Spirit of resistance

Trav­ellers in Cata­lan Lands

On the first of May, and a day, too, of balmy mild­ness which was wor­thy of the po­etry that has been writ­ten about it, I came on […] to Gerona, where I dined. It has a long and fa­mous his­tory, was once a splen­did city, as the re­mains of its ear­lier ar­chi­tec­ture prove, as well as the fact that it gave his title to the el­dest son of the an­cient kings of Aragon, who was called Prince of Gerona. Under Moors and Chris­tians it has al­ways been alike ter­ri­ble in war and faith­ful in peace. Its most in­ter­est­ing point to me, how­ever, is the awful re­sis­tance it made to the French in 1808, its final sur­ren­der, its gen­er­ous re­bel­lion in 1809, and the hor­rors of the siege that fol­lowed, when, after being block­aded eight months and re­main­ing starved two more, it hardly yielded to three di­vi­sions of the French army. It is the first time I have been on a gen­uine field of Span­ish hero­ism; and when I looked about me here, I saw the cathe­dral pierced with bombs and still bear­ing marks of hav­ing been for­ti­fied, and whole streets more or less marked by the des­o­la­tion of war. I felt that I had come among a peo­ple whose ge­nius and char­ac­ter is dif­fer­ent from any I have seen yet, for, though I have been where much more blood was spilt, I have never yet found the traces of such a spirit of re­sis­tance as this.

Gerona, too, gave me my first glimpse of an­other less favourable side of the Span­ish char­ac­ter; I mean its re­li­gious slav­ery. When I walked through the streets and found every fourth or fifth per­son I met a solemn ec­cle­si­as­tic with a long black cloak and a por­ten­tous hat curled up at the sides in a most char­ac­ter­is­tic and ex­clu­sive man­ner; when I found the lower class of peo­ple doing more rev­er­ence to them than a Phar­isee ever ex­acted, and all around me in­di­cat­ing the pre­pon­der­ance of ec­cle­si­as­ti­cal in­flu­ence over every other, it seemed as if I must be in a dream […] When I was in Bologna, a city five times larger than Gerona, which con­tains hardly 12,000 in­hab­i­tants, I re­mem­ber hav­ing been struck with the in­crease of the clergy, which was cer­tainly nat­ural enough on my en­trance into a state ex­clu­sively ec­cle­si­as­ti­cal; but there is not so great a dif­fer­ence in this re­spect be­tween Bologna and a Protes­tant town as there is be­tween the most de­vout city in the pat­ri­mony of St. Peter and Gerona. I felt at once that I had never been in a Catholic coun­try be­fore.

In the evening I came on as far as Grenote [La Gra­n­ota], a mere ham­let of four houses, such as we often see in Amer­ica[…]I amused my­self an hour, look­ing at them by moon­light and lis­ten­ing to the nightin­gales and whip-poor-wills with which the neigh­bour­ing woods seemed full, and what­ever may be said in prose or in verse about the gai­ety of French­men, I do not be­lieve all France could have fur­nished me such a sight as this. […]

“May 2. Still con­tin­u­ing my route through the fine coun­try I have so long been en­joy­ing and ad­mir­ing, I came down upon the shore of the Mediter­ranean at Pineda, and passed along through a great num­ber of ac­tive, in­dus­tri­ous, thriv­ing vil­lages, where the men are fish­er­men and the women weavers and lace-mak­ers, to Mataro, a town of 27,000 in­hab­i­tants. The cul­ti­va­tion was every-where neat and good, the pop­u­la­tion busy, well-nour­ished, and ex­pert, and the coun­try show­ing me plainly that it is im­prov­ing and in­creas­ing, since every­where I saw new houses build­ing. In­deed, tak­ing it all to­gether, its de­li­cious cli­mate, suf­fi­ciently marked by hedges of aloes in all di­rec­tions, and palm-groves, and its hearty, ac­tive, over­flow­ing pop­u­la­tion, I do not know when I have seen a coun­try that has pleased me more than this.

On the morn­ing of the 3rd I passed through two or three more of the same kind of vil­lages and great num­bers of lit­tle ham­lets. I fi­nally en­tered the rich plain in which stands Barcelona. The plain, cov­ered with coun­try houses, bounded on one side by the Mediter­ranean and on the other by a long line of hills that fol­lows the coast, and filled every­where with the in­flu­ences of the great city that closes up the prospect be­fore you, a strik­ing and ma­jes­tic show.