Chapter 9

There is, however, this difference in the Bovarism of Nature's most exquisite moments. They seem other than they are not by seeming more than they are but by seeming less. It is by the attenuation of the medium, by an approach to obscurity, by an approximation to the faintness of a dream, that Beauty is manifested. I recall the Greek head of a girl once shown at the Burlington Fine Arts Club,--over which Rodin, who chanced to see it there, grew rapturous,--and it seemed to be without substance or weight and almost transparent. "Las Meninas" scarcely seems to me a painting made out of solid pigments laid on to a material canvas, but rather a magically evoked vision that at any moment may tremble and pass out of sight. And when I awoke in the dawn a while ago, and saw a vase of tulips on the background of the drawn curtain over a window before me, the scene was so interpenetrated by the soft and diffused light that it seemed altogether purged of matter and nothing but mere Loveliness remained. There are flowers the horticulturist delights to develop which no longer look like living and complex organisms, but only gay fragments of crinkled tissue-paper cut at random by the swift hand of a happy artist. James Hinton would be swept by emotion as he listened to some passage in Mozart. "And yet," he would say, "there is nothing in it." Blake said much the same of the drawings of Dürer. Even the Universe is perhaps built on the same plan. "In all probability matter is composed mainly of holes," said Sir J.J. Thomson a few years ago; and almost at the same moment Poincaré was declaring that "there is no such thing as matter, there is only holes in the ether." The World is made out of Nothing, and all Supernal Beauty would seem to be an approach to the Divine Mystery of Nothingness. "Clay is fashioned, and thereby the pot is made; but it is its hollowness that makes it useful," said the first and greatest of the Mystics. "By cutting out doors and windows the room is formed; it is the space which makes the room's use. So that when things are useful it is that in them which is Nothing which makes them useful." Use is the symbol of Beauty, and it is through the doors and the windows of Beautiful Things that their Beauty emerges.--Man himself, "the Beauty of the World," emerges on the world through the door of a Beautiful Thing.

_June_ 5.--"A French gentleman, well acquainted with the constitution of his country, told me above eight years since that France increased so rapidly in peace that they must necessarily have a war every twelve or fourteen years to carry off the refuse of the people." So Thicknesse wrote in 1776, and he seems to have accepted the statement as unimpeachable. Indeed, he lived long enough to see the beginning of the deadliest wars in which France ever engaged. The French were then the most military people in Europe. Now they are the leaders in the great modern civilising movement of Anti-Militarism. To what predominant influence are we to attribute that movement? To Christianity? Most certainly not. To Humanitarianism? There is not the slightest reason to believe it. The ultimate and fundamental ground on which the most civilised nations of to-day are becoming Anti-militant, and why France is at the head of them, is--there can be no reasonable doubt--the Decline in the Birth-rate. Men are no longer cheap enough to be used as food for cannon. If their rulers fail to realise that, it will be the worse for those rulers. The people of the nations are growing resolved that they will no longer be treated as "Refuse." The real refuse, they are beginning to believe, already ripe for destruction, are those Obscurantists who set their backs to Civilisation and Humanity, and clamour for a return of that ill-fated recklessness in procreation from which the world suffered so long, the ancient motto, "Increase and multiply,"--never meant for use in our modern world,--still clinging so firmly to the dry walls of their ancient skulls that nothing will ever scrape it off. The best that can be said for them is that they know not what they talk of.

It is really a very good excuse and may serve to save them from the bloody fate they are so eager to send others to. They are entitled to contend that it holds good even of the wisest. For who knows what he talks about when he talks of even the simplest things in the world, the sky or the sunshine or the water?

_June_ 15.--Am I indeed so unreasonable to care so much whether the sun shines? The very world, to our human eyes, seems to care. It only bursts into life, it only bursts even into the semblance of life, when the sun shines. All this anti-cyclonic day the sky has been cloudless, and for three hours on the sea the wavelets have been breaking into sudden flashes and spires of silver flower-like flames, while on the reflecting waters afar it has seemed as though a myriad argent swallows were escorting me to the coasts of France.

In the evening, in Paris, the glory of the day has still left a long delicious echo in the air and on the sky. I wander along the quays, and by a sudden inspiration go to seek out the philosophic hermit of the Rue des Saints Pères, but even he is not at home to-night, so up and down the silent quays I wander, aimlessly and joyously, to inhale the fragrance of Paris and the loveliness of the night, before I leave in the morning for Spain.

_June_ 19.--As I entered Santa Maria del Mar this morning by the north door, and glanced along the walls under the particular illumination of the moment (for in these Spanish churches of subdued light the varying surprises of illumination are endless), there flashed on me a new swift realisation of an old familiar fact. How mediaeval it is! Those grey walls and the ancient sacred objects disposed on them with a strange irregular harmony, they seem to be as mediaeval hands left them yesterday. And indeed every aspect of this church--which to me has always been romantic and beautiful--can scarcely have undergone any substantial change. Even the worshippers must have changed but little, for this is the church of the workers, and the Spanish woman's workaday costume bears little mark of any specific century. If Cervantes were to return to this district--perhaps to this district alone--of the city he loved it is hard to see what he would note afresh, save the results of natural decay and the shifting of the social centre of gravity.

Whenever I enter an old Spanish church, in the south or in the north, still intact in its material details, in the observance of its traditions, in its antique grandiosity or loveliness, nearly always there is a latent fear at my heart. Who knows how long these things will be left on the earth? Even if they escape the dangers due to the ignorance or carelessness of their own guardians, no one knows what swift destruction may not at any moment overtake them.

In the leading article of the Barcelonese _Diluvio_ to-day I read:

The unity which marked the Middle Ages is broken into an infinite variety of opinions and beliefs.

Everywhere else, however, except in our country, there has been formed a gradation, a rhythm, of ideas, passing from the highest to the deepest notes of the scale. There are radicals in politics, in religion, in philosophy; there are also reactionaries in all these fields; but it is the intermediate notes, conciliatory, more or less eclectic, which constitute the nucleus on which every society must depend. In Spain this central nucleus has no existence. Here in all orders of thought there are only the two extremes: _all or nothing_.

And the article concludes by saying that this state of things is so threatening to the nation that some pessimists are already standing, watch in hand, to count the moments of Spain's existence.

This tendency of the Spanish spirit, which there can be little doubt about, may not threaten the existence of Spain, but it threatens the existence of the last great fortress of mediaeval splendour and beauty and romance. France, the chosen land of Saintliness and Catholicism, has been swept clear of mediaevalism. England, even though it is the chosen land of Compromise, has in the sphere of religion witnessed destructive revolutions and counter-revolutions. What can save the Church in Spain from perishing by that sword of Intolerance which it has itself forged?

_June_ 20.--In a side-chapel there is a large and tall Virgin, with seemingly closed eyes, a serene and gracious personage. Before this image of the Virgin Mother kneels a young girl, devoutly no doubt, though with a certain careless familiarity, with her dark hair down, and on her head the little transparent piece of lace which the Spanish woman, even the smallest Spanish girl-child, unlike the free-spirited Frenchwoman, never fails to adjust as she enters a church.

I have no sympathy with those who look on the Bible as an outworn book and the Church as an institution whose symbols are empty of meaning. It is a good thing that, somewhere amid our social order or disorder, the Mother whose child has no father save God should be regarded as an object of worship. It would be as well to maintain the symbol of that worship until we have really incorporated it into our hearts and are prepared in our daily life to worship the Mother whose child has no known father save God. It is not the final stage in family evolution, certainly, but a step in the right direction. So let us be thankful to the Bible for stating it so divinely and keeping it before our eyes in such splendid imagery.

The official guardians of the Bible have always felt it to be a dangerous book, to be concealed, as the Jews concealed their sacred things in the ark. When after many centuries they could no longer maintain the policy of concealing it in a foreign tongue which few could understand, a brilliant idea occurred to them. They flung the Bible in the vulgar tongue in millions of copies at the heads of the masses. And they dared them to understand it! This audacity has been justified by the results. A sublime faith in Human Imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.

No wonder they feel so holy a horror of Eugenics!

_June_ 22.--I can see, across the narrow side-street, that a room nearly opposite the windows of my room at the hotel is occupied by tailors, possibly a family of them--two men, two women, two girls. They seem to be always at work, from about eight in the morning until late in the evening; even Sunday seems to make only a little difference, for to-day is Sunday, and they have been at work until half-past seven. They sit, always in the same places, round a table, near the large French windows which are constantly kept open. At the earliest sign of dusk the electric light suspended over the table shines out. They rarely glance through the window, though certainly there is little to see, and I am not sure that they go away for meals; I sometimes see them munching a roll, and the Catalan water-pot is always at hand to drink from. If it were not that I know how the Catalan can live by night as well as by day, I should say that this little group can know nothing whatever of the vast and variegated Barcelonese world in whose heart they live, that it is nothing to them that all last night Barcelona was celebrating St. John's Eve (now becoming a movable festival in the cities) with bonfires and illuminations and festivities of every kind, or that at the very same moment in this same city the soldiery were shooting down the people who never cease to protest against the war in Morocco. They are mostly good-looking, neatly dressed, cheerful, animated; they talk and gesticulate; they even play, the men and the girls battering each other for a few moments with any harmless weapons that come to hand. They are always at work, yet it is clear that they have not adopted the heresy that man was made for work.

I am reminded of another workroom I once overlooked in a London suburb where three men tailors worked from very early till late. But that was a very different spectacle. They were careworn, sordid, carelessly half-dressed creatures, and they worked with ferocity, without speaking, with the monotonous routine of machines at high pressure. They were tragic in the fury of their absorption in their work. They might have been the Fates spinning the destinies of the world.

A marvellous thing how pliant the human animal is to work! Certainly it is no Gospel of Work that the world needs. It has ever been the great concern of the lawgivers of mankind, not to ordain work, but, as we see so interestingly in the Mosaic Codes, to enjoin holidays from work.

_June_ 23.--At a little station on the Catalonian-Pyrenean line near Vich a rather thin, worn-looking young woman alighted from the second-class carriage next to mine, and was greeted by a stout matronly woman and a plump young girl with beaming face. These two were clearly mother and daughter, and I suppose that the careworn new-comer from the city, though it was less obviously so, was an elder daughter. The two women greeted each other with scarcely a word, but they stood close together for a few moments, and slight but visible waves of emotion ran sympathetically down their bodies. Then the elder woman tenderly placed her arm beneath the other's, and they walked slowly away, while the radiant girl, on the other side of the new-comer, lovingly gave a straightening little tug to the back of her jacket, as though it needed it.

One sets out for a new expedition into the world always with a concealed unexpressed hope that one will see something new. But in our little European world one never sees anything new. There is merely a little difference in the emotions, a little finer or a little coarser, a little more open or a little more restrained, a little more or a little less charm in the expression of them. But they are everywhere just the same human emotions manifested in substantially the same ways.

It is not indeed always quite the same outside Europe. It is not the same in Morocco. I always remember how I never grew tired of watching the Moors in even the smallest operation of their daily life. For it always seemed that their actions, their commonest actions, were set to a rhythm which to a European was new and strange. Therefore it was infinitely fascinating.

_June_ 24.--St. John's Eve was celebrated here in Ripoll on the correct, or, as the Catalans call it, the classical, date last night. The little market-place was full of animation. (The church, I may note, stands in the middle of the Plaza, and the market is held in the primitive way all round the church, the market-women's stalls clinging close to its walls.) Here for hours, and no doubt long after I had gone to bed, the grave, sweet Catalan girls were dancing with their young men, in couples or in circles, and later I was awakened by the singing of Catalan songs which reminded me a little of Cornish carols. The Catalan girls, up in these Pyrenean heights, are perhaps more often seriously beautiful than in Barcelona, though here, too, they are well endowed with the substantial, homely, good-humoured Catalan graces. But here they do their hair straight and low on the brows on each side and fasten it in knots near the nape of the neck, so they have an air of distinction which sometimes recalls the Florentine women of Ghirlandajo's or Botticelli's portraits. The solar festival of St. John's Eve is perhaps the most ancient in our European world, but even in this remote corner of it the dances seem to have lost all recognised connection with the bonfires, which in Barcelona are mostly left to the children. This dancing is just human, popular dancing to the accompaniment, sad to tell, of a mechanical piano. Yet even as such it is attractive, and I lingered around it. For I am English, very English, and I spend much of my time in London, where dancing in the street is treated by the police as "disorderly conduct." For only the day before I left a London magistrate admonished a man and woman placed in the dock before him for this heinous offence of dancing in the street, which gave so much pleasure to my Catalan youths and maidens all last night: "This is not a country in which people can afford to be jovial. You must cultivate a spirit of melancholy if you want to be safe. Go away and be as sad as you can."

_June_ 25.--Up here on the solitary mountain side, with Ripoll and its swirling, roaring river and many bridges below me, I realise better the admirable position of this ancient monastery city, so admirable that even to-day Ripoll is a flourishing little town. The river has here formed a flat, though further on it enters a narrow gorge, and the mountains open out into an amphitheatre. It is, one sees, on a large and magnificent scale, precisely the site which always commended itself to the monks of old, and not least to the Benedictines when they chose the country for their houses instead of the town, and here, indeed, they were at the outset far away from any great centre of human habitation. Founded, according to the Chronicles, in the ninth century by Wilfred the Shaggy, the first independent Count of Barcelona, one suspects that the selection of the spot was less, an original inspiration of the Shaggy Count's than put into his head by astute monks, who have modestly refrained from mentioning their own part in the transaction. In any case they flourished, and a century later, when Montserrat had been devastated by the Moors, it was restored and repeopled by monks from Ripoll. In their own house they were greatly active. There is the huge monastery of which so much still remains, not a beautiful erection, scarcely even interesting for the most part, massive, orderly, excessively bare, but with two features which will ever make it notable; its Romanesque cloisters with the highly variegated capitals, and the sculptured western portal. This is regarded as one of the earliest works of sculpture in Spain, and certainly it has some very primitive, one may even say Iberian, traits, for the large _toro_-like animals recall Iberian sculpture. Yet it is a great work, largely and systematically planned, full of imaginative variety; at innumerable points it anticipates what the later more accomplished Gothic sculptors were to achieve, and I suspect, indeed, that much of its apparent lack of executive skill is due to wearing away of the rather soft stone the sculptors used. In the capitals of the cloisters--certainly much later--a peculiarly hard stone has been chosen, and, notwithstanding, the precision and expressive vigour of these artists is clearly shown. But the great portal, a stupendous work of art, as we still dimly perceive it to be, wrought nearly a thousand years ago in this sheltered nook of the Pyrenees, lingers in the memory. Also, like so many other things in the far Past, its crumbling outlines scatter much ancient dust over what we vainly call Modern Progress.

_June_ 26.--Every supposed improvement in methods of travelling seems to me to sacrifice more than it gains; it gains speed, but it sacrifices nearly everything else, even comfort. Yet, I fear, there is a certain unreality in one's lamentations over the decay of the ancient methods; one is still borne on the stream. I have long wanted to cross the Pyrenees, and certainly I should prefer to cross them leisurely, as Thicknesse would have done (had he not preferred to elude them by the easier and beaten road), in one's own carriage. But, failing that, surely I ought to have walked, or, at least, to have travelled by the diligence. Yet I cannot escape the contagious disease of Modernity, and I choose to be whirled through the most delicious and restful scenery in the world, at the most perfect moment of the year, in three hours (including the interval for lunch) in a motor 'bus, while any stray passengers on the road, as by common accord, plant themselves on the further side of the nearest big tree until our fearsome engine of modernity has safely passed. It is an adventure I scarcely feel proud of.

Yet even this hurried whirl has not been too swift to leave memories which will linger long and exquisitely, among far other scenes, even with a sense of abiding peace. How often shall I recall the exhilaration of this clear, soft air of the mountains, touched towards the summits by the icy breath of the snow, these glimpses of swift streams and sudden cascades, the scent of the pine forests, the intense flame of full-flowered broom, and perhaps more than all, the trees, as large as almond trees, of richly blossomed wild roses now fully out, white roses and pink roses, which abound along these winding roads among the mountains. Where else can there be such wild rose trees?

_June_ 27.--It is, I suppose, more than twenty years since I stopped at Perpignan for the night, on the eve of first entering Spain, and pushed open in the twilight the little door of the Cathedral, and knew with sudden deep satisfaction the beauty and originality of Catalonian architecture. The city of Perpignan has emerged into vigorous modern life since then, but the Cathedral remains the same and still calls me with the same voice. It seems but yesterday that I entered it. And there, at the same spot, in the second northern bay, the same little lamp is still twinkling, each faint throb seemingly the last, as in memory it has twinkled for twenty years.

_June_ 28.--Nowhere, it is said, are the offices of the Church more magnificently presented than in Barcelona. However this may be, I nowhere feel so much as in Spain that whatever may happen to Christianity it is essential that the ancient traditions of the Mass should be preserved, and the churches of Catholicism continue to be the arena of such Sacred Operas as the Mass, their supreme and classic type.

I do not assert that it need necessarily be maintained as a Religious Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come to an end.

It would remain as Art. As Art, as the embodied summary of a great ancient tradition, a supreme moment in the spiritual history of the world, the Mass would retain its vitality as surely as Dante's _Divine Comedy_ retains its vitality, even though the stage of that Comedy has no more reality for most modern readers than the stage of Punch and Judy. So it is here. The Play of the Mass has been wrought through centuries out of the finest intuitions, the loftiest aspirations, of a long succession of the most sensitively spiritual men of their time. Its external shell of superstition may fall away. But when that happens the play will gain rather than lose. It will become clearly visible as the Divine Drama it is, the embodied presentation of the Soul's Great Adventure, the symbolic Initiation of the Individual into the Spiritual Life of the World.