SARAGOSSA

They say that no man touches the spirit of Spain unless he travels across its great wastes with the muleteers. But I should say that a Northerner will get that spirit more fully if he goes painfully afoot, communing with himself and marvelling at the endless barren solitudes around him. Or if he has not time or power to carry on through all those leagues and leagues and days and days of emptiness (on which the villages are strung out at great intervals like beads on a chain and the towns are half a week apart), then let him at least make trial of some interludes on foot, alternating them with the slow railway or with one of those innumerable motor-coaches which now cover all the roads in the north.

For here it must be said (as a digression) that no part of Europe has changed more in the matter of transport than Catalonia and Aragon between the Ebro and the Pyrenees. I find new and good roads where twenty years ago were mule tracks, and everywhere good and punctual petrol services, linking up the whole countryside in a network. This change is for the better. It does not concentrate men in one place; it destroys nothing of the past; it quickens the life of all these provinces.

Still I say, if you would get into the genius of the land, go as much on foot as you can, at the price of a very heavy tedium and (in summer) of fatigue under a new sun, worse than any you have known. For if you so act, you are under the conditions which those also were under who pushed back Islam: slowly recovered and rebuilt Christendom on these high plains, half-a-mile above the world.

But a man does well to travel in this way by winter as well as by summer, so that he may know the terrible cold under which the hardihood of the race has been tempered. The men who spread their language over the new world and (what was much more of a feat) their every social habit, their very cooking and slang; the men who, for a century, held half Europe by arms and who at last wearied themselves out in the Dutch and German and French fighting, and in the attempt to hold at once all the seas, even in the north; the men whose pignoned ramparts you find in Luxemburg as in Sicily, and whose exuberant stone carvings are in Arras as on the Pacific—these conquerors were tempered just as steel is tempered. For steel white hot is plunged into freezing water; so they on these bleak roofs of the peninsula, where the fierce summers turn suddenly into long months of clear and biting cold. The popular proverb has it thus: ‘Nine months of ice and three of hell.’

The peninsula is a great arid, upland steppe, traversed by gaunt and barren ranges which run from east to west and divide it into broad bands: great vistas. With one straining of the eyes from the foothills of the Pyrenees (as from the Peña beyond Jaca) a man may see through that thin, piercing air, right away to the sombre lift of the Moncayo; from the Moncayo (somewhat eastward) to the summits of the Guadarrama; from these, to the high hills, sharp blue, beyond Toledo; from these to the Morena, and from the Morena, I am told (I have not seen that last sight), to the snows of the Sierra Nevada itself, which overhang the southern shore. All Spain in four wide bands.

And this vast plateau falls down everywhere upon its edges to the sea, so that the whole land may be compared to a very high, ill-watered tableland of dust surrounded by a belt of low, luxurious gardens, stretched between the escarpment and the sea.

The masters of this people, those who have stamped their fierceness for ever upon the face of the world, and whose mark you meet, from California, eastward round to the Philippines again, were bred under the harsh, firm discipline of the upland wastes and ruled the fertile land below. It was in the bare high places that all the fighters of the Reconquista made their advance, thrusting forward from mountain range to mountain range, over the parched broad flats between. It is in the direction of this advance that Spain should be learned; from north to south.

Coming down from the Pyrenean boundary wall by the Gallego trench, you follow the main riding of the men who at last seized and destroyed the Emirate of Saragossa. You look upon things with their eyes, coming daily to things which are new to you, as such things were then new to them; leaving the trees and scant grasses of the foothills and coming to that incredible white wilderness, without a blade or leaf upon it, which, to the west of the Gallego, overhangs the Ebro. Indeed, even the man who travels by train down that valley gets some sharp impression of strangeness as he looks across the flat and sees mile after mile of leprous marl which looks not like something of nature, but like something dumped in a gigantic engineering feat, reminding one of those glaring heaps above the Cornish clay mines; but here the glare is a day’s march long and hundreds of feet high, and dead and burned ash-white under the sun.

A man so proceeding also sees, what is characteristic of this land, the cornfields, painfully recovered patch by patch amid so much barrenness. He has come from France, where, save in the mountains, all is vineyard, pasture, plough, orchard, or cool, damp woods, with watercourses everywhere, and large, slow, clear rivers, humanising all. But he has passed a barrier like none other in the world, and he is now in quite new land, where a man ploughs what he can under a vengeful sky—sometimes an open stretch of fertile plain, but, for the most part, pockets and exceptions in the stretch of dusty rock.

I have walked all day, on my way southward to the Ebro, and seen not a score of habitations nor one clear mile of tillage. It is not so, indeed, along the river itself; but in the lands to the west, if one has the curiosity to make that turn, the traveller will see such savage loneliness as he could not think to exist in Europe, not even in the _causses_ of the Tarn basin south of Auvergne.

In such a landscape the works of man are the more marvellous. You come towards evening upon what seems to be but a brown lump of the same earth, somewhat raised above the brown dust of the way. You come nearer, and you see that it is the grouping of a village. But nothing tells you (till you are within the street) how much the Mind of Man will here appear displayed and triumphant. The church you discover to be of the most solemn and most calculated darkness within; all its woodwork carved with innumerable details, rich, fantastic, foisoning; its ancient windows calculated to subdue the light; its stones gloriously diverse with deep, personal ornament, and the whole coming from one national soul heavy with dignity and incapable of lapse. One could almost say that every large village had not only such a monument peculiar to itself, expressive of its inmost being, but also in the shields carven above the lintels, in the ironwork of the gates and balconies, in the house-balustrades of stone, a similar wealth of creative power. Such a village of Aragon is like an island in the sea, or an oasis. A special spot crammed with vigour and time.

Then, beyond again, the rock and the dust continue, and you look back in the mid-morning of your next day’s journey, under the glaring sun, and all that hidden treasure is turned once more into a brown lump, hardly distinguishable from the burned stones of the plain.

The last long day’s ride of the knights southward to the river, the last two long days of marching for the men afoot, took generations to recover. Christendom held Huesca while the shrill Mohammedan cry was still calling to prayer from the minarets of Saragossa. That Emirate stood out by cunning and by arms long after all to the south and to the east had fallen. But the King of Aragon at last rode in; and where the chief mosque had been they began to build the Seo, the central shrine, the greatest glory of the city to-day.

Saragossa, of all the famous cities of Europe, makes the least appeal to one coming by its main approach. It had so much history and had suffered so many famous things that already the men beyond the Pyrenees a thousand years ago thought of it as standing upon a high hill, conspicuous and fantastic. That is the vision of it in the _Song of Roland_. But the real Saragossa is nothing of the kind. This square mile, into which there push back roots of two thousand years, which still bears distorted the Imperial Name (Cæsarea Augusta), which became the capital of the proudest of the conquerors in the full tide of the Christian advance and crusade, and which in our modern time set an example of heroism higher than that of any other city in its furnace of resistance to Napoleon’s generals, gives no proof to the eye of its greatness.

You see, as you come in, the broad trench of the Ebro, sometimes rolling a mass of muddy water between its eaten, soft banks; more often trickling a parched, thin stream. Nothing is conspicuous but the domes of Our Lady of the Pillar, the very large church to the west of the bridge; on the cupolas of which Goya’s frescoes have cracked, in the very entrance to which is that very ancient tradition of the West, the small statue of The Pillar, older perhaps than Glastonbury. Save for those domes and for the high tower of the cathedral to the left, there is nothing to make you consider Saragossa as you take your weary way in, parched and choked with Aragon.

But when you come within the cool of the cathedral, then you perceive the externals, and, if you are fortunate, you feel something of the soul also which stood to arms for nine hundred years until the great fatigue of the seventeenth century came upon it and it fell half-asleep; a sleep in which it is now stirring.

It is wearisome to repeat the repetitive impression which these great churches of the Spaniard leave; yet each is of its own place and has its own individual manner. Saragossa, less dark than most, less awful, is more uplifted. And this effect comes from a high lantern tower which reveals with light the main altar and the north end of the Coro.

When last I stood there it was the feast of Corpus Christi, and there was some gathering of people—not very many. The music was of that strange sort with which Spain had long rendered me familiar. Still more familiar were the words of the ritual: all of these were what I had seen and heard, I know not how often, up and down the provinces of this land.

But what was peculiar to the heart of the realm was the light coming down from above, from the height of the tower. On the inner walls of it the last of the Middle Ages had nobly placed in woven carving the arms, the names, the titles, the dates of the building: a memorial: the bishops and the kings of Aragon.

It was not yet noon. The heat outside was an oven already; but I was here within, sheltered, and permitted a recollection.

And it seemed to me, while I sat there so musing, that there is a double strength in tradition. First, the strength which we all know, the strength of continued names and forms which, though they become archaic and grotesque, bind the sons to the fathers, and are, therefore, most religiously to be preserved. But the second, stranger and more powerful, more full of body, is that strength in tradition which has a resurrection about it assuring a continuance of life.

There is a sort of tradition which is not a form, nor a ritual, nor a name, but a surviving influence; and this (said I to myself) is the abiding strength, promise, and earnest of the future of Spain. The vital memory; the things _quæ olim promisisti ad Abraham et patres nostros_. To have such things within one, that indeed is to be alive.

So I mused in the cathedral of Saragossa the last time I was there. As it seems to me the past develops, continuous, and is alive in Spain; like a seed still promising good things, whereas in so much of the West the seeds have perished.

I can pay no attention at all to those who regard the cherishing of the past as an arresting, or a cramping; a check. Upon the contrary, it seems to me the privilege of a lively mind. For you may notice among men of middle age how most of them have grown intent upon the anxieties of the moment, or the base appetites of the moment, and have so become degraded with the passage of time. But here and there one man remembers not only his boyhood but his youth; not only his youth but his manhood, and is continuous with all he ever was. Such is the privilege of the Spaniards among the men of other nations. Such reserves have they for their next advance and for their rehabilitation.