The Spanish Temper

by V. S. Pritchett

  Barcelona has stood against this spirit. In practical terms, since 1840 its people have created the only solid middle class in Spain, whose role, according to the historians, was to facilitate the emergence from the mediaeval system when it broke down. Catalonia could have Europeanized Spain, but failed to do so, in one major crisis after another, because its political separatism made it suspect to Madrid. The differences between the Spanish regions are not merely picturesque; they are real and strong, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Catalans were deeply separated from Madrid. To such an extent that the Madrid government actually employed police agents to assassinate rich employers in Barcelona after the rising in 1909. That is to say, the Madrid police used the workers’ revolutionary movements in Barcelona against the employers in order to teach Catalan nationalism a lesson.

  In 1909 Catalonia had risen to stop Catalan reservists being sent to the unpopular Moroccan War. In all the violent strikes, street wars, bomb-throwings, and coups d’état of Barcelona, this particular one is instructive in its simple illustration of what happens in Spain after acts of revolt. The rising was crushed. It brought changes in Madrid. But the outstanding scapegoat was a man who had had nothing to do with the revolt: the school-teacher Ferrer, whose name became world-famous as one of the martyrs of liberty. As so often happens, not a martyr whom all liberals found entirely acceptable. But whatever the character of Ferrer was, the real reason for his execution was that he was an atheist who conducted a free school, outside of the clerical monopoly; he was shot at the request of the clerical party. Ferrer was only one of the many founders of free schools in Spain, and he was certainly not a great man. The great name in modern Spanish education, as I have said earlier, was Francisco Giner de los Ríos, who was one of those who influenced a whole generation and played an important part in the intellectual renaissance which made Madrid a brilliant place before 1936. The execution of Ferrer did not in fact kill the free-school movement, but it showed the political power of the Church and its sense of what was the vital political question. Once more in the exhaustion after the Civil War the Church is the real political victor, not General Franco. The first movement to go was the movement for “free schools.” The free schools were, of course, far from being atheistical in the crude manner of Ferrer; indeed, they were attended chiefly by the children of sound Catholic families, who thought official Catholic education inferior and out of date. Few except the extremists among the believers think it good.

  The political situation in Barcelona has always been complicated by the issue of Catalan nationalism. At first this movement was in the hands of the rich manufacturers, and when these men were pacified by government office and by tariffs, it fell into the hands of the lesser middle classes and the workers. But the chief revolutionary force was the anarcho-syndicalists. I need not describe the rise of this party in Spain nor its actions in Barcelona before and during the Spanish Civil War, but it is necessary to add to what I have already said about the movement. Anarchism was, essentially, a protest against industrial capitalism itself, by people who lived in an old, pre-industrial, mediaeval culture. When workers and peasants saw the Church allying itself with the industrial order, they lost their faith, and anarchism became a religion. It was preferred to Communism and Socialism because it was not materialistic, because it rejected industrial capitalism altogether and regarded the whole system as morally corrupting.

  In The Spanish Cockpit, Borkenau says:

  Anarchism is a religious movement, in a sense profoundly different from the sense in which that is true of the labour movements of the progressive countries. Anarchism does not believe in the creation of a new world through the improvement of the material conditions of the lower classes, but in the creation of a new world out of the moral resurrection of those classes which have not yet been contaminated by the spirit of mammon and greed. At the same time anarchism is far from being well-behaved and pacifist; it has integrated, in its mentality, all the Robin Hood tradition of former generations and emphatically believes in violence; not in organized conflict only, but in fighting as an everyday means of settling the divergence of views between simple men and their masters.…

  A notable number of criminals were admittedly in the anarchist ranks, and the anarchists were indeed responsible for robberies, casual shootings, and church-burnings in the Civil War. The anarchists were intolerable to the European Left-wing participants in the Civil War, and were uncontrollable. But Catalans who supported Franco have told me that the Chekas, or Communist-run secret courts in Catalonia, were loathed because they “killed behind closed doors, coldly, after trial.” This “deeply offended the Catalan nature and tradition,” which is to shoot suddenly, in hot blood, publicly, in the street. An example of hot-blooded attack by anarchists was the burning of the notorious Women’s Prison in Barcelona, where generations of workers had seen their wives and daughters taken. It was an act rising from generations of indignation. The Communists—as Mr Langdon Davies notes in his excellent book on Catalonia, Gatherings in Catalonia—would have built a better prison: the exalted anarchists would have had no prison at all. The tension in Barcelona is primitive; it can be compared with the tension in the north of England at the time of the Chartist risings. It is a primitive protest against the satanic mills. Now, since 1939, Barcelona is quiet; thousands of Reds must have joined the Franco Falange. One has, all the same, the impression that, in time, the old pattern of Barcelona politics will reappear.

  The only reason for thinking the revolutionary situation closed is that Europe has certainly moved out of that revolutionary state of mind which dominated it between the two wars. Perhaps a process of adjustment has been completed: intellectual and political ferment has certainly gone.

  The modern city of Barcelona, north of the Plaza de Cataluña, is a piece of grandiose planning. Wide boulevards make the long climb towards the mountains. There are rond-points like deserts at the intersections; the city has been built for a motor age that has not seriously arrived in Spain. One looks in vain for a Spanish car on the road. In the Paseo de Gracia there are blocks of flats built by the fantastic school of architects who thrived at the beginning of the century, very much under the influence of Art Nouveau. The lines of these buildings are wavy in heavy shallow curves and suggest, rather disagreeably, a style based on over-succulent and pulpy tropical vegetation, the hollow stems of the banana, the spongy stem and umbrella of the toadstool. The Germanic note, the suggestion of Grimm’s fairy tales turned soft, is obvious. The originality of Gaudi, the outstanding architect of this school, is characteristic of the fantastic side of the Catalan imagination. The chief example of Gaudí’s talent—perhaps we shall call it visionary genius working in isolation—is the notorious Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia. This neo-Gothic Cathedral is unfinished. There is a façade, there are four towers like factory chimneys made in stone fretwork. Plants, flowers, animals, dominate the detail of the façade. A cypress shelters a doorway; stone leaves, like creepers or vines, trail over the design. A rose breaks open, a capital bursts into palm leaves, ornate fruits, phallic buds, and abstract pods appear on pinnacles, a cape of snow-laden pine branches—or so it appears—encloses the Puerta de la Fe, trees and jewelled canopies envelop corners, a flamingo grows out of a pillar as if it were being drawn out of dough by the fingers of a skilled confectioner. Certainly the Cathedral celebrates the riot of nature romantically, decoratively, and with a studied determination to break every architectural convention. Although the mood is Gothic, the gorging of decoration is baroque and one’s mind goes back to the excesses of Churriguerra; all the more as one learns that Gaudí felt that he was creating a hymn to life, and that the essence of life was colour. A great deal of what is now grey and doughy stone would have been a glitter of jewelled vermilions, greens, and blues—which once more suggests the fantasies of the pastry-cook, but also reminds us of the Spanish taste for polychrome statuary and the tiled domes of the churches in Valencia. The hard, clear, se
rene Mediterranean light can assimilate colour. All the layman can say of the Sagrada Familia is that some of its original detail is strong and exciting, and some flaccid, feeble, and sick-spirited. We are really looking at a fragment of a building which the architect decided to turn inside out. And as we go away, we can reflect that the taste for the bizarre, for the multiform, the over-decorated, the impulse to excess, is very Spanish. Before the war one could compare the excess of riotous baroque in the Church of Belén on the Ramblas with the Sagrada Familia, but Belén was burned out in the Civil War and now has a severe classical austerity. The anarchists—as Mr Langdon Davies says—liked baroque because it burned. The excess of Barcelona, the excess of Gaudí, the excess of Dali, the excess of Picasso—half Catalan, half malagueño—is native.

  The city is dominated by the mountain called Tibidabo and the repellent church that is being built on its summit. One would a thousand times sooner have Gaudi’s work than this religious Odéon. The building has been going on for a generation, and a terrible figure of the Christ stands in the courtyard waiting to be heaved on top, where its halo will be electrically lit. The collapse of Spanish religious art has this awful monument, which is one of the jokes of the city.

  One of the world-shakers who showed me round Barcelona again stopped in the street and pointed to this horror. “Through that building,” he said, “I lost my religious faith. For it was announced on a public notice when I was young that by Divine Promise the church would be completed by a certain date that was named. It was not completed, and I complained to one of the fathers, who explained that by completion was meant that the roof would be on. That was too much for me.” Oh blessed, pagan, literal Mediterranean. With worldly eye you regard those offers of indulgences inscribed on the walls of Tibidabo. Childishly you take your families for a joy ride at the Amusement Park, which has been placed beside the church on the precipice overlooking the city. Savagely you drove your political prisoners there, only fifteen year ago, on the last ride of their lives, gave them the last cigarette, and shot them.

  Long before we reached the city, at a second crossing of the Ebro by some bad mountain road, we came to a new steel bridge across this superb river. Green and smooth as marble, or thick blood-colour, according to the season, it is a river that flows a good deal in profound ravines, as indeed do most of the Spanish rivers. We crossed the bridge and stopped for a glass of beer on the other side. There were four men in the café playing cards, and I asked the proprietor which side had destroyed the bridge in the Civil War. He was a dusty, thin-haired, sly-faced man in his fifties.

  “The others,” he said.

  “But who are the others?” I said. “Fascists or the Reds?”

  “The others,” he said. “In a civil war,” he said, “it is always ‘the others’—and whoever wins is right.”

  And saying this, he rubbed his forefinger lightly down his nose and let it rest at the tip—the gesture of innuendo, the gesture of Sancho Panza. One will find the correlative passage in almost any chapter of that book, which contains all other books on Spain.

  1 This famous picture was painted by El Greco in the last years of the reign of Philip II, and Cossio calls it “one of the truest pictures of the history of Spain” and of what Spanish society was like in body and in soul. The picture commemorates the death of a famous citizen, Don Gonzalo Ruya de Toledo, who was buried in 1323. He had built the Church of San Tomé in Toledo, and at his funeral the mourners at the grave were not astonished to see him carried up to heaven by Saint Stephen. The portraits are all taken from people contemporary with El Greco; the group is a gathering of neurotic gentlemen who have the air of monks. Cossio comments on “the cold and monotonous sobriety of its grey tones, its sharp spiritual note, its energetic expression of the national life.”

  For Dorothy

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