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.