fate they are so eager to send others to. They are entitled to contend
that it holds good even of the wisest. For who knows what he talks about
when he talks of even the simplest things in the world, the sky or the
sunshine or the water?
_June_ 15.--Am I indeed so unreasonable to care so much whether the sun
shines? The very world, to our human eyes, seems to care. It only bursts
into life, it only bursts even into the semblance of life, when the sun
shines. All this anti-cyclonic day the sky has been cloudless, and for
three hours on the sea the wavelets have been breaking into sudden flashes
and spires of silver flower-like flames, while on the reflecting waters
afar it has seemed as though a myriad argent swallows were escorting me to
the coasts of France.
In the evening, in Paris, the glory of the day has still left a long
delicious echo in the air and on the sky. I wander along the quays, and by
a sudden inspiration go to seek out the philosophic hermit of the Rue des
Saints Pères, but even he is not at home to-night, so up and down the
silent quays I wander, aimlessly and joyously, to inhale the fragrance of
Paris and the loveliness of the night, before I leave in the morning for
Spain.
_June_ 19.--As I entered Santa Maria del Mar this morning by the north
door, and glanced along the walls under the particular illumination of the
moment (for in these Spanish churches of subdued light the varying
surprises of illumination are endless), there flashed on me a new swift
realisation of an old familiar fact. How mediaeval it is! Those grey walls
and the ancient sacred objects disposed on them with a strange irregular
harmony, they seem to be as mediaeval hands left them yesterday. And
indeed every aspect of this church--which to me has always been romantic
and beautiful--can scarcely have undergone any substantial change. Even
the worshippers must have changed but little, for this is the church of
the workers, and the Spanish woman's workaday costume bears little mark of
any specific century. If Cervantes were to return to this
district--perhaps to this district alone--of the city he loved it is hard
to see what he would note afresh, save the results of natural decay and
the shifting of the social centre of gravity.
Whenever I enter an old Spanish church, in the south or in the north,
still intact in its material details, in the observance of its traditions,
in its antique grandiosity or loveliness, nearly always there is a latent
fear at my heart. Who knows how long these things will be left on the
earth? Even if they escape the dangers due to the ignorance or
carelessness of their own guardians, no one knows what swift destruction
may not at any moment overtake them.
In the leading article of the Barcelonese _Diluvio_ to-day I read:
The unity which marked the Middle Ages is broken into an infinite
variety of opinions and beliefs.
Everywhere else, however, except in our country, there has been
formed a gradation, a rhythm, of ideas, passing from the highest to
the deepest notes of the scale. There are radicals in politics, in
religion, in philosophy; there are also reactionaries in all these
fields; but it is the intermediate notes, conciliatory, more or less
eclectic, which constitute the nucleus on which every society must
depend. In Spain this central nucleus has no existence. Here in all
orders of thought there are only the two extremes: _all or
nothing_.
And the article concludes by saying that this state of things is so
threatening to the nation that some pessimists are already standing, watch
in hand, to count the moments of Spain's existence.
This tendency of the Spanish spirit, which there can be little doubt
about, may not threaten the existence of Spain, but it threatens the
existence of the last great fortress of mediaeval splendour and beauty and
romance. France, the chosen land of Saintliness and Catholicism, has been
swept clear of mediaevalism. England, even though it is the chosen land of
Compromise, has in the sphere of religion witnessed destructive
revolutions and counter-revolutions. What can save the Church in Spain
from perishing by that sword of Intolerance which it has itself forged?
_June_ 20.--In a side-chapel there is a large and tall Virgin, with
seemingly closed eyes, a serene and gracious personage. Before this image
of the Virgin Mother kneels a young girl, devoutly no doubt, though with a
certain careless familiarity, with her dark hair down, and on her head the
little transparent piece of lace which the Spanish woman, even the
smallest Spanish girl-child, unlike the free-spirited Frenchwoman, never
fails to adjust as she enters a church.
I have no sympathy with those who look on the Bible as an outworn book and
the Church as an institution whose symbols are empty of meaning. It is a
good thing that, somewhere amid our social order or disorder, the Mother
whose child has no father save God should be regarded as an object of
worship. It would be as well to maintain the symbol of that worship until
we have really incorporated it into our hearts and are prepared in our
daily life to worship the Mother whose child has no known father save God.
It is not the final stage in family evolution, certainly, but a step in
the right direction. So let us be thankful to the Bible for stating it so
divinely and keeping it before our eyes in such splendid imagery.
The official guardians of the Bible have always felt it to be a dangerous
book, to be concealed, as the Jews concealed their sacred things in the
ark. When after many centuries they could no longer maintain the policy of
concealing it in a foreign tongue which few could understand, a brilliant
idea occurred to them. They flung the Bible in the vulgar tongue in
millions of copies at the heads of the masses. And they dared them to
understand it! This audacity has been justified by the results. A sublime
faith in Human Imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
No wonder they feel so holy a horror of Eugenics!
_June_ 22.--I can see, across the narrow side-street, that a room nearly
opposite the windows of my room at the hotel is occupied by tailors,
possibly a family of them--two men, two women, two girls. They seem to be
always at work, from about eight in the morning until late in the evening;
even Sunday seems to make only a little difference, for to-day is Sunday,
and they have been at work until half-past seven. They sit, always in the
same places, round a table, near the large French windows which are
constantly kept open. At the earliest sign of dusk the electric light
suspended over the table shines out. They rarely glance through the
window, though certainly there is little to see, and I am not sure that
they go away for meals; I sometimes see them munching a roll, and the
Catalan water-pot is always at hand to drink from. If it were not that I
know how the Catalan can live by night as well as by day, I should say
that this little group can know nothing whatever of the vast and
variegated Barcelonese world in whose heart they live, that it is nothing
to them that all last night Barcelona was celebrating St. John's Eve (now
becoming a movable festival in the cities) with bonfires and illuminations
and festivities of every kind, or that at the very same moment in this
same city the soldiery were shooting down the people who never cease to
protest against the war in Morocco. They are mostly good-looking, neatly
dressed, cheerful, animated; they talk and gesticulate; they even play,
the men and the girls battering each other for a few moments with any
harmless weapons that come to hand. They are always at work, yet it is
clear that they have not adopted the heresy that man was made for work.
I am reminded of another workroom I once overlooked in a London suburb
where three men tailors worked from very early till late. But that was a
very different spectacle. They were careworn, sordid, carelessly
half-dressed creatures, and they worked with ferocity, without speaking,
with the monotonous routine of machines at high pressure. They were tragic
in the fury of their absorption in their work. They might have been the
Fates spinning the destinies of the world.
A marvellous thing how pliant the human animal is to work! Certainly it is
no Gospel of Work that the world needs. It has ever been the great concern
of the lawgivers of mankind, not to ordain work, but, as we see so
interestingly in the Mosaic Codes, to enjoin holidays from work.
_June_ 23.--At a little station on the Catalonian-Pyrenean line near Vich
a rather thin, worn-looking young woman alighted from the second-class
carriage next to mine, and was greeted by a stout matronly woman and a
plump young girl with beaming face. These two were clearly mother and
daughter, and I suppose that the careworn new-comer from the city, though
it was less obviously so, was an elder daughter. The two women greeted
each other with scarcely a word, but they stood close together for a few
moments, and slight but visible waves of emotion ran sympathetically down
their bodies. Then the elder woman tenderly placed her arm beneath the
other's, and they walked slowly away, while the radiant girl, on the other
side of the new-comer, lovingly gave a straightening little tug to the
back of her jacket, as though it needed it.
One sets out for a new expedition into the world always with a concealed
unexpressed hope that one will see something new. But in our little
European world one never sees anything new. There is merely a little
difference in the emotions, a little finer or a little coarser, a little
more open or a little more restrained, a little more or a little less
charm in the expression of them. But they are everywhere just the same
human emotions manifested in substantially the same ways.
It is not indeed always quite the same outside Europe. It is not the same
in Morocco. I always remember how I never grew tired of watching the Moors
in even the smallest operation of their daily life. For it always seemed
that their actions, their commonest actions, were set to a rhythm which to
a European was new and strange. Therefore it was infinitely fascinating.
_June_ 24.--St. John's Eve was celebrated here in Ripoll on the correct,
or, as the Catalans call it, the classical, date last night. The little
market-place was full of animation. (The church, I may note, stands in the
middle of the Plaza, and the market is held in the primitive way all round
the church, the market-women's stalls clinging close to its walls.) Here
for hours, and no doubt long after I had gone to bed, the grave, sweet
Catalan girls were dancing with their young men, in couples or in circles,
and later I was awakened by the singing of Catalan songs which reminded me
a little of Cornish carols. The Catalan girls, up in these Pyrenean
heights, are perhaps more often seriously beautiful than in Barcelona,
though here, too, they are well endowed with the substantial, homely,
good-humoured Catalan graces. But here they do their hair straight and low
on the brows on each side and fasten it in knots near the nape of the
neck, so they have an air of distinction which sometimes recalls the
Florentine women of Ghirlandajo's or Botticelli's portraits. The solar
festival of St. John's Eve is perhaps the most ancient in our European
world, but even in this remote corner of it the dances seem to have lost
all recognised connection with the bonfires, which in Barcelona are mostly
left to the children. This dancing is just human, popular dancing to the
accompaniment, sad to tell, of a mechanical piano. Yet even as such it is
attractive, and I lingered around it. For I am English, very English, and
I spend much of my time in London, where dancing in the street is treated
by the police as "disorderly conduct." For only the day before I left a
London magistrate admonished a man and woman placed in the dock before him
for this heinous offence of dancing in the street, which gave so much
pleasure to my Catalan youths and maidens all last night: "This is not a
country in which people can afford to be jovial. You must cultivate a
spirit of melancholy if you want to be safe. Go away and be as sad as you
can."
_June_ 25.--Up here on the solitary mountain side, with Ripoll and its
swirling, roaring river and many bridges below me, I realise better the
admirable position of this ancient monastery city, so admirable that even
to-day Ripoll is a flourishing little town. The river has here formed a
flat, though further on it enters a narrow gorge, and the mountains open
out into an amphitheatre. It is, one sees, on a large and magnificent
scale, precisely the site which always commended itself to the monks of
old, and not least to the Benedictines when they chose the country for
their houses instead of the town, and here, indeed, they were at the
outset far away from any great centre of human habitation. Founded,
according to the Chronicles, in the ninth century by Wilfred the Shaggy,
the first independent Count of Barcelona, one suspects that the selection
of the spot was less, an original inspiration of the Shaggy Count's than
put into his head by astute monks, who have modestly refrained from
mentioning their own part in the transaction. In any case they flourished,
and a century later, when Montserrat had been devastated by the Moors, it
was restored and repeopled by monks from Ripoll. In their own house they
were greatly active. There is the huge monastery of which so much still
remains, not a beautiful erection, scarcely even interesting for the most
part, massive, orderly, excessively bare, but with two features which will
ever make it notable; its Romanesque cloisters with the highly variegated
capitals, and the sculptured western portal. This is regarded as one of
the earliest works of sculpture in Spain, and certainly it has some very
primitive, one may even say Iberian, traits, for the large _toro_-like
animals recall Iberian sculpture. Yet it is a great work, largely and
systematically planned, full of imaginative variety; at innumerable points
it anticipates what the later more accomplished Gothic sculptors were to
achieve, and I suspect, indeed, that much of its apparent lack of
executive skill is due to wearing away of the rather soft stone the
sculptors used. In the capitals of the cloisters--certainly much later--a
peculiarly hard stone has been chosen, and, notwithstanding, the precision
and expressive vigour of these artists is clearly shown. But the great
portal, a stupendous work of art, as we still dimly perceive it to be,
wrought nearly a thousand years ago in this sheltered nook of the
Pyrenees, lingers in the memory. Also, like so many other things in the
far Past, its crumbling outlines scatter much ancient dust over what we
vainly call Modern Progress.
_June_ 26.--Every supposed improvement in methods of travelling seems to
me to sacrifice more than it gains; it gains speed, but it sacrifices
nearly everything else, even comfort. Yet, I fear, there is a certain
unreality in one's lamentations over the decay of the ancient methods; one
is still borne on the stream. I have long wanted to cross the Pyrenees,
and certainly I should prefer to cross them leisurely, as Thicknesse would
have done (had he not preferred to elude them by the easier and beaten
road), in one's own carriage. But, failing that, surely I ought to have
walked, or, at least, to have travelled by the diligence. Yet I cannot
escape the contagious disease of Modernity, and I choose to be whirled
through the most delicious and restful scenery in the world, at the most
perfect moment of the year, in three hours (including the interval for
lunch) in a motor 'bus, while any stray passengers on the road, as by
common accord, plant themselves on the further side of the nearest big
tree until our fearsome engine of modernity has safely passed. It is an
adventure I scarcely feel proud of.
Yet even this hurried whirl has not been too swift to leave memories which
will linger long and exquisitely, among far other scenes, even with a
sense of abiding peace. How often shall I recall the exhilaration of this
clear, soft air of the mountains, touched towards the summits by the icy
breath of the snow, these glimpses of swift streams and sudden cascades,
the scent of the pine forests, the intense flame of full-flowered broom,
and perhaps more than all, the trees, as large as almond trees, of richly
blossomed wild roses now fully out, white roses and pink roses, which
abound along these winding roads among the mountains. Where else can there
be such wild rose trees?
_June_ 27.--It is, I suppose, more than twenty years since I stopped at
Perpignan for the night, on the eve of first entering Spain, and pushed
open in the twilight the little door of the Cathedral, and knew with
sudden deep satisfaction the beauty and originality of Catalonian
architecture. The city of Perpignan has emerged into vigorous modern life
since then, but the Cathedral remains the same and still calls me with the
same voice. It seems but yesterday that I entered it. And there, at the
same spot, in the second northern bay, the same little lamp is still
twinkling, each faint throb seemingly the last, as in memory it has
twinkled for twenty years.
_June_ 28.--Nowhere, it is said, are the offices of the Church more
magnificently presented than in Barcelona. However this may be, I nowhere
feel so much as in Spain that whatever may happen to Christianity it is
essential that the ancient traditions of the Mass should be preserved, and
the churches of Catholicism continue to be the arena of such Sacred Operas
as the Mass, their supreme and classic type.
I do not assert that it need necessarily be maintained as a Religious
Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation
by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are
surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to
carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity
failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come to an
end.
It would remain as Art. As Art, as the embodied summary of a great ancient
tradition, a supreme moment in the spiritual history of the world, the
Mass would retain its vitality as surely as Dante's _Divine Comedy_
retains its vitality, even though the stage of that Comedy has no more
reality for most modern readers than the stage of Punch and Judy. So it is
here. The Play of the Mass has been wrought through centuries out of the
finest intuitions, the loftiest aspirations, of a long succession of the
most sensitively spiritual men of their time. Its external shell of
superstition may fall away. But when that happens the play will gain
rather than lose. It will become clearly visible as the Divine Drama it
is, the embodied presentation of the Soul's Great Adventure, the symbolic
Initiation of the Individual into the Spiritual Life of the World.
It is not only for the perpetuation of the traditions of the recognised
Sacred Offices that Churches such as the Spanish churches continue to
constitute the ideal stage. Secular drama arises out of sacred drama, and
at its most superb moments (as we see, earlier than Christianity, in the
_Bacchae_, the final achievement of the mature art of Euripides) it still
remains infused with the old sacred spirit and even the old sacred forms,
for which the Church remains the only fitting background. It might
possibly be so for _Parsifal_. Of all operas since _Parsifal_ that I have
seen, the _Ariane et Barbe Bleue_ of Dukas and Maeterlinck seems to me the
most beautiful, the most exalted in conception, the most finely symbolic,
and surely of all modern operas it is that in which the ideas and the
words, the music, the stage pictures, are wrought with finest artistry
into one harmonious whole. It seems to me that the emotions aroused by
such an Opera as _Ariane_ could only be fittingly
expressed--unecclesiastical as Blue Beard's character may appear--in the
frame of one of these old Catalonian churches. The unique possibilities of
the church for dramatic art constitute one of the reasons why I shudder at
the thought that these wonderful and fascinating buildings may some day be
swept of their beauty and even torn down.
_June_ 29.--I have always felt a certain antipathy--unreasonable, no
doubt--to Brittany, and never experienced any impulse to enter it. Now
that I have done so the chances of my route have placed my entry at
Nantes, where the contact of neighbouring provinces may well have modified
the Breton characteristics. Yet they seem to me quite pronounced, and
scarcely affected even by the vigorous and mercantile activity of this
large city. A large and busy city, and yet I feel that I am among a people
who are, ineradically, provincial peasants, men and women of a temper
impervious to civilisation. Here too are those symbols of peasantry, the
white caps of endless shape and fashion which seem to exert such an
attraction on the sentimental English mind. Yet they are not by any means
beautiful. And what terrible faces they enfold--battered, shapeless,
featureless faces that may have been tossed among granite rocks but seem
never to have been moulded by human intercourse. The young girls are often
rather pretty, sometimes coquettish, with occasionally a touch of careless
abandonment which reminds one of England rather than of France. But the
old women--one can scarcely believe that these tragic, narrow-eyed,
narrow-spirited old women are next neighbours to the handsome, jovial old
women of Normandy. And the old men, to an extent that surely is seldom
found, are the exact counterparts of the old women, with just the same
passive, battered, pathetic figures. (I recall the remark of an English
friend who has lived much in Brittany, that these people look as though
they were still living under the Ancient Régime.) I know I shall never
forget the congregation that I saw gathered together in the Cathedral at
High Mass this Sunday morning, largely made up of these poor old decayed
abortions of humanity, all moved by the most intense and absorbed
devotion.
There is something gay and open about this Cathedral. The whole ritual is
clear to view; there is a lavish display of scarlet in the choir
upholstery; the music is singularly swift and cheerful; the whole tone of
the place is bright and joyous. One cannot but realise how perfectly such
a worship is adapted to such worshippers. Surely an accomplished
ecclesiastical art and insight have been at work here. We seem to see a
people scarcely made for this world, and sunk in ruts of sorrow, below the
level of humanity, where no hope is visible but the sky. And here is their
sky! How can it be but that they should embrace the vision with a fervour
surely unparalleled in Christendom outside Russia.