The sewing machine clicked from early morning till night in the house
of the Lunas. This and the hammering of the shoemaker were the only
sounds of work that disturbed the holy silence of the upper cloister.
When Gabriel left his bed at sunrise, after a night of painful
coughing, he would find Sagrario already in the entrance room
preparing her machine for the day's work. From the day following that
of her return to the Cathedral she had devoted herself to work with
sullen silence as a means of returning unnoticed to the Claverias,
trusting that the people would forgive her past. The gardener's widow
procured her work, and so the sound of the stitching was continually
heard in the old "habitacion," accompanied very often by melodies from
the Chapel-master's harmonium.
The "Wooden Staff" moved about his house like a shadow. He remained
continually in the Cathedral or in the lower cloister, only coming up
to the "habitacion" when it was absolutely necessary. He ate his meals
with his head bent, in order not to look at his daughter, who was
seated opposite to him at the other end of the table, ready to burst
into tears at the sight of her father before her. A painful silence
oppressed the family. Don Luis being so absent-minded, seemed the only
one not to perceive the situation, and chatted gaily with Gabriel
about his hopes and his musical enthusiasms. Everything seemed to him
quite natural; nothing disturbed him, and the return of Sagrario to
the family hearth had not caused him the slightest surprise.
When dinner was over Esteban fled, not to return to the house till
night-time; after supper he locked himself into his own room,
leaving his brother and his daughter in possession of the entrance
sitting-room. The machine began to work again, and Don Luis fingered
his harmonium till nine o'clock, when Silver Stick locked the tower
staircase, rattling his bunch of keys with a noise that equalled a
curfew. Gabriel felt indignant at his brother's obstinacy.
"You will kill the child; what you are doing is unworthy of a father."
"I cannot help it, brother; it is impossible for me to look at her. It
is sufficient for me to tolerate such things in the house. Ay! if you
could only tell how the people's looks wound me!"
In reality the scandal produced by the return of Sagrario to the
Claverias had been much less than he had feared. She seemed so ill and
so weary that none of the women felt any animosity against her, and
the energetic protection of her Aunt Tomasa imposed respect. Besides,
those simple women of instinctive passions could not now feel towards
her that hostile envy that her beauty and the cadet's courtship had
formerly inspired. Even Mariquita, Silver Stick's niece, found a
certain salve to her vanity in protecting with disdainful tolerance
that unhappy girl who in former days had attracted the attention of
every man who visited the upper cloister.
Curiosity only disturbed the calm of the Claverias for about a week.
Little by little the women ceased to stand about the Luna's door
to watch Sagrario bending over her machine, and the girl quietly
continued her sad and hard-working life. Gabriel seldom left the
"habitacion." He spent whole days by the young woman's side,
endeavouring by his presence to atone for the hostile aloofness of her
father. It pained him that she should find herself so despised and
solitary in her own house. Every now and then the Aunt Tomasa came to
see them, enlivening them with the optimism of her happy old age. She
was pleased with her niece's conduct; to work hard so as not to be a
drag on her obstinate old father, and to help towards the maintenance
of the house, was clearly what was required; but all the same there
was no reason she should kill herself with work--calm and good humour,
this bad time would lead to a better; she was there to get things
straight with that fiend-possessed Gabriel, and she made the gloomy
"habitacion" ring with her healthy laugh and lively words.
At other times Gabriel's friends would invade the house, abandoning
the assemblies at the shoemaker's. They could not bear Luna's absence,
they wanted to hear him, to consult him, and even the shoemaker when
his work was not urgent would leave his bench and, smelling of paste,
with his apron tucked into his belt and his head rolled up in striped
handkerchiefs, would come and sit by Sagrario's machine.
The young woman fixed her sad eyes with admiration on her uncle. She
had always from her childhood heard her parents speak with respect of
that extraordinary relative who was travelling in foreign countries;
she vaguely remembered him as a shadow crossing her love dream when he
had spent a few days in the Cathedral before establishing himself in
Barcelona, astonishing them all by the accounts of his travels and
his foreign customs. Now she returned to find him aged, as sickly as
herself, but influencing all who surrounded him by the mysterious
power of his words, that were like heavenly music to those poor
narrow-minded souls.
In the midst of her sadness Sagrario had no other pleasure but to
listen to her uncle; she felt the same as did those simple men who
left their work to seek Luna in their anxiety to hear fresh things
from his lips. Gabriel was the modern world that for so many years had
rolled on far from the Cathedral, never touching it, but which had at
last entered in to stir and awaken a handful of men who were still
living in the sixteenth century.
The appearance of Sagrario had brought about a change in Luna's life;
he became more communicative, and he lost a great deal of the reserve
he had imposed upon himself when he took refuge in the stony lap of
the church. He no longer forced himself to keep silence and to hide
his thoughts; the presence of a woman seemed to enliven him and
wake once more his propagandist fervour. His companions saw a new
Gabriel--more loquacious and more disposed to communicate to them the
"new things," that were already upheaving the traditional course of
their thoughts, and that even now had on many nights disturbed their
sleep.
They talked, discussed and consulted Luna, so that he could clear
their confused ideas, and above the voices of the men sounded the
continual click, click of the sewing machine, always busy, like an
echo of the universal work surging in the world, while the calm of the
Infinite spread itself through the precincts of the church.
All those men, accustomed to the slow, regular, quiet duties of the
church, with long periods of rest, admired the nervous activity of
Sagrario.
"You will kill yourself, child," said the old organ-blower. "I know
very well what it is like, I have done something of the same sort; I
blow and blow at those bellows, and when it is a mass with much
music, such as Don Luis loves, I end by cursing the organ and him who
invented it, for indeed it nearly breaks my arms."
"Work!" said the bell-ringer with emphasis. "Work is a punishment from
God! You all know its origin. It was the eternal penalty imposed on
our first parents by the Lord when He drove them out of Paradise. It
is a chain that we must drag on for ever."
"No, señor," replied the shoemaker. "As I have read in the newspapers,
work is the greatest of all the virtues, not a punishment; laziness is
the mother of vice, and work is a virtue. Is it not so, Don Gabriel?"
The shoemaker looked at the master, watching for his words as a
thirsty man looks for water.
"Work," said Gabriel, "is neither a punishment nor a virtue; it is a
hard law to which we have to submit for self-preservation and for the
welfare of the species. Without work life could not exist."
And with the same fervid enunciation with which he had in former times
swayed the multitude at those meetings of protest against society, he
explained to this half-dozen men and the quiet sewer, who stopped her
machine to listen, the greatness of universal work, which every day
laboured on the earth, to subdue it and force it to yield sustenance
for man.
It was a struggle the whole twenty-four hours against the blind forces
of Nature. The army of work extended over the whole globe, exploring
the continents, leaping to the islands, sailing the seas, and
descending to the bowels of the earth. How many were its soldiers? No
one could count them--millions and millions. At daybreak no one was
absent from the roll-call; the casualties were replaced, the gaps that
poverty and misfortune opened in the ranks were filled up immediately.
As soon as the sun rose the factory chimney began to smoke, the hammer
broke the stone, the file bit the metal, the plough furrowed the
earth, the ovens were lighted, the pump worked its piston, the hatchet
sounded in the wood, the locomotive moved amidst clouds of vapour, the
cranes groaned on the wharves, the steamers cut the waters, and the
little barks danced on the waves dragging their nets. None were absent
from work's review. All hurried on, driven by the fear of hunger,
defying danger, not knowing if they would live till night, or if the
sun rising over their heads would be the last in their lives. And that
daily concentration of human energies began with the first light of
day in all parts of the world, wherever men had assembled and built
towns and constituted societies, or even in the deserts to be
reclaimed by their energies.
The stonemason breaks the stone with his hammer, and at every breath
is poisoned by inhaling the invisible particles. The miner descends to
the hell of modern times with no other guide than the glimmer from
his lamp, to wrest from the strata of the earliest ages relics of the
earth's infancy, those carbonised trees that gave shade to prehistoric
animals. Far from the sun and far from life, he defies death, just as
the mason, poised on a slight scaffolding despises giddiness, watched
only by the birds, surprised to see a creature without wings perched
on such a dizzy height.
The workman in the factory, changed by a fatal and mistaken progress
into a slave of machinery, lives fastened to it like another wheel, a
spring of human flesh, struggling with his physical weariness against
the iron muscles that never tire; brutalised daily by the deafening
cadence of pistons and wheels to give us the innumerable products of
industry rendered necessary by the life of civilisation.
And these millions and millions of men who support the existence
of society, who fight for it against the blind and cruel forces of
Nature, who every morning return to the struggle, seeing in this
monotonous and continual sacrifice the sole aim of their existence,
form the immense family of wage-earners, living on the surplus of a
privileged minority, contenting themselves to subsist on the smallest
part of what these reject, submitting to a wretched remuneration,
always the lowest, without hope of saving or of emancipation.
"It is this egotistical minority," said Gabriel, having arrived at
this point, "who have falsified truth, endeavouring to persuade the
majority of workers that work is a virtue, and that the only mission
of man on earth is to work till he perishes. This code, invented, by
the great capitalists, misquotes science, declaring that people can
only live healthily who devote themselves to work, and that all
inaction is fatal, but is silent as to what science adds--that
excessive work destroys men with far greater rapidity than if they
were living in idleness. They say that work is a painful necessity for
the preservation of life, but they do not say it is a virtue, because
repose and sweet inaction are far more grateful to men and to all
animals than exertion and fatigue. The fable of Paradise, the story of
the Biblical God imposing the sweat of labour as a punishment in order
to earn subsistence, shows that in all times the natural temperament
of man considered rest as the pleasantest condition, and that work
must be considered as an evil indispensable to life, but all the same
an evil. Ruled by the instinct of preservation, man ought only to work
just as much as is necessary for food. But as the immense majority do
not work for themselves alone, but for the profits of a minority of
employers, these require that a man should work as much as he is able,
even if he dies from his over-exertion, and in this way they become
rich, hoarding the surplus from production. Their contention is that
a man should work more than is required for himself, that he should
produce more than is required for his own necessities. In this surplus
lies their wealth, and to obtain it they have invented a monstrous and
inhuman morality, that by means of religion and even of philosophy,
glorifies work, saying that work is the greatest of all virtues and
idleness the source of all vices. And this makes me ask, if idleness
is a vice in the poor, how is it that among the rich it is counted as
a sign of distinction and even of elevation of mind? And if work is
the greatest of all virtues, how is it that capitalists endeavour to
amass wealth in order to free themselves and their descendants from
the practice of so great a virtue? Why is it that this society which
exalts work with every sort of poetical conception relegates the
worker to the lowest rank? Why do they receive with greater enthusiasm
a soldier who has fought, more or less, than an aged workman who has
spent seventy years working without any one praising him or being
grateful to him for so much virtue?"
The servants of the Cathedral nodded their heads, assenting to what
fell from the master; they looked up to him as simple people always
look up to those who come down to them as apostles of a new idea.
The continual friction with Gabriel had caused to germinate in their
minds, stunted by the traditional atmosphere, a growth of ideas, like
the microscopic mosses the winter rains had formed on the granite
buttresses of the church. Hitherto they had lived resigned to the
life that surrounded them, moving like somnambulists on the undecided
boundary which separates soul from instinct, but the unexpected
presence of that fugitive from social battles was the impulse that
launched them into full thought, walking tentatively and with no other
light than that of their master.
"You," went on Gabriel, "do not suffer from the slavery of work like
those who live among modern factories. The Church does not require
great exertions from you, and the service of God does not destroy you
from over-fatigue, though it kills you with hunger. There exists a
monstrous inequality between the salaries of those down below who sit
in the choir and sing and what you earn, who lend to worship all the
strength of your arms. You will not die of fatigue, it is true; many a
workman in the towns would laugh at the lightness of your duties; but
you languish from poverty. I see in this cloister the same anaemic
children that I saw in workmen's slums, I see what you eat and what
you are paid. The Church pays its servants as in the days of faith;
she believes that we still live in the times when whole towns would
throw themselves into the work with the hope of gaining heaven, and
would help to raise cathedrals without any more positive recompense
than the workman's stew and the blessing of the bishop; and all this
while, you, beings of flesh who require nourishment, deceive your
stomachs and those of your wives and children with potatoes and bread,
while down below those wooden images are covered with pearls and gold
in senseless profusion, and without its ever occurring to you to ask
yourselves why the idols who have no wants should be so rich, while
you are unable to satisfy your own and live in misery."
The listeners looked at each other in astonishment, as though these
words were an illuminating flash. They were doubtful for a moment as
though frightened, and then the faith of conviction illuminated their
faces.
"It is true," said the bell-ringer in a gloomy tone.
"It is true," repeated the shoemaker, throwing into his words all
the bitterness of his grinding life of poverty, with a constantly
increasing family, and with no other help but his inadequate work.
Sagrario remained silent. She did not understand many of her uncle's
sayings, but she received them all as gospel coming from him, and they
sounded in her ears like delicious music.
Gabriel's reputation spread among the humble inhabitants of the
church, and all the servants of the Primacy gossiped about his wisdom.
The clergy took notice of him, and more than once on rainy evenings
the canon librarian, taking his walk in the cloisters, tried to make
Gabriel talk; but the fugitive, with a remnant of prudence, showed
himself towards the cassocks, as they themselves said, coldly
courteous and reserved, fearing that they would expel him if they
became acquainted with his views.
Only one priest of all those he saw in the upper cloister had inspired
him with any confidence. This was a young man of wretched appearance,
with worn-out clothes, a chaplain of one of the innumerable convents
of nuns in Toledo. He received seven duros a month, which were all
his means of supporting himself and his old mother, a common peasant
woman, who had denied herself bread in order to give an education to
her son.
"You see, Gabriel," said the priest. "You see how it is--such a great
sacrifice to earn less than a common labourer earns in my village. Why
did they ordain me with so much ceremony? Was it for this I sang mass
in the midst of so much pomp, as though in wedding the Church I were
uniting myself to wealth?"
His poverty made him the slave of Don Antolin, and in the last third
of the month he came almost every day to the cloister, trying to
soften Silver Stick with his prayers and induce him to lend a few
pesetas. He even flattered Mariquita, who could not show herself shy
with him, in spite of his cassock.
"He has a very good appearance," she said to the women of the
Claverias with the enthusiasm inspired by every man. "I like to see
him by the side of Don Gabriel and to hear them talk as they walk in
the cloister. They look like two great noblemen. His mother called him
Martin, no doubt because he resembled the Saint Martin by that painter
they call El Greco, that hangs in some parish church, but I forget
which."
To cajole Don Antolin was a far more arduous task, and the poor little
curate suffered much in his endeavours to propitiate the miser, who
was irritated if his miserable loans were not repaid at the proper
time. Silver Stick with his love of authority was delighted to hold a
priest and an equal under his thumb, so that those in the Claverias
should see that he did not order about the small fry only. Don Martin
was for him only a servant in a cassock, and he made him come up to
the cloister nearly every evening on various pretexts. His delight
Was to keep him whole hours standing in front of his door, obliged to
listen and to pay attention to all his words.
Gabriel felt pity for the moral dependency in which the poor young man
lived, and he would often leave his niece, going out into the cloister
to join them. His other friends were not long in discovering him;
first of all the bell-ringer, then the organ-blower, and presently the
verger, the Perrero, and the shoemaker would join the group, of which
Silver Stick was the nucleus. Don Antolin was delighted to see himself
surrounded by so many people, never imagining that Gabriel was the
attraction, thinking always it was his authority that inspired fear
and respect.
Recognising equality with no one but Luna, to him only he addressed
his conversation, as though the others had no other duty but to listen
to him in silence; if anyone spoke to him he pretended not to hear,
but continued addressing Gabriel. Mariquita, huddled up in a shawl,
followed them with her eyes from the door, sharing her uncle's pride
in seeing himself surrounded by such a group, who accompanied him in
his stroll up and down the cloister; the proximity of so many men
seemed to turn her head.
"Uncle! Don Gabriel!" she called in a coaxing voice. "Won't you come
in; you will be more comfortable inside the house, because, even
though it is sunny, it is very cold."
But the uncle paid no attention to her words, and continued his walk
on the side of the cloister bathed by the sun, talking pompously on
his favourite theme, the present poverty of the Cathedral and its
greatness In former times.
"These cloisters in which we are," he said; "do you believe that they
were built to serve as a refuge to the humble secular people who now
live in them? No, señor, although the Church was generous, she would
not have built these 'habitaciones,' with their inner courtyards and
their colonnades for Wooden Staffs and vergers, etc. This cloister,
which was to have been as large and beautiful as the one below, was
begun by the great Cardinal Cisneros" (Don Antolin raised his hand to
his cap) "so that the canons should live in them subject to conventual
regulations; but the canons in those days were very rich, and,
being great lords, would not consent to live shut up here; they all
protested, and the cardinal, who was very quick-tempered, wished to
keep them in leading strings, but one of them started to Rome with
their complaints, sent by his comrades. Cisneros, being governor of
the kingdom, placed guards at all the ports, and the emissary was
arrested as he was going to embark at Valencia. The end of it all
was that after a long suit the gentlemen of the Chapter came off
victorious, and lived out of the Primacy, and the Claverias remained
unfinished with this low roof and this balustrade, both provisional.
But even as it is kings have lived in this cloister; that great
monarch, Philip II., spent several days here. What glorious times!
when the kings, who had palaces at their command, preferred living in
these rooms, so as to be inside the Cathedral and nearer to God. Such
kings, such people. For this reason Spain was greater then than ever.
We were masters of the world. We had power and money, and we lived
happily on earth in the certainty of reaching heaven after death."
"That is true," said the bell-ringer; "those were the good times, and
for their return we fought in the mountains. Ay! if only Don Carlos
had been victorious! if only there had not been traitors amongst us!
Is it not true, Gabriel? You who fought in the war as I did, you can
say if I am not right."
"Hold your tongue, Mariano," said Gabriel, smiling sadly. "You do not
know what you are saying. You fought and shed your blood for a cause
that even now you do not understand. You went to the war as blindly as
I did. Do not look so sullen; it is no use contradicting. Well then,
let us see, what did you wish for when you went out to fight for Don
Carlos?"
"I? First of all that every man should come by his own. Did not the
crown belong to his family? Well, let it be given to him."
"And is this all?" asked Luna with displeasure.
"That was the least of it. What I wanted, and do want, is that
the nation should have a good master, an upright lord, and a good
Catholic, who without restraints of laws or Cortes, should govern us
all with bread in one hand and a stick in the other. For the robber,
garrote him! for the honoured, 'you are my friend!' A king who will
not allow the rich to crush the poor, and who will not allow any one
to die of hunger who wishes to work. Come, I think I am explaining
myself clearly."
"And all this, do you believe that it existed at any time, or that
your king would be able to restore it? Those centuries that you
describe as those of greatness and well-being were really the worst
in our history; they were the cause of Spanish decadence, and the
beginning of all our ills."
"Stop there, Gabrielillo," said Silver Stick. "You know a great deal,
and have travelled and read much more than I have, but we cannot
swallow that. I am very much interested in the question, and I will
not allow you to take advantage of the ignorance of Mariano and these
others. How can you say that those times were evil, and that the
fault is theirs of what is happening to us now? The true culprit is
liberalism, the unbelief of the age, which has let the devil loose in
our house. Spain, when it does not trust its kings and has no faith in
Catholicism, is like a lame man who drops his crutches and falls to
the ground. We are nothing without the throne and the altar, and the
proof of this is everything that has happened to us since we had
revolutions. We have lost our islands, we count for nothing among the
other countries. The Spaniards who are the bravest men in the world,
have been defeated, there is not a peseta anywhere, and all those
gentlemen who harangue in Madrid vote fresh taxes and we are always
involved in difficulties. When was this ever seen in former times?
When?"
"Worse and more shameful things were seen," said Luna.
"You are mad, youngster! Those travels have corrupted you, till I
believe you are hardly a Spaniard! Look you, that he denies what
everybody knows, what is taught in all the schools! And the Catholic
kings; were they nothing? You need no books to know that. Go into the
choir, and you will see on the lower stalls all the battles that those
religious kings gained over the Moors with the help of God. They
conquered Granada and drove out the infidels who had held it seven
centuries in barbarism. Afterwards came the discovery of America. Who
could accomplish that? No one but ourselves; and that good queen who
pawned her jewels so that Columbus should accomplish his voyage. You
cannot deny all this, it seems to me. And the Emperor Charles V.! What
have you to say about him? Do you know any more extraordinary man! He
fought all the kings of Europe, and half the world was his, 'the sun
never set on his dominions,' we Spaniards were masters of the world;
you cannot either deny this. And still we have said nothing of Don
Philip II., a king so wise and so astute that he made all the monarchs
of Europe dance at his pleasure, as though he were pulling them with
a string. Everything was for the greater glory of Spain and the
splendour of religion. Of his victories and greatness we have said
nothing; if his father was victorious at Pavia, he overturned his
enemies at St. Quintin. And what do you say about Lepanto? Down in the
sacristy we preserve the banners of the ship that Don Juan of Austria
commanded. You have seen them; one of them represents Jesus crucified,
and they are so long, so very long, that when they were fastened to
the triforium, the ends had to be turned up so that they should not
trail on the ground. So, was Lepanto nothing? Come, Gabriel, you
really must be mad to deny certain things. If someone had to conquer
the Moors lest they should possess themselves of all Europe and
endanger the Christian faith, who did it? The Spaniards. When the
Turks threatened to become masters of the seas, who went out to meet
them? Spain and her Don Juan. And who went to discover a new world
but the ships of Spain; and who sailed round the world but another
Spaniard, Magallanes; and for everything great it has always been us,
always us, in those days of religion and prosperity. And what can
we say about learning? Those centuries produced Spain's most famous
men--great poets and most eminent theologians; no one has equalled
them since. And to show that religion is the source of all greatness,
the most illustrious writers have worn the religious habit. I guess
what will be your argument, that after such glorious kings came others
less distinguished, and so the decadence commenced. I know something
about that also. I have heard the librarian of the Cathedral and other
people of great learning say this. But this really means nothing.
These are the designs of God, by which He puts His people to the
proof, just as He does with individuals, bringing them down to low
estate, to raise them again to great honour, so that they may continue
in the right way. But we will not speak of this; if there has been
a decadence we do not want to know anything about it. We want the
glorious past, the brilliant times of the Catholic kings, of Don
Carlos and the two Philips, and it is on them that we fix our eyes
when we talk of Spain returning to her good old times."
"But those centuries, Don Antolin," said Gabriel calmly, "were those
of Spanish decadence; in them was begun our ruin. I am not surprised
at your anger; you repeat what you have been taught. There are people
here of the highest education who are not less irritated if you touch
what they call their golden age. The fault is in the education that
is given in this country. All history is a lie, and to know it so
misrepresented it would be far better not to know it at all. In the
schools the past of the country is taught from the point of view of a
savage, who appreciates a thing because it shines and not because of
its worth or utility. Spain was great, and was on the high road to
become the first nation in the world, by solid and positive merits
that the hazards of war or policy could not have destroyed; but that
was before the centuries that you praise, before the times of the
foreign kings: in the Middle Ages which held great hopes, which have
vanished since the consolidation of national unity. Our Middle Ages
produced a cultivated, industrious and civilised people like none
other in the world; they had in them the materials for the building of
a great nation; but foreign architects came in who hastily ran up this
edifice; those first few years of existence that astound you with the
splendour of novelty, and among whose ruins we are still groping."
Gabriel forgot all his prudence in the ardour of discussion. He felt
no fear of Silver Stick, with his manner of an inquisitor incapable of
reasoning. He wished to convince him; he felt all the fervour, all the
irresistible impulse of his proselytising days, without trying in any
way to disguise his feelings from consideration of the atmosphere
surrounding him. Don Antolin listened to him in astonishment, fixing
on him his cold glance. The others listened, feeling confusedly the
marvel that such ideas should be enunciated in the cloister of a
cathedral. Don Martin, the chaplain of the nuns, who stood behind his
miserly protector, showed in his eyes the eager sympathy with which he
heard Luna's words.
He described the Hispano-Roman people over whom the Gothic invasion
swept, without, however, causing a gap, because before long the
conquerors had succumbed to the lower Latin degeneration, remaining
without strength, spending themselves in theological struggles and
dynastic intrigues like those of Byzantium. The regeneration of Spain
did not come from the north with the hordes of barbarians, but from
the south with the invading Arabs. At first they were few, but they
were sufficient to conquer Roderick and his corrupt courtiers. The
instinct of the Christian nationality revolting against the invaders,
and the gathering together of the whole soul of Spain on the rocky
heights of Covadonga to fall once more upon their conquerors, was all
a lie. The Spain of those days gratefully welcomed the people from
Africa and submitted without resistance. A squadron of Arab horsemen
was sufficient to make a town open its gates. It was a civilising
expedition more than a conquest, and a continual current of
immigration was established over the Straits. Over them came that
young and vigorous culture, of such rapid and astonishing growth,
which seemed to conquer though it was scarcely born: that civilisation
created by the religious enthusiasm of the Prophet, who had
assimilated all that was best in Judaism and in Byzantine
civilisation, carrying along with it also the great Indian traditions,
fragments from Persia and much from mysterious China. It was the
Orient entering into Europe, not as the Assyrian monarchs into Greece,
which repelled them seeing her liberties in danger, but the exact
opposite, into Spain, the slave of theological kings and warlike
bishops, which received the invaders with open arms. In two years they
became masters of what it took seven centuries to dispossess them. It
was not an invasion contested by arms, but a youthful civilisation
that threw out roots in every part. The principle of religious liberty
which cements all great nationalities came in with them, and in the
conquered towns they accepted the Church of the Christians and the
synagogues of the Jews. The Mosque did not fear the temples it found
in the country, it respected them, placing itself among them without
jealousy or desire of domination. From the eighth to the fifteenth
century the most elevated and opulent civilisation of the Middle Ages
in Europe was formed and flourished. While the people of the north
were decimating each other in religious wars, and living in tribal
barbarity, the population of Spain rose to thirty millions, gathering
to herself all races and all beliefs in infinite variety, like the
modern American people. Christians and Mussulmans, pure Arabs,
Syrians, Egyptians, Jews of Spanish extraction, and Jews from the East
all lived peaceably together, hence the various crossings and mixtures
of Muzarabes, Mudejares, Muladies and Hebrews. In this prolific
amalgamation of peoples and races all the habits, ideas, and
discoveries known up to then in the world met; all the arts, sciences,
industries, inventions and culture of the old civilisations budded
out into fresh discoveries of creative energy. Silk, cotton, coffee,
oranges, lemons, pomegranates, sugar, came with them from the East, as
also carpets, silk tissues, gauzes, damascene work and gunpowder. With
them also came the decimal numeration algebra, alchemy, chemistry,
medicine, cosmology and rhymed poetry. The Greek philosophers, who
were nearly vanishing into oblivion, saved themselves by following the
footsteps of the Arab conquerors. Aristotle reigned in the university
of Cordoba. That spirit of chivalry arose among the Spanish Arabs,
which has since been appropriated by the warriors of the north, as
though it were a special quality belonging to Christian people. While
in the barbarous Europe of the Franks, the Anglo-Normans, and the
Germans, the people lived in hovels, and the kings and barons in rocky
castles blackened by the smoke of their fires, devoured by vermin,
dressed in coarse serge, and fed like prehistoric man, the Spanish
Arabs were raising their fantastic Alcazars, and, with the refinement
of ancient Rome, they met at their baths to converse on all literary
and scientific questions. If any monk from the north felt the hunger
of learning, he came to the Arab universities or the Jewish synagogues
of Spain, and the kings of Europe thought they would be cured of their
infirmities if, by dint of golden bribes, they could procure a Spanish
physician.
When little by little the aboriginal element separated itself from the
invaders and small Christian nationalities arose, the Arabs and the
old Spaniards (if indeed after the constant mingling of blood there
was any difference between the two races) fought chivalrously without
exterminating each other after the battles, mutually respecting one
another, with long intervals of peace, as though they wished to
retard the moment of final separation, and often joining in various
enterprises.
A system of liberty ruled in most of the Christian States. The Cortes
arose much earlier than in the other western countries of Europe, and
the Spanish people governed and regulated their expenses themselves,
seeing only in their king a military chief. The municipalities were
little republics with their own elected magistrates. The town militia
realised the ideal of a democratic army. The Church at one with the
people lived peacefully with the other religions in the country; an
intelligent bourgeoisie created large industries in the interior, and
fitted out the first navy of the times at their own cost, and Spanish
products were more sought after than any other in all the ports
of Europe. There were towns then as populous as any of the modern
capitals; whole populations devoted themselves to weaving different
kinds of stuffs, and everything was cultivated on the soil of the
Peninsula.
The Catholic kings marked the apogee of national strength, but it was
the beginning also of its decadence. Their reign was great because the
flow of energy begun in the Middle Ages lasted till their times; but
it was execrable, because their tortuous policy turned Spain from the
right way, rousing in us religious fanaticism and the ambition of
universal empire. Two or three centuries ahead of the rest of Europe,
Spain was for the world of those days what England is for our own
times. If we had followed the same policy of religious toleration, of
fusion of races, of industrial and agricultural work in preference to
military enterprises, where should we not be now?
Gabriel asked this question, interrupting his ardent description of
the past.
"The Renaissance," continued Luna, "was more Spanish than Italian. In
Italy the literature of antiquity, and Greco-Roman art revived, but
the Renaissance was not entirely literary. The Renaissance represents
the springing into life of a new and cultivated society, with arts
and manufactures, armies and, scientific knowledge, etc. And who
accomplished this but Spain, that Arab-Hebrew-Christian Spain of the
Catholic kings? The Gran Capitan taught the world the art of modern
warfare; Pedro Navarro was a wonderful engineer; the Spanish troops
were the first to use firearms, and they created also the infantry,
making war democratic, as it gave the people the superiority over the
noble horsemen clad in armour; finally, it was Spain who discovered
America."
"And does all this seem little to you?" interrupted Don Antolin. "Do
you not exactly agree with what I said? We have never seen so much
power and greatness united in Spain as in the times of those kings,
who with reason some call the Catholics."
"I agree that it was a grand period of our history; the last that was
really glorious, the last gleam that flashed before that Spain, who
alone walked in the right way, was extinguished. But before their
deaths the Catholic kings commenced the decadence by dismembering that
strong and healthy Spain of the Arabs, the Christians and the Jews.
You are right, Don Antolin, to say that those kings are not called
the Catholics for nothing. Doña Isabel with her feminine fanaticism
established the Inquisition, so science extinguished her lamp in the
mosques and synagogues, and hid her books in Christian convents.
Seeing that the hour for praying, instead of reading, had come,
Spanish thought took refuge in darkness, trembling in cold and
solitude, and ended by dying. What remained devoted itself to poetry,
to comedies and theological tracts. Science became a pathway that led
to the bonfire; and then came a fresh calamity, the expulsion of the
Spanish Jews, so saturated with the spirit of this country, loving it
so dearly, that even to-day, after four centuries, scattered on the
shores of the Danube or the Bosphorus there are Spanish Jews who weep,
like old Castillians, for their lost country:
'Perdimos la bella Sion;
Perdimos tambien España
Nido de consolacion.'[1]
[Footnote 1: 'We lost our lovely Sion; we also lost our Spain, that
nest of consolation.]
"That people who had given Maimonides to the science of the Middle
Ages, and who were the mainstay of all the industries and commerce
of Spain, left our country _en masse_. Spain, deceived by its
extraordinary vitality was opening its own veins to satisfy the
growing fanaticism, believing that it could survive this loss without
danger. Afterwards came what a modern writer has called 'the foreign
body,' interposing itself in our national life--those Austrians who
came to reign and caused Spain to lose her distinctive character."
"Gabriel," interrupted the priest, "you are talking absurdities. The
true Spain began with the emperor, and went on equally gloriously
under Don Philip II. This is the pure and uncorrupted Spain that we
ought to take as an example, and which we hope to restore."
"No. The pure and uncorrupted Spain, the Spanish Spain without foreign
admixture, is that of the Arabs, Moors and Jews, that of religious
tolerance, that of industrial and agricultural wealth, and of free
municipalities; that which perished under the Catholic kings. What
came after was a Teutonic and a Flemish Spain turned into a German
colony, serving as a mercenary under foreign standards, ruining itself
in undertakings in which it had no interest, shedding blood and gold
for the ambition of the so-called Holy Roman Empire. I can understand
the enchantment that the emperor exercised over the bigoted and
ignorant people who worshipped the past. A great man that Don Carlos!
Brave in fight, astute in politics, jolly and hearty as one of the
burgomasters of his own country; a great eater, a great drinker, and
loving to catch the girls round the waist. But he had nothing Spanish
about him. He only appreciated his mother's heritage for what he could
wring out of it. Spain became a servant to Germany, ready to supply
as many men as were required, and to furnish loans and taxes. All the
exuberant life garnered in this country by Hispano-Arab culture
was absorbed by the north in less than a hundred years. The free
municipalities disappeared, their defenders went to the scaffold both
in Castille and Valencia; the Spaniard abandoned his plough or his
weaving to range the world with an arquebus on his shoulder, and the
town militias were transformed into bands which fought all over Europe
without knowing why. The flourishing towns became villages; churches
were turned into convents; the popular and tolerant clergy were
changed into friars who imitated with servile complacency the German
fanaticism. The fields remained barren for want of hands to cultivate
them, the poor dreamt of becoming rich from the sack of the enemy's
towns and left their work; the industrious burghers abandoned commerce
as only fit for heretics, and became nurseries of clerks and petty
magistrates; and the armies of Spain as unbeaten and glorious as they
were ragged, with no pay but pillage and in continual mutiny against
their chiefs, flooded our country with a swarm of wretched vagabonds,
from whence proceeded the bully, the beggar with his blunderbuss, the
highwayman, the wandering hermits, the starving nobleman, and all
those characters of which picturesque novels have availed themselves."
"But, the devil, Gabriel!" cried indignantly Silver Stick; "do you
deny that Don Carlos, who built the Alcazar of Toledo, and Don Philip
II., who lived in this very cloister, were two great kings?"
"I do not deny it; they were two extraordinary men, but they killed
Spain for ever. They were two foreigners, two Germans; Philip II.
clothed himself with a false Spaniardism to continue the German policy
of his father. This masquerading caused us great harm, because there
are many men now who think of him as the noblest representation of a
Spaniard. The absurd inventions and lapses from truth to which those
times give rise are enough to drive one mad. Many Catholics dream of
canonising Philip II. for the cold cruelty with which he exterminated
heretics, but such a king had really no Catholicism but his own; he
was heir to the German Cæsarism, that eternal hammer of the Popes.
Driven by pride, he was always sailing to the windward of schism and
heresy; that he did not break with the Pontificate was solely that
this latter feared that the Spanish soldiery, who had twice entered
Rome, would remain there for ever, and that it would have to submit to
all their extortions. The father and son robbed us with dissimulation
of our nationality, and dissipated our life for their purely personal
plans of reviving the Cæsarism of Charlemagne and forming the Catholic
religion to their own imagination and taste. They nearly destroyed the
ancient religious feeling of Spain, so cultivated and tolerant from
its continual intercourse with Mahomedanism and Judaism; that Spanish
Church, whose priests lived peacefully in the towns with the alfaqui
and the rabbi, and who punished with moral penalties those who from
excess of zeal disturbed the worship of the infidels. That religious
intolerance which foreign historians consider a purely Spanish product
was really imported by the German Caesars. It was the German friar who
came with his devout brutality and his crazy theology, not tempered
as in Spain by Semitic culture. With their intolerance and
impracticability they provoked the revolution of the Reformation in
the northern countries, and, driven out of them, they came here to
plant afresh their ignorance and fanaticism. The ground was well
prepared. When the free towns whose municipalities were republics
fell, the people also languished; the foreign seed produced in a
short time an immense forest, the forest of the Inquisition and the
fanaticism which still exists; the modern woodmen cut and lop, but
they soon fall off wearied; the arms of one man can do little against
a trunk that has grown for centuries. Fire, nothing but fire, can
exterminate that cursed vegetation."
Don Antolin opened his eyes in horror. He was not angry now, he seemed
quite thunderstruck by Luna's words.
"Gabriel, my son!" he exclaimed; "you are 'greener' than I thought.
Just think where you are; remember what you are saying. We are in the
Holy Metropolitan Church of all the Spains."
But Luna was fairly launched by the renewal of his historical
remembrances and he was not to be stopped, driven on as he was by his
propagandist zeal. He was fired by the old oratorical fervour, and he
spoke as at those meetings when he could scarcely continue his speech
for the applause, and the protests and surging of the multitude
obstructing the police.
The horror of the priest only seemed to excite him more.
"Philip II.," he continued, "was a foreigner, a German to the very
bones. His grave taciturnity, his slow and penetrating mind, were not
Spanish, they were Flemish. The impassibility with which he received
the reverses which ruined the nation was that of a foreigner who was
bound by no ties of affection to the country. 'It is better to reign
over corpses than over heretics,' he said, and corpses the Spaniards
really were, condemned not to think, but to lie in order to conceal
their thoughts. All the ancient offices had disappeared. Outside
the Church there was no future for any adventurous soul, except in
America--which ceased to be of any use to the nation after it became
converted into the treasure chest of the king--or to be a soldier
fighting in Europe for the rehabilitation of the Holy German Empire,
for the subjection of the Pope to the Emperor or the extinction of the
reformed religion, undertakings that in no way concerned Spain, but
were all the same very blood-letting affairs, even for those who
escaped with their lives. All the handicraftsmen disappeared, carried
away to the armies, and the towns became filled with invalids and
veterans, carrying their rusty swords, their only proof of personal
valour. All the middle-class guilds were suppressed; there only
remained nobles proud of being servants to the king and a populace
who only asked for bread and entertainments, like the Romans, and
contented themselves with the broth from the convents and the burning
of heretics organised by the Inquisition.
"After this, ruin overwhelmed us; after the great Caesars, so fatal to
Spain, came the little ones--Philip III., who gave the final blow by
expelling the Moors; Philip IV., a degenerate with literary fancies,
who wrote verses and courted nuns, and the miserable Charles II.
"Spain had never been so religious, Don Antolin," said Luna. "The
Church was mistress of everything; the ecclesiastical tribunals judged
even the king himself, but secular justice could not touch even the
hem of a garment of the lowest sacristan, even though he committed the
greatest crimes in the public streets. Only the Church could judge its
own; as Barrioneuva relates in his memoirs, friars armed to the teeth
wrested from the king's justice at the foot of the scaffold, in broad
daylight in the midst of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, one of their own
brothers condemned for murder. The Inquisition, not satisfied with
burning heretics, judged and punished gangs of cattle-lifters. Men of
letters, terrified, took refuge in ornamental literature as the last
refuge of thought, confining themselves to the production of witty
novels or plays, in which a fantastic honour was exalted which only
existed in poets' imagination, while the greatest corruption of morals
reigned. The great Spanish genius ignored or feigned to ignore what
the religious revolution beyond the frontiers was saying. Quevedo
only, who was the most daring, ventured to say:
'With the Inquisition....
Hush! Silence!'
the sad epitaph of Spanish thought which preferred to perish as it
could not speak the truth. In order to live quietly and support
themselves in those days of ignorance, many poets sought the shadow
of the Church and wore its vestments. Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirsode
Molina, Miradamerscua, Tarriga, Argensola, Gongora, Rioja, and others
were priests, many of them after stormy lives. Montalban was a priest
and employed in the Inquisition, and even the poor Cervantes, in
his old age, had to take the habit of St. Francis. Spain had eleven
thousand convents, more than a hundred thousand friars, and forty
thousand nuns, and to these must be added seventy-eight thousand
priests and the innumerable servitors and dependents of the Church,
such as alguaciles, familiars, jailors, and notaries of the
Inquisition, sacristans, stewards, buleros,[1] convent door-porters,
choristers, singers, lay brothers, novices--and I know not how many
other people. In exchange, the nation from a population of thirty
millions had shrunk to seven millions in less than two hundred
years. The expulsion of Jews and Moors by religious intolerance, the
continual foreign wars, the emigration to America in the hopes of
growing rich without work, hunger, the lack of sanitation, and the
abandonment of agriculture, had brought about this rapid depopulation.
The revenues of Spain had fallen to fourteen million ducats, whereas
the clerical revenue had risen to eight millions; the Church possessed
more than half the national fortune! What times! Eh, Don Antolin?"
[Footnote 1: _Buleros_--One charged with distributing crusading bulls
and collecting alms for them.]
Silver Stick listened coldly, as though he had formed some definite
idea about Luna, and therefore did not make much account of his words.
"However bad they were," he said slowly, "they could not be worse than
they are at present. At all events no one robbed the Church. Everyone
was contented in his poverty, thinking of heaven, which is the only
truth, and the worship of God which corresponds to it. Is it that you
possibly do not believe in God?"
Gabriel avoided an answer, and went on talking of those times.
"It was a period of barbarism and stagnation, and while Europe was
developing and progressing the people who had been foremost in all
civilisation were now left far behind. The kings, inspired by Spanish
pride and the hereditary pretensions of the German Caesars, conceived
the mad idea of mastering all Europe, with no more support than
a nation of seven million of inhabitants, and a few companies of
ill-paid and starving soldiers. The gold from America had gone to fill
the Dutchmen's purses, and in this undertaking, worthy of Don Quixote,
the nation received blow after blow. Spain became more and more
Catholic, poorer and more barbarous. She aspired to conquer the whole
world, yet in the interior she had whole provinces uninhabited; many
of the old towns had disappeared, the roads were obliterated and no
one in Spain knew for certain the geography of the country though few
were ignorant of the situation of heaven and of purgatory. The farms
of any fertility were not occupied by granges but by convents, and
along the few highways bivouacked bands of robbers, who took refuge,
when they found themselves pursued, in the monasteries, where they
were welcomed for their piety, and for the many masses they ordered
for their sinful souls.
"The ignorance was atrocious, the kings were advised even in warlike
matters by priests. Charles II., when the Dutch troops offered to
garrison the Spanish towns in Flanders, consulted with the clerics as
on a case of conscience, because this might facilitate the diffusion
of heresy, and he ended by preferring to let them fall into the hands
of the French, who, although they were enemies, were at all events
Catholics. In the university of Salamanca the poet Torres de
Villarroel could not find a single work on geography, and when he
spoke of mathematics, the pupils assured him it was a kind of sorcery,
a devilish science that could only be understood by anointing oneself
with an ointment used by witches. The theologians rejected the project
of a canal to unite the Tagus and the Manzanares, saying that this
would be a work against the will of God; but having laid this
down--fiat--the two rivers joined themselves even though they had
been separated from the beginning of the world. The doctors of Madrid
begged Philip IV. to allow the refuse to remain in the streets
'because the air of the town being exceedingly keen, it would cause
great ravages unless it were impregnated with the vapours from the
filth,' and a century later, a famous theologian in Seville registered
in a public document with those who were discussing with him, 'that
we would far rather err with Saint Clement, Saint Basil and Saint
Augustin, than agree with Descartes and Newton.'
"Philip II. had threatened with death and confiscation anyone who
published foreign books or who circulated manuscripts, and his
successors forbade any Spaniard to write on political subjects, so,
finding no ways of expansion for thought, they devoted themselves to
fine arts and poetry; painting and the theatre rose to a higher level
than in any other country; they were the safety valves of the national
genius; but this spring of art was only ephemeral, for in the midst of
the seventeenth century a grotesque and debasing decadence overwhelmed
everything.
"The poverty in those centuries was horrible; that same Philip II.,
though he was lord of the world, put up titles of nobility for sale
for the sum of six thousand reals, noting on the margin of the decree
'that it was not necessary to inquire much into the quality and origin
of the people.' In Madrid the people sacked the bakeries, fighting
with their fists for the bread. The president of Castille travelled
through the province with the executioner to wring the scanty harvest
from the peasants. The collectors of taxes, finding nothing that they
could collect in the towns, tore off the roofs of the houses, selling
the woodwork and the tiles. The families fled to the mountains
whenever they saw in the distance the king's representative, and so
the towns remained deserted and fell into ruins. Hunger came in even
to the royal palaces, and Charles II., Lord of Spain and of the
Indies, was unable on several occasions to procure food for his
servants. The ambassadors of England and Denmark were obliged to sally
forth with their armed servants to seek for bread in the suburbs of
Madrid.
"And amidst all this the innumerable convents, masters of more than
half the country and the sole possessors of wealth, showed their
charity by distributing soup to those who had strength to fetch it,
and by founding asylums and hospitals, where the people died of misery
though they were certain of reaching heaven. The ancient manufactures
had all disappeared. Segovia, so famous for its cloth, that had
employed over 40,000 persons in its manufacture, only held 15,000
inhabitants, and these had so completely forgotten the art of weaving
wool that when Philip V. wished to re-establish the industry, he was
obliged to import German weavers.
"And it was the same thing in Seville, in Valencia, and in Medina del
Campo, so famous for their fairs and their manufactures," continued
Gabriel. "Seville which in the fifteenth century had 16,000 silk
weavers, at the end of the seventeenth could only produce 65. Though
it is true in exchange its Cathedral clergy numbered 117 canons, and
it had 78 convents, with more than 4,000 friars and 14,000 priests
in the diocese. And Toledo? At the close of the fifteenth century
it employed 50,000 artisans in its silk and wool weaving and in its
factory of arms, to say nothing of curriers, silversmiths, glovers,
and jewellers; at the end of the seventeenth century it had hardly
15,000 inhabitants. Everything was decayed, everything was ruined;
twenty-five houses belonging to illustrious families had passed into
the hands of the convents, and the only rich people in the town were
the friars, the archbishop and the Cathedral. Spain was so exhausted
at the end of the Austrian rule that she saw herself nearly divided
among the different powers of Europe, like Poland, another Catholic
country like ours. The quarrels among the kings were the only thing
that saved her."
"If those times were so bad, Gabriel," said Silver Stick, "how was
it the Spaniards showed such unanimity? How was it there were no
'pronunciamientos' and risings in these deplorable times?"
"What could they do? The despotism of the Caesars had imposed on the
Spaniards a blind obedience to the kings as the representatives
of God, and the clergy had educated them in this belief from the
community of interests between the Church and the throne. Even the
most illustrious poets corrupted the people, exalting servility to the
monarchy in their plays. Calderon affirmed that the property and life
of a citizen did not belong to himself but to the king. Besides,
religion filled everything; it was the sole end of existence, and the
Spaniards meditating always on heaven, ended by accustoming themselves
to the miseries of earth. Do not doubt but the excess of religion was
our ruin, and came very near exterminating us as a nation. Even now we
are dragging along the consequences of this plague which lasted for
centuries. To save this country from death what had to be done? The
foreigners had to be called in, and the Bourbons came. See how low we
had fallen that we had not even soldiers. In this land, even if we
were wanting in other advantages, we could from the earliest days
reckon on good warlike leaders; but look, in the war of succession we
had to have English and French generals, and even officers, for there
was not a Spaniard who could train a cannon or command a company; we
had no one to serve us as a minister, and under Philip V. and Fernando
VI. all the Government were foreigners, strangers called in to revive
the lost manufactures, to reclaim the derelict lands, to repair the
ancient irrigation channels, and to found colonies in the deserts
inhabited by wild beasts and bandits. Spain, who had colonised half
the world after her own fashion, was now re-discovered and colonised
by Europeans.[1] The Spaniards seemed like poor Indians, guided by
their Cacique the friar, with their rags covered with scapularies and
miracle-working relics. Anti-clericalism was the only remedy against
all this superstition and ruin, and this spirit came in with the
foreign colonists. Philip V. wished to suppress the Inquisition and to
end the naval war with the Mussulman nations which had lasted for a
thousand years, depopulating the shores of the Mediterranean with the
fear of the Barbary and Turkish pirates. But the natives resisted any
reform coming from the colonists, and the first Bourbon had to desist,
finding his crown in danger. Later on his immediate successors, having
deeper roots in the country dared to continue his work. Carlos III.
in his endeavour to civilise Spain laid a heavy hand on the Church,
limiting its privileges and curtailing its revenues, being careful of
earthly things and forgetful of the heavenly. The bishops protested,
speaking in letters and pastorals 'of the persecutions of the poor
Church, robbed of its goods, outraged in its ministers, and attacked
in its immunities,' but the awakened country rejoiced in the
only prosperous days it had known in modern times before the
disestablishment. Europe was ruled by philosophic kings and Charles
III. was one of them. The echo of the English revolution still
vibrated through the world; the monarchs now wished to be loved and
not feared, and in every country they struggled against the ignorance
and brutality of the masses, bringing about progressive reforms
by royal enactment and even by force. But the great evil of the
monarchical system was its heredity, the power settled in one family,
for the son of a clever man with good intentions might be an imbecile.
After Charles III. came Charles IV., and as if this were not
sufficient, in the year of his death the French revolution broke out,
which made all the kings in Europe tremble, and the Bourbons of Spain
quite lost their heads, which they were never able to recover. They
went astray, wandering from the right way, throwing themselves once
more into the arms of the Church as the only means of avoiding the
revolutionary danger, and they have not yet returned, nor will they,
to the right track. Jesuits, friars and bishops became once more the
counsellors at the palace, as they still are, as in the times when
Carlos II. concocted his military and political plans with a council
of theologians. We have had false revolutions which have dethroned
people, but not ideas. It is true we have advanced a little, but
timidly, with halting footsteps and disorderly retreats, like one who
advances fearfully, and suddenly, at the slightest noise, rushes back
to the point of departure. The transformation has been more exterior
than interior. The minds of the people are still in the seventeenth
century; they still feel the fear and cowardice engendered by the
inquisitorial bonfires. The Spaniards are slaves to their very marrow;
their pride and their energies are all on the surface; they have not
lived through three centuries of ecclesiastical servitude for nothing.
They have made revolutions, they are capable of rebelling, but they
will always stop short at the threshold of the Church, who was their
mistress by force and remains so still, even though its power has
vanished. There is no fear of them entering here. You may remain quite
easy, Don Antolin, though in justice many accounts might be required
of her from the past. Is it because they are as religious as formerly?
You know that this is not the case, though they complain with reason
of the way in which the ancient grandeur of the Church has been
extinguished without popular aid."
[Footnote 1: In 1897 an Act was passed "to colonise derelict land in
Spain."]
"That is true," said Silver Stick; "there is no faith. No one is
capable of making any sacrifice for the house of God. Only in the hour
of death, when fear comes in, do some of them remember to assist us
with their fortune."
"There is no faith, that is the truth. The Spaniard, after that
religious fever that nearly killed him, lived in a state of perfect
indifference, not from scientific reflection but from inability to
think at all. They know they will go either to heaven or hell; they
believe it because they have been taught so, but they let themselves
be carried on by the stream of life, without the strength to choose
either one place or the other. They accept the established, living
in a sort of an intellectual somnambulism. If now and then thought
awakening suggests some criticism it is smothered at once by fear;
the Inquisition still lives among us though we have no longer the
bonfires, but we are terribly afraid of 'what will be said.' A
stationary and narrow-minded society is our modern holy office. He
who raises his protest, rising above the general and common monotony,
draws upon himself the stupid anger of scandalised man, and suffers
punishment; if he is poor he is put to the proof of hunger, his means
of life being cut away from him, and if he is independent he is burned
in effigy, creating emptiness around him. Everyone must be correct and
agree to what is established, and hence it arises, that, bound to
one another by fear, never an original thought arises, there is no
independent thought, and even the learned keep to themselves the
conclusions they draw from their studies. As long as this goes on the
task of the revolutionary is useless in this country; they may change
the apparent nature of the soil, but when the pickaxe strikes they
come at once on the stones of ages, solid and compact. The national
character though it has lost its religious faith is unchanged. Faith
is dead, but the corpse still remains with the appearance of life,
occupying the same place and obstructing the pathway. The Church is
poor and driven into a corner compared to what it was formerly, Don
Antolin, but do not fear, its situation will not be aggravated, the
tide has risen to its full height and will not overflow; as long as
the people in this country are afraid to say what they think, as long
as they are scandalised by a new idea, and tremble at what their
neighbours will say, so long will they laugh at revolutions, for
however much they break out, none of these will bring the water to
your mouths."
Don Antolin laughed on hearing this.
"But Gabrielillo, man--you must be mad. All this reading and
travelling has turned your head. At first I was indignant, thinking
you were among those who wished for another revolution to take
away the little that is left to us, proclaiming the republic and
suppressing all ecclesiastical things, but I see that you go much
beyond this, that you conform to nothing, and that everything seems to
you the worst; and this rather pleases me, because I see you are not a
terrible enemy to be feared as you fire from too far. It seems to me
that your head is as much affected as your chest. But do all these
revolutions we have had seem as nothing to you? Do you think the
country is still as savage as you have described it in past years? But
I," continued the priest ironically, "hear a great deal said about the
progress of the country, and I know that we have railways, and that
the long chimneys are arising in all the town suburbs, and many of the
impious are delighted at this, comparing them to the church belfries."
"Bah!" exclaimed Gabriel indifferently. "There is a little of this
progress; the revolutions have placed Spain in touch with other
countries, the progressive current has caught this country and is
carrying it along as the Asiatics and others are carried; no one
can escape it nowadays. But we advance at very low water, inert and
without strength; if we advance it is with the current, and not by
our own energy, while other people stronger than we swim and swim,
advancing at every stroke. How have we contributed to this progress?
Where are our manifestations of modern life? The railways, few and
bad, are the work of foreigners, and are their property; the grass
grows between the rails, which shows that we still follow the holy
calm of carts and wagons. The most important industries, metallurgy
and mines, are all in the hands of foreigners or of Spaniards who are
subject to them, living under their bountiful protection. Commerce
languishes under an old-fashioned protection which enhances the price
of all commodities, and so there is no capital forthcoming; money
remains hidden in earthen jars in the fields as treasure, or in the
towns is devoted to usury as in past times; the most daring venture
to invest in public stock; Government continues the mismanagement,
certain of always finding someone to lend, and pointing to this credit
as a proof of the country's prosperity. There are in Spain two million
hectares of uncultivated land, twenty-six millions of unirrigated
arable land, and only one million irrigated. This cultivation of
unirrigated land, which has come to be almost our only agriculture
is a concession that Spanish indolence makes to hunger, a perpetual
demonstration of the fanaticism that trusts in prayer or in the rain
from heaven more than in human progress. The rivers rush to the sea
through scorched-up provinces overflowing in winter, not to fertilise,
but to carry away everything in the volume of the inundation; there is
plenty of stone for churches and new convents, but none for dykes and
reservoirs; they build belfries and cut down the trees that attract
the rain. And do not tell me again, Don Antolin, that the Church is
poor and in no ways in fault; the poor are yourselves, you of the old
and traditional Church, you of the religion 'à la Española,' for in
this as in everything else there are fashions, and the faithful
follow the most recent; for here are the Jesuits, the most modern
manifestation of Catholicism, the 'latest novelty,' with their Sacred
Heart of Jesus and other French idolatries, building palaces and
churches in all directions, diverting the money that formerly went to
the Cathedrals, the only evidence of wealth in the country. But let us
return to our progress. Worse even for agriculture than the drought
is the ignorance and routine of the labourers, every new invention or
scientific appliance repels them, thinking it evil. 'The old times
were the good ones, our ancestors cultivated in this way and so ought
we'; and so ignorance is turned into a sort of national glory, and
we cannot hope for any remedy at present. In other countries the
universities and high schools send out reformers, men fighting for
progress; here the centres of learning only send out a proletariat
of students who must live, besieging all the professions and public
appointments, with the sole desire to open themselves a way to
continuous employment. They study (if you can call it study) for a few
years, not to learn, but to gain a diploma, a scrap of paper which
authorises them to earn their bread. They learn anything that the
professor teaches, without the slightest desire to inquire any
further. The professors are for the greater part doctors or barristers
practising their profession, who come between whiles and sit for an
hour in their chairs, repeating like a phonograph what they have said
for many previous years, and then they return to their sick or their
lawsuits, without caring in the least what is being said or written in
the world since they got their appointments. All Spanish culture is at
second hand, purely on the surface, 'translated from the French,' and
even this is only for the scanty minority who read, for the rest of
those so-called intellectuals have no other library but the text-books
they studied as children, and all they learn of the progress of human
thought is from the newspapers. The parents who are desirous of
securing as soon as possible the future of their sons who are seeking
a career, send them to these centres of learning when they scarcely
know how to speak; the man-student of other countries, in the
full plenitude of his thinking powers, does not exist here. The
universities are full of children, and in the different institutes you
only see short trousers, and the Spaniard, before he shaves himself
for the first time, is a licentiate and on the high road to become
a doctor; the wet nurse will end by sitting by the professor. These
children who receive the baptism of science at an age when in other
countries they are playing with their toys, being confirmed in the
title that proclaims their scientific acquirements, study no more;
these are the intellectuals who are to direct and save us, and who
to-morrow may be legislators and ministers. Come, my good man, it is
enough to make one laugh!"
Gabriel did not laugh, but Silver Stick and the others applauded his
words. Any criticism against the present times delighted the priest.
"This country is drained, Don Antolin, nothing remains standing. The
number of towns which have vanished since our decadence commenced is
incalculable. In other countries ruins are carefully preserved, as
so many stone pages of their history; they are cleaned, preserved,
supported and strengthened, and paths opened round them so that all
can examine them. Here, where Roman, Byzantine and Arab art have
passed, and also the Mudejar, the Gothic and the Renaissance--in fact,
all the styles of Europe--the ruins in the country are hidden and
disfigured by herbage and creepers, and in the towns they are
mutilated and disfigured by the vandalism of the people. They are
constantly thinking of the past, and yet they despise its remains;
what a country of dreams and desolation! Spain is no longer a country,
it is an ill-arranged and dusty museum, full of old things that
attract all the curious of Europe, but in which even the ruins are
ruined."
The eyes of Don Martin, the young curate, fastened themselves on
Gabriel. They seemed to speak to him and express the pleasure with
which he heard his words. The other listeners, silent and with bowed
heads, did not feel less the enchantment of those propositions which
sounded so audaciously in the restful and rank atmosphere of the
cloister. Don Antolin was the only one who laughed, finding Gabriel's
ideas quite charming but absolutely crazy It was getting late and the
sun had sunk below the roofs of the Cathedral. Silver Stick's niece
called to them once again from the door of her house.
"We are coming, child," said the priest, "but I have one thing first
to say to this gentleman."
And addressing himself to Luna, he continued:
"But, Hombre de Dios![1]--but I ought not to call you that as you
are so turbulent--you think everything is out of joint. The Spanish
Church, worn out as you say, has become very poor, and still you say
this revolution is a very small affair. What do you wish for? What
is it that you desire so that things might be settled? Tell us your
secret quickly and let us go, for the cold is very sharp."
[Footnote 1: Man of God.]
And he laughed again, looking at Gabriel with paternal pity as though
he were a child.
"My remedy!" exclaimed Gabriel, taking no notice of the priest's
gesture. "I have no remedy whatever, it is the progress of humanity
that alone offers one. All the nations on earth have passed through
the same evolutions; first of all they were ruled by the sword, then
by faith, and now by science. We ourselves have been ruled by warriors
and priests, but now we tarry at the gate of modern life, without the
strength or wish to take science by the hand, who is the only guide
we could have, hence our sad situation. Science is nowadays in
everything--in agriculture, in all manufactures, in arts and crafts,
in the culture and well-being of the people; it is even in war. Spain
still lives far from the sun of science, at most she knows a pale
reflection, cold and feeble, that comes to us from foreign countries.
The failure of faith has left us without strength, like those
creatures who, having suffered from a severe illness in their youth,
remain anaemic for ever, without possible recuperation, condemned to
premature old age."
"Bah! Science!" said Silver Stick, turning towards his house; "that
is the eternal cry of all the enemies of religion. There is no better
science than to love God and His works. Good evening."
"Very good evening, Don Antolin; but remember this, we have not yet
done with faith and the sword; sometimes one directs us or the other
drives us; but of science, never a word, unless Spain has changed in
the last twenty-four hours."