The Shadow of the Cathedral

"Philip II. had threatened with death and confiscation anyone who published foreign books or who circulated manuscripts, and his successors forbade any Spaniard to write on political subjects, so, finding no ways of expansion for thought, they devoted themselves to fine arts and poetry; painting and the theatre rose to a higher level than in any other country; they were the safety valves of the national genius; but this spring of art was only ephemeral, for in the midst of the seventeenth century a grotesque and debasing decadence overwhelmed everything.

"The poverty in those centuries was horrible; that same Philip II., though he was lord of the world, put up titles of nobility for sale for the sum of six thousand reals, noting on the margin of the decree 'that it was not necessary to inquire much into the quality and origin of the people.' In Madrid the people sacked the bakeries, fighting with their fists for the bread. The president of Castille travelled through the province with the executioner to wring the scanty harvest from the peasants. The collectors of taxes, finding nothing that they could collect in the towns, tore off the roofs of the houses, selling the woodwork and the tiles. The families fled to the mountains whenever they saw in the distance the king's representative, and so the towns remained deserted and fell into ruins. Hunger came in even to the royal palaces, and Charles II., Lord of Spain and of the Indies, was unable on several occasions to procure food for his servants. The ambassadors of England and Denmark were obliged to sally forth with their armed servants to seek for bread in the suburbs of Madrid.

"And amidst all this the innumerable convents, masters of more than half the country and the sole possessors of wealth, showed their charity by distributing soup to those who had strength to fetch it, and by founding asylums and hospitals, where the people died of misery though they were certain of reaching heaven. The ancient manufactures had all disappeared. Segovia, so famous for its cloth, that had employed over 40,000 persons in its manufacture, only held 15,000 inhabitants, and these had so completely forgotten the art of weaving wool that when Philip V. wished to re-establish the industry, he was obliged to import German weavers.

"And it was the same thing in Seville, in Valencia, and in Medina del Campo, so famous for their fairs and their manufactures," continued Gabriel. "Seville which in the fifteenth century had 16,000 silk weavers, at the end of the seventeenth could only produce 65. Though it is true in exchange its Cathedral clergy numbered 117 canons, and it had 78 convents, with more than 4,000 friars and 14,000 priests in the diocese. And Toledo? At the close of the fifteenth century it employed 50,000 artisans in its silk and wool weaving and in its factory of arms, to say nothing of curriers, silversmiths, glovers, and jewellers; at the end of the seventeenth century it had hardly 15,000 inhabitants. Everything was decayed, everything was ruined; twenty-five houses belonging to illustrious families had passed into the hands of the convents, and the only rich people in the town were the friars, the archbishop and the Cathedral. Spain was so exhausted at the end of the Austrian rule that she saw herself nearly divided among the different powers of Europe, like Poland, another Catholic country like ours. The quarrels among the kings were the only thing that saved her."

"If those times were so bad, Gabriel," said Silver Stick, "how was it the Spaniards showed such unanimity? How was it there were no 'pronunciamientos' and risings in these deplorable times?"

"What could they do? The despotism of the Caesars had imposed on the Spaniards a blind obedience to the kings as the representatives of God, and the clergy had educated them in this belief from the community of interests between the Church and the throne. Even the most illustrious poets corrupted the people, exalting servility to the monarchy in their plays. Calderon affirmed that the property and life of a citizen did not belong to himself but to the king. Besides, religion filled everything; it was the sole end of existence, and the Spaniards meditating always on heaven, ended by accustoming themselves to the miseries of earth. Do not doubt but the excess of religion was our ruin, and came very near exterminating us as a nation. Even now we are dragging along the consequences of this plague which lasted for centuries. To save this country from death what had to be done? The foreigners had to be called in, and the Bourbons came. See how low we had fallen that we had not even soldiers. In this land, even if we were wanting in other advantages, we could from the earliest days reckon on good warlike leaders; but look, in the war of succession we had to have English and French generals, and even officers, for there was not a Spaniard who could train a cannon or command a company; we had no one to serve us as a minister, and under Philip V. and Fernando VI. all the Government were foreigners, strangers called in to revive the lost manufactures, to reclaim the derelict lands, to repair the ancient irrigation channels, and to found colonies in the deserts inhabited by wild beasts and bandits. Spain, who had colonised half the world after her own fashion, was now re-discovered and colonised by Europeans.27 The Spaniards seemed like poor Indians, guided by their Cacique the friar, with their rags covered with scapularies and miracle-working relics. Anti-clericalism was the only remedy against all this superstition and ruin, and this spirit came in with the foreign colonists. Philip V. wished to suppress the Inquisition and to end the naval war with the Mussulman nations which had lasted for a thousand years, depopulating the shores of the Mediterranean with the fear of the Barbary and Turkish pirates. But the natives resisted any reform coming from the colonists, and the first Bourbon had to desist, finding his crown in danger. Later on his immediate successors, having deeper roots in the country dared to continue his work. Carlos III. in his endeavour to civilise Spain laid a heavy hand on the Church, limiting its privileges and curtailing its revenues, being careful of earthly things and forgetful of the heavenly. The bishops protested, speaking in letters and pastorals 'of the persecutions of the poor Church, robbed of its goods, outraged in its ministers, and attacked in its immunities,' but the awakened country rejoiced in the only prosperous days it had known in modern times before the disestablishment. Europe was ruled by philosophic kings and Charles III. was one of them. The echo of the English revolution still vibrated through the world; the monarchs now wished to be loved and not feared, and in every country they struggled against the ignorance and brutality of the masses, bringing about progressive reforms by royal enactment and even by force. But the great evil of the monarchical system was its heredity, the power settled in one family, for the son of a clever man with good intentions might be an imbecile. After Charles III. came Charles IV., and as if this were not sufficient, in the year of his death the French revolution broke out, which made all the kings in Europe tremble, and the Bourbons of Spain quite lost their heads, which they were never able to recover. They went astray, wandering from the right way, throwing themselves once more into the arms of the Church as the only means of avoiding the revolutionary danger, and they have not yet returned, nor will they, to the right track. Jesuits, friars and bishops became once more the counsellors at the palace, as they still are, as in the times when Carlos II. concocted his military and political plans with a council of theologians. We have had false revolutions which have dethroned people, but not ideas. It is true we have advanced a little, but timidly, with halting footsteps and disorderly retreats, like one who advances fearfully, and suddenly, at the slightest noise, rushes back to the point of departure. The transformation has been more exterior than interior. The minds of the people are still in the seventeenth century; they still feel the fear and cowardice engendered by the inquisitorial bonfires. The Spaniards are slaves to their very marrow; their pride and their energies are all on the surface; they have not lived through three centuries of ecclesiastical servitude for nothing. They have made revolutions, they are capable of rebelling, but they will always stop short at the threshold of the Church, who was their mistress by force and remains so still, even though its power has vanished. There is no fear of them entering here. You may remain quite easy, Don Antolin, though in justice many accounts might be required of her from the past. Is it because they are as religious as formerly? You know that this is not the case, though they complain with reason of the way in which the ancient grandeur of the Church has been extinguished without popular aid."

"That is true," said Silver Stick; "there is no faith. No one is capable of making any sacrifice for the house of God. Only in the hour of death, when fear comes in, do some of them remember to assist us with their fortune."

"There is no faith, that is the truth. The Spaniard, after that religious fever that nearly killed him, lived in a state of perfect indifference, not from scientific reflection but from inability to think at all. They know they will go either to heaven or hell; they believe it because they have been taught so, but they let themselves be carried on by the stream of life, without the strength to choose either one place or the other. They accept the established, living in a sort of an intellectual somnambulism. If now and then thought awakening suggests some criticism it is smothered at once by fear; the Inquisition still lives among us though we have no longer the bonfires, but we are terribly afraid of 'what will be said.' A stationary and narrow-minded society is our modern holy office. He who raises his protest, rising above the general and common monotony, draws upon himself the stupid anger of scandalised man, and suffers punishment; if he is poor he is put to the proof of hunger, his means of life being cut away from him, and if he is independent he is burned in effigy, creating emptiness around him. Everyone must be correct and agree to what is established, and hence it arises, that, bound to one another by fear, never an original thought arises, there is no independent thought, and even the learned keep to themselves the conclusions they draw from their studies. As long as this goes on the task of the revolutionary is useless in this country; they may change the apparent nature of the soil, but when the pickaxe strikes they come at once on the stones of ages, solid and compact. The national character though it has lost its religious faith is unchanged. Faith is dead, but the corpse still remains with the appearance of life, occupying the same place and obstructing the pathway. The Church is poor and driven into a corner compared to what it was formerly, Don Antolin, but do not fear, its situation will not be aggravated, the tide has risen to its full height and will not overflow; as long as the people in this country are afraid to say what they think, as long as they are scandalised by a new idea, and tremble at what their neighbours will say, so long will they laugh at revolutions, for however much they break out, none of these will bring the water to your mouths."

Don Antolin laughed on hearing this.

"But Gabrielillo, man—you must be mad. All this reading and travelling has turned your head. At first I was indignant, thinking you were among those who wished for another revolution to take away the little that is left to us, proclaiming the republic and suppressing all ecclesiastical things, but I see that you go much beyond this, that you conform to nothing, and that everything seems to you the worst; and this rather pleases me, because I see you are not a terrible enemy to be feared as you fire from too far. It seems to me that your head is as much affected as your chest. But do all these revolutions we have had seem as nothing to you? Do you think the country is still as savage as you have described it in past years? But I," continued the priest ironically, "hear a great deal said about the progress of the country, and I know that we have railways, and that the long chimneys are arising in all the town suburbs, and many of the impious are delighted at this, comparing them to the church belfries."

"Bah!" exclaimed Gabriel indifferently. "There is a little of this progress; the revolutions have placed Spain in touch with other countries, the progressive current has caught this country and is carrying it along as the Asiatics and others are carried; no one can escape it nowadays. But we advance at very low water, inert and without strength; if we advance it is with the current, and not by our own energy, while other people stronger than we swim and swim, advancing at every stroke. How have we contributed to this progress? Where are our manifestations of modern life? The railways, few and bad, are the work of foreigners, and are their property; the grass grows between the rails, which shows that we still follow the holy calm of carts and wagons. The most important industries, metallurgy and mines, are all in the hands of foreigners or of Spaniards who are subject to them, living under their bountiful protection. Commerce languishes under an old-fashioned protection which enhances the price of all commodities, and so there is no capital forthcoming; money remains hidden in earthen jars in the fields as treasure, or in the towns is devoted to usury as in past times; the most daring venture to invest in public stock; Government continues the mismanagement, certain of always finding someone to lend, and pointing to this credit as a proof of the country's prosperity. There are in Spain two million hectares of uncultivated land, twenty-six millions of unirrigated arable land, and only one million irrigated. This cultivation of unirrigated land, which has come to be almost our only agriculture is a concession that Spanish indolence makes to hunger, a perpetual demonstration of the fanaticism that trusts in prayer or in the rain from heaven more than in human progress. The rivers rush to the sea through scorched-up provinces overflowing in winter, not to fertilise, but to carry away everything in the volume of the inundation; there is plenty of stone for churches and new convents, but none for dykes and reservoirs; they build belfries and cut down the trees that attract the rain. And do not tell me again, Don Antolin, that the Church is poor and in no ways in fault; the poor are yourselves, you of the old and traditional Church, you of the religion 'à la Española,' for in this as in everything else there are fashions, and the faithful follow the most recent; for here are the Jesuits, the most modern manifestation of Catholicism, the 'latest novelty,' with their Sacred Heart of Jesus and other French idolatries, building palaces and churches in all directions, diverting the money that formerly went to the Cathedrals, the only evidence of wealth in the country. But let us return to our progress. Worse even for agriculture than the drought is the ignorance and routine of the labourers, every new invention or scientific appliance repels them, thinking it evil. 'The old times were the good ones, our ancestors cultivated in this way and so ought we'; and so ignorance is turned into a sort of national glory, and we cannot hope for any remedy at present. In other countries the universities and high schools send out reformers, men fighting for progress; here the centres of learning only send out a proletariat of students who must live, besieging all the professions and public appointments, with the sole desire to open themselves a way to continuous employment. They study (if you can call it study) for a few years, not to learn, but to gain a diploma, a scrap of paper which authorises them to earn their bread. They learn anything that the professor teaches, without the slightest desire to inquire any further. The professors are for the greater part doctors or barristers practising their profession, who come between whiles and sit for an hour in their chairs, repeating like a phonograph what they have said for many previous years, and then they return to their sick or their lawsuits, without caring in the least what is being said or written in the world since they got their appointments. All Spanish culture is at second hand, purely on the surface, 'translated from the French,' and even this is only for the scanty minority who read, for the rest of those so-called intellectuals have no other library but the text-books they studied as children, and all they learn of the progress of human thought is from the newspapers. The parents who are desirous of securing as soon as possible the future of their sons who are seeking a career, send them to these centres of learning when they scarcely know how to speak; the man-student of other countries, in the full plenitude of his thinking powers, does not exist here. The universities are full of children, and in the different institutes you only see short trousers, and the Spaniard, before he shaves himself for the first time, is a licentiate and on the high road to become a doctor; the wet nurse will end by sitting by the professor. These children who receive the baptism of science at an age when in other countries they are playing with their toys, being confirmed in the title that proclaims their scientific acquirements, study no more; these are the intellectuals who are to direct and save us, and who to-morrow may be legislators and ministers. Come, my good man, it is enough to make one laugh!"

Gabriel did not laugh, but Silver Stick and the others applauded his words. Any criticism against the present times delighted the priest.

"This country is drained, Don Antolin, nothing remains standing. The number of towns which have vanished since our decadence commenced is incalculable. In other countries ruins are carefully preserved, as so many stone pages of their history; they are cleaned, preserved, supported and strengthened, and paths opened round them so that all can examine them. Here, where Roman, Byzantine and Arab art have passed, and also the Mudejar, the Gothic and the Renaissance—in fact, all the styles of Europe—the ruins in the country are hidden and disfigured by herbage and creepers, and in the towns they are mutilated and disfigured by the vandalism of the people. They are constantly thinking of the past, and yet they despise its remains; what a country of dreams and desolation! Spain is no longer a country, it is an ill-arranged and dusty museum, full of old things that attract all the curious of Europe, but in which even the ruins are ruined."

The eyes of Don Martin, the young curate, fastened themselves on Gabriel. They seemed to speak to him and express the pleasure with which he heard his words. The other listeners, silent and with bowed heads, did not feel less the enchantment of those propositions which sounded so audaciously in the restful and rank atmosphere of the cloister. Don Antolin was the only one who laughed, finding Gabriel's ideas quite charming but absolutely crazy It was getting late and the sun had sunk below the roofs of the Cathedral. Silver Stick's niece called to them once again from the door of her house.

"We are coming, child," said the priest, "but I have one thing first to say to this gentleman."

And addressing himself to Luna, he continued:

"But, Hombre de Dios!28—but I ought not to call you that as you are so turbulent—you think everything is out of joint. The Spanish Church, worn out as you say, has become very poor, and still you say this revolution is a very small affair. What do you wish for? What is it that you desire so that things might be settled? Tell us your secret quickly and let us go, for the cold is very sharp."

And he laughed again, looking at Gabriel with paternal pity as though he were a child.

"My remedy!" exclaimed Gabriel, taking no notice of the priest's gesture. "I have no remedy whatever, it is the progress of humanity that alone offers one. All the nations on earth have passed through the same evolutions; first of all they were ruled by the sword, then by faith, and now by science. We ourselves have been ruled by warriors and priests, but now we tarry at the gate of modern life, without the strength or wish to take science by the hand, who is the only guide we could have, hence our sad situation. Science is nowadays in everything—in agriculture, in all manufactures, in arts and crafts, in the culture and well-being of the people; it is even in war. Spain still lives far from the sun of science, at most she knows a pale reflection, cold and feeble, that comes to us from foreign countries. The failure of faith has left us without strength, like those creatures who, having suffered from a severe illness in their youth, remain anaemic for ever, without possible recuperation, condemned to premature old age."

"Bah! Science!" said Silver Stick, turning towards his house; "that is the eternal cry of all the enemies of religion. There is no better science than to love God and His works. Good evening."

"Very good evening, Don Antolin; but remember this, we have not yet done with faith and the sword; sometimes one directs us or the other drives us; but of science, never a word, unless Spain has changed in the last twenty-four hours."