Part 10

The next day was market-day at Leiria, and long before dawn the town was busy. This was by far the largest country market I saw in Portugal, and the gathering of peasantry the quaintest and most picturesque. The shops, particularly those in the mosaic-paved praça, are mainly wholesale warehouses for the supply of village traders, and a very extensive distributing trade must be done. The town itself, on this occasion, was one vast emporium, and multitudes of people bargained from early morning till past midday in the acacia avenues under the brilliant dark-blue sky. A gay-looking crowd they were: for the costume here is quite distinct. The women invariably wear a velvet pork-pie hat over a yellow or red head-kerchief, of which the ends hang down the back, and the older women have full black cloaks with hoods, whilst most of them have a broad band, some nine inches wide, of yellow cloth round the bottom of the skirt. The wares exposed for sale were infinite. In the praça great heaps of maize, grapes, potatoes, chestnuts, and beans covered the mosaic pavement, whilst stalls displayed calicoes and cloths of vivid colours. Giant yellow gourds in high piles lined the footpath, and elsewhere under the shade of the trees stacks of grass-fodder and maize-leaves for cattle stood. In another space heaps of salt, and long lines of stalls for the sale of salted sardines and salted pork, were followed by a score of temporary butchers’ shops. Then came stands for the sale of fresh fish, skate, sardines, and cod, with the inevitable bacalhau; and farther on, spread upon the ground, were hundreds of homely crocks, red amphoræ, slender and beautiful in shape, coarse household dishes gaudily decorated, and unglazed jars to keep water cool. Beneath a beautiful picturesque arcade of ancient arches in the praça women were seated before panniers piled with pears, figs, apples, melons, and grapes, such as Covent Garden might glory in; and hard by strings of garlic, onions, and eschalot claimed their purchasers. In a field by the side of the river long lines of oxen, horses, and asses were for sale, and men in red and green nightcaps, and trousers made of two or three different coloured cloths, soberly bargained for the beasts. Over all was the dark-blue arch of the sky, and the brilliant sun, tempered beneath the trees by the light-green of the acacia leaves: but what strikes most an observer who is familiar with the south, is the absence of vociferation and apparent excitement. There was no shouting, no pushing or quarrelling, and every transaction in the chaffering town seemed to be got through with serious deliberation. Even the cluster of gaily-dressed women around the stately sixteenth-century fountain adjoining the hotel, gossiped staidly, and the children playing beneath the trees were as grave as little judges. This is Leiria as I saw it on market-day; but long before sunset the country people trudged homeward again; the ox-wains carried away the produce and merchandise; the stalls and booths folded their canvas sides and disappeared, and the next morning Leiria resumed its habitual sleep, from which it awakens but once a week.

[Illustration: THE ENCARNAÇÃO, LEIRIA.]

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Footnote 1:

I noted with interest that this castle of Ourem, and others of these vast hill-top strongholds, had the outer defences arranged similarly to those I have described in the chapter on the buried city of Citania; namely, that on the side of the hill, where attack was difficult or impracticable, the outer walls dipped far down the slope, whilst at the point where danger might be apprehended the three lines of circumvallation were comparatively close together. This arrangement of hill-top defences was evidently long pre-Roman in the Peninsula, and seems to have been adopted by the Romans and their Gothic successors.

VI BATALHA AND ALCOBAÇA

I drove out of Leiria in the morning just as the business of the market was in full swing; and for the first half-hour of the upward way amidst a country of vines and olives, we met crowds of country people riding into the town on heavily laden asses. Then, mounting high above the plain, we passed into the region of pines and heather, where the warm but invigorating air came charged with the scent of thyme, lavender, and rosemary. At a point of the road, about eight miles from Leiria, a deep hollow opens to the left, and at the bottom of it, and reached by a downhill road running almost parallel with the way we came, lies the world-famed abbey of Batalha, the wonder and envy of ecclesiastical architects for six centuries, and even now, dismantled and bedevilled as it is, one of the most beautiful Gothic structures in existence.

Before its west front I stand lost in admiration. The whole edifice is built of a marble-like limestone, which time has turned to a beautiful soft yellowish cream colour, similar to that of an old Japanese ivory carving. Like most Portuguese cathedrals the body of the church is somewhat narrow; but in this case a large chapel on the north side extends the apparent width of the exterior west front. How can one hope to convey in written words an adequate impression of this exquisite façade? To the severe perpendicular parallel lines over the door and window, reminiscent of the west front of Lincoln, is added a lace-like elaboration of parapets, pinnacles, and glorious flying buttresses, which almost bewilders by its aerial gaiety and transparent richness. A beautiful Gothic breastrail stands before a double flight of steps leading down to the west door, for the abbey is lower even than the road before it; “the portal,” wrote William Beckford, a hundred and twenty years ago, “full fifty feet in height, surmounted by a window of perforated marble of nearly the same lofty dimensions, deep as a cavern, and enriched with canopies and imagery in a style that would have done honour to William of Wykeham, some of whose disciples or co-disciples in the train of the founder’s consort, Philippa of Lancaster, had probably designed it.”

To me this door presented itself rather more in detail. I saw a portal the whole width of the nave-space, the deep, bevilled sides being occupied by the Twelve Apostles standing under rich Gothic canopies, and from the capitals above them a slightly pointed arch sprang ending in a floreated cross finial, the arch itself being composed of six orders, each occupied by a row of Kings of the House of David under exquisite Gothic canopies. The great window above is full of tracery so intricate and plastic in appearance as almost to banish the impression of a work in stone. The octagonal lantern of the side chapel is supported by flying buttresses of indescribable grace and lightness, and is fronted by a screen pierced with three Gothic windows almost level with the main west front; and upon every point of the building and along each side of the roof of the nave crocketed pinnacles rise, supported by fairy flying buttresses—the effect of the whole exterior from the west front being an exquisite blending of seriousness and exuberant rejoicing.

And these were precisely the feelings that prompted the establishment here of the Dominican abbey at the instance of its English foundress, Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, married in 1386 John, the Master of Avis, the high-minded and patriotic bastard of the royal house, who had successfully resisted Spanish aggression the year before, and, with the assistance of the English archers at Aljubarrota, had gained for himself the crown of Portugal. Here in the neighbourhood of the battle, at the instance of Philippa, was built this abbey of Dominican monks in devotional thankfulness for the signal victory, and for the rescue of the King from threatened death. All through the older portion of the building the English Plantagenet influence is predominant, and marks the abbey as being entirely different from all other ecclesiastical buildings in Portugal.

The monastery was always a poorly endowed one, in glaring contrast to the neighbouring Cistercian house of Alcobaça, one of the richest monastic houses in the world. Beckford, in his humorous description of his visit to both houses in 1782, draws a lively comparison between the two. Accompanied by two great Portuguese prelates, of whom he makes merciless fun, he had gone to see Alcobaça at the wish of the Prince Regent. His great train of servants and attendants had been received with lavish splendour and Gargantuan gluttony at Alcobaça, and on the way with the prelate of the latter house to visit Batalha, the whole party had got drunk at Aljubarrota, whose wine is famous. They arrived at Batalha at night.

“Whilst our sumpter mules were unloading, and ham and pies and sausages were rolling out of plethoric hampers, I thought these poor monks looked on rather enviously. My more fortunate companions—no wretched cadets of the mortification family these, but the true elder sons of fat mother church—could hardly conceal their sneers of conscious superiority. A contrast so strongly marked amused me not a little.... The Batalha prior and his assistants looked quite astounded when they saw the gauze-curtained bed and the Grand Prior’s fringed pillow, and the Prior of St. Vincent’s superb coverlid, and basins and ewers and other utensils of glittering silver being carried in. Poor souls! they hardly knew what to do or say or be at—one running to the right, another to the left—one tucking up his flowing garments to run faster, and another rebuking him for such a deviation from monastic decorum.”

I have in my library a manuscript account by Lord Strathmore of the visit he paid to the two monasteries twenty years before Beckford, and his account of the poverty of Batalha in comparison with Alcobaça is more emphatic still. He says:—

“Though far from rich, they received us with great hospitality. The prior, an exceedingly good, kind, old man, exerted his utmost efforts to do us honour, and had a cook sent to him from the Bishop of Leria upon ye occasion. We here with many thanks dismist our militia, who had been mounting guard hitherto at ye door of our apartment. This convent is of ye most elaborate and exquisite Gothic architecture I ever saw, one part being left imperfect, being so beautiful that nobody dar’d to finish it. When we took leave of our old prior next morning ye only request he made us was that we would relate to ye minister how much their fabric had suffered by the earthquake [_i.e._ of 1755], and how much they needed ye King’s assistance to repair it: whereas I could not help observing that every one of our friends who had been particularly assiduous about us at Alcobaça desired us to remember their names particularly at Lisbon.”

Alas! priors and monks, rich and poor, have all gone now, and the place is a “national monument,” with hardly a pretence of being a place of worship.

The interior of the church is almost severe in its plainness, the lofty narrow nave being divided by clustered pillars arranged in a somewhat peculiar manner; the three pillars facing the nave supporting the groins of the main roof, whilst from the remaining three spring the groining of the aisle. Before the high altar, and close to the steps, are two magnificent tombs side by side, the recumbent figures upon them hand in hand; the male in full armour, the woman clasping a book. “_Hic Jacet Eduardus I., Port. et Alg., Rex et Regina, Elenora Uxor Ejus_,” runs the inscription around the fillet; and this is the tomb of the unhappy Duarte, son of John the Great and Philippa of Lancaster, who died of a broken heart, whilst still young, at the disaster to his arms and house in the defeat of his crusading attack upon Tangier.

As Beckford saw the church during service it must have throbbed with the life and colour that it now lacks.

“There is greater plainness [_i.e._ than Winchester], less panelling, and fewer intersections in the vaulted roof: but the utmost richness of hue, at this time of day at least, was not wanting. No tapestry however rich, no painting however vivid, could equal the gorgeousness of the tint, the splendour of the golden and ruby light which streamed forth from the long series of stained glass windows: it played, flickering about in all directions on pavement and on roof, casting over every object myriads of glowing mellow shadows, ever in undulating motion, like the reflection of branches swayed to and fro in the breeze. We all partook of these gorgeous tints, the white monastic garments of my conductors seemed as it were embroidered with the brightest flowers of paradise, and our whole procession kept advancing invested with celestial colours.”

Iconoclasm and war have wrought their fell work upon Batalha since then; but still the lovely fane stands materially uninjured. The transept-chapels and sacristy are fine, especially the latter, though the seventeenth-century carved woodwork matches ill with the exquisite pure Gothic groining of the roof, and the great yellow sarcophagus of Diego Lopez de Souza, master of the Order of Christ, in the adjoining chapel of St. Barbara, is a remarkable piece of sixteenth-century work.

One of the great glories of Batalha is the side chapel already mentioned, the octagonal “chapel of the Founder.” The arrangement of it and its general effect are strikingly like those of Queen Victoria’s mausoleum at Frogmore. In the centre, standing high and imposing in all the pomp of Gothic tracery, are the twin tombs of John the Great and his English wife, their sculptured effigies hand in hand as the noble pair went through life; and around the chapel are ranged the sarcophagi of their sons Pedro, João, Fernando (who chivalrously passed all the best years of his life a hostage to the Moor), and, the greatest of them all, the Prince Dom Henrique the Navigator, who made Portugal a world power. Upon each stone coffin are carved the insignia of the Garter and the arms of England quartered with those of Portugal, and along the fillets run the quaint mottoes that each royal personage adopted for his device. Some of them are enigmatical; such as that which consists of the repetition of the word “_Désir_” alternating with the scale of justice, and the other that offers the riddle of “VII.,” a cogwheel, and “_Jamais_” repeated again and again. “Pro rege pro grege,” on the other hand, if hackneyed, is still quite intelligible.

“All these princes,” says Beckford, “in whom the high bearing of their intrepid father and the exemplary virtues and strong sense of their mother were united, repose after their toil and suffering in this secluded chapel, which, indeed, looks a place of rest and holy quietude; the light equally diffused, forms, as it were, a tranquil atmosphere, such as might be imagined worthy to surround the predestined to happiness in a future world. I withdrew from the contemplation of these tombs with reluctance, every object in the chapel that contains them being so pure in taste, so harmonious in colour, every armorial device, every mottoed label, so tersely and correctly sculptured.... The Plantagenet cast of the whole chamber conveyed to me a feeling so interesting, so congenial, that I could hardly persuade myself to move away.”

Every word written by Beckford a hundred and twenty years ago of this chapel is true to-day, and I could have lingered for hours before the coffins of these heroic princes and their parents in a day-dream of recollection prompted by their noble lives and deeds.

Just outside the door of the chapel, in the pavement of the nave, is a stone bearing the almost effaced inscription that below it lies the body of “Martin Gonsalves de Maçada, who saved the life of the King Dom John in the battle of Aljubarrota”; and one speculates that had it not been for the fortunate deed of this obscure gentleman, this great abbey would never have been built, and the kings and princes that lie in it would never have existed, with the exception of the Master of Avis himself, who would have passed down to history not as the founder of a dynasty but as an unsuccessful rebel.

A door in the south aisle leads into the renowned cloister, and here, the work being of a later date than the church, controversy has spent itself as to whether the luxuriant exuberance of the sculpture is, or is not, in perfect taste. Personally I find the cloister exquisite beyond description, and I care not whether the purists condemn it or not. The sensation produced, it is true, is—like all Manueline sculpture—neither purely devotional nor highly exalted, but rather one of joyous delight in the actual handiwork, in the gracious curves, in the kaleidoscopic variety, in the dexterous adaptation of means to ends, and these sensations, though I am told that they are vulgar when produced by ecclesiastical sculpture, I experience in the fullest measure as I gaze at this marvel of human skill, the cloistered court of Batalha. Standing in the centre of the courtyard and looking up at the abbey, one sees three beautiful lace-like parapets rise one above the other along the whole length, on cloister, clerestory, and nave, clear-cut edges of perfect curves against the blue sky. Each of the cloister arches is filled with stone tracery of amazing richness and variety, the cross of the Order of Christ and the armillary sphere being deftly introduced in the fretwork with great effect. This cloister, like that of Belem, of which I shall speak later, seems to mark the purer and less extravagant development of the Manueline style, in which the Gothic traditions have not been entirely cast aside, and only the most callous soul could remain unmoved by its exquisite beauty. From the cloister there opens a chapter-house of the same style and period, a perfect gem, although the entrance arch leading to it shows signs, in the lace-like pendent ornament that lines it, of the over-elaboration which finally led to decadence. The chapter-house is thus described by Beckford with special reference to what struck me most—namely, the exquisite groining, springing like palm branches from clustered pillars in the wall, and all centring in the apex of the roof:—“It is,” he said, “a square of seventy feet, and the most strikingly beautiful apartment I ever beheld. The graceful arching of the roof, unsupported by console or column, is unequalled; it seems suspended by magic, indeed human means failed twice in constructing this bold unembarrassed space. Perseverance and the animating encouragement of the sovereign founder at length conquered every difficulty, and the work remains to this hour secure and perfect.”

Close by is the great refectory of the monks, now used as a sort of lumber-room museum of débris; and leading from it the vast, vaulted kitchen, its stone roof blackened still by the smoke of centuries of cooking fires. The humble little ancient cloister of the original monastery still remains, with its rows of cells in the upper ambulatory. Here there is no Manueline exuberance or wealth, only reverent pointed Gothic, grave groined roofs and arches unadorned, enclosing, as of old, the sweet, quiet little garden that more than a century ago aroused the admiration of Beckford.

[Illustration: THE CLOISTERS, BATALHA.]

From there the distance is but a few steps to the “unfinished chapels”; but the contrast of feeling between the two places is wide indeed. The chapels consist of a sort of Lady chapel or apse built out at the back of the high altar, like Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster. A large central chapel with ten smaller chapels round it rise to perhaps half their intended height, and roofless, for when King Manuel died in 1521 the work was stopped and has never been resumed. The first view of this fragment, and particularly of the great arch by which it was intended to connect it with the church, strikes an observer with astonishment that human brains and hands could ever compass such intricacy of design and execution. Convolutions more tortuous than those of Arab art, floridness more overloaded than Churriguerra ever dreamt of, boldness for which the only just word is insolence, here run riot unrestrained, fatiguing the eye, tiring the mind, and ending by palling upon the senses from mere over-exuberance. The lower portion and pillars, and the exterior of the chapels, are restrained and sober, and this makes the more overwhelming the arches and the upper pillars designed to support the roof. One feels that the design is that of a genius, but of a genius whom another step would have led to madness, and who threw aside all the accepted canons of his art. But, withal, though Beckford avoids detailed notice of these chapels, it is impossible even for the purist in architecture to pass such work by without some admiration being mixed with his surprise. The great arch leading into the church is the culminating point of the work; its western side being a mass of intertwined foliage, knots, cables, flowers, and concentric lines, cut in high relief in seven distinct mouldings or orders, and the inner line of the arch is decorated with a deep pendent open-work border; whilst forming part of the intricate design of the whole arch, the enigmatical words “_Tanias el Rey_” are repeated hundreds of times on small labels. What the words mean nobody knows, though the most probable guess is that they may be an anagram for “_Arte e Linyas_” (“art and lines,” in old Portuguese).

[Illustration: “THE UNFINISHED CHAPELS,” BATALHA]

As I walked up the road leading from the hollow in which the abbey stands, I looked back again and again at the perfect loveliness of the building I was leaving behind. The flying buttresses, the lines upon lines of fretwork edging, the multitude of floreated pinnacles, and the glorious Gothic of the west front, all of the softened hue of old gold, presented in my eyes the perfection of a Gothic building. I have seen the stately grandeur of Amiens, the soaring pride of Cologne, the vast magnificence of Burgos, and the fairy prettiness of Milan, and I have worshipped at the shrines of Ely, Norwich, and Lincoln. Each one in its way is supreme and incomparable; but Batalha, reservedly nestling in its green hollow far from the busy haunts of men, has a charm of its own that I have found in no other Gothic church; and as I finally turned my back upon it, I carried with me a memory which in my life will never fade.

We are soon amongst the pines and heather again, driving along an elevated ridge with a valley and bold mountain ranges beyond upon either side, the effect of the distant hills seen through the perpendicular lines formed by the straight pine trunks that cluster on each side being very beautiful. A sort of light-blue veil seems to cover the far landscape, such an atmosphere as Corot loved to paint; not a mist arising from dampness, but the azure tint of the air itself seen by its clarity to a vast distance through the dark pine copses.