This Would Be Good For Hallowe'en!

We're still in the Cartuja near Burgos, eagerly waiting to admire its greatest treasure - the sole reason it has been allowed to continue in existence as a Carthusian monastery - its splendid royal tomb. Actually it's a double tomb, containing the remains both of King Juan II and his queen, Isabella. And as royal tombs - even Spanish royal tombs - go, it's pretty weird-looking. Nathaniel's attempt to capture on paper its strange form, its intricate surface of carved alabaster, all lying beneath that great vaulted roof receding into the darkness...well, it could be a set from a Hammer Horror. If Dracula rose from this tomb we wouldn't be surprised. It's one of the creepiest illustrations in the book.

I think for me the effect is made worse by the vaulted roof, which reminds me very unpleasantly of a whale's skeleton. As seen from inside.

We Meet A Monk We Do Like

We're still in Burgos, we've done the Cathedral and the tomb of El Cid, we're moving swiftly on to Letter VI, yet more tombs, and especially

The Chartreuse of Miraflores. 

Chartreuse to me means green cocktails: but a bit of rootling around on the net and I learn Chartreuse is called Chartreuse because it was originally a drink made by Carthusian monks - Chartreuse being French for 'Carthusian' -  and the Carthusians are a 'contemplative order'.  This means that they...contemplate. So, to all intents and purposes they stay in their monastery and pray.  They don't go out into the world helping the poor, tending the sick, converting the heathen and generally doing good, and so to a certain mindset - mainly Protestant - they and their ilk are rather a waste of space.  They give the whole idea of being a monk a bad name.

Happier days: Zurbaran's painting of St Bruno in the cartuja

It interests me that there is no trace of this attitude in Nathaniel, despite his having a conventional British upbringing and at least one brother who was an Anglican vicar. Nor is it that he is pro-religious.  On the contrary, I get the feeling he is probably pretty much agnostic. He is certainly oddly calm when reflecting that Christianity is a creed whose time has passed.

All the same, the specifically Catholic aspects of Spanish religion - the processions, the emotion, the incense, celibacy, statues of the Virgin, candles and all, which occasionally had Victorian Brits rolling their eyes to heaven or snorting in outright contempt - don't faze him in the slightest. He takes them as they come.  No doubt had he found the Carthusian monks reeling round the cloisters drunk while pawing the local girls he would have passed a dry comment or two.  But he doesn't find that.  He finds instead a sadly dwindled place. The once-great Chartreuse of Miraflores is now home to only four monks and a single elderly Prior, the head of his order, who in former days presided over the great monastery at Xeres (Jerez). But there has been a revolution in Spain, and those in charge of it have found, like Henry VIII before them, that monasteries yield rich pickings.  Only two or three of these cartujas have been spared, and purely because the monarchy has been spared. Basically, if a monastery contains royal tombs, it survives. 

"The great Chartreuse of Xeres contained probably no such palladium, for it was among the first of the condemned: its lands and buildings were confiscated; and its treasures of art, and all portable riches, dispersed, as likewise its inhabitants, in the direction of all the winds."

What Nathaniel calls 'Xeres de la Frontera' modern Spaniards call Jerez, and its name has entered English via its most famous product, a fortified wine which was even more indispensable to Victorian dining tables than it is to ours - Sherry. Naturally he has to glance at this:

"In England the name of Xeres is only generally known in connection with one of the principal objects of necessity, which furnish the table of the gastronome; but in Andalucia the name of Xeres de la Frontera calls up ideas of a different sort.  It is dear to the wanderer in Spain, whose recollections love to repose on its picturesque position, its sunny skies, its delicious fruits, its amiable and lively population, and lastly on its magnificent monastery, and the treasures of art it contained.  The Prior of that monastery has been removed to the Cartuja of Burgos, where he presides over a community, reduced to four monks, who subsist almost entirely on charity.  This amiable and gentleman-like individual, in whom the monk has in no degree injured the man of the world, - although a large estate, abandoned for the cloister, proved sufficiently the sincerity of his religious professions, - had well deserved a better fate than to be torn in his old age from his warm Andalucian retreat, and transplanted to the rudest spot in the whole Peninsula, placed at an elevation of more than four thousand feet above the level of the Atlantic, and visited up to the middle of June by snow storms."

This likeable old guy, "this innocent victim of reform", is ill. He has only just recovered from one serious attack, and now he is bedridden again.

Reform, we feel, is not a word that carries pleasant associations for Nathaniel. 

Haverty, Viardot and rivals in print

I am slowly coming round to the view that our boy may have been a bit full of himself. I do not think Nathaniel suffered from lack of self-belief.  Do these sound like the words of a man diffident about offering his own opinions?

"I had read of Toledo being in possession of the finest church in Spain,—and that in the book of a tourist, whose visit to this town follows immediately that to Seville. Begging pardon of the clever and entertaining writer to whom I allude, the Cathedral of Toledo strikes me as far from being the finest in Spain; nor would it be the finest in France, nor in England, nor in other countries that might be enumerated, could it be transported to either."

So take that, Martin Haverty, you, you - tourist!  Because it was Martin Haverty, an Irish journalist, who Nathaniel here claims had recklessly and foolishly preferred the Cathedral of Toledo to that of Seville: and what's more he compounded the offence by saying so in print in a book about his travels in Spain - a year or two earlier.

Thus annoyingly pipping our boy at the post, travel-writing-about-Spain-wise.

All of which makes me wonder, was Nathaniel consulting Haverty's book as he went on his own tour? Or did he read it afterwards, snorting contemptuously at its opinions? Possibly ripping out pages, screwing them into balls and slam-dunking them into a wastepaper basket?

Or did Haverty's book in fact give him the bright idea of turning his letters to Mrs C-----r and his assorted Spanish sketches into solid cash?

Sadly I don't know.  All I know is, he had clearly read the "clever and entertaining" Haverty's book, otherwise he wouldn't have patronised its judgment quite so...so..patronising-gittishly.

(You can read about Haverty here, and his book Wanderings in Spain is available free as an e-text in Google books.)

Indeed, so eager is Nathaniel here to show his opinion on cathedrals is better than anyone else's in the world  that he actually misrepresents what the harmless Haverty wrote. In fact it was:

"I shall proceed at once to enumerate the principal curiosities of Seville, and begin with the Cathedral, one of the finest in the world, and unrivalled by any one in Spain, except by that of Toledo."

See, Nathaniel?  See what he's saying there?  Haverty is extolling the cathedral of Seville.. Seville is the one he considers - as you yourself do - to be among the finest in the world: and not Toledo, which he merely thinks is the only other one in Spain that is even close.

Calm down, dear.

As for Viardot and his input in Nathaniel's work, I shall save it for another post.

What does a gentleman care for money?

I had thought this book was a complete original: a one-off, knocked out in a burst of enthusiasm by a gentleman-amateur who loved his subject so much he was willing to venture into print. I thought he had no grander aim than to amuse himself and a lady friend,  please his own vanity, perhaps impress a cultured friend or two.  But now, I think the whole project was really about making money.

Why?

Because this notice appeared in a supplement to The Times of March 11, 1844:

He has got married.
Abroad. 

And his bride's father is somebody who later describes himself grandly in a census return as a 'landed proprietor', and who no doubt was, but - there is land, and there is land.  From what I can see I doubt Benjamin Price Esq. of Westbury in the county of Bucks is in anything like the same league, acreage-wise, as Nathaniel Wells Esq. of Piercefield in the county of Monmouth.

(Also, whatever happened to the charming Mrs C......r that Nathaniel sent all his Spanish letters to? She of the elegant balls, silky pet dogs and rented chateaux?  She is nowhere mentioned, unless she was on the wedding guest list at the Embassy.)

No.  Somehow I feel the eldest son of a very wealthy man should be marrying in his local parish church, or perhaps his bride's...but not in Paris.  What I suspect is that Nathaniel has married in a hurry and, crucially, may have married beneath him.  He has married 'to disoblige his family', in Austen's phrase.  So presumably there has been an almighty row, his father is reluctant to increase the usual funds and suddenly, turning all those letters from Spain and those sprightly amateur pictures into something you can actually get money from, is quite an urgent matter. 

Furthermore I think I know why he married when he did.  Very shortly after the marriage it seems (from later census returns)  the new Mrs Wells was blessed with a son.  And I can't quite say how soon after, for the baby boy was apparently born in Caen, and yet strangely the Anglican church there has no record of his baptism.  And in later life, he seems uncertain quite how old he is.

And also, when Nathaniel suddenly dies while his son (Nathaniel Armstrong Wells II) is a mere infant - what happens?  Is Baby swept into the bosom of his wealthy grandfather and carried off to Piercefield, there to receive the upbringing suited to the heir of many acres? No.  The first census return after his father's death finds little toddler Nathaniel living with his widowed mother, who is teaching in a school.

Teaching. In. A. School.

That's right - Georgiana Lucy, widow of Nathaniel Armstrong Wells Esq, the daughter of the 'landed proprietor' Benjamin Price of Westbury - is earning her own crust like any other poor widow.  At least she isn't taking in washing.

So now I think I can guess why Nathaniel took his manuscript to the printers.

Now and Then

Then: what Nathaniel saw

Now: it has changed a bit, I agree.

The discrepancy between these two images is not due to Nathaniel's bad drawing skills: the fountain apparently did look different back then.  It had clearly been in the wars, in every sense. According to Nathaniel, when he saw it you couldn't even tell what those four fragmented, beaten-up Cupids were meant to be riding on.

Looking at the modern photo we can see the basin and central column rising from it aren't much altered, but the Cupids and their dolphins(?) have been heavily restored, and there has clearly been a significant rebuild at the top.  Even in Nathaniel's day, when the little statue surmounting the fountain was so damaged the Christ child had vanished altogether, there was  a visible difference in colour between the lower part of the fountain and the upper: so it seems the lower part is much older. The original design is perhaps impossible to guess.  Would an earlier age have chosen to place the vaguely erotic symbols of Cupids and Melusines beneath a statue of the Virgin?   I can't say.  Anyway, as Nathaniel described it:

"This little antique monument charms, by the quaint symmetry of its design and proportions, and perhaps even by the terribly mutilated state of the four fragments of Cupids, which, riding on the necks of the same number of animals so maltreated as to render impossible the discovery of their race, form projecting angles, and support the basin on their shoulders. Four mermaids, holding up their tails, so as not to interfere with the operations of the Cupids, ornament the sides of the basin, which are provided with small apertures for the escape of the water; the top being covered by a flat circular stone, carved around its edge. This stone,—a small, elegantly shaped pedestal, which surmounts it,—and the other portions already described, are nearly black, probably from antiquity; but on the pedestal stands a little marble virgin, as white as snow. This antique figure harmonises by its mutilation with the rest, although injured in a smaller degree; and at the same time adds to the charm of the whole, by the contrast of its dazzling whiteness with the dark mass on which it is supported. The whole is balanced on the capital of a pillar, of a most original form, which appears immediately above the surface of a sheet of water enclosed in a large octagonal basin."

"Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me"

Heroes! We all have them. Personal and national heroes, men who mirror to us the qualities we most envy, the ones we fervently wish we had ourselves.  But heroism is like taffeta, it is not the same in all lights. A man devoutly admired by one group can be an object of passionate scorn, or even downright hate, to another.  Through Nathaniel's eyes we are about to meet the greatest hero of Christian Spain - El Cid.

"The hero is represented in the most extraordinary of attitudes: the head is thrown back, and the face turned towards one side; the legs in a sort of studied posture; a drawn sword is in the right hand, the point somewhat raised. The general expression is that of a comic actor attempting an attitude of mock-heroic impertinence; and is probably the result of an unattained object in the mind of the artist, of producing that of fearless independence."

This is Nathaniel's damning verdict on an oil painting of El Cid that once hung in the Ayuntamiento - not a very good one it seems.  It was presumably put there by those who genuinely wished to honour the great man whose bones rested amongst them.   But Nathaniel has no time for this picture.  To him it's an artistic failure, rubbish.

Only, is it just the picture he has no time for?  Really he is not just dissing whatever poor provincial artist attempted the likeness of Spain's great preserver: inevitably, by association, he is ridiculing the hero himself. 

El Cid statue in the centre of modern Burgos

This is an unpopular viewpoint, at least in the west.  The statue above was put up only sixty years ago, a mere six years before Hollywood canonised El Cid in the person of Charlton Heston. Like the film, it aims to show El Cid as the magnificent champion of Christian Spain against the Moors, and that is still very much how he is seen by many in Spain today.  But we soon learn that, for Nathaniel, El Cid's hero status is overblown, ambiguous,  untrustworthy - undeserved.

"For those who are satisfied with the orthodox histories of the monks, he is without defects—a simple unsophisticated demi-god. But there have been Mahometan historians of Spain. These are universally acknowledged to have treated of all that concerned themselves with complete accuracy and impartiality; and, when this happens, it should seem to be the best criterion, in the absence of other proof, of their faithful delineation of others' portraits."

The icon of one group will often be the hate figure of another.  I am sensing something significant about Nathaniel, which is that he loves Spain so much not for its triumphant Christian past, but for its lost Moorish civilization. His derogatory attitude to El Cid is the litmus test which proves something profound about him.

Deep, deep  down,  Nathaniel Armstrong Wells Esq. of Piercefield, Monmouthshire, wishes the Africans had won.

"She's the best of her kind, but her kind is not the best."

We are on our way out of the cathedral at Burgos, pausing at the door for a final, lingering, critical glance:

... "not forgetting to enjoy, as we leave the church, a long gaze at its elegant and symmetrical proportions. It may be called an unique model of beauty of its particular sort, especially when contemplated without being drawn into comparison with other edifices of a different class. Catalani is said, on hearing Sontag's performance, to have remarked that she was "la première de son genre, mais que son genre n'était pas le premier." Could the cathedral of Seville see that of Burgos, it would probably pronounce a similar judgment on its smaller rival."

Angelica Catalani, singer: (1780-1849)

Come again, Nathaniel - Catalani? Sontag?

Okay, Wikipedia tells me who Catalani was, the famous Italian soprano on the left. "Sontag" presumably is Henriette Sontag, a rival songstress Catalani damned with faint praise: her remark translates something like "she's the best of her kind, but her kind is not the best."

He's recalling the judgment of a famous but faded soprano who was already in her sixties as he journeys confidently through Spain, pronouncing so robustly on its architectural charms.  (We know, he doesn't, that the old lady singer he quotes will still outlive him by three years.)

So: the Cathedral of Burgos is very lovely, and if he hadn't already seen the one at Seville Nathaniel would have have been utterly bowled over by it.  As it is, yes, perfectly charming, but - he has seen better.

So we turn our backs on the Cathedral of Burgos and head across the hot stones of the square towards the Ayuntamiento.  This is the Town Hall, and in itself not interesting enough to detain jaded aesthetes like us:

 "The building, like other town-halls, possesses an airy staircase, a large public room, and a few other apartments, used for the various details of administration; but nothing remarkable until you arrive at a handsomely ornamented saloon, furnished with a canopied seat fronting a row of arm-chairs. This is the room in which the municipal body hold their juntas."

We are heading there because surprisingly, the Town Hall of Burgos is where we shall find the remains of Spain's greatest hero - a man whose fame reached even 20th century Hollywood.

We are going to pay our respects at the grave of El Cid.