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."
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
cluster round their mother at the door, and she passes 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
pass 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 passed 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 maître."
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 Tetuán," unfinished, with a
dashing rainbow-hued charge of horsemen 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, González, Pérez, García, 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-assertion, 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 preëminently
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 Señor Pompeo Gener's "Cosas de España," which but widens
the breach. One discerns it in the ignoble 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 Fernán
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 España"
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 "Liberté" 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, Lérida, 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,
Gijón, Coruña, 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 constitutional 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 classes 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 prick 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 Alcántara, the
plumed and helmeted knights of the noble 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, Ramón 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 Assisian, 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, León, Toledo, Siena.