Would Catalonia gain by any of the changes she dreams of? Surely under the formalism of France, her self-willed independence would chafe and break loose, for independence is a characteristic of all Spaniards, in all ages, now and always; one cannot exaggerate it. Also the heart of the province is too deeply religious to live under the "Liberté" of her neighbor. In the United States religious liberty is little talked of, but is a solid fact, wherein the new world gives a needed lesson to the old, with its narrow horizons and petty disputes. In France, where this liberty is vaunted, it is a farce: no Catalan could long tolerate such freedom. Again, if this small state were independent, where would she stand? A thought that strikes one forcibly after a tour of the province, whose towns, Gerona, Lérida, Tarragona, are of mediocre importance. Catalonia independent would be practically one city, Barcelona, whose trade the central government could cripple by prohibitory tariffs. Her pride would suffer more as one of the smallest, weakest states in Europe, than it now suffers under its lawful king, part of an old race that once led the world, and which if only this discontented daughter would generously help, has red blood enough to again play a prominent part. Spain needs just such help as the Catalan can give, she needs his grit, his industry, his progressiveness. Could he now bear the overweighted burden in a better spirit, before many years it would be lightened. The north is awakening to industrial life; Bilbao, Santander, Gijón, Coruña, Vigo, will soon be strong trading centers, and the older commercial city can gather supporters to work for fiscal autonomy, since the chief grievance is the centralized system of government in Madrid. Let her agitate in a constitutional way for a system like the separate state arrangement of our union. The opposition of two vigorous sides is a sign of life in a nation. Discussion means change and advancement. For full vigor both sides are needed, the conservative to serve as brake on the democrat's too swiftly-turning wheels. An important cause of Spain's decay,[39] according to Don Juan Valera, came from all classes thinking the same way; drunk with pride on the ending of the centuries of crusade against their Moorish invader, with the discovery of a new continent the people lay back in slothful inertia, without the prick of dispute to rouse them. Opposition and struggle are essential to vigor, but disloyalty saps a nation's strength. Let them strike straight-front blows from the shoulder, for Madrid needs rousing, but let them not stab in the back. Often when wandering among the old tombs of Spain, those effigies of the grand-masters of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcántara, the plumed and helmeted knights of the noble brows, I recalled some ringing lines of Newbolt's. Every boy of Barcelona should know them by heart, they are not so needed in Castile:
"To set the cause above renown,
To love the game above the prize,
To honour while you strike him down
The foe that comes with fearless eyes.
To count the life of battle good,
And dear the land that gave you birth,
And dearer yet the brotherhood
That binds the brave of all the earth."
Her intense local patriotism has a more sympathetic side than double-naming her streets and bearing a jealous grudge against her central government. This is the revival of her provincial literature. The interest in dialects and folk lore is a tendency common to many countries to-day, but in Catalonia the movement is on a grand scale. There newspapers and magazines in dialect are circulated, poems and novels are printed not for the literary alone but for the populace. Men of undeniable genius have written in the local tongue, one of the first to use it being that strangely interesting character of the thirteenth century, Ramón Lull, seneschal of Majorca, troubadour, mystic hermit, philosopher, missionary, and his final glory, martyr for the Faith; he is honored in the Church as el beato Raimundo Lulio. By less than ten years he missed being the contemporary of the gentle Assisian, the habit of whose tertiaries he wore; he wandered through Italy while Dante was writing his visions, in that wonderful century called dark, that can claim a Thomas Aquinas, a Bonaventura, an Abertus Magnus, an Elizabeth of Hungary, a Dominic, an Anthony of Padua, and that scattered over Europe such witnesses of its upleap of aspiration as Amiens, Chartres, Westminster, Salisbury, Cologne, Strasburg, León, Toledo, Siena.
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.