Impressions of Spain

feel ashamed to plead guilty to a predilection and preference for the pig.” And wherever one travels in the peninsula, one is met by the local dish, which is, indeed, rather a dinner than a dish; and when one has become used to it, it is both satisfying and exquisite. The puchero, or stew, would have delighted the heart and stomach of Huckleberry Finn, whose gastronomic prejudices, it will be remembered, favoured a “barrel of odds and ends” in which “things get mixed up and the juice kinds of swaps around and things go better.” The chief ingredients of the national puchero are bacon, beef, fowl, according to the state of the larder, cooked in one mass with garbanzos, a bean of peculiar size and tenderness and flavour, cabbage, carrots, gourd and long-pepper, a sausage or two being thrown in by way of make weight. The puchero is amenable to unending expansion, according to the status of the householder. Where the means are straightened, it consists of meat and garbanzos only, but the wealthy housewife adds to it a hundred delicious tit-bits; and if the juice that “kinds of swaps around” is sometimes a trifle over-seasoned, the general result is, as a rule, delicious. Dumas has left it on record that he suffered from hunger in Spain. I can only suppose that the supply of puchero was insufficient for his requirements. I cannot believe that the dish deprived him of his appetite. Then, again, the Spaniards are great people for sweets; they are, indeed, masters of this branch of the culinary art, and their preserved fruits and quince jelly seems to form an indispensable complement to the dinner table; while their fruits and vegetables, their oranges, Malaga grapes, asparagus and artichokes are famous in song and story.

In one field of enterprise, and that, curiously enough, the one in which their late antagonists, the Americans, claim pre-eminence over the civilised world, viz., in the journalistic arena, Madrid is ahead of New York, England, and Paris. In influence the press of Spain is second to none; in variety it is equal to that of Paris; and in La Correspondencia de España, Madrid has invented a newspaper which has no counterpart in any other city in the world. It is supposed that nobody can retire to rest before reading the latest edition of this “night-cap of Madrid,” as it is commonly styled; and it is certain that few people in the capital, who profess to take a lively interest in the world’s doings, ever go to bed until they have perused it. It is innocent of politics, and almost contemptuous of parties. The object of its wealthy originator and proprietor is not to propagate views, but to give news. Nothing in Spain, or out of it, which reaches Madrid is omitted from La Correspondencia, of which there are three editions published during the day, the last of which appears somewhere between ten o’clock and midnight. Nobody takes it for its views, or its special articles, although the mania of the moment has seized its millionaire proprietor, and compelled him to adopt something of the movement of contemporary journalism, but for its news it is read by everybody in Madrid. Its advertisement charges are, consequently, very high; and also, consequently, it has its imitators. But they do not prosper.

Although the Spaniard has an enormous capacity for enjoyment, his popular pastimes are not numerous. Bull-fighting, as I shall explain, is meat and drink to him, and it is something more, because it is his horse-racing, cricket, football, and the prize-ring rolled into one. It is his National sport. Horse-racing is creeping into popularity; but although all Madrid attends the meetings at the Hippodrome, and ladies don their most gorgeous gowns to do honour to the sport, it is doubtful if it will imperil the strong position which the bulls hold in the affections of the people. After bull-fighting, the only other universal amusement is the guitar and the dance. The upper classes affect polo and tennis; in the Basque provinces Pelota rouses enthusiasm, and cock-fighting is still practised amongst the lower classes in most of the Spanish towns; but these must be classed in “side-shows” in the gallery of their general recreations.

A widespread and entirely erroneous impression prevails in this country that the Spanish national dances are indecent. People who entertain this notion may dispense with it as soon as possible. Londoners are frequently given the opportunity of witnessing Spanish dancing at the Alhambra by Otero, or Guerrero, or that even more splendid exponent of the art, Consuelo Tortajada. I was present one evening at London’s Alhambra, when the last-named was dancing the “Malagueña”—a variety to which the description “poetry of motion” may be applied with full justice—and a spectator remarked to me: “Very fine, very fine indeed, but you should see it danced in Madrid. You wouldn’t recognise it for the same thing.” And his look was more meaningful than his words. Although he was not aware of it, he had informed me that he had never been to Madrid, or at least had never witnessed the Andalucian dance on the stage of a theatre there; and I suspect that if I had displayed a craving for further information, I should have been assured that Spanish women generally are ladies of flexible ethics, who indulge in cigarettes. I believe that by paying for the edifying spectacle, certain gipsy dances of the Hindoo “nautch” variety can be witnessed in the gipsy quarter of Seville; but the Spaniard leaves these exhibitions to the English and American tourists, who call it “studying the life of the country,” or “gaining experience.” Those shows have no more connection with the national dances than has burglary with the marriage service. In the streets outside the cafes, and in the theatres, the dances of Spain are as irreproachable as a pas de seul by Miss Topsy Sinden.

In the Spanish theatre, with the exception of the leading playhouses in the larger cities, the two, and even more shows a night system is an ancient and universal practice. The pieces are short, and the charges for admission are not based on the idea of so much a seat, but so much a piece. Each item costs the spectator fivepence, and the audience is constantly being changed and renewed during the evening. Variety is the spice of the entertainment; and in the provincial towns, where the theatres are always well patronised, a constant change of bill is maintained. Madrid alone supports no less than nineteen theatres; and Madrid, let it be remembered, is a city with under half-a-million inhabitants. At the same rate, London would have over two hundred.

If one could extend the list of amusements without fear of being thought irreverent, I should be inclined to include the saints’ festivals in this category. Although these religious observances are conducted with sincere devotional decorum, they provide, as they do in all Roman Catholic countries, the excuse for, as well as the main feature of, a general holiday. I have seen many festival crowds in Spain, and the good humour, the innocent happiness and universal sobriety that characterise them, is to an Englishman acquainted with English holiday-makers, as novel as it is delightful. The festival of San Isidro del Campo, the tutelary saint of Madrid, is the principal festival of the Madrilenian year, and is religiously celebrated by all the lower classes and the peasants

who come from the neighbouring villages. It takes place on May 15th, and provides the most genuine bit of local colour that is to be witnessed outside Toledo. The great concourse sets out early; and crossing the Manzanares, follows a road which is lined with men and women offering their “agua fresca” (cold water) from large jugs. Water, it may be noted, is the staple beverage of all Spanish fairs and festivals. On the other side of the river—in May, the Manzanares belies the description—the miscellaneous vehicles (some drawn by as many as six mules) discharge their crowded freights, and soon the country is like an ant-hill, except that ants are usually in mourning, and do not wear such bright colours as the peasant women and the soldiers who form so large a portion of the crowd. There are innumerable booths for eating and drinking, and other common features of folk festivals. More unique are the family groups scattered everywhere, eating their slices of cold meat, salad, red pepper and oranges. Many have their wine in the same old pig-skins of which one reads in Don Quixote. At every hundred yards there is some sort of primitive music, to the rhythm of which the young men and young women dance with an expression of delighted absorption. Indeed the whole crowd wear a look of indifference to the past and future, and a determination to make the most of the passing moment. Away up the hill are long rows of booths with pottery, toys for children and cakes, and further up still is the saint’s chapel, into which all the people crowd in turn to kiss a silver image held by the priest, to receive a printed picture of the saint, and to drop a copper. But that wonderful crowd, whether at dance, or meat, or its devotion, contained the greatest number of happy faces I have ever seen together in my life.

El Escorial.

The Escorial, which has been pronounced to be the “eighth wonder of the world,” owed its existence to Philip II. and the celebrated architects, Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, and is at once a palace, a monastery and the pantheon of the monarchs of Spain. Formerly, it was known as the Royal Monastery of St. Lawrence, and it was raised in commemoration of the battle of St. Quentin, when the Spanish army routed the French on the festival day of the martyr, St. Lawrence. Philip II., or the architect, or both, are commonly believed to have designedly planned the outline of the building in the shape of a gridiron, out of respect for the butchered saint, whose martyrdom on one of those utensils is a matter of history. Probably, however, chance rather than design is responsible for the exact plan; though there can be no doubt, looking down at the Escorial from the top of the neighbouring mountains, that the simile is justifiable. A desire to protect majesty from the keen winds and to obtain for majesty’s apartments the bulk of the sunshine in the neighbourhood, perhaps helped to make the Escorial what it is, architecturally speaking.

Before the French invasion, the church teemed with treasures of art—sacred vessels of gold and silver—a multitude of shrines—reliquaires—and a tabernacle of such exquisite workmanship, that it was wont to be spoken of as worthy to be one of the ornaments of the celestial altar. All these were destroyed by La Houssage’s troopers when they occupied the Escorial in 1808, by way of giving vent to their national feeling respecting the battle of St. Quentin, two-and-a-half centuries before. The Escorial sustained a still greater loss in 1837, during the Carlist war, when about a hundred of the choicest paintings were removed, for safety’s sake, to the Museo at Madrid.

The exploration of the Escorial is a formidable undertaking, comprising as it does the inspection of a palace, a convent, two

colleges, three chapter-houses and three libraries, with their concomitant complement of halls, dormitories, refectories and infirmaries. There are no fewer than eighty-six staircases; and someone, gifted with a turn for statistics, has calculated that to visit every individual room and to traverse each staircase and corridor, would occupy four entire days, and carry the adventurer over a distance of about a hundred and twenty English miles. The square of the building covers 500,000 feet; there are eighty-eight fountains, fifteen cloisters, sixteen courtyards, and 3,000 feet of painted fresco.

Twenty-one years were occupied in its construction, but a century did not suffice to collect the wonderful literary treasures which it now contains. One of the most famous MSS. in the Escorial library is the “Libro de Oro,” the letters of which are composed of eight kilogrammes (18 lbs.) of gold leaf. These letters, which are of course very thin, are attached to parchment. Forty-two richly-decorated altars are to be seen in the interior of the palace church, but more wonderful in their way than the altars are the service books for the use of the choir. It is said that each leaf of each book was made from an entire calf-skin, 17,000 skins being used in the process.

Beneath the church is the burial place of the kings of Spain; the one spot, one would imagine, where etiquette would not rule; but where, in reality, it is most rigorously observed; for right royal dust must not mingle with the dust of princes, and a separate pantheon was for this cause built for those sons of kings who had not actually worn the purple. Apart from its treasures and its curiosities, there is one quarter of the Escorial which is of particular interest to English-speaking peoples. In three small rooms, as bare as the cell of the anchorite, dwelt the husband of Queen Mary of England, that monkish and forbidding sovereign at whose command the myriad ships of the Invincible Armada were hurled against England. His ambition was to make England the appanage of Spain; all he obtained were a few English elms which still flourish in the palace gardens.

Yet another Royal Palace, occupying an extensive valley, surrounded by hills, is situated at Aranjuez, in the extreme south of the province of Madrid, on the left bank of the full-flowing river Tajo. In the town of Aranjuez there are splendid farms, palaces and hotels, wide thoroughfares, good churches, theatre, hospital, barracks, very beautiful promenades, and all the other adjuncts of a model town. All these, however, are surpassed by the beauty of the gardens and parks which, with the Royal Palace, are the property of the Crown. The illustration shows the side of the Royal dwelling which opens on to what are called the Island gardens, on account of their being surrounded by the waters of the river Tajo. The first thing that strikes one is the monumental fountain which deals with the allegory of the Pillars of Hercules, and was designed by the Italian sculptor, Alexander Algardi. The building, which was commenced in 1561 by Philip II. and continued by all the Bourbon kings, is elegantly proportioned, and is surrounded by delicious gardens, luxurious avenues of trees, picturesque woods, and large lakes.

Barcelona.

This feeling is not of course peculiar to the Catalans. Spanish character, and the special localism that forms one of its most distinctive features, has changed but little since Richard Ford, writing more than half-a-century ago, said: “The inhabitants of the different provinces think, indeed, that Madrid

is the greatest and richest court in the world, but their hearts are in their native localities. ‘Mi paisano,’ my fellow-countryman, or rather my fellow-countyman, fellow-parishioner, does not mean Spaniard, but Andalucian, Catalonian as the case may be. When a Spaniard is asked, ‘Where do you come from?’ the reply is, ‘Soy hijo de Murcia—hijo de Granada’—‘I am a son of Murcia—a son of Granada,’ &c.” This is strictly analogous to the “children of Israel,” the “Bene” of the Spanish Moors, and to this day the Arabs of Cairo call themselves children of that town; and just as the Milesian Irishman is a “boy from Tipperary,” &c., and ready to fight with anyone who is so also, against all who are not of that ilk: similar, too, is the clanship of the highlander: indeed, everywhere, not perhaps to the same extent as in Spain, the being of the same province or town creates a powerful freemasonry: the parties cling together like old school-fellows. It is a home, and really binding feeling. To the spot of their birth, all their recollections, comparisons, and eulogies are turned: nothing, to them, comes up to their particular province; that is their real country. “La Patria,” means Spain at large, is a subject of declamation, fine words, palabras—palaver, in which all, like Orientals, delight to indulge, and to which their grandiloquent idioms lends itself readily: but their patriotism is still largely parochial, and self is the centre of Spanish gravity.

And so it happens that if the Catalan has scant liking for the romantic, pleasure-loving, guitar-thrumming Andalucian, the Andalucian, on the other hand, regards the Catalan as a hard, pedantic and unpoetic mechanic. As a matter of fact, he is straightforward without being hard, grave without pedantry, hospitable without ostentation; and, like all Spaniards, he is a poet. Poetry, as a national characteristic, is an accident of climate. Here is Barcelona, the Manchester of Spain, a hive of manufacturing industry, rejoicing in one of the most lovely sites in Europe, possessed of a climate equal to that of Naples, and with its beauty untarnished by the hand of time, or the artificer. Such an atmosphere, such skies, such stars make a people poets against their wills. I do not imply a charge against the Spaniards that they write poetry—that is an entirely different thing. They may—they do, happily, for the most part—die with all their poetry in them; but they are none the less poets; and indeed they are, as Oscar Wilde argued, the better poets on that account. For the Spanish temperament rises superior to the temptations of environment. If it were my good fortune to live perpetually beneath that star-spangled sky, I believe I could not resist the impulse to write verse. If for no other reason than for this alone I doff my beaver to the unversifying Catalan.

There is, however, another characteristic which accounts for their prosperity, and excuses the tone of superiority they adopt towards the people of the neighbouring provinces—they are not afraid of work. Since the thirteenth century, when the Catalans led the way to the whole world in maritime conquest and jurisprudence, they have never thought trade to be a degradation, but rather have ennobled it by their honesty and enterprise. The Spanish race generally has lacked the trading spirit. An intelligent American writer, who has studied the causes which have brought Spain down from her ancient eminence in the affairs of Europe, finds them in a position different from that which is generally supposed. “Pride, a weak monarch, a dissolute court, religious intolerance—all these,” says our transpontine critic, “are admirable starting points from which to prove a nation’s decline. But Spain has been by no means unique in the possession of these requisites. A close examination of intrigue, and counter-intrigue, and plot at the capital reveals a condition different from that of some other countries only in being a little later in occurrence. In

fact, all these are mere effects; the cause is the absence of that which has developed the great nations of the earth, the cause on which civilisation rests, the great primitive developing agency—the trading spirit. For seven centuries she was a battlefield. During that time, while she was keeping the Mohammedan wolf from the door of Europe, there was no chance for the development of the trading spirit. What growth came in a measure to some of the coast cities was the result of local commercial relations finding an extension and expansion between nation and nation. The spirit of getting by the good right arm grew, and produced its tradition; while the precarious cultivation of land for food, an occupation ever more and more removed from the leaders, became the work of an ignorant and unrespected class.

“With the absence of trade goes the absence of knowledge of the outside world; and though a certain general knowledge was brought back by the Europe-conquering soldiers of Charles and Philip, it was a knowledge of how easily gain could be made in the old way, rather than a stimulus to the merchant.

“Without the logical traditions of buying and selling, raised up through generations, Spain could hardly avoid the errors of government which the want of such traditions bring. She could scarcely hope not to become the victim of each and every scheme for a financial millennium, as a nation, which we are all accustomed to smile at when played in the more self-evident form of personal charlatanry. And, most of all, the dignity of work has been lost. The Spanish labourer pitied himself—and was pitied.

“Up to the beginning of the Cuban war, however, a better condition had been developing. Education, and a knowledge of the outside world, were bringing home to this nation that to be the proudest man in the world it is well to have a basis for that pride in tangible rather than traditional things; and of so excellent a nature have I found the Spaniard when one knows him, that I cannot help believing in his ultimate development.

“But few, I know, cross the threshold of the Spanish house to find how good a man at heart the owner is. He is proud, it is true, and does not much favour the stranger; but it is the pride of a reserved nature, not of a weak one.”

There is indeed much truth to be found in this view of the situation. Spain has never been a great commercial nation; she

is, in fact, only now entering for the first time the commercial arena. No nation in Europe commenced her career on a trade basis. Conquest in the early ages was the only acknowledged industry; and the empires of Carthage, Phœnicia, Rome, Spain, and Great Britain all rose to greatness by the right of might. England was a young nation when Spain commenced to decline after centuries of conquest and supremacy, and England was ripe to receive the impression of the value of commerce as a maker and sustainer of kingdoms. Germany did not become a great power until the supremacy of trade was universally acknowledged; America was cradled in a counting house, and brought up in the atmosphere of profit and loss.

Barcelona, of all the cities of Spain, has never been blind to the advantages of commerce; and to-day, the city, in its bustling activity, its red-hot life, its ceaseless movement and sense of prosperity resembles all the great commercial cities of the world—London, New York, Melbourne, Liverpool, and Chicago. But in one respect it more nearly approaches London in the resemblance, by reason of an ill-favoured side of approach. I have often met at Tilbury or Liverpool—but Tilbury especially—friends who have been on their first visit to our Metropolis, and I have begged them, as a personal favour, not to form any opinion of the city from the railway-carriage windows. The squalor and dreariness of the eastern approach to London is only mildly reproduced by the southern environs of Barcelona. Indeed, when one makes one’s first acquaintance with it, it is difficult to believe that it is the boastedly first city of Spain. Yet the boast is not unjustified in so far, at least, as the concerns of every-day life, polity and progress are concerned. When once the visitor is within the circle of her brighter ways, he will look in vain for any of the smudginess whose kingdom and on-coming have been heralded by smudge; he will speedily recognise the fact that here is rolling by him a greater volume of trade than in all the other great centres of Spanish commercial life put together. Everywhere in Barcelona there is apparent the lively, virile animation, bred of a prosperous and forceful existence; and it is this which constitutes one of the great charms of the place. In no town-ways of Spain, not even in those of Seville, is the visitor so well rewarded as in Barcelona.

On one of my visits to Barcelona, I arrived in the city during the labour riots last year. Trains had been fired at and attacked with stones, so the windows of the carriages were barricaded, and all precautions were taken for the safety of the passengers. We were allowed, however, to enter the station unmolested; and although the crowded streets were paraded by the military, and a further outburst of public feeling was expected, the force of the human volcano had evidently expended itself before our arrival. Much property had been damaged; and, on all sides, one saw windows riddled with bullets, or smashed with stones, and evidences that the industrious and law-abiding Barcelonian is a Spaniard when roused. There was an alertness akin to menace in the flashing glances that inspected us that seemed to threaten all kind of unpleasant eventualities. But we walked through the streets in perfect safety; and my good friend, who had driven in from his country house to meet me, along roads patrolled by soldiers and skirted by turbulent rioters, apologised delightfully for the insecurity of the highways which rendered him unable to offer me the hospitality of his house until the following day. The risk he had run in coming in to Barcelona to welcome me did not occur to him. I was his friend—he had not given a thought

for his skin. As we promenaded the streets, he approached men and asked them questions about the riot, and the scowl disappeared from their faces as a sea-mist lifts from the cliffs as they gave us the required information. I have written that the Spaniard’s good manners are the result not of an acquired and superficial politeness, but are derived from a natural and national courtesy that is inbred in the race. There is in their attentions a vein of selfishness which is half its charm. A stranger will do you a courtesy for which your thanks can only half pay him—the other half-payment he himself contributes for the service. He has pleased you, and in so doing he has pleased himself. And one feels that he has pleasure in his own unselfishness. It is impossible to be many hours in Spain without recognising this delightful trait. You step into a shop and inquire the way to the cathedral. The friendly shopkeeper places himself immediately at your disposal. He takes down his capa, and personally conducts you to the desired spot. It is the same always. You ask for your bearings of a member of the famous guardia civil, and the pair will solemnly march you to your destination; or the first pedestrian you meet proceeding in the opposite direction, faces about on the instant, and retraces his steps through the length or breadth of a town to put you on the right road.

We have no force in this country that corresponds with the Guardia Civil; perhaps the Royal Irish Constabulary are their nearest counterpart in organisation and fine morale. This body, which is composed of 20,000 foot and 500 mounted guards, are neither soldiers nor policemen, but they combine the duties of both. Their splendid physique, and smart, soldierly bearing—only the best men in the Spanish Army are admitted to the ranks of the Civil Guards—give one a feeling of security and a sense of order that nothing else seems to impart. They are stationed in every town and small village throughout the country. They patrol the roads, they accompany every train, and are to be seen at every station; they are to be encountered everywhere, and always in pairs. Dressed in blue tunic and trousers of the same colour, with light buff-coloured belts, cocked hats, and top-boots, they carry their well-polished rifles in a manner which engenders the respect of evil-doers. In contrast with the leisurely life around them, they stride through the traffic, in it, but not of it—a class apart. They are, indeed, apart in habit

as well as in appearance. Their association with the outer world is almost entirely official. They live in barracks, mess together, and hold themselves aloof. Their esprit de corps is as perfect as their discipline; they cannot be bribed, nor induced to accept a reward for any service they may render you. The safety of property and life in Spain is in their keeping; and it may be said without exaggeration that they have done more to establish order in the Peninsula than any other body.

Barcelona, besides being a busy, wide-awake, and rapidly-growing commercial and industrial centre, contrasting strongly with some other Spanish cities that still seem to be shrouded in the mists of the middle ages, has also acquired the reputation of being a beautiful city—beautiful, of course, in the modern sense; for, where modern enterprise rules, the old-time beauty is apt to take flight. Its situation, on a slope running down from the mountains to the sea, is both healthful and picturesque. Its streets and boulevards are wide, regular, and well made; and its main avenue, the Rambla, has been styled, not without justice, the “Unter den Linden” of Barcelona. This line of promenade, formed by the Ramblas of Santa Monica, del Centro, de San José, de Estudios, de Canaletas, and the Paseo de Gracia is a veritable triumph of boulevarding. Europe may be challenged to produce anything finer. It runs from the port right through the heart of the town, and out into the country, a practically uninterrupted series of carriage drives and public promenades, shaded nearly all the way by over-arching plane-trees. The lower portions are lined with handsome shops and cafés, with the best hotels and theatres; and all the upper reach—the Gracia Paseo—with the imposing blocks of houses of the Ensanche, the residential region, par excellence, of the city.

The little Rambla de San José, too, may justly be accorded its more popular name of “de las Flores:” for here each morning is held the flower market, when both sides of the broad central walk are lined with stacks heaped up in dazzling profusion with all the floral wealth which southern sunlight, nature, and art can produce. Here, amid the splendid highways of the city, one may find a continual occupation for both eye and mind in the ever-shifting and gorgeous colouring, and in all the movements of the colossal game of life. The hour does not signify—early or late, morning, afternoon, or night, it is all one—for Barcelona folk seem to be able to do without sleep; and at all times the air is deliciously soft, and yet so fresh, from the sea and from the hill-country which backs up the city, that one is ever impelled onwards. In the full artery of the life of it, one comes across the Lonja, the Casas Consistoriales and Diputacion, but one looks in vain for the great cathedral, the Churches of Santa Maria del Mar, Santa Ana, Santa Maria del Pino, the old Benedictine Monastery of San Pablo del Campo, the Roman remains, and the fine Renaissance houses. These are not for those who run to see, but are hidden away, tucked out of sight, so to speak, in a most vexatious and puzzling manner.

In Barcelona, we have the old town with its narrow, tortuous lanes, and the new town with its streets laid out at right angles, its handsome houses, and its air of general prosperity. The trade of the city is ever increasing, and its prospects are almost illimitable. The wealth of the city has overflowed into the handsome suburb of Paseo de Gracia, with its villas and miniature palaces, and its population of nearly 40,000 inhabitants. The port of Barcelona has, in the process of improvement, effaced the historical Muralla del Mar; and its site is now occupied by a broad, handsome quay, laid out with palms, and enriched with a wonderful stone and bronze column, 197 feet high, surmounted with a statue of Columbus. More handsome and lofty houses are to be found in the Plaza Real; the finest

shops are situated in the Calle de Fernando; while the Calle Ancha is given over to banks and insurance offices. In the Plaza del Palacio is the beautiful fountain in Carrara marble representing the four Catalonian provinces of Barcelona, Lérida, Tarragona, and Gerona. Another superb piece of street ornamentation is the Columbus Memorial, which was erected in 1889. It is built at the end of the Rambla in the Plaza de la Paz, and has the picturesque silhouette of Montjuich for a background. The pedestal, which is octagonal in form, rests on a circular base, flanked by four spacious ledges, decorated with eight lions, and from it rises the iron column, crowned by a magnificent Corinthian capital supporting a bronze globe; above which, in graceful pose, is seen the statue of the immortal discoverer, also in bronze. Many historical and allegorical statues embellish this memorial, and also high reliefs in copper depicting the chief events in the life of Columbus and a great number of ornaments and other details, all equally elegant. From the ground to the top of the statue the monument is 180 feet in height. The vaulted arches underneath are used as a burying-place for distinguished Catalan sailors. A lift runs inside the column to the top, and a magnificent panoramic view is to be obtained from the capital. I have referred especially to this column and the fountain because to my mind they are the most imposing of the many columns, pyramids, and statues that abound in the squares and thoroughfares of the city.

Dark, mysterious, and imposing, the Gothic Cathedral is worthy of a place by the most beautiful of Spain. After the great Cathedral of Seville, I know no other that impresses one in the same way as the Cathedral of Barcelona. The fine proportions and carefully-arranged lighting are common to them both. At Tarragona, Salamanca, Toledo, Burgos, Leon, and Santiago, we can see work that will bear more close analysis and confer great teaching; but the Catalan here teaches us his school of stern, solid, domestic architecture, and he conveys his lesson by the finest of examples. Here we may learn that little faults on the part of old workers, and big, glaring faults on the part of their successors are powerless to detract from the effect of awful solemnity and majesty of their splendid vistas, to stultify the great ideas and fine grasp upon the subject of scale with which the Cathedral was carried out. Beside this, its numerous fine bits of enriched detail work and its glorious stained glass are mere matters of detail—and the election of models—and they are scarcely noticed.

I have listened to some beautiful music beautifully rendered in the Cathedral of Barcelona, and in many of the great cathedrals in Spain; and I have seen an audience go into ecstacies over a piece of vocalisation in the Opera House at Madrid; but I should hesitate to describe the Spanish as a musical nation. Singing among the working people is a habit and a relaxation, but it is scarcely an art. The working people of Barcelona, or of the Peninsula generally for that matter, are not naturally musical; but they do not sing the less on that account. One day as I sat in a friend’s room in the Hotel and listened to the servants chortling incessantly as they went about their work, I asked a trifle impatiently: “Do these good people never cease their singing?” He looked up with a quizzical twinkle in his questioning eyes. “Singing?” he asked. I held up my finger, and the sound of three different voices, uplifted in three different ecstacies, came from the corridor. “Oh! that,” he replied, still smiling: “Yes, they do a good deal of it. So you call that singing; now I think that is very amiable of you.” I asked him why their songs were unduly long; and learned that as each vocalist improvises his or her own song, both words and music, it is only limited by his or her individual fancy. “But what are the subjects of their ballads?” I protested, and my friend responded, “Oh! just anything—a bullfight, a tender tale of love, a report of a police court case with ten adjournments.” Schubert, it is said, could set a handbill to music, but these people improvise a romantic opera out of an overdue laundry account. Their guitar playing has little but mere form; and their dancing—the dancing of the working-classes who picnic by the wayside and dance for the sheer love of it and the joy of living—is governed, or seems to be, by the whim of the performer. When the children are not playing at bullfights, they are indulging in one or other of their innumerable singing and dancing games.

Besides the interest it affords in itself, Barcelona is within hail of Monserrat, the pride of Catalonia, and one of the natural wonders of Spain, which lies some thirty miles north from the city. Antonio Gallenga has written of this wonderful mountain: “It is the loftiest and grandest temple and most formidable citadel that was worked by God’s hands. The Monastery, standing as it does, squeezed on its narrow ledge, with an abyss of untold fathoms at its feet, and the weight of three great rocky masses hanging over its head, must look both mean in size and tame in taste, crushed by the Titanic grandeur, by the sublime harmony and the terrible power exhibited by the Supreme Architect in this His masterpiece of earthly handiwork.”

Nor is the description out of keeping with the subject. Seen from the road, this terrible yet beautiful mountain, throwing off its morning mantle of mists and lifting its weird peaks to the sun, presents a vision of entrancing loveliness. At its base, the Monastery, vast in size and hideous in its severity, is almost a blot upon the landscape. But the climb from the Monastery to the summit of Monserrat is fraught with a succession of overpowering sensations, of perpetual contrast between terror and delight. The immense mass of mountain, about twenty-five miles in circumference at its base, is composed of a grey conglomerate of the granite type, brittle and crumbling; and by its nature assuming every variety of fanciful and weird appearances, baffling the utmost extent of men’s inventive powers. For about half the distance to the top its body remains solid; then rent asunder in every direction, it towers in thousands of fantastic pinnacles to its highest point, some four thousand feet above the sea. “There is hardly a spot,” says Gallenga, “where you do not feel that you stand on a thousand feet precipice; hardly a nook where some great boulder, as big as the Vatican Palace, is not suspended over your head, ready, as you fancy, to slide down in avalanche at every burst of the storm wind.” There are huge, straight columns, the bases and shafts of which have thus been crumbling away for thousands of years; while the top, or as one may say, the capital, still hangs up in air on nothing. Impervious as those crags and cliffs appear, they are, however, crossed by paths running like threads on the edge of the precipice.