Part 24

Lull was born in the capital of the Balearic Islands, which lie a day's sail from Barcelona, and having passed an apprenticeship at court under Jaime _el Conquistador_ of Aragon, he led in Palma a life of pleasure and dissipation till his romantic conversion at thirty-two. Núñez de Arce has enshrined the legend in verse: so violent was the seneschal's pursuit of a fair lady of the city that he once on horseback followed her into church to the scandal of the people. The poet gives the final scene that cured his passion, when she who was so exquisite without, to repell his advances, exposed to him a hidden cancer. The shock changed the worldling to a saint. Distributing his goods to the poor, he retired to a mountain, and spent some years in prayer. Later in his energetic career he returned to this hermitage to pass again periods in meditation for his spiritual strengthening, being the first to show that special faculty of the Spanish mystic, the double life of solitary ecstasy and active charity. The desire to convert the Mohammedan took such possession of his soul that at forty he put himself to school, like the great Basque patron of a later day, and in Paris he studied logic and Arabic in preparation for his future career.

Lull attained fourscore years, the latter half of his life being dominated by his burning purpose to convert Islam. One pope after another as he mounted the chair of Peter was beseiged by this astonishing man, and he wandered from court to court urging the universities to teach the oriental languages, that missionaries for the East might be fittingly prepared. Little success crowned his efforts for popes and kings had troubles nearer home. The Catalan enthusiast came at an inopportune moment; the last two Crusades under St. Louis of France had left discouragement behind. However, before his death he had the satisfaction of seeing chairs of Hebrew and Arabic founded by a pope, by a French king, and in Spain and England. The indefatigable man visited Austria, Poland, and Greece; he advocated the protection of the Greeks against Moslem incursions, a result only achieved in our own day; he stopped in Cypress, traversed Armenia, Palestine, and Egypt, zealously expounding the Gospel. His first visit as an apostle to Northern Africa was a failure. There is something touching about this old missionary of six hundred years ago being driven out of Tunis--he and his loved library--and embarked with harsh orders never to return. Not in any spirit of patronage did he labor for the conversion of souls, but wiser than many to-day he carried with him true knowledge and respect for the Mohammedans. His liberal intelligence assimulated much that was of value in their ideas, especially from those heretics of Islam, the Persian Sufis, or mystics.

A second time when over seventy Lull ventured across to Africa, and again he--and the books--were violently expelled. I fear our blessed Raimundo was a bit of a visionary, he thought to convince by intellectual debate. The king of England learning of the old scholar's chemical studies, with the curiosity of the period in regard to the philosopher's stone, invited him to London, and lodged him with the monks of Westminster Abbey. Chemistry was merely a side issue in the life of the great missionary. Just short of his eightieth year, with untiring courage and magnificent faith, he set forth once more on his final apostleship to the Mohammedan, and once more preached in Egypt, Jerusalem, and Tunis. At Bugia he was stoned by the furious populace, who left him for dead on the beach, and some Genoese merchants carried away his almost lifeless body. Before they reached the harbor of Palma the martyr had died, and his townsmen buried him with honors in the church of his master, St. Francis.

Lull's books, the "Ars Magna" and the "Arbor Scientiæ," are filled with the curious system he evolved for reducing discords. He tried to co-ordinate and facilitate the operations of the mind, to simplify all sciences by showing them to be branches of one trunk. Much of his theory may be fanciful and impractical, but it was a truly suggestive idea based on the profound truth of the unity of knowledge. He explored many branches of the human mind, and left works on medicine, theology, politics, jurisprudence, mathematics and chemistry. The accusation of alchemy is untenable, for he made his experiments in scientific good faith, and wrote against astrology. For three centuries, down to the time of Descartes, Lull was considered a leader of the intellect, and his books were recommended by the universities of Europe.

The Catalan dialect has been used by men of marked talent in our own time. The whole of Spain should be as proud of Padre Jacinto Verdaguer, as all France is of their Provençal, Mistral. Verdaguer's "Atlantada," called the best epic of the century, was crowned in 1855 at the Floral Games, festivals which are held in Barcelona each year, for competitions in verse and prose, and to revive the national dances.

This intellectual movement rouses the stranger's enthusiasm, and if it keeps itself dissociated from politics,--those abominable politics that sink every noble thing they fasten on, patriotism, education, religion, art,--the revival may prove more than a passing phase. Alert in literature, in music, in the sciences, in municipal progress, and commercial success, what need has this city to be jealous of the capital; they are too different for comparison. Madrid lacks much that Barcelona can claim; a Catalan could emulate some Castilian qualities. Each vitally needs the other.

GERONA

AND FAREWELL TO SPAIN

"I count him wise Who loves so well man's noble memories He needs must love man's nobler hopes yet more!"

WILLIAM WATSON.

"Una restauración de la vida entera de España no puede tener otro punto de arranque que la concentración de todas nuestras energías dentro de nuestro territorio. Hay que cerrar con cerrojos, llaves, y candados todas las puertas por donde el espíritu español se escapó de España para derramarse por los cuatro puntos del horizonte, y por donde hoy espera que ha de venir la salvación; y en cada una de esas puertas no pondremos un rótulo dantesco que diga: "Lasciate ogni speranza," sino este otro más consolador, más humano, muy profundamente humano, imitado de San Ajustín: "Noli foras ire; in interiore Híspaniæ habitat veritas."

ANGEL GANIVET: "_Idearium Español_."

The day drew near for our leaving Spain. Eight months had passed since we entered from the north of the Pyrenees isthmus, and now we found ourselves at its southern exit. They had been months filled with an absorbing and unexpected interest; we had come into Spain for a mere autumn tour, and she had forced us to linger. And I must repeat that I came with the average pessimistic idea that she was a spent and more or less worthless country, till what I saw about me daily changed me to a partisan. It was a hard farewell to take now. When Spain is allowed to show herself as she is, she wins a regard that is like an intense personal affection.

At dawn on the early day in June set for our departure we left Barcelona; before night we would be in France, but the leave-taking was to be broken by some hours in Gerona. As usual it was the fact of its possessing a first-rate church that determined us to stop. This was to be the last of the grand cathedrals which more than those of any land, even of France with their purer art, had realized my ideal of worship and reverence. As Gerona was in Catalonia, good architecture was to be expected, but this was better than good. The Cathedral which dominates the town was worthy of its stirring memories. An imposing flight of eighty steps, like that of the Ara C[oe]li in Rome, ascends to its west portal. At the head of this staircase we paused to look out on the panorama of the Pyrenees--mountain rose behind mountain, the foreground hills well-wooded, those beyond covered with snow. Here was no stupid Escorial facing in to a blank wall. The old masters with vivifying imaginations had brought the glories of nature to worship with them, had hung as it were in their porch, this lovely landscape.

Within the Cathedral the first impression is its spaciousness. The width is astonishing; indeed the hall-like nave of Gerona is the widest Gothic vault in Christendom, and were it longer by two bays, no cathedral of Europe could have surpassed the effect. The wide nave of Catalan churches is a national feature that here reaches its acme. The choir of Gerona is on a smaller scale, and the meeting of the two makes a curious feature, not bad inside, but in the exterior view extremely ugly. Probably in time the choir would have been enlarged to fit its monstrous nave. The men in those days started undertakings as if they could never die, but later generations have lacked their enthusiastic ambition.

By happy chance we were in time to assist at a last High Mass in a Spanish cathedral. It is no exaggeration to say one's heart felt heavy in listening to the solemn chanting, watching the reverence of priests, acolytes, and congregation, to realize that this was for the last time. The last time we should see the kiss of peace carried symbolically from the priest at the altar to the canons in the choir, the last time we should hear the clamor of the wheel of bells. I looked up to where they hung on the wall and nodded them a little personal farewell, so often had they charmed me. Farewell to sedate Spanish piety, to the devotional unconsciousness of individual prayer. Over the frontier, during the coming summer at Luchon, I was soon to hear wooden signals clapped during Mass to guide the wandering attention of the people, to see the children scamper out in obvious relief.

The chancel of Gerona is a gem. The iron _reja_ that shuts in the _capilla mayor_ is of the plainest, like a wall of stacked spears guarding the holy of holies. There is no towering _retablo_, which would be out of character with slender Catalan piers; instead, behind the altar is a marvelous reredos of silver carved in scenes, and surmounted by three Byzantine processional crosses,--all ancient and priceless enough to be the treasure of a national museum. The altar and the canopy over it are also of silver, _retablo_ and altar being placed where they now stand in 1346. The effect of iron _reja_ and precious shrine is faultlessly artistic; we sigh here for a beauty as completely lost for our copying as is the tranquil perfection of these gravestones, the sculptured stelæ of Athens.

The service over, we proceeded to examine the church. The cloisters are oddly irregular in shape, and look out on the snow-topped Pyrenees. So beautiful was the prospect that I added this cloister setting to the dream-cathedral Spain tempts one to build. It would have the cloisters of Tarragona with this outlook of Gerona's; also Gerona's altar and _retablo_, though the reredos of Avila and that of Tarragona are worthy rivals. There would be the grand staircase of this Cathedral, and it would ascend to a western portal like León's, with Santiago's _Pórtico de la Gloria_ within; the north and south doors would be Plateresque from Salamanca and Valladolid. The cathedral would be set on Lérida's crag, with the city of Toledo climbing to it and the Tagus churning below. The nave would be Seville's, and Seville's windows would light it and her organ thunder there. The choir would be Toledo's, carved by Rodrigo, Berruguete, and Vigarni, the chancel Barcelona's stilted arches. How they could be combined is hard to solve, but round this _capilla mayor_ would run the double ambulatory of Toledo, and the apse outside have León's flying buttresses,--the apse which the old mystics held as symbolic of the crown of thorns about the head of Christ (the Altar). _Rejas_ from Burgos, Granada, Seville, would guard the chapels, and tombs of knights and bishops from Sigüenza, from Zamora--from every town of Spain in fact--would line the walls: tapestries and treasures from Saragossa; a _via crucis_ by Hernández and portrait statues by Montañés; a sacristy like that of Avila; a _sala capitular_ copied from the Renaissance grace of San Benito in Alcántara; and a wealth of side chapels,--a Condestable chapel, a San Isidoro, a Cámera Santa, a San Millán, a Santa María la Blanca, and an isolated shrine like Palencia's, standing in the ambulatory. And always beneath the vault of this cathedral would be found far-off little Lugo's solemn adoration, and there would be processions as imposing as Andalusia, with the piety of Estremadura, or the Basque. The Giralda, built in the warm red stone of Astorga tower, would stand close by, and not far away, a monastery, line for line, like Poblet. Sitting in a Spanish cloister looking out on the Pyrenees, one drifts into dream-pictures of the ideal cathedral.

Gerona has a few other churches worth examining, that of San Feliu, with two Roman sarcophagi and several early Christian ones with wave-like lines. We rambled about the plaza where a fair was in progress, and at every turning kept bidding farewell to familiar scenes of Spanish life; we were not again to hear the peace-bringing "_Vaya Usted con Dios!_" not again to assent to the cordial "_Hasta luego!_"

The city is massively built, but it has a battered look, and no wonder. During the French invasion, Gerona stood a siege as terrific as any in history, yet who of us has heard of it? In May, 1809, a French army surrounded the city where there were only three thousand soldiers for the defense, yet for seven months the town defied the invaders, and that with half a dozen breaches in the walls. The women shouldered guns and drilled in a battalion formed by Doña Lucía Fitzgerald; old men and children piled up the earth of the ramparts; cloistered nuns, at a higher call, left their convents to nurse the wounded to whom they gave up their cells, so many priests fell fighting on the walls that no services were held in the churches, there was only the burning of candles; no one bought or sold, for every shopman was a soldier. When a gallant English volunteer died on the ramparts, he exclaimed that he lost his life gladly in a cause so just for a nation so heroic.

The French drew closer and closer, and slowly the city starved. The hardships endured were incredible. They ate rats and mice, yet no thought came of surrender. A hot August dragged by, in September the French attacked fiercely and on both sides the men fell like flies. Who was the soul of this indomitable fortitude? The order and subordination told of a master mind, and Gerona had one, Don Mariano Alvarez de Castro, the inflexible governor. He it was who enrolled the women and children in the defense; his lofty spirit never wavered, and his force of character gave him so accepted an authority that he was able to direct a hopeless defense without recourse to cruelty. The siege of Gerona was not stained by any brutal act.

The blockade drew closer. By October literally all food was gone, and the people began to fall in the streets to a foe more terrible than bullets. Governor Alvarez stood like a rock of courage. When he passed up the Cathedral steps where the heart-rending groups of the dying lay, his very presence gave hope: if there was a faint-hearted citizen in Gerona, he was more afraid of that iron man than of the French. Never would the governor have yielded, but toward the close of the year he fell ill in the infested air, and as he lay in delirium the city capitulated. With hundreds of dead bodies lying unburied in the streets, there was nothing else to be done.

Then followed a scene which did honor to the invader; it rings with the same chivalry that Velasquez painted in the "Surrender of Breda," where Spínola bends to meet the conquered Nassau, the same spirit that made those Frenchmen of an earlier day carry a certain wounded knight, their prisoner, on a litter from Pamplona across the mountains to his castle of Loyola. The foreign troops marched into Gerona in a dead silence, with not a gesture of triumph, moved to awe by the corpses that covered the pavements and to reverence by the few hollow-eyed, living skeletons that met them. The moral victory lay with the conquered. When food was offered the starved people, even that was at first refused. Don Mariano Alvarez, taken prisoner on his bed, died mysteriously, poisoned, some say, in the fortress of Figueras not long after. And all this horror and heroism was only a hundred years ago!--we too walked the streets of Gerona in silent reverence.

Then once again on the train; more volcanic hills, more dry rivers that showed what the spring torrents must be like, and in a few hours Port-Bou, the Spanish frontier town, was reached. We stood at the car window looking out sadly on the last of Spain as the train swept round the blue inlets of the Mediterranean.

Farewell to this great Christian democracy where the simple title of Don is borne by king and people alike, to the "nation least material of Europe," farewell to a grave, contented race, whose leaders left noble works as noble as their lives, whose writers were soldiers and heroes, where artists prepared for religious scenes by fasting and prayers, where mystics were not negative and inert, but emerged from their union with God with more power for practical life, whose women have by instinct the dignity of womanhood, untainted yet by luxury, a land that can boast the two first women of all ages and countries, an Isabella of Castile, and a St. Teresa.

Some may think I carry admiration too far. Carping criticism of Spain has been pushed to such an extent that it is time to swing to the other side: where there can be no joy, no admiration, there can be no stimulus. I like to take M. René Bazin's words as if addressed to me: "Vous avez raison de croire à la vitalité de l'Espagne. Elle n'a jamais été une nation déchue, elle a été une nation blessée."

A wounded nation but not one stricken to death. She is recovering. Let her but be patient and aspire slowly; disciplined, tried in the fire and purified, by living without the ceaseless upheavals of the past century, by industry, by commerce, with no encumbering colonies to drain her blood, with the Catalans calling the Castilians "_paisanos_," she will get back her former strength and _brio_. Her literature, her art, are lifting their heads.

My prayer for Spain in her rehabilitation is, that she may not diverge from her national spirit and traditions, may modern ideas not change her unworldliness and her stoical endurance, "_su esencia inmortal y su propio carácter_." May she guard her faith, her glory in the past and her aspiration for the future, the faith of the Cross that has struck deeper root here than in any spot on earth, but remembering always that her own greatest saint warns her: "In the spiritual life not to advance is to go back." May she never lose the virile independence of character that so distinguishes her people, the pride of simple manhood that looks out of the eyes of her honorable peasantry and makes their innate courtesy. No nation was ever formed so completely by the chivalry of the Middle Ages as Spain. May she always be _España la heróica_!

INDEX

Acuña, tomb of Bishop, 40, 41

Africa, 74, 86, 87, 178, 230, 245, 246, 337, 409, 416, 417

Ajustina of Aragon ("Maid of Saragossa"), 381

Alacón, Pedro Antonio de, 151, 328, 335, 336, 337

Alas, Leopoldo, 93, 328, 341, 342, 349

Alba de Tormes, 159, 160, 200, 205-210

Albertus Magnus, 414

Alcalá de Henares, 28, 67, 73, 142, 238, 244, 246, 249, 342, 372

Alcántara, 359-364, 394

Alcántara, St. Peter of, 199

Alfonso II, _el Casto_, 90, 94

Alfonso VI, 87, 116, 129, 231, 236

Alfonso VIII, _él de las Navas_, 50, 84

Alfonso X, _el sabio_, 134, 291, 375

Alfonso XI, 250

Alfonso XII, 179, 180, 217, 333, 337, 343

Alfonso XIII, 50, 174, 180, 181, 182, 217, 287, 289, 290, 291, 292, 351, 355

Alhambra, the, 86, 258, 265-272, 280, 396

Almohades, the, 88

Almoravides, the, 88

Altamira y Crevea, Sr. Rafael, 327

Alva, Duke of, 65, 205

Alvarez de Castro, Mariano, 426, 427, 428

Amadeus I (Duke of Aosta), 179, 333

America, the U. S. of, 9, 16, 18, 41, 64, 128, 140, 209, 332, 370, 397, 411

America, South, 90, 177, 211, 248, 290, 319, 332, 364, 365, 366, 395, 397

Amicis, Edmondo de, 259

Amiens, cathedral of, 81, 415

Andalusia, 2, 37, 87, 102, 105, 112, 151, 178, 189, 225, 230, 242, 257 259, 316, 317, 319, 333, 336, 343

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 187, 414

Aragon, 79, 105, 226, 372, 375-384, 391

Architecture, 9, 36, 42, 43, 48, 54, 81, 91, 147, 151, 232, 295, 385, 393, 400, 403, 421. _See_ Gothic, Romanesque, Plateresque

Arenal, Doña Concepción, 133

Arfe family, the de, 202, 312

Armory, Madrid, the Royal, 114, 220, 226, 227, 228

Arroyo, 360, 363, 368

Astorga, 4, 105, 113-116, 141, 159

Asturias, 4, 79-103, 105, 112, 267, 341, 346

Asturias, Prince of, 84, 85, 288, 291, 324

Athens, 149, 268, 423

Augustine, St., 18, 155, 156, 189, 246, 342

Augustus Cæsar, 107, 392

Averroës, 88, 319

Avila, 6, 159, 160, 162, 164, 166, 195-212, 213, 216, 269, 273, 396

Azcoitia, 14, 18, 23

Azpeitia, 23, 30, 31

Baalbec, ruins of, 353

Bacon, Lord, 28, 64, 69, 135

Bailén, battle of, 172, 380

Balearic Islands, 415

Balmes y Uspia, Jaime, 210

Baltazar Carlos, infante, Don, 60, 221, 227, 378

Balzac, Honoré de, 327, 333

Barcelona, 7, 8, 26, 28, 140, 146, 216, 345, 379, 394, 395-419, 421

Basque Provinces, 4, 13-32, 36, 79, 83, 101, 105

Bazán, Doña Emilia Pardo, _see_ Pardo Bazán

Bazin, M. René, 79, 258, 347, 429

Becerra, Gaspar, 115

Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 256

Bembo, Pietro, Cardinal, 251

Benedict XIV, 136

Benedictine rule, the, 48, 49, 135, 136, 225, 364, 389

Benson, Rev. Robert Hugh, 188

Berruguete, Alonso de, 44, 60, 82, 205, 233, _illustration_ 256, 377, 424

Bidassoa, river, 15

Bilbao, 4, 91, 140, 412

Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente, 328, 340, 341

Boabdil, 227

Bobadilla, 2, 265

Bonaventura, St., 187, 414

Borgia, St. Francis (de Borja), 21, 26, 28, 30, 191, 199, 240, 251, 252, 253, 254, 371

Borromeo, St. Charles, 191, 255

Borrow, George, _quoted_, 283

Boston, U. S. A., 64, 118, 148, 224

Bourbon kings in Spain, the, 72, 136, 171, 173, 234, 324, 367

Briz, Francisco Pelayo, 411

Browning, Robert, 34

Brunetière, Ferdinand, 337

Budé, Guillaume, 28

Byron, Lord, 321, 381

Byzantine Influences in Spanish Art, 48, 94, 96, 108, 148, 262, 403, 423

Bull-fight, the, 11, 16, 127, 128, 129, 309, 358

Burgos, 4, 33-54, 55, 56, 57, 92, 95, 148, 189, 201, 204, 273, 424

Caballero, Fernán, _pseud_ (Doña Cecelia B. von F. de Arrom), 127, 328, 329, 330, 343, 411

Cáceres, 356, 357, 358, 359, 362, 364, 369

Cadiz, 7, 71, 143, 176, 178, 316-325

Calatyud, 376

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 240, 253, 327

Calvin, John, 68

Campion, Edmund, 68

Campoamor, Ramón de, 179, 274

Cano, Alonzo, 60, 61

Cano, Melchor, 153

Cantabrian mountains, 82, 83, 84, 102, 112, 122, 124, 347, 348

Carmelite Order, the, 183, 189, 198, 199, 200

Carmona, Salvador, _see_ _illustration_ 327

Carr, Sir John, 381, 382

Castelar y Ripoll, Emilio, 179

Castile, 6, 12, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 54, 55, 79, 83, 101, 105, 165, 184, 196, 201, 204, 211, 212, 228, 229, 238, 245, 247, 257, 259, 267, 282, 397, 411, 429

Catalan language, 409, 414, 418

Catalan question, 409-414

Catalonia, 3, 79, 101, 105, 134, 253, 383, 385, 388, 391, 392, 396, 397, 400, 404, 405, 409, 410, 411, 412, 414, 419, 421, 429