Part Three — Beyond Spain
Chapter XI The Rift in Barcelona
The cathedrals of Spain are splendors heaped by the hand of chaos. Well they sing the discord of a world too full of life to find perfection save in the dream of death. Most of them rise from stones that formed a mosque; the mosque ofttimes was a converted citadel of Visigoth or Roman. And here Spain brought her will to unity. Where could these rank lusts of a hundred factions, these voices of continents and peoples meet, save in death? The simple romanesque is buried under the aspiring jungle of baroque, plateresque, Gothic, churriguera. Window, reja, retablo, altar flourish like fevers and sum up to silence.
If this is Spain, Barcelona is of another land. The cathedral of the great town of the Catalans is luminous and graceful. Although it could be lost in the vastitudes of the cathedrals of Seville or Salamanca its voice is clear and carries farther: it bespeaks the living.
Yet here, too, the church is dark. The brown-black stones are lifted by the day of the deep windows into a rosy flush. The Choir is so low that the line from cimborio to capilla mayor is free. Toward the Altar, the Choir is open. Its sides are exquisite spires that rise in tremulous shadow. The windows are small. They hold light in their stained glass like eyes. The church is a reticent life gazing within itself. And what it sees is an inset of twenty columns making a sort of inner body, a dark and mystic body in the gaze of the glowing outward walls.
The loveliest monument of the Catalans, their church bespeaks them. It is a thing of beauty: but unlike the beauty that resides in Spain, it is not tragic. Beauty is consummation: in Castile the goal is immobility or death. Here the perfected mood is wakefulness. The grace is gentle and assured: it is not tortured, neither is it prophetic. Close is the ease of the fields of France, of France’s churches. Close is the balance of Attica....
Islam had short shrift in the Catalan Province which rests upon the Pyrenees and faces east across the sea toward Italy and Greece. When the Moslem came, the Catalan retreated into France. And in less than a hundred years (in 797) the great town of Gerona (you can still see its walls and its fortress-church) fell to the Frankish Christians. In 801, the vassals of Charlemagne drove out the Crescent forever. Barcelona became Frankish: Catalonia was apportioned to Frankish nobles. This strain of alien blood is a symbol of the wavering dissonance that has endured in Catalonia forever. For the yearning of Spain was to be Spain: and the will of the Catalans was to be part of Europe.
The Teuton element in Spain is Visigothic. With the Franks there came across the dwindling spurs of the Pyrenees the Gallo-Romans of Provincia, a different intensity of the Idea of Rome from that of the Ibero-Romans. Catalonia straddled the mountains, mingling in spirit and in affairs with France. Almost at once after the Reconquest, it took the lead in the Mediterranean trade of the Provincian littoral. Feudalism flourished here, as it never did in Spain—a true French feudalism, heritage of Charlemagne who indeed had held Spain clear to the Ebro. The domains of the great Counts of Barcelona were as wide north of the Pyrenees as south. And already, sharing this participance of France, in the eleventh century there are Italians (Pisans) fighting under the pennants of Barcelona against the Valencian Moor. Even today, the spirit and the tongue of the Catalans bestrides the Eastern Pyrenees from Lérida to the French Roussillon, from Tarragona to the French Port Vendres.
The Catalan of Spain is an outsider within the gates. Ere Spain stratified her chaos into locked unity, Catalonia was free to be exploited by the hardier will of Aragon. But as Aragon was set within the grip of Isabel of Castile, Catalonia became an irrepressible motion—needing to be repressed. Its flow of energy in an immobile State meant anarchy: its lyrism was discord within Spain whose counterpoint of themes summed into silence. Spain achieved her union. Madrid on the roof of Castile became the symbol of union: Barcelona, at the half open gate which led to Italy and France, to Greece and Africa, became the symbol of disruption.
Castile tried to woo this province, as it wooed Valencia, Galicia, Extremadura, Andalusia. But the Catalan blood could not respond to the immobile ecstasy of Castile: nor could the winds and the songs which blew in at the door of Barcelona be shut out. The Catalan remained light, moving, gay. When the unity of Spain was strong, the Catalan was a tonic discord. Now that Spain’s unity is flaccid, the Catalan is a menace.
But if Barcelona is not Spain, neither is it France. The Catalan is a unique organic compound of the Mediterranean, of the Mountain and of Spain. His cathedral is set in a town that beats with a rich fervor. The Ramblas—wide, gay avenues—descend to the sea and the town faces with them from the wooded hills. It is an old ripe city: a labyrinth of streets that are fresh with the salt, dark with the feudal yoke, yet glamorously flowing as if in cognizance of the genius of this people to outlast all yokes. This is no strong race, as the Aragonese or even the Basques are strong. It is a subtle and a gracious people. Its secret of survival is manifest in the women: delicate daughters of Eve, perhaps the fairest of all Europe, hued like April orchards, and with eyes like twilight. They have the permanence not of the eternal, but of the evanescent which returns. The flower that was Greece has been cast here upon a coast of Spain and has grown afresh. This life does not resist: it returns. France mastered the Catalans: and they returned. Aragon used them ruthlessly in war: they returned. Castile stifles and racks them: they are returning. For they are like the Spring, the evanescent Spring—which returns....
Their rising song begins to be heard over the shut land. It is not heroic song: it is after all the assertion of a race of traders. It is not thunderous. What thunders is the Castilian silence. And the heroic is the Spanish sleep. And the enduring is the Spanish drama of which the Catalans, even in their apartness, must be part. Spain has a dawning will to break from the unity which its will created: her atoms, anarchic but pregnant, stir to be loosed and to begin again. Despite its denial, Catalonia shares in this unborn Spain. Once the resistance of the Catalans helped to rouse Aragon and Castile with greater energy and clearer mind: helped to create Spain. Now this same resistance of the Catalans, even if it disrupts, may serve to create Spain again.