Places and Persons
Paulding, Gouverneur
Places and Persons MISSIONARIES AT THE FAIR By GOUVERNEUR PAULDING SPAIN has always worried travelers because it is the country where Catholicism may and does appear in the most unexpected...
...But when you find that this sculpture and painting fill a building as big as a state capitol with forty-seven great rooms and eight halls, and does this without touching the Prado in Madrid, or the great Exhibition in Seville, or, seemingly, any of the churches you have visited, you cannot help but be impressed...
...They are shown in crude and precise oil paintings—beheaded, crucified, tortured...
...You enter one pavilion out of three...
...All the buildings are faced with light like New York skyscrapers...
...It is disturbing both to Catholics and others this confrontation with the spiritual, this necessity to deny or admit the idea of God elsewhere than in church, at a time other than those rare moments when we permit ourselves to consider the essential...
...You were either proud to be of a mind with the people who produced it or it did not interest you...
...Moreover in Spain the despised are concerned with God...
...In this sense, for a foreigner and a Catholic, Spain is a catechism to which he must reply...
...You are tired from seeing so much and you answer at random that the appearances of faith were great in the middle-ages but that God alone knows what hidden pride undermined the structure...
...And on top of the hill stands the National Palace—the main Spanish exhibit—and what is shown there is Catholic art...
...It is a chamber of horrors...
...People who believe in that sort of thing should see them...
...The German Building is the most interesting technically of the lot...
...It is packed with booths and a labyrinth of partitions and you have to follow the crowd...
...You must look at that evidence, look at it seriously—and search your heart...
...Anna Pavlova is there...
...This Faith, the enemy says, which reached a height in the middle-ages so great that it gave actually a solution to the eternal problem of employer and employee, set aside the ancient punishment of the confusion of tongues, and produced the beauty that fills this building...
...At night the cascade and the fountains are lighted up from under the water...
...That is what you have come to see but you let it wait a day or two and visit the city...
...A great cascade pours down the hill and disappears into machinery that brings it up again...
...You walk down one of these to the port and ride on a ferry—the only proper way to see any port...
...They said that as a Catholic you bore such a burden of knowledge that all humanity was not sufficient to share it and that this knowledge was the Faith...
...The lights change color, combine colors, progress and diminish in intensity, play color symphonies...
...You cry for relief—for the relief of art, the transposition of literature...
...Tonight she will dance the death of the swan...
...It was only serious if you took it seriously...
...You could not expect to find missionaries at a Fair...
...you are in Japan, Africa, China, India...
...Barcelona is modern...
...You drive to your hotel and sit in the warm gold light of the comfortable lobby...
...As you pass the stadium you see just below you a building that you had not noticed before...
...Sweden shows silverware...
...In the French Building hungry ladies walk round a huge circular glass case in which wax figures wear priceless clothes from Vionnet, Worth or Lanvin...
...It is a cold bitter question but despair is coldly bitter—it is also the unforgivable sin...
...It used to be independent and, like Genoa, had its consulates all over the world...
...But the atmosphere of the Fair is worldly and you answer with the prudence of the world...
...Most of it is modern and some parts modern at just the wrong moment when the freshly discovered properties of concrete led architects to cover fagades with writhing balconies, tortured wreaths of fantastic flowers, terrible caryatids holding up nothing...
...From the top you see the plain of Barcelona and the mountains behind it...
...There are restaurants, a stadium for football and track, tennis courts, a Coney Island amusement park...
...Searchlights fold out in a fan from the top of the hill...
...When a dancer comes out of the wings in a third-rate music hall and the spotlight picks out the gold of a cross on her breast, it is impossible not to be reminded that God is concerned not only with the rich, the middle classes, nor even with the poor alone, but also and actually with the despised...
...You answer that modern faith is a forest fire burning underground and visible only in places: that we have not deserved and may never deserve the reward of universal acquiescence...
...you are lost in unnamable Polynesian islands...
...When for a time the lights are plain white the effect is impressive and beautiful...
...He will find no new Faith, nor even a novel insistence on one part of the Faith rather than on others...
...And art was art...
...When you are tired there is a big hotel with little tables and wicker chairs on the sidewalk in front of it and you sit there and watch the traffic go by—double-decked busses, trolley cars, sixcylinder taxis...
...What flaw was in it that it could not endure...
...They taught you to abolish the picturesque and that all apparent differences in building, clothes, customs, language were due to conditions of time and space and amounted to nothing faced with the permanent major identity of man in all ages and in all countries...
...Japan is represented by kimonas and a tea shop...
...If asked—as the organizers of the Fair must have asked themselves—what was the finest and most impressive thing Spain could move into one building and show to the world, you would reply: the sculpture and the painting she has produced in the enthusiasm of her Catholic Faith...
...there are French, Italian, German airplanes...
...And the sight brought you to your knees...
...You can see them thirty miles away...
...At each terrace there are fountains...
...But what was built before and after this period is very fine...
...The great fountain splashes gold and silver...
...By day you visit the pavilions...
...You come up the coast from the south through orange groves, rice fields, olive trees...
...They are showing you as best they can evidence of the activity for which they die...
...Further on you see a dismal photograph of a little frame church in a forest clearing...
...But the Faith, the Creed, will be shown to him in fresh images, in unfamiliar language, at times and in places where he is unprepared, with the result that he will be asking himself how much and how deeply he believes—and how clearly he understands...
...It has a cross on it: crowds are going in and you follow...
...When a begging cripple names your wife his sister it may be what people call picturesque, but clearly it asks whether or not there is for you any reality in the conception of our being one family in the Body of Christ...
...Take the case of Barcelona...
...And do you believe with any measurable warmth that they died to any purpose ? You come out of the Pavilion of the Missionaries into the early evening...
...Everywhere are rough charts of statistics—a little priest in 1850, a bigger priest in 1900, a tall priest in 1930...
...You are trapped by one of Spain's surprises...
...When you sit with a village crowd watching a game of handball and the Angelus rings, and the players stop where they are and take off their caps and pray and cross themselves and start playing again, you are forced to consider, very unexpectedly, in just what degree of misery is your faith in and devotion to the Mother of God...
...They obey a red, green, yellow light system and it works...
...There is the Pavilion of Graphic Arts with fine printing and book-binding from all Europe...
...At the corner is a subway entrance...
...As everywhere in Spain there are the famous paseos, great avenues where traffic is relegated to narrow channels on each side of a central promenade...
...Your painter friends are busy painting Nude in a Window, House on a Hill...
...Do you want their death told in a poem...
...Then for a moment you think of the missionaries somewhere in China, somewhere in India...
...But what they did most of all was to show you for a moment that mysterious minority of the spirit who suffer for you and for the world...
...It might indeed ask you questions about the men who made it but the questions demanded no answer and were in a voice familiar to you, subdued and refined...
...There is the Palace of Agriculture that makes you wish you lived on a farm...
...You have facts before you, paintings that merely replace as best they can the photographer who was not there, and the facts relate often to men of your generation who died while you live...
...There are wax figures of natives praying before a God with ten arms, there are interminable collections of what one can only call souvenirs—musical instruments, charms, furniture—poor examples the curator of any museum would say...
...It is the surprise the Exhibition has kept for the last...
...The day before you leave Barcelona you return to the Exhibition—perhaps to see the great locomotives once more imprisoned on their little bit of track—and you climb to the top of the hill for the view...
...The crowd pushes you past faded collections of native clothes: you go upstairs and you find yourself in the "room of the martyrs...
...You had forgotten that there were such people as missionaries and you found them at the Barcelona Fair...
...As a Catholic, it is partly mine for it is a common heritage, you will say, and do I not recognize Saint Peter by the key he bears and the young Saint Sebastian by the arrows that pierce him...
...The Exhibition buildings are on terraces up the side of a steep hill...
...Like Genoa, too, it claims Columbus...
...You skip from continent to continent...
...It is called the Pavilion of the Missionaries...
...But do you want the death of these men to be told at all...
...These men are priests: they are priests engaged in a service which not infrequently leads them to death...
...Since the country was Catholic the art would be Catholic...
...You think in numbers and you measure by size...
...There are fine locomotives thatyou can pretend to drive...
...Why hope for a renewal of Faith throughout the world when you had faith once in so supreme a degree and it failed...
...They said that the middle-ages had failed and that we as individuals fail...
...They showed you that the crippled beggar was in fact your brother...
...They showed you facts...
...It is a large building but unbearably crowded with things to look at and people looking at them...
...you cross some high hills that reach an arm out into the sea and you come down through factories and power plants into Barcelona...
...As you go through the rooms you will claim a share of this treasure...
...Their dead bodies are shown modeled in wax...
...Finland exhibits codfish and paper...
...It was in a museum and would stay in a museum where people could see it and critics write about it...
...Austria, leather...
...You had industry, games, food, amusement and art at a Fair...
...There must be a hundred of them...
...The city provides a needed transition from Spain to a World's Fair...
...Denmark, porcelain...
...Of such a Europe very little remains and you are chilled by the worldly historical argument always produced against the Church...
...You will be right in feeling as you do for it was this passport of Catholicity and this part-ownership that, in the middle-ages, abolished frontiers and created for a precarious and regretted period the unity of Europe...
...Barcelona is the richest city in Spain, a great port, and Catalan...
...Places and Persons MISSIONARIES AT THE FAIR By GOUVERNEUR PAULDING SPAIN has always worried travelers because it is the country where Catholicism may and does appear in the most unexpected places and demand consideration...
...But here between the football field and the loop-theloop are missionaries with an exhibition of their own and you are in it...
...It has at present an International Exhibition...
...On the walls are their portraits, men of all conditions, of all nations, but all of them martyrs...
Vol. 12 • August 1930 • No. 17
