The American Architect
The ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW
Vol. cxxvWEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1924NUMBER 2437
SPANISH NOTES
BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM, F. A. I. A., Litt. D., LL. D.
Introduction
AFTER thirty-five years of intermittent
travel in all parts of Europe, during which anything beyond the Pyrenees was regarded with severe indifference, I at last encountered Spain, and since that eventful six months of revelation, nothing else seems to matter much, not even the little villages of England, the tall cathedrals of France or the hill towns of Italy — not even (and with shame be it spoken! ) not even Palermo or Venice or Carcassonne. The only call is “Back to Spain! ”
Why? Not wholly for its architecture perhaps, and its other arts, though these are sufficiently compelling. Chiefly it may be because here is a sort of sacred preserve, ringed with seas and rampired by high mountains and so permitted to retain some of the real values in life, lost long since by the highly civilized and progressive communities of this unhappy planet.
Never was a country so lied about (chiefly by
historians and French travelers) or so misjudged by contemporary intelligence. All you expected is not there and all you wished for is. Of course this is an exaggeration but it will give the idea. It is not a land of haughty hidalgos and profligate
caballeros lording it over a brutalized peasantry, but the only place I know where there is a true and vital democracy in the best sense. It is not priestridden and rotten with superstition, but the one place where religion is thoroughly evangelical
and a sane and normal part of the lives of nine persons out of ten. The people are not made savage by bullfights and black memories of the Inquisition; they are kindly, generous, gentle with children, merciful to animals, courteous beyond belief, self-respecting, austere, ascetic, and disdainful of physical comfort and physical suffering. Spain is not backward and degenerate just because it is not given over to industrialism, covetous commerce and predatory finance, but truly in the vanguard of real civilization because it estimates these things at their true worth and has preserved something of the old sense of comparative values. Finally it is not dirty but as clean (almost) as Holland or Scandinavia.
THE first impression is of vast antiquity. One digs down through one stratum below another to the mythical and the prehistoric. Modernism, the gilded Renaissance of the Catholic Kings, the years of crusading against
RALPH ADAMS CRAM, F. A. I. A.
The ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW
Vol. cxxvWEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1924NUMBER 2437
SPANISH NOTES
BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM, F. A. I. A., Litt. D., LL. D.
Introduction
AFTER thirty-five years of intermittent
travel in all parts of Europe, during which anything beyond the Pyrenees was regarded with severe indifference, I at last encountered Spain, and since that eventful six months of revelation, nothing else seems to matter much, not even the little villages of England, the tall cathedrals of France or the hill towns of Italy — not even (and with shame be it spoken! ) not even Palermo or Venice or Carcassonne. The only call is “Back to Spain! ”
Why? Not wholly for its architecture perhaps, and its other arts, though these are sufficiently compelling. Chiefly it may be because here is a sort of sacred preserve, ringed with seas and rampired by high mountains and so permitted to retain some of the real values in life, lost long since by the highly civilized and progressive communities of this unhappy planet.
Never was a country so lied about (chiefly by
historians and French travelers) or so misjudged by contemporary intelligence. All you expected is not there and all you wished for is. Of course this is an exaggeration but it will give the idea. It is not a land of haughty hidalgos and profligate
caballeros lording it over a brutalized peasantry, but the only place I know where there is a true and vital democracy in the best sense. It is not priestridden and rotten with superstition, but the one place where religion is thoroughly evangelical
and a sane and normal part of the lives of nine persons out of ten. The people are not made savage by bullfights and black memories of the Inquisition; they are kindly, generous, gentle with children, merciful to animals, courteous beyond belief, self-respecting, austere, ascetic, and disdainful of physical comfort and physical suffering. Spain is not backward and degenerate just because it is not given over to industrialism, covetous commerce and predatory finance, but truly in the vanguard of real civilization because it estimates these things at their true worth and has preserved something of the old sense of comparative values. Finally it is not dirty but as clean (almost) as Holland or Scandinavia.
THE first impression is of vast antiquity. One digs down through one stratum below another to the mythical and the prehistoric. Modernism, the gilded Renaissance of the Catholic Kings, the years of crusading against
RALPH ADAMS CRAM, F. A. I. A.