Dark, mysterious, and imposing, the Gothic Cathedral is worthy of a place by the most beautiful of Spain. After the great Cathedral of Seville, I know no other that impresses one in the same way as the Cathedral of Barcelona. The fine proportions and carefully-arranged lighting are common to them both. At Tarragona, Salamanca, Toledo, Burgos, Leon, and Santiago, we can see work that will bear more close analysis and confer great teaching; but the Catalan here teaches us his school of stern, solid, domestic architecture, and he conveys his lesson by the finest of examples. Here we may learn that little faults on the part of old workers, and big, glaring faults on the part of their successors are powerless to detract from the effect of awful solemnity and majesty of their splendid vistas, to stultify the great ideas and fine grasp upon the subject of scale with which the Cathedral was carried out. Beside this, its numerous fine bits of enriched detail work and its glorious stained glass are mere matters of detail—and the election of models—and they are scarcely noticed.
PLAZA DEL REY, BARCELONA.
ARAGON STREET, BARCELONA.
I have listened to some beautiful music beautifully rendered in the Cathedral of Barcelona, and in many of the great cathedrals in Spain; and I have seen an audience go into ecstacies over a piece of vocalisation in the Opera House at Madrid; but I should hesitate to describe the Spanish as a musical nation. Singing among the working people is a habit and a relaxation, but it is scarcely an art. The working people of Barcelona, or of the Peninsula generally for that matter, are not naturally musical; but they do not sing the less on that account. One day as I sat in a friend’s room in the Hotel and listened to the servants chortling incessantly as they went about their work, I asked a trifle impatiently: “Do these good people never cease their singing?” He looked up with a quizzical twinkle in his questioning eyes. “Singing?” he asked. I held up my finger, and the sound of three different voices, uplifted in three different ecstacies, came from the corridor. “Oh! that,” he replied, still smiling: “Yes, they do a good deal of it. So you call that singing; now I think that is very amiable of you.” I asked him why their songs were unduly long; and learned that as each vocalist improvises his or her own song, both words and music, it is only limited by his or her individual fancy. “But what are the subjects of their ballads?” I protested, and my friend responded, “Oh! just anything—a bullfight, a tender tale of love, a report of a police court case with ten adjournments.” Schubert, it is said, could set a handbill to music, but these people improvise a romantic opera out of an overdue laundry account. Their guitar playing has little but mere form; and their dancing—the dancing of the working-classes who picnic by the wayside and dance for the sheer love of it and the joy of living—is governed, or seems to be, by the whim of the performer. When the children are not playing at bullfights, they are indulging in one or other of their innumerable singing and dancing games.
Besides the interest it affords in itself, Barcelona is within hail of Monserrat, the pride of Catalonia, and one of the natural wonders of Spain, which lies some thirty miles north from the city. Antonio Gallenga has written of this wonderful mountain: “It is the loftiest and grandest temple and most formidable citadel that was worked by God’s hands. The Monastery, standing as it does, squeezed on its narrow ledge, with an abyss of untold fathoms at its feet, and the weight of three great rocky masses hanging over its head, must look both mean in size and tame in taste, crushed by the Titanic grandeur, by the sublime harmony and the terrible power exhibited by the Supreme Architect in this His masterpiece of earthly handiwork.”
Nor is the description out of keeping with the subject. Seen from the road, this terrible yet beautiful mountain, throwing off its morning mantle of mists and lifting its weird peaks to the sun, presents a vision of entrancing loveliness. At its base, the Monastery, vast in size and hideous in its severity, is almost a blot upon the landscape. But the climb from the Monastery to the summit of Monserrat is fraught with a succession of overpowering sensations, of perpetual contrast between terror and delight. The immense mass of mountain, about twenty-five miles in circumference at its base, is composed of a grey conglomerate of the granite type, brittle and crumbling; and by its nature assuming every variety of fanciful and weird appearances, baffling the utmost extent of men’s inventive powers. For about half the distance to the top its body remains solid; then rent asunder in every direction, it towers in thousands of fantastic pinnacles to its highest point, some four thousand feet above the sea. “There is hardly a spot,” says Gallenga, “where you do not feel that you stand on a thousand feet precipice; hardly a nook where some great boulder, as big as the Vatican Palace, is not suspended over your head, ready, as you fancy, to slide down in avalanche at every burst of the storm wind.” There are huge, straight columns, the bases and shafts of which have thus been crumbling away for thousands of years; while the top, or as one may say, the capital, still hangs up in air on nothing. Impervious as those crags and cliffs appear, they are, however, crossed by paths running like threads on the edge of the precipice.