Barcelona is the focus and centre of Catalanism, in all its proud, turbulent independence. More, perhaps, than any city in the world (Marseilles and Naples are near rivals) it gives an impression of tempestuous, surging, irrepressible life and brio. A Barcelona crowd roused to anger would be intimidating in a high degree. It is even a little intimidating when in its usual good humour. Drivers charge about the narrow streets and broad squares, sounding their horns loudly and continuously for sheer joy of noise; trams crash along, jangling shrill bells. After Barcelona, Madrid seems a genteel and almost soundless city. The Barcelonese seem to shout, scream, blow horns, laugh, stare, crowd, chatter, hang out flags, all day and all night. Up and down the Ramblas they walk and talk, buy and sell, drink in the cafés, stare with unflagging interest at passers by (their preoccupation with people is as intense as elsewhere in Spain; never for a moment do they seem to neglect the proper study of mankind - only for ‘man’ one should substitute ‘woman’). The famous Ramblas are delightful; divided by a shady grove of plane trees, two narrow one-way streets run north and south, through the length of the Old Town, crowded with cafés, shops, kiosks, people, trams, motor vehicles, boot-blacks and sellers of lottery tickets. On the dividing promenade people stroll, among brilliant flower stalls, newspaper kiosks, estanquillos, and stalls crowded with birds in cages - parakeets, pigeons, blue, green and yellow tits, who fill the air with their liquid twitterings. Beside them swim goldfish, crabs and water tortoises; white mice, guinea-pigs, little dogs, and tiny chimpanzees run to and fro in their boxes, and all is animation. Secretive youths sidle up; insinuatingly they try to persuade you to buy a watch, or a fountain pen, or a ring, for three hundred pesetas; they come quickly down to thirty, twenty, ten; they end by seeming to beg you to take it as a gift, as if the police were (as perhaps they are) hot on their tracks. Buxom women and girls, with fine hatless heads of black hair, smart men with white suits and dark glasses and canes, nippy street urchins, assiduous persons offering lottery tickets - they might, no doubt, be met with in any Spanish town, but here they seem to wear a peculiar air of confidence and vivacity. I do not think they sleep, or even go to bed. My bedroom overlooked the Rambla; when, soon after midnight, I went to bed, the population were always still strolling down there in a high state of animation. One morning I was awakened at four by loud conversation; going out on to my balcony and looking down, I perceived that the Rambla was still full of people sitting at café tables or on seats beneath the trees, or strolling to and fro, talking, laughing and screaming with the greatest vivacity, the street lights that gleamed above the plane trees now paling a little in a faint dawn. I dare say the flower stalls and the bird and animal stalls and the little boot-shiners were all there too. It was a pretty and fantastic sight, this crowd bewitched into perpetual nocturnal animation.
The Barcelonese are, indeed, a vivid and a tireless people: one sees why they have always had so many revolutions, bombs, commotions, aspirations, political movements, industries and wealth. Their spirit and energy are tremendous. Directly General Franco began his revolution, the Barcelona incendiaries rushed jubilantly round their churches and set them on fire. Church-burning, which has been called the second national sport of Spain, has nearly always been part of Spanish revolutions; the hatred of church and priests has bitten so deep into a large proportion of this religious people that churches are burnt down and priests murdered; when the revolutionary side is pro-clerical, this gesture has to be made by the loyalists. The first attack on church and religious orders was in Queen Cristina’s days; the last Barcelona large-scale church-burnings had been in July 1909, when sixty-three religious buildings had been attacked. Those riots began as an expression of distaste (somewhat irrelevant) for the war in Morocco: the military authorities in Barcelona turned a blind eye on the incendiaries, whose religious activities were, perhaps, considered a convenient diversion from more important objectives. Between 1931 and 1939, the period of the Catalan autonomous government, no religious buildings in Catalonia were attacked, though in Madrid and elsewhere the anti-ecclesiastical flames periodically blazed. But in July, 1936, after the rising of the army, the Barcelona mobs got down to it in earnest, and nearly all the convents and churches were lit; only the modern Sagrada Familia and the Cathedral (which was later hit by nationalist bombs) escaped altogether. Fortunately Catalonian churches are solidly built; in most cases, even when the interiors were burnt out, the external structure proved less inflammable and, though the incendiaries did what they could during that reign of savagery and terror, when human lives and human art alike became a holocaust to mob passion and brutality, few buildings were destroyed past repair. Others have been well and quickly restored. On the whole Barcelona, ten years after the war, has not the appearance of a city badly scarred, either from fire or from bombs. The Republican government, though unable to stop the first mob outbreaks, succeeded, when it did take control, in salvaging works of art and guarding the buildings from further attack.
Barcelona is a city of magnificent buildings, secular and religious. Its civic buildings, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, put up in the centuries of surging prosperity and commercial supremacy, decorate the Old Town with dignity and grace. There is the Episcopal Palace, with its great Gothic fourteenth-century window and its Romanesque patio; the exquisite group of buildings round the cathedral - the Gothic Canonry and the Pia Almoina, the Palacio Municipal, or Casa Consistorial, with its Gothic north façade, its beautiful portal topped by a lovely Archangel Raphæl, its fourteenth-century council hall and its graceful oblong patio. On the other side of the square is the Palacio de la Generalidad, the seat of the Catalan government from 1931 to 1939; its houses now the Diputación Provincial, with its fifteenth-century patio, its balustraded stairway, its upper court of oranges and gargoyles, and its chapel of St. George. Here the Institute of Catalan Studies used to be, before its abolition by the present government. Close to it is the Casa del Arcediano, the archdeaconry, with its fifteenth-century fountain, and patio wainscoted with charming modern azulejos; upstairs in this house are the municipal archives. In the Archivo de la Corona de Aragon, close by, a Renaissance building on the site of the old palace of the sovereigns of Catalonia and Aragon, with a particularly lovely gallery and stairway, there are four or five million documents of the mediæval State Chancellery. Opposite, still in the Plaza del Rey, is the old Royal Palace, with its tall fifteenth-century mirador, a charming object, with, on its right, the lovely thirteenth-century royal chapel of Santa Agueda, which houses a museum.
There are a number of attractive old private houses still undemolished in the streets and plazas, though modern vandalism has swept many away. Very lovely is the fifteenth-century Palacio de Centellas, its main façade quite unaltered, its patio and stairway unobtrusively restored; and the eighteenth-century baroque Casa de la Virreina on the Rambla de las Flores, once the home of a viceroy of Peru; its lower part has long been occupied by shops, which are now being removed. Among the few Barcelona baroque buildings, this house is particularly pretty and graceful, with its elegant roof balustrade, its balconies, its fine central window topped by the family arms. The Calle Monçada was once a street of fine houses; some, both Gothic and baroque, still remain, such as the palace of the Marques de Llió, whose flowered and shrubbed balcony on two wide arches hangs gracefully over a delightful patio. In this street too is the eighteenth-century Casa Dalmases, probably Italian work, with a relief sculpture of the rape of Europa on its stairway balustrade; its first owner represented Catalonia in London during the war of the Spanish succession. There are some pretty devices in. these baroque patios; some have faked truncated columns like those on the Renaissance stairway of the Generalitat; John Evelyn would have called them elegant cheats, and they have a charming ingenuous air. Another favourite eighteenth-century Barcelona trick was the covering of bricks and ashlars with plaster decorated with graffiti.
In the Old Town there are picturesque streets where Gothic houses still
stand; and old arches and seventeenth-century porches and mediæval houses and shops with projecting upper stories and pillared arcades crowd one another in the barrio of Santa Maria del Mar (see, for instance, the ancient Calle del Rech). This part of Barcelona is full of small isolated beauties, such as the two Gothic fountains of Santa Maria and San Justo. More self-conscious in its antiquity is the seventeenth-century señorial house which is now an inn, the Hostel de la Bona Sort, its patio got up to look like the courtyard of a mountain farm.
Of the fourteenth-century Llotja, or exchange, only the great Gothic hall remains; a magnificent cathedral of trade, where Barcelona merchants have met daily for six hundred years. Most of the Llotja was rebuilt in the 1770’s, in handsome, rather dull baroque, with a fine fountain of Neptune in the courtyard and statues personifying the continents gesticulating nobly and continentally in four recesses; inside the hall there is an immense and masterly staircase. Much more attractive is the Gothic hospital of Santa Cruz (in Catalan, Santa Creu) which now makes a noble home for the Biblioteca de Catalunya. Its spacious patio and fifteenth-century gallery are delightful; its Casa de Convalecencia, a baroque seventeenth-century building, has a graceful well in its court; its vestibule and dining-room are gaily illustrated with tiles, and there are Viladomat paintings on the chapel roof. Santa Cruz is one of the most agreeable buildings in Barcelona.
But it is, of course, its churches that are the city’s greatest architectural glory. Early Catalan Romanesque is beautifully represented by the little tenth-century cruciform Benedictine church of San Pablo del Campo, with its delightful twelfth-century cloister, on whose capitals the most charming animals beguile one - smiling lions, smug-looking snakes, and other agreeable creatures. San Pablo, said the Catalan republicans, after its partial burning, has been ‘cleansed by fire of the presbytery which smothered its apse. The slum clearance has already begun, and it will soon allow the beauty of its proportions to be seen for the first time for centuries. Its cloister and immediate surroundings are to form a public garden.’ Alas the best-laid schemes of Spanish men go oft agley.
The other tenth-century Benedictine church, San Pedro de las Puellas, also cruciform, has been badly spoilt by restoration and alteration; to a less extent the twelfth-century Santa Ana, which has fourteenth-century cloisters; this lovely church was badly damaged by the incendiarists, as was San Jaime. One can happily spend a whole day visiting the cloisters of the Barcelona churches; in them Catalan Gothic is seen at its most delightful. They have the tranquil charm, and often humour, that the sombre and impressive church interiors lack. The beautiful fourteenth and fifteenth-century cathedral cloisters, running round a court of orange trees, palms, aloes, flowers, fountains and Capitoline geese, have a most attractive rural air. The cathedral itself is a triumph of Catalan Gothic magnificence; its size, its colour (tawny golden), its position on its slight rise where once stood a Roman temple, then a mosque, in a quiet plaza in the centre of the tangled maze of streets that are the Old Town, make an overwhelming effect of dignity and majestic grace. The interior proportions are good; dense darkness fills it, a little light filtering in impressively through the stained glass window slits. One would wish more light to see the wealth of beautiful detail, such, for instance, as the richly sculptured pulpit stairway with its exquisite elaborate door, and the reliefs on the coro. But if one explores it with a good guidebook, imagination gives an illusion of sight. ‘The numerous side chapels are dark, and it is often difficult to find the keys,’ says my guidebook rather wearily.
But it is outside my scope and power to emulate the guidebooks in their persevering, detailed and admirable accounts of church interiors. Quitting (to use Bædeker’s favourite phrase) the cathedral, we emerge into its peaceful surrounding plazas, set about with their beautiful groups of collegiate-looking buildings, and make our way to Santa Maria del Pino, to deplore the fire damage and to admire the great aisle-less nave. Indeed, these Catalan naves are very noble, in their effect of space and unbroken stretch, an effect too often spoilt, however, by the placing of the heavy choir in the middle. Even more beautiful than the Pino is the grand fourteenth-century Santa Maria de Mar, wide naved, with narrow aisles. It was a good deal damaged inside by the incendiaries, but, since much of the interior seems to have been regarded by experts as uncommonly disagreeable and incongruous baroque, this seems to have been for the best. Outside, it is infinitely lovely. Indeed, the exterior beauty of Catalan churches greatly and nearly always exceeds the interior.
The baroque church of Belén, on the Rambla, with Viladomat paintings, was badly burnt. The Republican Council of Culture intended, it seems, to turn it into a flower market, but this scheme was naturally foiled by the victory of the side which prefers churches to remain churches. The secular uses to which ecclesiastical buildings were destined would, no doubt, have added greatly to the innocent pleasures of the Barcelonian citizenry.
It is, by serious and cultured persons, considered a pity that both fire and bombs have (so far) spared the great modern architectural high-spot of Barcelona, the pride of its simpler citizens, the jest of the more cultivated, Gaudi’s unfinished church of the Sagrada Familia. This remarkable expression of neo-Catalan architecture, begun by public subscription in 1882, has the amiable and fantastic air of a group of fun-fair towers - twisted mosaic pinnacles, scrolled round with cries of devotion and praise, a south façade dripping with sugar-icing stalactites, a fragment of cloister, a crypt. A detailed and vivid description of this extravaganza can be found in Mr. Evelyn Waugh’s Labels; he saw it in 1929; it was then badly cracked and its poise seemed (and seems still) precarious. It is, said Mr. Waugh, unlikely to be finished; he suggests that its completion might well be undertaken by some millionaire a little wrong in the head. Gaudi planned that it should be the work of several generations, each continuing it in their own style; if this should ever be done, the final product will be indeed worth a visit. That this rather unbalanced Templo Expiatorio survived the heavy Italian bombs that battered Barcelona during the civil war is regarded by some Barcelonese as a testimony to its divine protection; that the population omitted to burn it is certainly a testimony to their pride in it. What sins the church was built to expiate, I do not know; but no doubt Barcelona, like other cities, has committed plenty. Days of expiation are now solemnized in its precincts. Such an occasion (for expiation of blasphemy) was placarded on the wall that encircles it, exhorting all Barcelona to come and assist, in the pious tradition of their fathers. This expiatory occasion had occurred in June; it probably had something to do with the church-burnings. The Sagrada Familia, and other ebullitions of Gaudi and his school, such as the Guell pleasure park houses that look like the sugar plum dwellings of elves, are greatly prized by the Barcelonese. ‘What do you think of the Sagrada Familia?’ a little boy asked me, through the window of my car, as I was driving away. I told him it was beautiful; he smirked possessively. There is a naive, endearing quality in these magnificent extravaganzas of bad taste, as in the tawdry décor, the simpering painted plaster figures of saints and choir boys with alms-plates who posture like pious puppets within the sombre magnificence of Spanish churches. Latin bad taste does nothing by halves; it has the courage of its convictions. In the cemetery of the Italian town where I lived as a child, the defunct little girls who stood poised in marmoreal bliss upon their graves wore marble drawers exquisitely embroidered; they were greatly and generally admired; I should have admired them myself had they not been coldly regarded by our parents.
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