by side with the new, makes Barcelona unique. There are to be found primitive churches, such as Santa Ana, or San Pablo del Campo,[38] once, like St. Martin-in-the-Fields, placed among meadows; dim old churches similar in design, Byzantine cross form with a low dome over the center and with cloisters that make solemn oases of repose in the busy city. A later period built churches whose somber walls tower high above the crowded houses; such are Santa Maria del Pino and Santa Maria del Mar, characterized by wide hall-like naves. In the width of their nave lay the triumph of the Catalan masters. It was in the last named church that a pious woman of the town noticed one day a gray, emaciated man resting, among a group of children, on the steps of the altar, in his face a light of convincing holiness. Fresh from the spiritual battle in the Cave of Manresa, a grand self-mastery the reward of his struggle, no wonder the face of Ignatius compelled the reverence of the pa.s.ser by.
The Cathedral of Barcelona is a typically Catalan-Gothic church. For an _eglesia mayor_ it is small, but so true are its proportions and so skillfully is it lighted that it gives the effect of grandeur. As the clearstory windows are mere circles, on first entering one is in complete darkness, but gradually out of the gloom looms that loveliest feature of the building, the chancel, lighted by rare old gla.s.s, with slender piers and lofty stilted arches rising from pavement to vaulting in an unforgettable beauty of symmetry. The _retablo_ of the High Altar is in character, articulate and graceful, unlike the usual, overladen reredos of Spain. Incense, prayer, soaring aspiration, the symbolization of this presbytery is a perfect thing: again vividly came the conviction that temples such as these have had and ever will have a vital influence on a race.
Barcelona may be a shrewd commercial center, that in its material pride, in order not to be cla.s.sed with the improvident, brutally repudiates most of the _cosas de Espana_; she may print books whose every word is an insult to government and religion; she is still deeply Spanish in the earnest piety of the larger proportion of her citizens. A Catalan may tell you, especially if you belong to a northern race and a different creed, that what you see is all form, lip-religion, that the men here, like intelligent men the world over, are free-thinkers. It is an easy matter for the prejudiced visitor to get all his misconceptions confirmed by a native, no one is more bitter in abuse of his country than a Catalan. Fortunately, one has one"s own eyes wherewith to see.
But first I must quote from a recent letter to the _London Times_ from the Rev. James R. Youlden, in answer to a pessimist on the religious condition of Spain:
"In the city of Barcelona, the largest, most modern and most industrial of Spanish cities, the good attendance at Ma.s.s, not only of women and children but of the men, is most remarkable, as is also the number of communicants. I have myself often given Holy Communion on a Sunday morning in the church of San Pedro to such large numbers, fully one-third of them men, that my arms have ached in conveying the sacred particles. Ma.s.ses are celebrated every hour, and in some churches every half hour from 5 A.M. to 12 midday in all the twenty-four parish churches of the city (to say nothing of numerous convent chapels) in the presence of large and often crowded congregations. A visit to the church at any time from 8 till 12 on any Sunday morning would dispel some of the illusions of your Madrid correspondent."
A good test of the sincerity of religious conviction is what it costs the purse; new churches, like those of Barcelona, are not built by lip-religion. I spent several Sunday mornings sitting on one of the side benches of the Cathedral, learning that the Catalan, disunited from his mother land on many points, is ineradicably national in his creed. This was Spain, with the grave reverence of the smallest child, where the church is a loved home, a frequented refuge for meditation and strengthening prayer. Now a handsome and satisfied matron enters, followed by five or six children, the boys dressed as English sailors, little Battenbergs, the girls with hats like flower gardens; they cl.u.s.ter round their mother at the door, and she pa.s.ses each the blessed water with which to sign themselves. Behind this group come some alert young artisans; each instantly drops on both knees to make his salutation to the Altar--lip-religion does not care to disarray its Sunday suit like this--and each blesses himself in the swift national way, with the final carrying to the lips of the thumb and first finger crossed, a symbol of fidelity to his faith. May this custom never die out in Spain! From the first hour of her eight hundred years" crusade, from Cavadonga to Granada, her religion has been her glory, interwoven with her nationality, like that of the Jews of old, and if she understands her enduring interests, this Christian faith to which she has clung so loyally will be her aspiration in the future. When her men pa.s.s the High Altar without salute, when the street children cease to run in daily to kneel before a shrine, throwing their scanty skirts over their heads if a handkerchief is lacking, when politics and religion are synonymous, that day Spain may be called degenerate, but not now, while lamps of sincere conviction burn before her altars.
Ascension Thursday fell on a perfect day in late May, the warm sunshine tempered by a sea breeze; everyone was out gallantly in new summer suits. The houses were hung with the national flag, but the fairest decoration of the city were the hundreds of First Communicants who thronged the streets, accompanied by proud mothers and relatives. Each little girl in her quaint, long, white skirt, tulle veil and wreath of flowers, carried a new pearl chaplet or prayer book, and each boy wore a bow of white satin on his left arm. Few things are more appealing than an innocent-eyed child on this solemn day, and in after years, for those who have known such hours of purity, few memories are more indelible. As I pa.s.sed through the old city, its dark streets lightened by these groups, I could not help exclaiming, "Why, when she can present a scene of such loveliness and hope, must Barcelona so blindly envy her neighbor across the Pyrenees!" Not long after leaving Spain, I stopped in a village in the mountains of Dauphiny, half Catholic, half Huguenot. Both churches were practically empty. The children of the town, except those of a few stanch families, walked in a public procession to honor the mayor, behind a banner bearing the inscription, "Ni Dieu, ni maitre."
One cannot deny there are many in Barcelona whose aspiration would be satisfied with a similar procession in her streets, but the majority still prefer an Ascension Thursday of First Communicants.
Before the west door of the Cathedral are remains of ancient houses which, like Italy, bear the signs of guilds, for this city always differed from the rest of Spain in looking on trade as an honorable career. A street behind the Cathedral leads to other specimens of domestic architecture. Be sure not to be discouraged by the cold Herrara front of the House of the Deputation. It masks a Gothic building which, if properly restored, as well as the Casa Consistorial, or Town Hall, which stands opposite to it, would make of this formal plaza one of the most interesting squares in Europe. The city"s renewed pride in the Gothic of its province, her skillful architects, her wealth, should tempt her to the task. Be sure to go into both these buildings. In the Town Hall are some lovely _ajimez_ windows that show the restraint of the Catalan style: they attenuated the features as far as strength would allow, but they knew just where to stop. The result is grace, lightness, a subtle something of proportion. In the Deputation House hangs the Catalan painter Fortuny"s "Battle of Tetuan," unfinished, with a dashing rainbow-hued charge of hors.e.m.e.n that stirs the memory of Spain"s grand forays into Africa.
In exploring Barcelona one notices unfamiliar names on the shops, here are no longer Alvarez, Gonzalez, Perez, Garcia, but strange Catalan names, such as Bosch, Cla, Puig, Catafalch, Llordachs, Petz. On every side, in shops, in the tramcars, one hears the dialect spoken, rather rough sounding and wholly unintelligible to the traveler who knows only Castilian. In no other of Spain"s provinces is so much made of local differences. The names of the streets are written twice on the street corners, in Catalan and in Castilian, a ridiculous arrangement, for in these proper names the differences are slight; as _Calle de Cortes_, and _Correr de les Corts_. To appease his thirst for self-a.s.sertion, the practical Catalan has marked his streets in a less adequate way than the rest of the Peninsula he looks down on: the clearness of the street directions, each tile generally holding one bold letter, had been a satisfaction all over Spain. This brings me into hot water at once, the vexed ever palpitating Catalan question. Is this province, Spain"s richest and most progressive, to continue under the Spanish crown, to ally herself with France, or to be independent? She tells us in anger, she pays more than her share of the taxes, that she is an isolated commercial and industrial force in a nation that is preeminently agricultural, whose laws are made to foster the farmer at the expense of the trader: the loss of the colonies was an advantage for the rest of the country whose crying need is population, but for Barcelona it was a severe blow. Spain has hard problems to solve, with thirteen inhabitants to the square mile in some provinces and one hundred and eight to the mile here in Catalonia.
Books of open sedition are freely published, one picks them up in the waiting-room of a doctor"s office, in the bank, on the stalls. This is no new phase. From early times Catalonia has only considered her own interests, now joining with France against Spain, now changing sides, as she thought to benefit herself; for her the nation is a secondary consideration. History proves she has been ineradicably selfish; hence her success, a sophist may say, but there is something higher than self-aggrandizement, the success of giving her strength to reforming the abuses she proclaims. No one denies there is crying need for political and financial reform at Madrid, though it is not to be brought about by such a book as Senor Pompeo Gener"s "Cosas de Espana," which but widens the breach. One discerns it in the ign.o.ble jealousy of the Castilian, which rankles in the Catalan mind; for instance in speaking of Castilian literature of the nineteenth century he stops short at Fernan Caballero and makes no mention of the distinguished modern novelists. A writer who holds up Herbert Spencer as the ne plus ultra of philosophy (Spanish free-thinkers are a generation behind in certain phases of thought) need not be taken too seriously, but the "Cosas de Espana"
voices what is serious.
"Ah Castillo Castillano! why have we ever known you!" exclaims the Catalan poet Briz, in his celebrated poem, "Cuatro pals de Sanch," the blazon of the province, its four red bars. "If to us remains only one of our four bars of blood, to you we owe the loss, thou kingdom of the castles and the hungry lions. But, O Castillo Castillano, alas for you, if you break our last _pals de sanch_!" This bitter spirit of revolt makes this grand old province that should be Spain"s bulwark, Spain"s weakness instead.
Would Catalonia gain by any of the changes she dreams of? Surely under the formalism of France, her self-willed independence would chafe and break loose, for independence is a characteristic of all Spaniards, in all ages, now and always; one cannot exaggerate it. Also the heart of the province is too deeply religious to live under the "Liberte" of her neighbor. In the United States religious liberty is little talked of, but is a solid fact, wherein the new world gives a needed lesson to the old, with its narrow horizons and petty disputes. In France, where this liberty is vaunted, it is a farce: no Catalan could long tolerate such freedom. Again, if this small state were independent, where would she stand? A thought that strikes one forcibly after a tour of the province, whose towns, Gerona, Lerida, Tarragona, are of mediocre importance.
Catalonia independent would be practically one city, Barcelona, whose trade the central government could cripple by prohibitory tariffs. Her pride would suffer more as one of the smallest, weakest states in Europe, than it now suffers under its lawful king, part of an old race that once led the world, and which if only this discontented daughter would generously help, has red blood enough to again play a prominent part. Spain needs just such help as the Catalan can give, she needs his grit, his industry, his progressiveness. Could he now bear the overweighted burden in a better spirit, before many years it would be lightened. The north is awakening to industrial life; Bilbao, Santander, Gijon, Coruna, Vigo, will soon be strong trading centers, and the older commercial city can gather supporters to work for fiscal autonomy, since the chief grievance is the centralized system of government in Madrid.
Let her agitate in a const.i.tutional way for a system like the separate state arrangement of our union. The opposition of two vigorous sides is a sign of life in a nation. Discussion means change and advancement. For full vigor both sides are needed, the conservative to serve as brake on the democrat"s too swiftly-turning wheels. An important cause of Spain"s decay,[39] according to Don Juan Valera, came from all cla.s.ses thinking the same way; drunk with pride on the ending of the centuries of crusade against their Moorish invader, with the discovery of a new continent the people lay back in slothful inertia, without the p.r.i.c.k of dispute to rouse them. Opposition and struggle are essential to vigor, but disloyalty saps a nation"s strength. Let them strike straight-front blows from the shoulder, for Madrid needs rousing, but let them not stab in the back. Often when wandering among the old tombs of Spain, those effigies of the grand-masters of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcantara, the plumed and helmeted knights of the n.o.ble brows, I recalled some ringing lines of Newbolt"s. Every boy of Barcelona should know them by heart, they are not so needed in Castile:
"To set the cause above renown, To love the game above the prize, To honour while you strike him down The foe that comes with fearless eyes.
To count the life of battle good, And dear the land that gave you birth, And dearer yet the brotherhood That binds the brave of all the earth."
Her intense local patriotism has a more sympathetic side than double-naming her streets and bearing a jealous grudge against her central government. This is the revival of her provincial literature.
The interest in dialects and folk lore is a tendency common to many countries to-day, but in Catalonia the movement is on a grand scale.
There newspapers and magazines in dialect are circulated, poems and novels are printed not for the literary alone but for the populace. Men of undeniable genius have written in the local tongue, one of the first to use it being that strangely interesting character of the thirteenth century, Ramon Lull, seneschal of Majorca, troubadour, mystic hermit, philosopher, missionary, and his final glory, martyr for the Faith; he is honored in the Church as _el beato_ Raimundo Lulio. By less than ten years he missed being the contemporary of the gentle a.s.sisian, the habit of whose tertiaries he wore; he wandered through Italy while Dante was writing his visions, in that wonderful century called dark, that can claim a Thomas Aquinas, a Bonaventura, an Abertus Magnus, an Elizabeth of Hungary, a Dominic, an Anthony of Padua, and that scattered over Europe such witnesses of its upleap of aspiration as Amiens, Chartres, Westminster, Salisbury, Cologne, Strasburg, Leon, Toledo, Siena.
Lull was born in the capital of the Balearic Islands, which lie a day"s sail from Barcelona, and having pa.s.sed an apprenticeship at court under Jaime _el Conquistador_ of Aragon, he led in Palma a life of pleasure and dissipation till his romantic conversion at thirty-two. Nunez de Arce has enshrined the legend in verse: so violent was the seneschal"s pursuit of a fair lady of the city that he once on horseback followed her into church to the scandal of the people. The poet gives the final scene that cured his pa.s.sion, when she who was so exquisite without, to repell his advances, exposed to him a hidden cancer. The shock changed the worldling to a saint. Distributing his goods to the poor, he retired to a mountain, and spent some years in prayer. Later in his energetic career he returned to this hermitage to pa.s.s again periods in meditation for his spiritual strengthening, being the first to show that special faculty of the Spanish mystic, the double life of solitary ecstasy and active charity. The desire to convert the Mohammedan took such possession of his soul that at forty he put himself to school, like the great Basque patron of a later day, and in Paris he studied logic and Arabic in preparation for his future career.
Lull attained fourscore years, the latter half of his life being dominated by his burning purpose to convert Islam. One pope after another as he mounted the chair of Peter was beseiged by this astonishing man, and he wandered from court to court urging the universities to teach the oriental languages, that missionaries for the East might be fittingly prepared. Little success crowned his efforts for popes and kings had troubles nearer home. The Catalan enthusiast came at an inopportune moment; the last two Crusades under St. Louis of France had left discouragement behind. However, before his death he had the satisfaction of seeing chairs of Hebrew and Arabic founded by a pope, by a French king, and in Spain and England. The indefatigable man visited Austria, Poland, and Greece; he advocated the protection of the Greeks against Moslem incursions, a result only achieved in our own day; he stopped in Cypress, traversed Armenia, Palestine, and Egypt, zealously expounding the Gospel. His first visit as an apostle to Northern Africa was a failure. There is something touching about this old missionary of six hundred years ago being driven out of Tunis--he and his loved library--and embarked with harsh orders never to return. Not in any spirit of patronage did he labor for the conversion of souls, but wiser than many to-day he carried with him true knowledge and respect for the Mohammedans. His liberal intelligence a.s.simulated much that was of value in their ideas, especially from those heretics of Islam, the Persian Sufis, or mystics.
A second time when over seventy Lull ventured across to Africa, and again he--and the books--were violently expelled. I fear our blessed Raimundo was a bit of a visionary, he thought to convince by intellectual debate. The king of England learning of the old scholar"s chemical studies, with the curiosity of the period in regard to the philosopher"s stone, invited him to London, and lodged him with the monks of Westminster Abbey. Chemistry was merely a side issue in the life of the great missionary. Just short of his eightieth year, with untiring courage and magnificent faith, he set forth once more on his final apostleship to the Mohammedan, and once more preached in Egypt, Jerusalem, and Tunis. At Bugia he was stoned by the furious populace, who left him for dead on the beach, and some Genoese merchants carried away his almost lifeless body. Before they reached the harbor of Palma the martyr had died, and his townsmen buried him with honors in the church of his master, St. Francis.
Lull"s books, the "Ars Magna" and the "Arbor Scientiae," are filled with the curious system he evolved for reducing discords. He tried to co-ordinate and facilitate the operations of the mind, to simplify all sciences by showing them to be branches of one trunk. Much of his theory may be fanciful and impractical, but it was a truly suggestive idea based on the profound truth of the unity of knowledge. He explored many branches of the human mind, and left works on medicine, theology, politics, jurisprudence, mathematics and chemistry. The accusation of alchemy is untenable, for he made his experiments in scientific good faith, and wrote against astrology. For three centuries, down to the time of Descartes, Lull was considered a leader of the intellect, and his books were recommended by the universities of Europe.
The Catalan dialect has been used by men of marked talent in our own time. The whole of Spain should be as proud of Padre Jacinto Verdaguer, as all France is of their Provencal, Mistral. Verdaguer"s "Atlantada,"
called the best epic of the century, was crowned in 1855 at the Floral Games, festivals which are held in Barcelona each year, for compet.i.tions in verse and prose, and to revive the national dances.
This intellectual movement rouses the stranger"s enthusiasm, and if it keeps itself dissociated from politics,--those abominable politics that sink every n.o.ble thing they fasten on, patriotism, education, religion, art,--the revival may prove more than a pa.s.sing phase. Alert in literature, in music, in the sciences, in munic.i.p.al progress, and commercial success, what need has this city to be jealous of the capital; they are too different for comparison. Madrid lacks much that Barcelona can claim; a Catalan could emulate some Castilian qualities.
Each vitally needs the other.
GERONA
AND FAREWELL TO SPAIN
"I count him wise Who loves so well man"s n.o.ble memories He needs must love man"s n.o.bler hopes yet more!"
WILLIAM WATSON.
"Una restauracion de la vida entera de Espana no puede tener otro punto de arranque que la concentracion de todas nuestras energias dentro de nuestro territorio. Hay que cerrar con cerrojos, llaves, y candados todas las puertas por donde el espiritu espanol se escapo de Espana para derrama.r.s.e por los cuatro puntos del horizonte, y por donde hoy espera que ha de venir la salvacion; y en cada una de esas puertas no pondremos un rotulo dantesco que diga: "Lasciate ogni speranza," sino este otro mas consolador, mas humano, muy profundamente humano, imitado de San Ajustin: "Noli foras ire; in interiore Hispaniae habitat veritas."
ANGEL GANIVET: "_Idearium Espanol_."
The day drew near for our leaving Spain. Eight months had pa.s.sed since we entered from the north of the Pyrenees isthmus, and now we found ourselves at its southern exit. They had been months filled with an absorbing and unexpected interest; we had come into Spain for a mere autumn tour, and she had forced us to linger. And I must repeat that I came with the average pessimistic idea that she was a spent and more or less worthless country, till what I saw about me daily changed me to a partisan. It was a hard farewell to take now. When Spain is allowed to show herself as she is, she wins a regard that is like an intense personal affection.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A STREET STAIRWAY, GERONA]
At dawn on the early day in June set for our departure we left Barcelona; before night we would be in France, but the leave-taking was to be broken by some hours in Gerona. As usual it was the fact of its possessing a first-rate church that determined us to stop. This was to be the last of the grand cathedrals which more than those of any land, even of France with their purer art, had realized my ideal of worship and reverence. As Gerona was in Catalonia, good architecture was to be expected, but this was better than good. The Cathedral which dominates the town was worthy of its stirring memories. An imposing flight of eighty steps, like that of the Ara C[oe]li in Rome, ascends to its west portal. At the head of this staircase we paused to look out on the panorama of the Pyrenees--mountain rose behind mountain, the foreground hills well-wooded, those beyond covered with snow. Here was no stupid Escorial facing in to a blank wall. The old masters with vivifying imaginations had brought the glories of nature to worship with them, had hung as it were in their porch, this lovely landscape.
Within the Cathedral the first impression is its s.p.a.ciousness. The width is astonishing; indeed the hall-like nave of Gerona is the widest Gothic vault in Christendom, and were it longer by two bays, no cathedral of Europe could have surpa.s.sed the effect. The wide nave of Catalan churches is a national feature that here reaches its acme. The choir of Gerona is on a smaller scale, and the meeting of the two makes a curious feature, not bad inside, but in the exterior view extremely ugly.
Probably in time the choir would have been enlarged to fit its monstrous nave. The men in those days started undertakings as if they could never die, but later generations have lacked their enthusiastic ambition.
By happy chance we were in time to a.s.sist at a last High Ma.s.s in a Spanish cathedral. It is no exaggeration to say one"s heart felt heavy in listening to the solemn chanting, watching the reverence of priests, acolytes, and congregation, to realize that this was for the last time.
The last time we should see the kiss of peace carried symbolically from the priest at the altar to the canons in the choir, the last time we should hear the clamor of the wheel of bells. I looked up to where they hung on the wall and nodded them a little personal farewell, so often had they charmed me. Farewell to sedate Spanish piety, to the devotional unconsciousness of individual prayer. Over the frontier, during the coming summer at Luchon, I was soon to hear wooden signals clapped during Ma.s.s to guide the wandering attention of the people, to see the children scamper out in obvious relief.
The chancel of Gerona is a gem. The iron _reja_ that shuts in the _capilla mayor_ is of the plainest, like a wall of stacked spears guarding the holy of holies. There is no towering _retablo_, which would be out of character with slender Catalan piers; instead, behind the altar is a marvelous reredos of silver carved in scenes, and surmounted by three Byzantine processional crosses,--all ancient and priceless enough to be the treasure of a national museum. The altar and the canopy over it are also of silver, _retablo_ and altar being placed where they now stand in 1346. The effect of iron _reja_ and precious shrine is faultlessly artistic; we sigh here for a beauty as completely lost for our copying as is the tranquil perfection of these gravestones, the sculptured stelae of Athens.
The service over, we proceeded to examine the church. The cloisters are oddly irregular in shape, and look out on the snow-topped Pyrenees. So beautiful was the prospect that I added this cloister setting to the dream-cathedral Spain tempts one to build. It would have the cloisters of Tarragona with this outlook of Gerona"s; also Gerona"s altar and _retablo_, though the reredos of Avila and that of Tarragona are worthy rivals. There would be the grand staircase of this Cathedral, and it would ascend to a western portal like Leon"s, with Santiago"s _Portico de la Gloria_ within; the north and south doors would be Plateresque from Salamanca and Valladolid. The cathedral would be set on Lerida"s crag, with the city of Toledo climbing to it and the Tagus churning below. The nave would be Seville"s, and Seville"s windows would light it and her organ thunder there. The choir would be Toledo"s, carved by Rodrigo, Berruguete, and Vigarni, the chancel Barcelona"s stilted arches. How they could be combined is hard to solve, but round this _capilla mayor_ would run the double ambulatory of Toledo, and the apse outside have Leon"s flying b.u.t.tresses,--the apse which the old mystics held as symbolic of the crown of thorns about the head of Christ (the Altar). _Rejas_ from Burgos, Granada, Seville, would guard the chapels, and tombs of knights and bishops from Siguenza, from Zamora--from every town of Spain in fact--would line the walls: tapestries and treasures from Saragossa; a _via crucis_ by Hernandez and portrait statues by Montanes; a sacristy like that of Avila; a _sala capitular_ copied from the Renaissance grace of San Benito in Alcantara; and a wealth of side chapels,--a Condestable chapel, a San Isidoro, a Camera Santa, a San Millan, a Santa Maria la Blanca, and an isolated shrine like Palencia"s, standing in the ambulatory. And always beneath the vault of this cathedral would be found far-off little Lugo"s solemn adoration, and there would be processions as imposing as Andalusia, with the piety of Estremadura, or the Basque. The Giralda, built in the warm red stone of Astorga tower, would stand close by, and not far away, a monastery, line for line, like Poblet. Sitting in a Spanish cloister looking out on the Pyrenees, one drifts into dream-pictures of the ideal cathedral.
Gerona has a few other churches worth examining, that of San Feliu, with two Roman sarcophagi and several early Christian ones with wave-like lines. We rambled about the plaza where a fair was in progress, and at every turning kept bidding farewell to familiar scenes of Spanish life; we were not again to hear the peace-bringing "_Vaya Usted con Dios!_"
not again to a.s.sent to the cordial "_Hasta luego!_"