TARRAGONA AND THE CATALANS

I think if a man would feel Catalonia he should travel on foot in the northern mountains, hearing the Catalan speech and seeing the Catalan customs upon both sides of the border. Next he should visit for some days one of those smaller towns in which the modern industry of the province, which distinguishes it so sharply from the rest of Spain, has taken root. Lastly, he should steep himself in the spirit of Tarragona.

For Tarragona has that quality which you will everywhere find to be the best preservation of a local genius—the quality of tradition undisturbed by recent activity and expansion. Though it lies in the southernmost part of the province, yet it is intensely Catalan, and sums up in its serene antiquity the traditions of that land.

I have said that the problem of Catalonia and that of Morocco are the two perils of Spain to-day; one might almost say there were no other perils in the path of a continued prosperity, moral and physical. But these two are serious, and there are moments when they seem overwhelming. How serious is that of Morocco, the daily telegrams arriving for years were sufficient to prove. Catalonia is quite another matter. It is not an immediate physical peril, but it is a challenge to the Spanish unity.

The Catalan province, through an accident of history, received a different stamp from that of the rest of the peninsula at a moment when the final characters of our European countrysides were decided during the crystallising process of the Dark Ages. There has resulted not only a very different language—language is a poor test of national definition—but a sharp different corporate spirit and informing local habit.

All the rest of Spain—and Portugal as well for that matter—was moulded and informed by the lengthy, the annealing, the slowly victorious hammering back of Asia from European soil. But Catalonia was the March of the Ebro which Charlemagne kept as a bastion thrown out into Mohammedan land. From the very root of the Dark Ages it remained attached to the Gauls; and there was a Count of Barcelona to defend the Ebro frontiers of the empire here, just as the Counts and the Margraves upon the Elbe and Danube defended it against the pagan Slavs and Mongols. The broad, open pass of the Cerdagne, the easy passages of the last low eastern hills wherein the Pyrenees fall to the Mediterranean, were gateways into Catalonia at all times; and the coast country from just south of Narbonne right to the mouths of the Ebro, became one thing.

This separate Catalan idea has never failed. You find it far on in the seventeenth century, when the Catalan Assembly elected Louis XIII. of France to be Count of Barcelona, as a challenge to Madrid (hence the loss to Spain of Perpignan). You find it to-day in the Catalan acceptation of modern industry, and, what is much more important, in the acceptation of those transmontane French ideas, good and evil, which are abhorrent to Aragon and Castille.

Nearly every country of the modern world (with its strong, highly-centralised governments, its rapid communications, its unifying processes of education and law) has some such problem of local resistance to unity. It is not for a foreigner to judge either the moral issues involved or the strength of the forces upon either side, but no view of modern Spain can neglect that anomaly of the Catalonian demand. There is no symptom of decline in it—the local separate spirit is still strong and strengthening; to judge it, I say, one must not stand in the turmoil and cross-currents of a huge centre like Barcelona, where to some extent the religious quarrel and much more the violent industrial conflict of our time between rich and poor confuse the issue. One must take the Catalonian spirit where it is normal, traditional and native; and you will find it so most in Tarragona.

The town is the most orderly, the most compact, one might say, of all the more living cities of Spain. It is set on the slopes of a high hill, which it exactly covers, and the steep escarpment of which to the east overhangs a vast expanse of sea, over to the unseen Balearics, more than a hundred miles away.

The place has nothing about it of decay, although, like all seats of a peaceful antiquity, it has shrunk greatly from its ancient boundaries. They say that at the height of the Roman power it held, with its slaves and its travellers, a million souls. It has now, with its suburbs, not a twentieth of that number. Yet there does not stand about it that shadow of ancient amplitude which you find round other such cities—Ravenna, or Rome itself—detached relics of ancient use, ruins, the enclosed gardens run wild of palaces long disappeared.

The vineyards and the highly cultivated market ground and the pastures come right up to the limits of its continuous building and to the base of its hill. There seems to have happened here in part what happened wholly to Hippo in Africa; that is, the removal of all the stones, of every trace of building, from the area over which an ancient city shrank; and Tarragona, which gave its name to all these coasts of Spain when the Roman imperial power was at its height, stands now still marked with all the impress of a capital—but not too large; exact, dignified, and with no touch of mourning, of death, or even of decay. The port, which seems so small to our modern eyes, and which was yet the making of this centre over against the coasts of Italy, lies at its foot with a modern quarter around it. From this flat arises the hill of the city, which you mount by a main street, or better, by a fine flight of steps upon the seaward side, which climb right up to the broad parapet-way and garden, overhanging the Mediterranean upon the height; and there it is, upon the very summit of the hill, that you find the heart of the city and its memories. There you will see, built by chance into the walls of private houses, the stones of fifteen hundred and two thousand years.

I came upon one most curious window in a wall of no pretensions. Its two sides were supported by two red slabs, memorials or tombs, still inscribed with Latin letters. The lintel above was of a different colour, a greyish white, which looked much older, but was, in fact, more recent, and may, in fact, have counted not more than a thousand years. It had been taken, I suppose, from some ruined synagogue, for it bore, deeply cut into the hard, rough substance of it, a run of Hebrew letters.

Such things meet you, I had almost said, at every turn in these very steep, turning ways of the upper city; and you see, side by side with them, the good and sober modern buildings, still rich with tradition, in which the Spaniards everywhere excel.

Upon the very height of the summit, where once the citadel stood (closely surrounded by the immense blocks, older than history, of the cyclopean wall), stands the cathedral; and though every town of the Peninsula centres on its church, and therefore makes every mention of each particular shrine something of a repetition, no one can write of, or remember, Tarragona save in terms of that astonishing thing.

It stands more lonely than the main churches of most of the other towns, for it is at the extremity and on the height of the whole city. A wide space before its approach, flooded with an intense light and commonly empty of men, is your introduction to something exceptional in your travels. For as you pass the doors you come suddenly out of the glare into a very cold, black void. At first you can see nothing. You are in what seems to be the complete darkness of a vast cavern, very wide and as icy as might be some subterranean refuge; violently contrasting in its sudden cold and empty depth of night with the torrid splendour outside.

Then, very gradually, the eye perceives a glimmering shaft, an altar cloth under the gleam of a small taper; a broad vault lost above. But nothing more. The mediæval architects of Catalonia delighted in the two effects of gloom and breadth: a breadth which seems beyond the capacity of stone; an arch which seems, in the gloaming, almost too flat for so great a span. It is here at Tarragona only an extreme degree of what you also have in the chief parish church, and still more in the cathedral, of Barcelona. That degree of breadth is indeed so extreme that this strange, cubic nave of Tarragona, ebony night when you come into it out of the sunlight, stands by itself, and has no true parallel elsewhere in Europe. They who built it desired a place wherein the soul of man should enter at once into a profound contemplation, and be wholly cut off from the consideration of external things. They desired to put over and around the soul of man, roofing him and guarding him all about, a mystery of silence and of immensity. Certainly they achieved what they desired. I could imagine some man, over-experienced in the noisy unmeaning of the world—its ambitions bought at ten times their worth, and lost in a moment, its futile, torturing friction, and its fruitless, wasted fevers of energy—coming many hundred miles to find this place again, and to rest. It is the very heart of final repose.

When the eye has slowly grown used to the dim details of this huge cave and has begun to see its sublime proportion and design, it has another fulness of experience before it in the cloisters through the northern door, close on the gospel side of the great altar.

Passing through this northern door you come to what is the most charming, the most blessed, of all the wild gardens of the world, framed in a quadrilateral of delicate arches all around. I know them all, the cloisters of the Middle Ages. Here in England, every one, and I think every one in France; and here, in Spain, I know Barcelona, Seville, Oviedo and the strange double tier of Ripoll; and Leon, where I thought I had found, fifteen years ago, the loveliest of all such seclusions. But the cloister of Tarragona far surpasses them all. Upon its walls stand Roman tombs and, of course, the memories of the Middle Ages, and in one place, an exquisite small Moorish window, chiselled to an infinity of detail; and in another, a small rough monstrous head, from the ends of our darkness, when sculpture was almost lost. All the centuries are about you, but all asleep; and the only life of the place is in the graceful solemnity of the few trees, the grass and flowers of the court, the birds shooting to and fro, high round the warm golden stones of the tower.

That sky, that air you breathe, that slight wind coming over those ancient roofs are all of the sea. You know as you sit there, in the shade of the northern cloister, looking at that very mellow tower, kindly against the intense noon sky, and as your eye finds nothing but that sky, with the tiles of the garth and the chancel roof against it, that behind you, unseen, is a great regiment of mountains, guarding the plain and looking on this abrupt lonely hill, which is your station; and you know that just beyond, down below the giant walls, at the foot of the steeply-falling slope, is the splendour of the Mediterranean. All the while there is no sound but the very slight murmur of the sea wind in the leaves of the lonely little garden and, at long spaces, the sharp note of a darting bird.

It sounds an odd thing to say of eager Catalonia—but it is true—that here, if anywhere in the world, there is peace. That word, which the young cannot understand, but which represents, after a certain age, all the hunger of the heart, has here taken on flesh, as it were—a flesh of stone—and is with us: peace incarnate.