It is the old town, congested and gloomy though it is, that, set side by side with the new, makes Barcelona unique. There are to be found primitive churches, such as Santa Ana, or San Pablo del Campo,[38] once, like St. Martin-in-the-Fields, placed among meadows; dim old churches similar in design, Byzantine cross form with a low dome over the center and with cloisters that make solemn oases of repose in the busy city. A later period built churches whose somber walls tower high above the crowded houses; such are Santa María del Pino and Santa María del Mar, characterized by wide hall-like naves. In the width of their nave lay the triumph of the Catalan masters. It was in the last named church that a pious woman of the town noticed one day a gray, emaciated man resting, among a group of children, on the steps of the altar, in his face a light of convincing holiness. Fresh from the spiritual battle in the Cave of Manresa, a grand self-mastery the reward of his struggle, no wonder the face of Ignatius compelled the reverence of the passer by.
The Cathedral of Barcelona is a typically Catalan-Gothic church. For an eglesia mayor it is small, but so true are its proportions and so skillfully is it lighted that it gives the effect of grandeur. As the clearstory windows are mere circles, on first entering one is in complete darkness, but gradually out of the gloom looms that loveliest feature of the building, the chancel, lighted by rare old glass, with slender piers and lofty stilted arches rising from pavement to vaulting in an unforgettable beauty of symmetry. The retablo of the High Altar is in character, articulate and graceful, unlike the usual, overladen reredos of Spain. Incense, prayer, soaring aspiration, the symbolization of this presbytery is a perfect thing: again vividly came the conviction that temples such as these have had and ever will have a vital influence on a race.
Barcelona may be a shrewd commercial center, that in its material pride, in order not to be classed with the improvident, brutally repudiates most of the cosas de España; she may print books whose every word is an insult to government and religion; she is still deeply Spanish in the earnest piety of the larger proportion of her citizens. A Catalan may tell you, especially if you belong to a northern race and a different creed, that what you see is all form, lip-religion, that the men here, like intelligent men the world over, are free-thinkers. It is an easy matter for the prejudiced visitor to get all his misconceptions confirmed by a native, no one is more bitter in abuse of his country than a Catalan. Fortunately, one has one's own eyes wherewith to see. But first I must quote from a recent letter to the London Times from the Rev. James R. Youlden, in answer to a pessimist on the religious condition of Spain:
"In the city of Barcelona, the largest, most modern and most industrial of Spanish cities, the good attendance at Mass, not only of women and children but of the men, is most remarkable, as is also the number of communicants. I have myself often given Holy Communion on a Sunday morning in the church of San Pedro to such large numbers, fully one-third of them men, that my arms have ached in conveying the sacred particles. Masses are celebrated every hour, and in some churches every half hour from 5 A.M. to 12 midday in all the twenty-four parish churches of the city (to say nothing of numerous convent chapels) in the presence of large and often crowded congregations. A visit to the church at any time from 8 till 12 on any Sunday morning would dispel some of the illusions of your Madrid correspondent."
A good test of the sincerity of religious conviction is what it costs the purse; new churches, like those of Barcelona, are not built by lip-religion. I spent several Sunday mornings sitting on one of the side benches of the Cathedral, learning that the Catalan, disunited from his mother land on many points, is ineradicably national in his creed. This was Spain, with the grave reverence of the smallest child, where the church is a loved home, a frequented refuge for meditation and strengthening prayer. Now a handsome and satisfied matron enters, followed by five or six children, the boys dressed as English sailors, little Battenbergs, the girls with hats like flower gardens; they cluster round their mother at the door, and she passes each the blessed water with which to sign themselves. Behind this group come some alert young artisans; each instantly drops on both knees to make his salutation to the Altar—lip-religion does not care to disarray its Sunday suit like this—and each blesses himself in the swift national way, with the final carrying to the lips of the thumb and first finger crossed, a symbol of fidelity to his faith. May this custom never die out in Spain! From the first hour of her eight hundred years' crusade, from Cavadonga to Granada, her religion has been her glory, interwoven with her nationality, like that of the Jews of old, and if she understands her enduring interests, this Christian faith to which she has clung so loyally will be her aspiration in the future. When her men pass the High Altar without salute, when the street children cease to run in daily to kneel before a shrine, throwing their scanty skirts over their heads if a handkerchief is lacking, when politics and religion are synonymous, that day Spain may be called degenerate, but not now, while lamps of sincere conviction burn before her altars.
Ascension Thursday fell on a perfect day in late May, the warm sunshine tempered by a sea breeze; everyone was out gallantly in new summer suits. The houses were hung with the national flag, but the fairest decoration of the city were the hundreds of First Communicants who thronged the streets, accompanied by proud mothers and relatives. Each little girl in her quaint, long, white skirt, tulle veil and wreath of flowers, carried a new pearl chaplet or prayer book, and each boy wore a bow of white satin on his left arm. Few things are more appealing than an innocent-eyed child on this solemn day, and in after years, for those who have known such hours of purity, few memories are more indelible. As I passed through the old city, its dark streets lightened by these groups, I could not help exclaiming, "Why, when she can present a scene of such loveliness and hope, must Barcelona so blindly envy her neighbor across the Pyrenees!" Not long after leaving Spain, I stopped in a village in the mountains of Dauphiny, half Catholic, half Huguenot. Both churches were practically empty. The children of the town, except those of a few stanch families, walked in a public procession to honor the mayor, behind a banner bearing the inscription, "Ni Dieu, ni maître." One cannot deny there are many in Barcelona whose aspiration would be satisfied with a similar procession in her streets, but the majority still prefer an Ascension Thursday of First Communicants.
Before the west door of the Cathedral are remains of ancient houses which, like Italy, bear the signs of guilds, for this city always differed from the rest of Spain in looking on trade as an honorable career. A street behind the Cathedral leads to other specimens of domestic architecture. Be sure not to be discouraged by the cold Herrara front of the House of the Deputation. It masks a Gothic building which, if properly restored, as well as the Casa Consistorial, or Town Hall, which stands opposite to it, would make of this formal plaza one of the most interesting squares in Europe. The city's renewed pride in the Gothic of its province, her skillful architects, her wealth, should tempt her to the task. Be sure to go into both these buildings. In the Town Hall are some lovely ajimez windows that show the restraint of the Catalan style: they attenuated the features as far as strength would allow, but they knew just where to stop. The result is grace, lightness, a subtle something of proportion. In the Deputation House hangs the Catalan painter Fortuny's "Battle of Tetuán," unfinished, with a dashing rainbow-hued charge of horsemen that stirs the memory of Spain's grand forays into Africa.
In exploring Barcelona one notices unfamiliar names on the shops, here are no longer Alvarez, González, Pérez, García, but strange Catalan names, such as Bosch, Cla, Puig, Catafalch, Llordachs, Petz. On every side, in shops, in the tramcars, one hears the dialect spoken, rather rough sounding and wholly unintelligible to the traveler who knows only Castilian. In no other of Spain's provinces is so much made of local differences. The names of the streets are written twice on the street corners, in Catalan and in Castilian, a ridiculous arrangement, for in these proper names the differences are slight; as Calle de Cortes, and Correr de les Corts. To appease his thirst for self-assertion, the practical Catalan has marked his streets in a less adequate way than the rest of the Peninsula he looks down on: the clearness of the street directions, each tile generally holding one bold letter, had been a satisfaction all over Spain. This brings me into hot water at once, the vexed ever palpitating Catalan question. Is this province, Spain's richest and most progressive, to continue under the Spanish crown, to ally herself with France, or to be independent? She tells us in anger, she pays more than her share of the taxes, that she is an isolated commercial and industrial force in a nation that is preëminently agricultural, whose laws are made to foster the farmer at the expense of the trader: the loss of the colonies was an advantage for the rest of the country whose crying need is population, but for Barcelona it was a severe blow. Spain has hard problems to solve, with thirteen inhabitants to the square mile in some provinces and one hundred and eight to the mile here in Catalonia.
Books of open sedition are freely published, one picks them up in the waiting-room of a doctor's office, in the bank, on the stalls. This is no new phase. From early times Catalonia has only considered her own interests, now joining with France against Spain, now changing sides, as she thought to benefit herself; for her the nation is a secondary consideration. History proves she has been ineradicably selfish; hence her success, a sophist may say, but there is something higher than self-aggrandizement, the success of giving her strength to reforming the abuses she proclaims. No one denies there is crying need for political and financial reform at Madrid, though it is not to be brought about by such a book as Señor Pompeo Gener's "Cosas de España," which but widens the breach. One discerns it in the ignoble jealousy of the Castilian, which rankles in the Catalan mind; for instance in speaking of Castilian literature of the nineteenth century he stops short at Fernán Caballero and makes no mention of the distinguished modern novelists. A writer who holds up Herbert Spencer as the ne plus ultra of philosophy (Spanish free-thinkers are a generation behind in certain phases of thought) need not be taken too seriously, but the "Cosas de España" voices what is serious.
"Ah Castillo Castillano! why have we ever known you!" exclaims the Catalan poet Briz, in his celebrated poem, "Cuatro pals de Sanch," the blazon of the province, its four red bars. "If to us remains only one of our four bars of blood, to you we owe the loss, thou kingdom of the castles and the hungry lions. But, O Castillo Castillano, alas for you, if you break our last pals de sanch!" This bitter spirit of revolt makes this grand old province that should be Spain's bulwark, Spain's weakness instead.