It happened that on our train was a band of young soldiers returning to their homes after their military service, as irrepressible as escaped young colts. Such songs and merriment! Such family scenes at each station! Mothers and little sisters, blushing cousins and neighbors had flocked down from the villages on the Pyrenees slopes to welcome them. A touch of nature makes the world akin; we found ourselves waving, too, as the train drew away, leaving the returned lad in the midst of his rejoicing family. At the fortress-crowned town of Monzón we saw the last of our happy fellow travelers. There a young soldier led his comrades to be presented to a majestic old man with a plaid shawl flung over his shoulder like a toga, and the son's expression of pride in the noble patriarch was a thing not soon forgotten. In Spain few journeys lack a primary human interest, something to give food to heart or soul.
MINOR CITIES OF CATALONIA
Romanesque is the Trappist of architecture, ... on its knees in the dust, singing with lowered head in a plaintive voice the psalms of penitence.... This mystic Romanesque suggests the idea of a robust faith, a manly patience, a piety as secure as its walls. It is the true architecture of the cloister.... There is fear of sin in these massive vaults and fear of a God whose rigours never slackened till the coming of the Son. Gothic on the contrary is less fearful, the lowered eyes are lifted, the sepulchral voices grow angelic.... Romanesque allegorizes the Old Testament, and Gothic the New.—J.-K. HUYSMANS.
IN his valuable book on Spanish churches, Street is justly enthusiastic over the form that Gothic architecture took in the province of Catalonia, and especially over the now unused Cathedral of Lérida, which he calls the finest and purest early-pointed church in Europe. It was such praise that induced us to stop over in the dull, little city, crowned by the hill where the ancient Cathedral stands. Its history of ten sieges, and Velasquez's "Philip IV on horseback entering Lérida in triumph," somehow had suggested a grandiose impression that is far from lived up to by the modern town.
A pause of three hours between trains seemed to give ample time to see the Cathedral, but the scramble into which the visit to Lérida degenerated was proof that no limited period is ample time in this country of leisurely ease. Could we have gone direct to the citadel, all had been well, but as the hill is now a fort, with the old church turned into a dormitory for soldiers, much red tape was required to visit it. We hurried along the interminable crowded street that stretches beside the river, asking right and left for the office of the military governor. Wrongly directed, we burst into the somnolent quarters of the city authorities and made our request for a permit. With a slow dignity that no flurried haste could move, the provincial governor sent us to the private house of the military big-wig. There a precious half hour went by in the drawing-room with his handsome wife, who did not seem sorry to break the monotony of her exile by the strangers' visit. In came the genial governor waving the permit backward and forward for the ink to dry, and another half hour of social chatting went by, the very ink of Spain being gifted with dignified slowness. A soldier was put at our disposal to serve as guide, a young man as tranquil as his superior, for we climbed the hill at a snail's pace, and once inside the fort were stopped here and there by sentries who, letter by letter, it seemed to our impatience, spelled out the written paper. When finally we stood before the Cathedral, the soldier escort told us we must pause there while he went to seek the commandant of the fort. Precious minute after minute went by, till at last, the clock telling us we must soon be starting back to the station, we took the bull by the horns and entered the church without further delay.
A strange spectacle presented itself. In every direction were ranged cots, clothes hung about and washing troughs added to the confusion. The beautiful old church had been floored half way up its piers and down these improvised rooms we could see other rows of narrow beds. It was so cluttered that I could hardly get oriented; where was the nave? which were the transepts? We could see that the capitols of the pillars were grandly carved, that here was the beautiful clearness of form, the noble solidity of early Gothic, but the confusion of the soldiers' dormitory made it impossible to study the church with any satisfaction. Except for the architect, Lérida to-day hardly repays a visit. The soldiers stood round in astonishment at such unexpected visitors, so we were soon glad to confine our examination to the exterior portals and the tower.
Just as we were on the point of leaving, the commandant appeared, shook us warmly by the hand and prepared to take us over the fort. Like the military governor and his wife, he beamed with the interest of something new; the cordiality of all was perfect, but nothing, nothing, could hurry them. We explained that we had come to see the church alone, that our time unfortunately was limited, and we must now leave to catch the train for Poblet. He took a disappointed and bewildered farewell; up on his citadel in the land of pause and leisure such new-world notions of speed were disconcerting. With a hasty look at the noblest early-pointed church in Europe, a grateful handshake to the colonel, we hurried down the precipitous hill and jumped on the train just as it was moving out, our valises being flung in to us desperately at the final moment.
Soon the broken, fertile hills of the province of Catalonia closed in around us, and the country grew so charming that we were glad to have planned to pass a night near Poblet. From the train we saw the prominent brown mass of the monastery buildings, but, of course, we ran on some miles before stopping in a station. There we found a Catalan cart, two-wheeled with a barrel vaulted awning, and drove to the primitive hotel at Espluga. The landlord offered us his cart to drive out to Poblet, two miles away, but the bumps and ruts of the road from the station made us prefer to walk. The ill-kept roads and the not wholly cultivated fields told clearly that the industrial monks were no longer masters of the valley.
Poblet stood for monastic pride, only nobles entered as monks, the mitered abbot was a count-palatine and ruled the peasantry as their feudal lord; the revenues were enormous, but as Benedictines are invariably cultivated men, they were spent on ancient manuscripts, and in the ceaseless energy of building. When the mob came from the neighboring towns in 1835 to sack the convent, they shattered the very treasure they sought. In their blind ignorance they did not know that chiseled alabaster, wrought doors and windows, and carven cloisters, represented the hidden gold they were seeking. This uprising in Spain against the monasteries, the "pecado de sangre," was a political more than a religious affair; in the first Carlist war, the countryside here was Constitutional, while the monks of Poblet were firm for the Pretender Don Carlos. The havoc the mob wrought is heart-rending; and yet though empty and partly destroyed, Poblet is still one of the finest things in the Peninsula.
On our way out to it we happened to take a wrong turning, which fortunately led us to encircle the walled-in mass of buildings before entering, and gave us some idea of their great extent. It was a veritable town; there were hospices for visitors, hospitals, a king's palace, an abbot's palace, a village of workshops for the artisans, since in every age the monks had been builders. Every style was represented, each stage of Romanesque and Gothic; Poblet is indeed to-day one of the best places in Europe to study architecture, and the guardian told us that students from every country flock here in the summer time. Artists too are a familiar sight sketching the beautiful vistas, the arched library, the pillared sala capitular where effigies of the abbots lie so haughtily that one can almost understand the fury of the rabble, the imposing length and strength of the novices' dormitory where swallows now flit, the pure early Gothic of King Martin's palace, the odd little glorieta of the chief cloister. Pleasant quarters can be found in the caretaker's house, which is more convenient than living at Espluga down the valley. We wandered for hours through courtyards and cloisters that show the subtly simple proportions of Catalan art. The church of the monastery was built during that rare moment when Romanesque turned to pointed work; it is very narrow and severe and impressive. The once superb alabaster retablo is mutilated, and the tombs of the Aragonese kings are scattered. The bones of Jaime el Conquistador are now in Tarragona Cathedral. Poblet served as the Escorial of the rulers of Aragon and Catalonia, and is many times more worth visiting than Philip II's rigid pile in Castile. I strongly urge everyone who goes to Spain to turn aside from the beaten path to see this unrivaled Cistercian monastery, which it is no exaggeration to say is one of the most artistic groups of buildings in the world. The evening of our visit the sunset glorified the pretty rural valley whose brooks bounded merrily down the hillside. "Laugh of the mountain, lyre of bird and tree," Lope de Vega calls the gurgling, clear waters.