Piazza di Spagna

“ Madrid, however, like all urban Spain, comes thoroughly to life only with the fall of night. Occasionally a special celebration carries her populace to some strange corner of the city, but the fixed rendezvous is the Paseo de Recoletos, a broader Alameda where reigns by day an un-Spanish opulence of shade enjoyed only by the chairs stacked house-high beneath the trees. There is nothing hurried about the congregating. ”

“ Madrid is not a city. It is only a town. But such a town!—such streets! such shops! such horses! such carriages! such drives! such promenades! and over all the everlasting gaiety and insouciance of a people whose grand motto in all things mundane is this, ‘We have only one life—let us make the best of it and worry about nothing.’ Your true Spaniard never hurries and never worries and never frets. He inherits the dignity and the fatalism of the Moors, who have left their mark not only on the architecture of the cities, but upon the character of the citizens. ”

“ The Plaza Mayor is, to quote Baedeker, "the finest city square in Spain." It is a Spanish version of the Place Stanislas at Nancy, but instead of the pale grey French stone cut into refined and calculated elegance, it is all of the warm golden colour of Salamanca stone, and its proportions are not so nicely adjusted and, though the same elevation is maintained all round the square, the Spanish architects could not achieve symmetry, and façades are broken where its streets happen to enter. ”

“ Stroll, if you will, through the beautiful gardens of the Plaza Mayor (the grand square of Madrid) , saunter by the open shops of the Calle de Toledo, cross the oval-shaped Plaza de Oriente, which lies between the Royal Palace and the Royal Theatre, linger on any of the many handsome bridges, or promenade the beautiful prados—the Bank of Spain, one of the finest public{30} buildings in Europe, is situated in the Salon del Prado—and you shall never escape the carnival spirit that animates young and old, rich and poor alike. ”

“ Perhaps the best example of a square in the whole of the country is the Plaza Mayor. A lofty colonnade runs around the four sides and every evening the beauties and others of Salamanca make it their promenade. The men stroll round in one direction and the women in the opposite. The social life of a Spanish town passed in view before me, with all its fan and language of the eyes, as I sat at one of the small tables of a café and got this cheap and harmless entertainment for one real. ”

“ Richer by far would be the richest city of the earth could she purchase and transplant into her own midst the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca, with its small forest of palms, the rich brown medallioned façades and surrounding colonnades beneath which the salmantino is wont to stroll, la salmantina on his arm, while the band plays in the flower-shrouded stand in its center. Salamanca might sell, too, in spite of her boast that it is the finest in Spain, being poorer than the proverbial church mouse, were she not also Spanish and prouder than she is poor. ”

“ I delight in its wide, clean streets, its gay squares each containing a garden, fountain, and statuettes, its crowded cafes, its promenades, its spectacles, and its unending animation and bustle and crowded life. The street Alcalá, which divides Madrid in half, is magnificent in its{22} proportions. The Prado, made enchanting by its carriage drives and its avenues, filled with beautiful women, is a panorama of which one cannot have a surfeit; while the people, and the variety of life in the Puerta del Sol is in itself a sight that shall not be witnessed in any other city in Europe. ”

“ There is a general superstition that love is the Spaniard's prime passion. But I doubt it. For the once that we have been asked what we think of Spanish beauty, we have been twenty times questioned about our judgment of Spanish cooking.
Madrid at night. How much has one not dreamed of southern romance beneath skies of ultramarine? But Madrid seems just like any other large European city. It is Paris without the wit, Munich without the music. We talk, of course, of first impressions. The first impressions of a town are rarely national. Collective humanity is collective humanity everywhere ”

“ God—or profit—gave them energy. But Madrid is of no such beginning: Madrid is of the end. It is a consummation. It stands for the Spain that has annulled its motions.
Its greatness is but the stubborn Castilian will to remain and to hold all Spain in perfect equilibrium of forces. Madrid is the town of politicians, of social servants, of soldiers. It is a conservative town. It wants things as they are. From here goes forth the will to repress Barcelona, to exploit the Basques, to muzzle Unamuno, to tax Andalusia, to play at empire in Morocco. ”

“ Year by year the town grows in extent. Well-organised tramways carry you to and fro through endless thoroughfares. The richer merchants have built themselves streets of palatial residences that stretch away into suburbs. Few cities are so brilliantly lighted. If Spain is a poor country, Barcelona seems to have escaped the evil. There is animation about it, perpetual movement, a quiet activity. For it is quiet with all its business and energy, and so far has the advantage over Madrid, where the commercial element was less evident but the noise infinitely greater. ”

“ Both the trams and all streets and avenues are plainly marked with large clear signs, and the pleasant compactness of the city makes it easy to find one’s way about. The centre of life and activity is the Puerto del Sol—Gate of the Sun—an oval plaza which Spaniards fondly describe as “the busiest square in the world.” There is no doubt at all that it is the noisiest; with its clanging trams, rattling carriages, shouting street vendors, and ambulant musicians.
These latter, with the beggars, form to my mind the greatest plague of Madrid ”

“ The exquisite Moorish Palace of the Generalife at Granada, second only to the Alhambra and the Alcazar at Seville, is never visited by its proprietor, and is now one mass of white-wash, a victim of the zeal for cleanliness of a Sanitary "Administrador." In short to visit a Spanish city now, by the light shed upon its ancient glories by the industrious Ponz, is simply to have forced upon one's attention the most striking evidence of the "vanity of human things," and man's inherent tendency to destroy. ”

“ The streets are badly paved and dull, the climate is shrewd, and fuel, I was told, is scarce and expensive. Even the cathedral, though grand, is bare; and when one has visited the cathedral and lingered awhile in the pleasant garden of the Plaza Mayor—one of the largest and handsomest squares in Spain—and tested the accommodation of “La Comercio,” one can find little else to entrance one in the disappointing old city which was once a world-famed seat of learning. ”

“ Madrid is now the head-quarters of the national game, as it is of everything else. It is outwardly flourishing, it is adorned with statues, its parks are green, and its fountains spout gayly. Nevertheless, the impression it makes is melancholy. Beggary is importunate on its public ways. Palaces and poverty, great wealth and wretched penury, are huddled close together. Its assumption of splendor is in startling contrast with the desolate and uncared-for districts that surround it from the very edge of the city outward. ”

“ But nearer Madrid are barren stony plains, parched and arid, broken occasionally by a patch of stunted stone pines, while here and there rises abruptly a conical hill, crowned with crumbling ruins, with a brown mud-built village at its base.
Madrid has no pretension to architectural beauty; save the glistening white palace, it has scarce a building worth inspection. It has an untidy, unfinished appearance, rendered all the worse by the fact, that half of every street is undergoing the process of demolition or reconstruction. ”

“ Barcelona is not only the industrious city, it is also the cultivated one of the Peninsula. The opera there is one of the best in the world, and was once carried off bodily to Madrid by an ardent manager, who for his pains received the scorn of the envious Madrid people: they would not come to his performances, and he was almost ruined in consequence.
The old cathedral of the city is a temple singularly impressive by simple means—a sober Spanish-Gothic structure bathed in a perpetual gloom, through which the stained windows show with a jewelled splendor almost supernatural. ”

“ Madrid prides itself on being the spot at which all the avenues of the land converge equally, the exact centre of Spain being close beyond the city's confines, and marked—how appropriately—by a church! But Madrid is, notwithstanding, a national centre only in name. It enjoys a false luxury, while too many outlying provinces sustain a starveling existence. ”

“ As a city it can never be anything but second-rate; the new residential part near the parks is like the good districts of any average town. The famous Puerta del Sol is filled at every hour of the day and night with such a rabble of loafers and vociferating peddlers that it takes courage to push one's way through. As the Court was absent we missed seeing the brilliant morning hour of guard mounting before the Royal Palace. Occasionally some local sight would remind us we still were in Spain, the original and untamed. ”

“ If in Madrid the desert blossoms like the rose, it is a leafless rose, for the city has no suburbs. It lacks both the charm of environment so potent in Granada and Seville and the charm of ancient story, which these share with those other bygone courts—Toledo, Valladolid, Valencia, Saragossa. It is not a vital organ of modern European civilization, like artistic Paris or strenuous London. ”

“ On feast days in spring or summer, the town roars at the bull-ring. And when the last death is written in the sands, it swarms in lorries, motors, tally-hos, back to the Plaza de la Cíbeles; it spreads in numberless café tables on the broad sidewalks of the Alcalá. The Puerta del Sol—theater of revolutions—is a somber well whose sides are gray soiled houses and whose crowds are a thick condiment. Trolleys, lottery vendors, beggars, loafers, make a bright shuttle through the sluggish maze. ”

“ But expression always seems too easy; there is never the unbearable tension, the utter self-forgetfulness of the greatest drama. The Spanish theatre plays on the nerves and intellect rather than on the great harpstrings of emotion in which all of life is drawn taut.
At present in Madrid even café life is receding before the exigencies of business and the hardly excusable mania for imitating English and American manners. Spain is undergoing great changes in its relation to the rest of Europe, to Latin America, in its own internal structure. ”

“ And there is something in extreme slowness of motion, that is entirely opposed to business and duties,—a quick step, and a necessary one, are closely allied; but the street population of Madrid, with few exceptions, merely saunter; and wherever you reach an open space, especially the Puerta del Sol,—a small square in the centre of the city,—hundreds of gentlemen are seen standing, with no other occupation than shaking the dust from their segars. ”

“ The safety of property and life in Spain is in their keeping; and it may be said without exaggeration that they have done more to establish order in the Peninsula than any other body.
Barcelona, besides being a busy, wide-awake, and rapidly-growing commercial and industrial centre, contrasting strongly with some other Spanish cities that still seem to be shrouded in the mists of the middle ages, has also acquired the reputation of being a beautiful city—beautiful, of course, in the modern sense; for, where modern enterprise rules, the old-time beauty is apt to take flight. ”

“ Madrid is a compact town; the lower windows of all the monasteries and houses are defended by iron bars; many of the streets are spacious, and the whole of them are remarkably clean. The Plaza Major is a square of lofty houses, many of them stained of various colours; the windows are very close together, out of which hang mats and drapery of a variety of striped patterns, to shade220 the rooms from the mid-day sun. Here is the principal market for vegetables and other commodities, and it invariably presents a bustling and busy scene. ”

“ Notwithstanding Madrid's wartime growth and prosperity, the city is fast losing ground as the nucleus of the life and thought of Spanish-speaking people. The madrileño, lean, cynical, unscrupulous, nocturnal, explosive with a curious sort of febrile wit is becoming extinct. His theatre is beginning to pander to foreign tastes, to be ashamed of itself, to take on respectability and stodginess. Prices of seats, up to 1918 very low, rise continually ”

“ Should you chance to stumble on the Plaza Mayor,—called Plaza de San Francisco,—you are at once rewarded by the view of the ayuntamiento, one of the most elegant edifices in Spain: otherwise the extreme simplicity of the bare, irregular, but monotonous white houses, will create disappointment—you will stare about in the vain search of the magnificence, so much extolled, of this semi-Moorish capital, and discover, that nothing can be plainer, more simple, more ugly, than the exterior of the Seville habitations. ”

“ When all men think the same way without the spur of competition, inaction and ill-health are sure to follow. Perhaps the upholders of law and order need not worry too much to-day over the anarchists and socialists in the commercial districts of Spain: is not the health of a nation quickened by struggle?
The soul of a Spanish city is always the Cathedral, and Cordova has what it called one, but it is no more a Christian church than the Caaba at Mecca. The canons in Charles V's time tore out the center of the Mosque and built a Plateresque-Gothic capilla mayor and coro. ”