VII OPIUM DREAMS

I'm not sure what an ‘identity crisis’ is, but perhaps if it could be represented in stone the Palaçio da Pena would serve as an illustration; or perhaps not, worse, it’s reached a stage of advanced psychological and spiritual dissociation and gone mad in a genteel way, like a lunatic swaggering about in tinsel and brass under the delusion that he’s Napoleon or Julius Caesar. Good architecture is solidly related to the earth on which it stands, it derives from the same material, it’s form follows from its utilitarian function while it also strives to be beautiful within those limits, it allows itself the minimal necessary amount of ornamentation, which means that it follows the fundamental rule of all art, to be harmonious, proportionate and achieve the maximum effect with the greatest economy of means.. It’s a tangible analogy of a good life. Aesthetically speaking, Pena is therefore very bad architecture because it’s not sincere, it’s a lot of showy fuss over nothing much or something else, we may as well be clear about that from the start. At the same time, it’s a formidable feat of construction, ingenuity, craftsmanship and even possibly of imagination; and it’s in that discrepancy that the ‘dissociation’ exists.

Byron might have behaved ‘romantically’, but he kept his well-shod feet firmly on the ground and left his imaginary landscapes unpopulated except by himself or others he knew well. Walter Scott, on the other hand and for instance, as widely read or more at about the same time, was not himself a romantic figure but his novels are stuffed with fictitious characters safely restored from the Middle Ages and elsewhere going on as if they were. Victor Hugo’s essay in the ‘medieval’ genre was more convincing because Hugo was a better writer, but the hundreds of imitators taking up the theme of chaste knights and faithful, or occasionally dangerous, damsels had soon taken all leave of common sense. Similarly in painting: David Friedrich’s empty vistas of sublime Nature observed cautiously and thoughtfully by a solitary watcher diminished into views through arched windows from groined chambers inhabited by the same listless maidens, often not wearing a stitch, and their armor-clad admirers, sometimes with an angel or two to chaperon them and make sure they behaved themselves, as exemplified later by Burne-Jones. Or in music: Beethoven’s equivalent of the heroic open space progressed via the more delicate interior introspections of Chopin and the phantasmagoria of Schumann to the personal dramas of excitable individuals gleaned haphazardly from Donizetti’s very unclear comprehension of the past. The differences are less of technical talent than of the material, the tangible but elusive subject matter of art, and the unconscious psychology of the artist, himself the product of his time, which draws him to direct his skill accordingly. I’m not going to start a dissertation on that immensely complicated and controversial aspect of art or general history, merely to mention again that the only way to obtain a ‘feel’ of our ancestors and their activities is to look at what they made and produced.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge went one further. Assisted by what would now be called narcotics, he came up with this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round :

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Etc (published 1816)

Quite a few architects, if encouraged by their patrons, were inspired to have a go at their own version of Xanadu, the details of which were left conveniently imprecise by the poet; it’s tempting to think that Baron von Eschwege, a wandering Prussian, was one of them, an eminently suitable site having being pointed out to him. Whether that was exactly true or not, he could never be accused of failing to throw in as many unrelated ingredients as he could find: the stately dome was casually borrowed from Michelangelo’s Rome; there’s quite a bit, as is only appropriate, from Manueline Portugal; an appalling Triton with obscenely spread but somehow decently-obscured legs or pair of scaly tails, does service for those Baroque monsters who provided admittance through open jaws; there’s a lot of perfectly unnecessary ramparts and battlements with ‘medieval’ decorations and gargoyles and even a mock draw-bridge; a sort of bat-wing tower and a spire or two stand in for the fairy-tale Gothicism later exploited more successfully by Walt Disney; and for exoticism à l’Arabe little golden cupolas crop up here and there like mushrooms along with an arcade of Moorish arches. The proportions of the structure are all wrong anyway, the dome is more like a lid on a drum than a noble crown, a sort of cliff-face is stuck in front of it and the tower – with clock, of all things – is just plain ugly and really bears no relation to anything. The whole conglomeration was painted dark pink and yellow in accordance with the original design, or at least so said the authorities when they re-did it in those colours, shockingly, in the 1990’s. That’s not to mention the interior, which I don’t think I have the fortitude ever to enter again, what with the giant blackamoors holding up electrical globes and the vases of pampas grass dyed emerald green and scarlet, and ….. I won’t go on, it may not have been as bad as that to start with, though certainly the later Braganzas were distressingly bourgeois. So as not to be left out, the architectural Baron caused to be placed on a distant mound facing his ghastly creation a larger-than-life effigy of himself in the guise of that inevitable cliché of the time, a knight in shining armour, except that the shine, if such there ever was, has worn off and the effect, apart from being ludicrous, is unpleasantly like those cut-out silhouettes of the advertising bulls that used to lour threateningly on the horizons of the Spanish landscape.

Let’s take a look at Pena as it undeniably is (I choose a damaged photograph for reasons that will become clear in a minute; a much more professional and very well done set can be found here
http://www.pbase.com/diasdosreis/pena )

As a building Pena has no real function at all. At least five other very substantial and indeed magnificent royal palaces already existed within a short radius, and this one, with its rather poky rooms and acres of wasted space, is only there for display, and so that is how it has to be judged. Admittedly, as a spectacle and in spite of the colours, like this it’s quite a fine one, because there’s always something appealing about the works of man raised on God’s pinnacles, but it’s finer the more its dissolved in the clouds and mists that often envelop it and so blur the crude angles and accoutrements and downright forgeries that jar on closer inspection.

Now lets take at look at it as it seemed to its contemporaries, and about equally distant in both cases. The illustration is from a reproduction on an old post card, artist and date unknown but obviously during the period of construction because the dome has not yet been erected It’s a very nice picture that could serve as a splendid backdrop to Wagner’s Ring had that masterpiece been staged let alone written when the etching was done. This is art following art, with nature not having much to do with it, because its largely a fib. The absence of trees is a little puzzling, in view of the dense forests that now surround it. I think, from other sources also, that the serra at this stage, or in that part of it, was a good deal barer either because of fires or because the forestation that was undertaken as part of beautification of Pena still lay in the future, but nonetheless I’m sure also that the artist exploited the bareness for his own purposes, if only to leave the greater part of the frame unfilled and so emphasize the lofty and isolated aspect of the palace. Be that as it may, there is no place that I’ve ever been able to discover that affords this view, and even if there were the peak on the right – which appears to support here a Greek temple rather than the ruins of the castelo - does not rise to that height and does not bear the same topographical relation. I’m not too sure either about that triumphal drive up to the portals: there is one, now totally obscured, but I doubt it goes in such an artistically-useful direction. And while the form and details of the building are immediately recognizable, they’ve all been both tightened up and stretched here and there in order to make not just the composition more pleasing but the building itself. The lighting, as always, is completely impossible according to the laws of physics, but that’s another matter.

Can we effect by means of other artistic deceits a midway stance here by trying to be accurate while infusing with paint something of the romantic aura; or jiggle around even more outrageously with a Claudean sunset and with the (genuine but elsewhere) oriental pavilion and the swan lake?

Well no, not exactly, the castle remains essentially unsightly, the trees in fact are an artistic nuisance and distraction and anyway that’s much more difficult to do than it seems when the romantically transforming glass is no long available; but the point is that Pena will ‘work’ as a spectacle or an idea – a romantic picture in short, which is about the best I can say of it and conceivably partly the intention - if at all only as a sort of manipulated distant vision preferably wreathed in a dreamlike vapour induced by the weather or the right sort of mental preparation or hallucinogenics of some sort or other. It’s not entirely incidental that the nineteenth century was almost universally addicted to opium, not only metaphorically but literally in the form of laudanum in patent medicines. It removed what is now called ‘stress’, the anxiety of upholding an artificial existence and system of materialistic ethics that was its own invention. But vision of what - a mythical Valhalla inhabited by gods, a projection of an obscure Platonic aspiration, a primitive picture-making instinct, or nothing so high-falutin’? Pena is said, rightly or wrongly, to have been at least partly the inspiration for the – I think slightly superior, or less terrible – follies of Ludwig of Bavaria, one of the first victims of psychiatry and certainly a man for whom the word ‘practical’ would have meant nothing. Whether he was a deranged and irresponsible madman or a sort of innocent dreamer and eccentric for whom without his playthings life’s burdens were otherwise intolerable, or both, is a moot point, but it hardly matters because nothing short of incarceration stopped him any more than it would have his more fortunate Teutonic relative in Portugal.

Maria da Glória was made Rainha Maria II of Portugal when she was barely more than a child tossed about between South America and all over Europe. It had been intended, as a pawn, that she should marry her uncle, her father’s troublesome brother, to settle the succession question. He being removed from candidature, she was married at fifteen to another uncle, this time her mother’s brother, the step-grandson of Napoleon himself. He didn’t last for more than two months, and the poor girl then found herself a year later saddled with Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, a scion of an extended family extremely adept at promoting itself (another one got Victoria of England) and also with a mania for commemorating itself in extravagant memorials. Dona Maria expired after an apparently selfless life in 1853, worn out with pregnancies; the more sentimentally simple-minded of her subjects christened her “the good mother”, meaning that she was uncomplainingly put upon in one way or another by everyone else. D. Fernando, made of more durable material, in the meantime had fixed his eye on the ruins of the Monastery of Our Lady of Pena, or Penha (the first means grief, the second, in old Portuguese, something like a cliff, and therefore much more plausible), dramatically astride a rocky peak facing across a chasm to the ruins of the Arab fortress. There had, in fact, been a chapel there from earliest recorded times, and then a monastery enlarged over the centuries ever since, according to legend, D Manuel had seen from this lookout Vasco da Gama’s boats returning from India. It must have been a well-off establishment, there is mention even in 1514 of sixty-four thousand azulejos, and if the original renaissance alabaster altar-piece enclosed within the later palace – the only beautiful thing in it - is anything to go by. The monastery with its ‘tower’ was struck by lightening in 1743, but there were still forty residents or inmates until 1755 when it was struck much more disastrously by the earthquake and "profoundly ruined". In 1828 there were only two inhabitants, who were removed six years later with the dissolution of the monastic orders, leaving D Fernando with a free hand. Incorporating what remained of the monastery, including the chapel and a refectory (which became a dining room), construction went on from 1840 to 1868, though even then not completely. With the Consort’s death in 1885, the whole lot went to his former mistress, from whom the State subsequently acquired it for the benefit of the last Queen of Portugal, Dona Amélia; her days in it were short-lived for in 1911 she too was packed off, after which after only fifty years or so of semi-use it was as good as uninhabited. The labour involved is almost unthinkable. Pena literally perches on almost perpendicular rocks, and although evidently making use of what foundations were there would have involved considerable earth-moving and death-defying feats without the aid of any modern machinery, apart from there having to hauled up and then crafted the building and decorative materials, including apparently some of the Convento de Penha Longe and from as far away as Nuremburg. As well as all that an extensive park was levelled and built up and planted all around it, and the lot enclosed by high walls of many miles. The cost must have been enormous, and so the figure quoted, 400 contos, in present-day terms 2,000 euros, indicates nothing more than the extent of the devaluation and inflation of the national currency in the meantime – unless D Fernando was lying. If Alfred of England was typical, the Saxe-Coburgs didn’t have a penny of their own, but they made good use of everybody else’s. That Pena was paid for ‘privately’ is clear from the State buying it later, for 310 contos. But then again, if Dona Maria was the purse, where did she, as the daughter of little more than royal adventurers, get it from? Unfortunately most of these more interesting technical details have evaded history’s attentions, but we can gain some small idea of the beginnings from a popular print of the time.

This is a really wonderful picture, tumultuous and exciting in the very best tradition of early nineteenth century romanticism. Again, it comes from an old postcard, and I don’t know who did it; not Burnett, I don’t think, because he kept closer to what he saw than this artist surely did. Apart from the sensational but largely contrived mountain wilderness, which can’t be accommodated to that represented in the above and later depiction, this is most certainly not an edifice that fell into ruins during an earthquake before its portrayer was born and it bears no relation to the impoverished eyrie suggested by Byron twenty years or so before. And although the pre-earthquake monastery, as I said, was a rich and not insignificant one, there is no indication that it was ever so princely as to occupy all the space that presently supports a very large palace, and with at least five floors. Its architectural merits would have been, of course, much higher than those of its replacement because it had a very definite purpose, at once commemorative and domestic, and there is little doubt that it would have satisfied all the requirements of ‘romance’. All the same, and in other words, no such thing ever quite existed, but perhaps it’s not surprising, with an illustration like this, that D. Fernando’s ambitions were aroused .to try and make one. The pity is that he, or his architect(s), did it, or over-did it, so badly, by introducing so much bombast and Teutonic swagger without having any proper idea of the sources from which it was so casually borrowed and being so uncertain, evidently, as to why it was being done at all; what it boils down to is that Pena is architecturally and aesthetically illiterate but making a great performance as if it were not.

If I’m making a lot of noise here – too much, probably – over Pena, it’s as a reaction against the way in which something which is an astonishing achievement of human industry and ingenuity but also a staggering example of tastelessness, vulgarity, extravagance and sheer foolishness is promoted as if it were a ‘cultural’ monument of the highest order to which uneducated indiscriminate obeisance has to be made for form’s sake; I’m protesting against its being exploited as another item in the money-making tourist industry when the characteristic reaction to it is “my five-year old loved it”; I’m protesting, if it comes to that, against the notion of ‘culture’ as a sort of pap to be fed to the masses as a special treat when very few of the hundreds that are herded through every day have the faintest idea of what they are looking at, or why, except that everyone else is and that possibly there’s something there that will rub off if they’re respectful enough. There’s a certain amount of selfishness involved here. In the old days, I used to spend whole afternoons in the gardens and environs of Pena, seeing the hideous thing from so many angles and under so many different conditions that I became quite fond of it. All that came to an end when Brussels decreed that we had to pay our way by wringing it out of tourists, and so the broken walls were all cemented up, a ticket office installed at the only entrance, ridiculous transports introduced to cart to the palace itself those – the objects as usual of my particular irritation – who won’t make the slightest physical effort to go to a ‘site’ but litter it up anyway, and jeeps drive up and down the once moss-covered paths to check that no-one is there who hasn’t paid for the privilege. I confess also to an aversion to D Fernando, whose blustering whiskered effigy in bronze suggests a social-climbing bully, and to which the quite fortuitously same-named café in São Pedro contributes nothing to help: this seedily pretentious establishment, with it’s malevolently-gossiping habitués, faces its rival, the ‘Moorish Girl’, across the street, and if gossipers congregate there too they generally carry on their intrigues with a more light-hearted and Lusitanian benevolence and interested curiosity. I’m allowing, of course, my own ‘romances’, or prejudices, to take over absurdly.

I couldn’t, however, carp about the Parque da Pena, which is at once extremely beautiful and interesting while offering every opportunity for the wildest imagination to take flight. The crags and deep valleys suggested in the last illustration are all there, on a miniature scale, but covered – smothered almost – in a profusion of plants and trees of all sorts which must have taken almost as much labour as the palace to grow and rear and by now have become a jungle. Apart from the formal gardens, there’s an overgrown forest of camellia trees, for example, elsewhere another of giant New Zealand tree ferns and further on a some fine specimens of Californian sequoias, interspersed with the gnarled branches of native oaks and topped by every species of palm. Lower down there’s a series of ‘swan lakes’ with a crenellated toy castle in the water for the birds to live in. Dotted here and there are follies, grottos, pavilions and what would appear to be rustic rendezvous for escapees from palace decorum. Not all of these, strictly speaking, are any less sham than the palace itself, but being mere garden ornaments and in that setting it doesn’t matter, the effect is delightful. Not sham at all are – or were – the extensive and professional greenhouses used for propagating plants and supplying the palace with flowers. As late as 1985 or so there were still forgotten pots of gorgeous begonias there, and one or two elderly gardeners tending them, although most of the hundreds of other pots were lying around broken and a lot of the glass had already been smashed; before much longer, the gardeners I think having withdrawn or died, there was nothing much at all except a heap of debris fast being reclaimed by the vegetation. The Park spreads over an area of more than two hundred hectares and includes the highest point in the serra, Cruz Alta; it’s traversed by numberless tracks, some fairly rough and probably natural, as well as by many paths or even semi-avenues all paved with millions of Portuguese cobble-stones and bordered by inset decorative rocks. The latter lead to the several entrances to the Park, each with its own lodge, but these have fallen down and the gates are now all barred by unpleasant metal contrivances; the principal entrance is a car park and just as strongly barred by officious attendants. Fortunately few of the ordinary tourists wander far off the beaten track if they leave the palace precincts at all, so large tracts of the Park have remained more or less what they were, sanctuaries of cultivated nature, and actually there are still one or two places where it’s possible to sneak in.

The so-called Chalé da Condessa was a secret, or semi-secret, hideaway within the Park, a fair step from the Palace. It housed the Royal Mistress, a certain German actress and adventuress called Elisa Hensler who had already been elevated to the nobility for services rendered to another Saxe-Coburg princeling before she turned up in Portugal. She stayed where she was even after the death of her protector, and when she’d inherited the whole of Pena. but that may not have been just for reasons of modesty or discretion: she was greatly disapproved of by the Portuguese and most of all, perhaps naturally enough, by D Fernando’s son and heir. Nothing whatever was improved by his meeting a premature death and the scandals of poisoning that floated about thereafter. All the same, the dubious Condessa d’Edla didn’t do too badly. The Chalé is almost too ridiculous to be true, perhaps in keeping with the whole story, but in its secluded forest setting, surrounded by flowering shrubs, its undeniably an attractive retreat. I say ridiculous because although it’s a four-square and dumpy construction made from solid cement with a very flimsy vaguely-Tyrolean balcony all around the first floor level, the exterior walls have been contrived to resemble wooden planks and at the sides covered with tree-trunks and branches of inset cork, which material also surrounds the ‘gothic’ windows. Built in the 1860’s, it long ago was already in a fairly bad condition, but enough remained so that one hardly knew whether to burst out laughing or stare in amazement. Although boarded up, access was no great difficulty and worth the trouble, because it contains something I’ve never been able to work out. The main bedroom was preposterously but meticulously decorated in painted white lace over blue exactly following the description of his ‘heroine’s’ love-nest in Zola’s Nana. Now that novel only appeared in 1880, and it would be unlikely, surely, that a woman getting on and with every reason to uphold whatever respectability she could muster would deliberately imitate the decorations of the most blatant and vulgar tart in all literature, assuming she read at all. Could that mean that her fame, or infamy as the case may be, had spread to Paris? Or just, perhaps, that it was a vogue of the time, which Zola’s relative inexperience in the fashionable world represented to him as daring and original. The Countess hung onto her romantic chalet as a summer residence until 1911 in spite of everything. Later on, and up to the nineteen forties, it was inhabited by the then President of Portugal. I’m not sure what’s happened to it these days, if there’s much left to worry about.

Presumably because in those days most of what is now the Parque Nacional de Sintra-Cascais belonged to no-one in particular, the grounds of Pena evidently extend beyond the walls. Near the Condessa’s chalet, for instance, there was a sort of underground pass leading to what could have been agricultural land and a delicious little slate-roofed Hansel and Gretel house that I would have loved myself but which no-one paid the slightest attention to and so now its no longer there. Much more mysteriously, and also nearby, there’s a collection of five or six substantial and ornate houses in another walled estate only visible from the heights of Cruz Alta or just partly from an almost unknown track. They were all in good condition and the immediate area was well tended, but there appeared not to be a soul in them. The whole area was rather difficult to get into, but when I managed I had no desire at all to hang around. I had the impression that the blank windows were concealing watching eyes, and moreover I’d already heard, or imagined I’d heard, some blood-curdling shrieks from somewhere in the distance. That jagged ends of broken bottles had recently been set into the top of some of the wall was not very reassuring either. The place is supposed to be the property of some botanical or horticultural society, but it’s too eerie and ostentatiously silent to be quite convincing. I’ve never spoken to anyone else in Sintra who’s ever heard of it, so what its original purpose was I have no idea – some other secluded hideaway for individuals not welcome at the palace? I see that Vale Flor, as it’s called, is receiving some official attention lately as another potentially listed site, but with no historical information made available. Having already announced myself as sceptical of ghosts, all the same that side of the serra has some unpleasant spots, where the hair on the back of the neck tends to rise as if in awareness that lives have departed with such agony and reluctance as to leave a permanent crease in the air.