THE day drew near for our leaving Spain. Eight months had passed since we entered from the north of the Pyrenees isthmus, and now we found ourselves at its southern exit. They had been months filled with an absorbing and unexpected interest; we had come into Spain for a mere autumn tour, and she had forced us to linger. And I must repeat that I came with the average pessimistic idea that she was a spent and more or less worthless country, till what I saw about me daily changed me to a partisan. It was a hard farewell to take now. When Spain is allowed to show herself as she is, she wins a regard that is like an intense personal affection.

A Street Stairway, Gerona
A Street Stairway, Gerona

At dawn on the early day in June set for our departure we left Barcelona; before night we would be in France, but the leave-taking was to be broken by some hours in Gerona. As usual it was the fact of its possessing a first-rate church that determined us to stop. This was to be the last of the grand cathedrals which more than those of any land, even of France with their purer art, had realized my ideal of worship and reverence. As Gerona was in Catalonia, good architecture was to be expected, but this was better than good. The Cathedral which dominates the town was worthy of its stirring memories. An imposing flight of eighty steps, like that of the Ara Coeli in Rome, ascends to its west portal. At the head of this staircase we paused to look out on the panorama of the Pyrenees—mountain rose behind mountain, the foreground hills well-wooded, those beyond covered with snow. Here was no stupid Escorial facing in to a blank wall. The old masters with vivifying imaginations had brought the glories of nature to worship with them, had hung as it were in their porch, this lovely landscape.

Within the Cathedral the first impression is its spaciousness. The width is astonishing; indeed the hall-like nave of Gerona is the widest Gothic vault in Christendom, and were it longer by two bays, no cathedral of Europe could have surpassed the effect. The wide nave of Catalan churches is a national feature that here reaches its acme. The choir of Gerona is on a smaller scale, and the meeting of the two makes a curious feature, not bad inside, but in the exterior view extremely ugly. Probably in time the choir would have been enlarged to fit its monstrous nave. The men in those days started undertakings as if they could never die, but later generations have lacked their enthusiastic ambition.

By happy chance we were in time to assist at a last High Mass in a Spanish cathedral. It is no exaggeration to say one's heart felt heavy in listening to the solemn chanting, watching the reverence of priests, acolytes, and congregation, to realize that this was for the last time. The last time we should see the kiss of peace carried symbolically from the priest at the altar to the canons in the choir, the last time we should hear the clamor of the wheel of bells. I looked up to where they hung on the wall and nodded them a little personal farewell, so often had they charmed me. Farewell to sedate Spanish piety, to the devotional unconsciousness of individual prayer. Over the frontier, during the coming summer at Luchon, I was soon to hear wooden signals clapped during Mass to guide the wandering attention of the people, to see the children scamper out in obvious relief.

The chancel of Gerona is a gem. The iron reja that shuts in the capilla mayor is of the plainest, like a wall of stacked spears guarding the holy of holies. There is no towering retablo, which would be out of character with slender Catalan piers; instead, behind the altar is a marvelous reredos of silver carved in scenes, and surmounted by three Byzantine processional crosses,—all ancient and priceless enough to be the treasure of a national museum. The altar and the canopy over it are also of silver, retablo and altar being placed where they now stand in 1346. The effect of iron reja and precious shrine is faultlessly artistic; we sigh here for a beauty as completely lost for our copying as is the tranquil perfection of these gravestones, the sculptured stelÆ of Athens.

The service over, we proceeded to examine the church. The cloisters are oddly irregular in shape, and look out on the snow-topped Pyrenees. So beautiful was the prospect that I added this cloister setting to the dream-cathedral Spain tempts one to build. It would have the cloisters of Tarragona with this outlook of Gerona's; also Gerona's altar and retablo, though the reredos of Avila and that of Tarragona are worthy rivals. There would be the grand staircase of this Cathedral, and it would ascend to a western portal like LeÓn's, with Santiago's PÓrtico de la Gloria within; the north and south doors would be Plateresque from Salamanca and Valladolid. The cathedral would be set on LÉrida's crag, with the city of Toledo climbing to it and the Tagus churning below. The nave would be Seville's, and Seville's windows would light it and her organ thunder there. The choir would be Toledo's, carved by Rodrigo, Berruguete, and Vigarni, the chancel Barcelona's stilted arches. How they could be combined is hard to solve, but round this capilla mayor would run the double ambulatory of Toledo, and the apse outside have LeÓn's flying buttresses,—the apse which the old mystics held as symbolic of the crown of thorns about the head of Christ (the Altar). Rejas from Burgos, Granada, Seville, would guard the chapels, and tombs of knights and bishops from SigÜenza, from Zamora—from every town of Spain in fact—would line the walls: tapestries and treasures from Saragossa; a via crucis by HernÁndez and portrait statues by MontaÑÉs; a sacristy like that of Avila; a sala capitular copied from the Renaissance grace of San Benito in AlcÁntara; and a wealth of side chapels,—a Condestable chapel, a San Isidoro, a CÁmera Santa, a San MillÁn, a Santa MarÍa la Blanca, and an isolated shrine like Palencia's, standing in the ambulatory. And always beneath the vault of this cathedral would be found far-off little Lugo's solemn adoration, and there would be processions as imposing as Andalusia, with the piety of Estremadura, or the Basque. The Giralda, built in the warm red stone of Astorga tower, would stand close by, and not far away, a monastery, line for line, like Poblet. Sitting in a Spanish cloister looking out on the Pyrenees, one drifts into dream-pictures of the ideal cathedral.

Gerona has a few other churches worth examining, that of San Feliu, with two Roman sarcophagi and several early Christian ones with wave-like lines. We rambled about the plaza where a fair was in progress, and at every turning kept bidding farewell to familiar scenes of Spanish life; we were not again to hear the peace-bringing "Vaya Usted con Dios!" not again to assent to the cordial "Hasta luego!"

The city is massively built, but it has a battered look, and no wonder. During the French invasion, Gerona stood a siege as terrific as any in history, yet who of us has heard of it? In May, 1809, a French army surrounded the city where there were only three thousand soldiers for the defense, yet for seven months the town defied the invaders, and that with half a dozen breaches in the walls. The women shouldered guns and drilled in a battalion formed by DoÑa LucÍa Fitzgerald; old men and children piled up the earth of the ramparts; cloistered nuns, at a higher call, left their convents to nurse the wounded to whom they gave up their cells, so many priests fell fighting on the walls that no services were held in the churches, there was only the burning of candles; no one bought or sold, for every shopman was a soldier. When a gallant English volunteer died on the ramparts, he exclaimed that he lost his life gladly in a cause so just for a nation so heroic.

The French drew closer and closer, and slowly the city starved. The hardships endured were incredible. They ate rats and mice, yet no thought came of surrender. A hot August dragged by, in September the French attacked fiercely and on both sides the men fell like flies. Who was the soul of this indomitable fortitude? The order and subordination told of a master mind, and Gerona had one, Don Mariano Alvarez de Castro, the inflexible governor. He it was who enrolled the women and children in the defense; his lofty spirit never wavered, and his force of character gave him so accepted an authority that he was able to direct a hopeless defense without recourse to cruelty. The siege of Gerona was not stained by any brutal act.

The blockade drew closer. By October literally all food was gone, and the people began to fall in the streets to a foe more terrible than bullets. Governor Alvarez stood like a rock of courage. When he passed up the Cathedral steps where the heart-rending groups of the dying lay, his very presence gave hope: if there was a faint-hearted citizen in Gerona, he was more afraid of that iron man than of the French. Never would the governor have yielded, but toward the close of the year he fell ill in the infested air, and as he lay in delirium the city capitulated. With hundreds of dead bodies lying unburied in the streets, there was nothing else to be done.

Then followed a scene which did honor to the invader; it rings with the same chivalry that Velasquez painted in the "Surrender of Breda," where SpÍnola bends to meet the conquered Nassau, the same spirit that made those Frenchmen of an earlier day carry a certain wounded knight, their prisoner, on a litter from Pamplona across the mountains to his castle of Loyola. The foreign troops marched into Gerona in a dead silence, with not a gesture of triumph, moved to awe by the corpses that covered the pavements and to reverence by the few hollow-eyed, living skeletons that met them. The moral victory lay with the conquered. When food was offered the starved people, even that was at first refused. Don Mariano Alvarez, taken prisoner on his bed, died mysteriously, poisoned, some say, in the fortress of Figueras not long after. And all this horror and heroism was only a hundred years ago!—we too walked the streets of Gerona in silent reverence.

Then once again on the train; more volcanic hills, more dry rivers that showed what the spring torrents must be like, and in a few hours Port-Bou, the Spanish frontier town, was reached. We stood at the car window looking out sadly on the last of Spain as the train swept round the blue inlets of the Mediterranean.

Farewell to this great Christian democracy where the simple title of Don is borne by king and people alike, to the "nation least material of Europe," farewell to a grave, contented race, whose leaders left noble works as noble as their lives, whose writers were soldiers and heroes, where artists prepared for religious scenes by fasting and prayers, where mystics were not negative and inert, but emerged from their union with God with more power for practical life, whose women have by instinct the dignity of womanhood, untainted yet by luxury, a land that can boast the two first women of all ages and countries, an Isabella of Castile, and a St. Teresa.

Some may think I carry admiration too far. Carping criticism of Spain has been pushed to such an extent that it is time to swing to the other side: where there can be no joy, no admiration, there can be no stimulus. I like to take M. RenÉ Bazin's words as if addressed to me: "Vous avez raison de croire À la vitalitÉ de l'Espagne. Elle n'a jamais ÉtÉ une nation dÉchue, elle a ÉtÉ une nation blessÉe."

A wounded nation but not one stricken to death. She is recovering. Let her but be patient and aspire slowly; disciplined, tried in the fire and purified, by living without the ceaseless upheavals of the past century, by industry, by commerce, with no encumbering colonies to drain her blood, with the Catalans calling the Castilians "paisanos," she will get back her former strength and brio. Her literature, her art, are lifting their heads.

My prayer for Spain in her rehabilitation is, that she may not diverge from her national spirit and traditions, may modern ideas not change her unworldliness and her stoical endurance, "su esencia inmortal y su propio carÁcter." May she guard her faith, her glory in the past and her aspiration for the future, the faith of the Cross that has struck deeper root here than in any spot on earth, but remembering always that her own greatest saint warns her: "In the spiritual life not to advance is to go back." May she never lose the virile independence of character that so distinguishes her people, the pride of simple manhood that looks out of the eyes of her honorable peasantry and makes their innate courtesy. No nation was ever formed so completely by the chivalry of the Middle Ages as Spain. May she always be EspaÑa la herÓica!