Part 23
Just as we were on the point of leaving, the commandant appeared, shook us warmly by the hand and prepared to take us over the fort. Like the military governor and his wife, he beamed with the interest of something new; the cordiality of all was perfect, but nothing, nothing, could hurry them. We explained that we had come to see the church alone, that our time unfortunately was limited, and we must now leave to catch the train for Poblet. He took a disappointed and bewildered farewell; up on his citadel in the land of pause and leisure such new-world notions of speed were disconcerting. With a hasty look at the noblest early-pointed church in Europe, a grateful handshake to the colonel, we hurried down the precipitous hill and jumped on the train just as it was moving out, our valises being flung in to us desperately at the final moment.
Soon the broken, fertile hills of the province of Catalonia closed in around us, and the country grew so charming that we were glad to have planned to pass a night near Poblet. From the train we saw the prominent brown mass of the monastery buildings, but, of course, we ran on some miles before stopping in a station. There we found a Catalan cart, two-wheeled with a barrel vaulted awning, and drove to the primitive hotel at Espluga. The landlord offered us his cart to drive out to Poblet, two miles away, but the bumps and ruts of the road from the station made us prefer to walk. The ill-kept roads and the not wholly cultivated fields told clearly that the industrial monks were no longer masters of the valley.
Poblet stood for monastic pride, only nobles entered as monks, the mitered abbot was a count-palatine and ruled the peasantry as their feudal lord; the revenues were enormous, but as Benedictines are invariably cultivated men, they were spent on ancient manuscripts, and in the ceaseless energy of building. When the mob came from the neighboring towns in 1835 to sack the convent, they shattered the very treasure they sought. In their blind ignorance they did not know that chiseled alabaster, wrought doors and windows, and carven cloisters, represented the hidden gold they were seeking. This uprising in Spain against the monasteries, the "_pecado de sangre_," was a political more than a religious affair; in the first Carlist war, the countryside here was Constitutional, while the monks of Poblet were firm for the Pretender Don Carlos. The havoc the mob wrought is heart-rending; and yet though empty and partly destroyed, Poblet is still one of the finest things in the Peninsula.
On our way out to it we happened to take a wrong turning, which fortunately led us to encircle the walled-in mass of buildings before entering, and gave us some idea of their great extent. It was a veritable town; there were hospices for visitors, hospitals, a king's palace, an abbot's palace, a village of workshops for the artisans, since in every age the monks had been builders. Every style was represented, each stage of Romanesque and Gothic; Poblet is indeed to-day one of the best places in Europe to study architecture, and the guardian told us that students from every country flock here in the summer time. Artists too are a familiar sight sketching the beautiful vistas, the arched library, the pillared _sala capitular_ where effigies of the abbots lie so haughtily that one can almost understand the fury of the rabble, the imposing length and strength of the novices' dormitory where swallows now flit, the pure early Gothic of King Martin's palace, the odd little _glorieta_ of the chief cloister. Pleasant quarters can be found in the caretaker's house, which is more convenient than living at Espluga down the valley. We wandered for hours through courtyards and cloisters that show the subtly simple proportions of Catalan art. The church of the monastery was built during that rare moment when Romanesque turned to pointed work; it is very narrow and severe and impressive. The once superb alabaster _retablo_ is mutilated, and the tombs of the Aragonese kings are scattered. The bones of Jaime _el Conquistador_ are now in Tarragona Cathedral. Poblet served as the Escorial of the rulers of Aragon and Catalonia, and is many times more worth visiting than Philip II's rigid pile in Castile. I strongly urge everyone who goes to Spain to turn aside from the beaten path to see this unrivaled Cistercian monastery, which it is no exaggeration to say is one of the most artistic groups of buildings in the world. The evening of our visit the sunset glorified the pretty rural valley whose brooks bounded merrily down the hillside. "Laugh of the mountain, lyre of bird and tree," Lope de Vega calls the gurgling, clear waters.
We took a long hour to loiter back to Espluga, accompanied by a racy old character, Sabina, and her tourist donkey. The peasants returning from cutting wood up in the mountains above us gave a new greeting, "_Santas Noches_," reminiscent, no doubt, of the former masters of the valley.
Then the following day we took the train south of Tarragona, to the "Little Rome" that is the reputed birthplace of Pontius Pilate, of which Martial sang, and where Augustus Cæsar wintered. The landscape was a delight, showing the most unrivaled cultivation of soil I have ever seen, flowering orchards, fields of wheat and poppies, the very vineyards that Pliny has described; the sensation of the earth's lavish bounty, of the fecundity of the sun and the intoxication of growing things was overwhelming. And a week before we had been freezing in Sigüenza!
On the train was an amusing company. Some dozen people came to one of the stations en route to escort an alert, keen-eyed little bishop, who mounted nimbly among us. Everyone bent to kiss his episcopal ring, and even when some shrewd business men entered the carriage later, and saw that a bishop was its occupant, they too knelt to kiss his hand in salutation, republican Catalans though they were. I could not take my eyes off the delightful little prelate, so happily unconscious of his purple satin skull cap with its St. Patrick's green rosette on top, and his equally vivid green woolen gloves. Then when we reached Tarragona, down he stepped briskly, and instead of entering an episcopal carriage as we expected, he got into a public diligence and drove off like a true democratic Spaniard.
The Mediterranean at Tarragona was brilliantly, startlingly blue. As it burst on us in its sun dazzling wonder it seemed as if the bleak high table-land of the country behind was a nightmare of the imagination. Surely a whole continent must separate such luxury and such aridness.
We wandered about the white, glaring city, glad to bask in warm sun and drink in the salt air, happy too to be back again by the inland sea that has known the great nations of the earth, to be part again of the marvelous belt of ancient civilization that encircles its blue water. Tarragona was surrounded by cyclopean walls, the huge boulders of Rome below, and the smaller mediæval stones above. The blinding sun made the Cathedral so dark that it was long before we could see our way about. It is solemn and very earnest, with a fortress-like apse, and with cloisters the most perfect in the country. The doorways and capitols are so curiously carved that they merit detail study. The Roman urns, a Moorish prayer niche, and so on, down through the centuries, showed again how clearly architecture in Spain tells her history. The chief _retablo_ is of extreme beauty, with large statues and smaller scenes combined harmoniously; in it the restraint that distinguishes the Catalan school is very apparent.
On leaving Tarragona, the railway followed the coast for some time, then to our disappointment branched inland to loop round to Barcelona. When we realized that we could have taken the line that runs the whole way by the sea, we were annoyed at our mistake, though later we were grateful to it, for the inland route gave a noble view of Montserrat, that astonishing serrated ridge of gray rock, a cragged comb of stone, geologically a puzzle of formation, which abruptly rises out of the plain. For an hour the train drew nearer and nearer to it, so we got an admirable view. Our proposed ascent of the mountain was never to take place, and this was to be our only glimpse of the shrine to which thousands of pilgrims flock each year, where St. Ignatius Loyola sought counsel and made his vigil of the armor. When Barcelona was reached the illness which had been fastening itself closer since the unfortunate drive to Alcántara declared itself unmistakably, and many proposed excursions, such as Montserrat, Manresa, Ripoll, with its unique portal, had to be foregone. To leave a country with some of its best things unvisited is an open invitation to return,--which theory may be good philosophy, but is not wholly adequate in stifling regrets.
BARCELONA
"He who loves not, lives not."
RAMÓN LULL.
"Solemn the lift of high-embowered roof, The clustered stems that spread in boughs disleaved, Through which the organ blew a dream of storm That shut the heart up in tranquillity."
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
I wonder if, to the reader, when hearing the name Barcelona there rises one sovereign picture,--Isabella and Ferdinand's reception of Columbus on his return from the New World. It may have been some print seen in childhood that impressed itself indelibly on my imagination, but always with the name Barcelona I seemed to see _los Reyes Católicos_ seated on their throne listening to the man whose genius was so well bodied forth in his face and bearing. Around stood gentle-eyed natives of the Antilles, with their ornaments of pearls and gold, lures that were to rouse the rapacity which exterminated those Arcadian peoples, and to break the heart of their great discoverer. Heart-break and defeat lay in the future, this was an hour of enthusiastic hope. When Columbus had finished his peroration, the Queen and the court fell on their knees in a spontaneous burst of exaltation, and together intoned that king's hymn of victory, the _Te Deum_.
It was the unknown Barcelona that called up this scene of Spain's heroic hour; the city as it is to-day has blurred and dimmed the picture. There is a striking statue of Columbus on a column that faces the harbor, but it is not of him nor of his patrons that you think here. The Castle of Segovia, the walls of Avila or Toledo, the Alhambra hill, Seville's Alcázar, these are romantic spots that make
"the high past appear Affably real and near, For all its grandiose air caught from the mien of kings";
but I defy the imaginative lover of old times to call up the romantic in the modern capital of Catalonia; seething with industrial life, with revolutionary new ideas, she is too aggressive and prosperous for sentimental regrets.
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 mediæval 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 space 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 space 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 Señor 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 clustered 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 sex 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 municipal institutions 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 institutions: "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] passed, when we were sure of intelligent help.
[Illustration: 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 María del Pino and Santa María 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 passer 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 glass, 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 classed with the improvident, brutally repudiates most of the _cosas de España_; 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 Mass, 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. Masses 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."