SALAMANCA

Of the towns in Europe which, by the sound of their names and by the connotation of them, coupled with their remoteness, carry influence, Salamanca is one.

Such a glamour is commonly disappointing in experience. Either the place was once worthy of the verbal symbol which stands for it in a foreign ear but has been destroyed by modern travel, or it has been swallowed up (like Barcelona) by the modern industrial development and has but a nucleus of strong things, standing small and half forgotten in a flood of modern worthlessness. Now Salamanca is different from these, for it is worthy of its name.

I had always desired to see it, but I never had. In the days when I wandered on foot over northern Spain as a younger man I never pushed so far west. Later the main line to Madrid (which all follow) held me, as it does the elderly. I have found that most of those who go under the walls of the city upon their way to Lisbon pass it unseen; the International Express runs by it, but does not leave visitors. Like so many of the finest things in Europe, it is seen from the railway at its worst. When I did come to visit Salamanca the other day for the first time in my life I found it, as I say, worthy of all that it had promised. But to judge it as it should be judged, one must not come in by the common road or rail from the direction of north or east. One must come in across the river from the south.

The great University of the Middle Ages, the rival of Oxford and of Paris, the dominating towers, the characteristic saffron stone of the hill—all these stand out before you on the journey northward from the Guadarrama mountains.

I had not myself the good fortune to approach it in this fashion, but I shall take that road next time I come to the city, for it is from the end of that road, coming to the River Tormes and its ancient bridge, that you see Salamanca as it was meant to be seen—a pyramid of great buildings culminating in the towering mass of the cathedral.

Here, as in a hundred other cases, it is from the Roman approach that one sees the European meaning. The road, thus coming upon Salamanca northward from the mountains, was, and is, Roman. The bridge over which that road reaches the city (coming in at the foot of its low cliff) is the bridge over which the Roman armies marched—which the Roman armies made. Its stones are still Roman, and the strength of them.

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You may say that all the central and northern famous towns of Spain, the towns of the upland, of the plateau (especially of Old and New Castille), have a note of isolation. They stand on great wind-swept open places, with only here and there a tree, and only here and there, miles apart, each from each, little groups of houses. But Salamanca has this character more strongly impressed upon it than has any other town—this quality of loneliness and the surprising imprint of a special life in the midst of things unlike itself.

You come upon Salamanca as you might come upon a human traveller in a place where you expected no man. It stands in the midst of what in autumn might be thought a desert—what, even when the crops are green in spring, has a fine desolation about it; and that desolation is made the more striking by the line of snow-tipped, rocky heights to the south, which horizon the plains along the sky. One would think those plains waterless as one goes the miles across them, but one comes not infrequently upon their rivers running in broad trenches scooped out of the loose soil, or breaking through reefs of barren limestone; rivers which vary in volume from great tumbles of water when the snow is melting, or after storm, to mere runnels between sand banks in the late summer heat or in the depth of the exceedingly cold winters of that tableland. All such rivers lend their value to the towns upon them. For, different as such rivers are from our northern broad and equal streams, with their green meadows, and different as they are even from the mountain streams of Italy, yet are the Spanish towns upon them river towns. Toledo is the town of the Tagus, Saragossa of the Ebro, Salamanca of the Tormes.

Wherever great wealth has been centred in the past upon some restricted site, if there has accompanied its expenditure a civilisation of high spiritual value and of a fixed, exalted sense of beauty, you have the works of man in a profusion of creative power fixed for ever. You will see that effect in the neglected square half-mile of Santiago, crammed with magnificence, and you see it here in Salamanca.

The University Buildings have what all the ancient universities of Europe have—a vitality bequeathed to them by generations of youth. In the private houses of Salamanca you see before you, in stone, endeavour and accumulated effort, an expenditure of carving without limit, an attempt everywhere to leave a record, and that attempt successful.

But it is the cathedral, more than any other building, which gives its soul to the place. And in it you may note what is the characteristic of Spain—that the decay of the Middle Ages did not affect (as one might think it should have done) the skill of men’s hands nor the justice of their vision.

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The ornament is late; the piling on of detail is of a sort which tourists in the Ruskin tradition will call excessive. There are experiments in structure which are manifestly exaggerated. Yet the whole is a marvel.

I think it especially characteristic of the place that in the frieze which runs round the nave for a total distance of perhaps three hundred yards (a crowd of little figures, animals and foliage and men, one creation from first to last) each detail is an individual; just as in real creation each living unit has its own life. It is not enough to say there is no repetition; it is rather true to say there is infinite variety in unity.

Also have I seen in the church of Salamanca, better than elsewhere, success in the attaining of _height_ and its effect in the noble ironwork. The soaring gates of the chapels are as tall as the masts of a full-rigged ship. The pilasters, coloured and even (what may seem excessive, but on the spot is sober enough) _gilt_, have almost the effect of Beauvais in their ceaseless uplifting of line. Moreover, less than in any other Spanish cathedral I know does the Coro break the effect of height.

The cathedral of Salamanca is a splendid edifice from within and from without. It has that power of using the features in its landscape which the men of its time gave to every great building. It is the true completion of the height on which it stands, leading up into its tower the lines of the hill which is its foundation.

Lastly there is this to be said about my old city of Salamanca—something which lends a peculiar pleasure to the visiting of it—that it is not mournful in its decay; it is not abandoned; it is properly alive.

Its schools, which were one of the four great groups of the Western World hold not a quarter of the youth they once held. It does not radiate, as once it radiated, its intelligence and learning through the West. But it is not dead nor even diminished in life; it is still the great university town, it is still a national glory, and, what is more important, it is still itself, its function is not warped. Its value is permanent, its essential activity unimpaired, and all this is crowned with permanent beauty, like a garment, not new at all, but never to fade.

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_Part II_

_Portugal_