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Title: Virgin Spain
Scenes from the spiritual drama of a great people
Author: Waldo David Frank
Release date: August 8, 2024 [eBook #74212]
Language: English
Original publication: NYC: Boni & Liveright, 1926
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIRGIN SPAIN ***
_VIRGIN SPAIN_
[Illustration: colophon]
_by WALDO FRANK_
_The Unwelcome Man_
_The Dark Mother_
_Rahab_
_City Block_
_Holiday_
_Chalk Face_
_The Art of The Vieux Colombier_
_Our America_
_Salvos_
_Virgin Spain_
and Introductions to
_Adventures in The Arts, by Marsden Hartley_
_Cane, by Jean Toomer_
_The Plays of Molière_ (_Modern Library_)
_Lucienne, by Jules Romains_.
[Illustration:
VIRGIN SPAIN
SCENES FROM THE SPIRITUAL
DRAMA OF A GREAT PEOPLE
WALDO FRANK
NEW YORK
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1926
]
COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration: colophon]
First printing, March, 1926
Second printing, June, 1926
_To_
_those brother Americans_
_whose tongues are Spanish and Portuguese_
_whose homes are between the Rio Grande
and Tierra del Fuego_
_but whose America
like mine_
_stretches from the Arctic to the Horn._
OFTEN, MEDITATING ON THE FERVOR WITH WHICH SPAIN HAS EVER DEFENDED
AND PROCLAIMED THE DOCTRINE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION, I HAVE
THOUGHT THAT IN THE DEPTHS OF THIS DOGMA THERE MUST BE A MYSTERY
AKIN WITH THE MYSTERY OF OUR NATIONAL SOUL: THAT PERHAPS THIS DOGMA
IS A SYMBOL ... OF OUR BEING. ...
ANGEL GANIVET.
_ACKNOWLEDGMENTS_
¶ The wanderer upon the face of the earth will love these lands whose
drama is the burden of my book, if for no other reason for the pure
hospitality of their peoples. To move from the Sahara of the Arabs to
Biscay of the Basques, is to move from hospitable home to hospitable
home: is to be chained forever in the remembrances of kindness. Unto all
my friends, whose names are not too numerous to mention but whose grace
would feel itself abused by public thanks, my thanks, then.
¶ Acknowledgments more intellectual are more easy. Above others, I am
indebted to Federico de Onís, Head of the Department of Spanish
Literature at Columbia University. Professor de Onís, whom I was
fortunate to find in Spain, carried me to his native Salamanca (whence
alas! Unamuno had just been exiled). After my book was written, he took
time to read the proofs and to give me the unstinted, generous,
invaluable aid of his erudition. I must name also José Ortega y Gasset,
the outstanding intellectual master of the younger generation in Spain;
Juan Ramón Jiménez, the poet; Luis Araquistáin, the satirist and social
critic; Manuel Cossío, the authority on Greco; Azorín and Pío Baroja,
Spain’s leading novelist; Ramiro de Maeztu and Enrique Díez-Canedo,
critical leaders in Spain’s cultural renascence; Ramón Carande, the
historian, and Pedro Salinas, the poet. All of these eminent men of
Spain, in long conversations, helped me with a hospitality truly of
their land, to my search for understanding of a people notoriously poor
in critical and historical tradition. Nor can I neglect to mention
Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican poet and Ambassador to the Argentine
Republic, and Baldamiro Sanín Cano, the Colombian essayist, who helped
to clarify for me that so urgent aspect of the Spanish spirit which is
American. It must, however, be understood that none of these men is to
be held responsible for the conception or for any of the ideas of this
book.
¶ Much of the materials of my work has appeared in article form in
magazines. To the Editors of _The Commonweal_, _The Dial_, _The Menorah
Journal_, _The Nation_, _The New Republic_, _The North American Review_,
_La Revista de Occidente_ (Madrid), _The Saturday Review_ and _The
Virginia_ (University) _Quarterly_, my acknowledgments, also.
¶ Finally, a word by way of explanation. What I have attempted might be
called a Symphonic History. Spain is a complex integer: some of the
elements which compose it are known commonly under such terms as
climate, geography, historical events, literature, manners, custom, laws
and art. Since I felt the Personality of Spain to hold all of these
_immediately_, as a body holds all its organs, I have essayed, not to
discuss them severally, not to relate their passage and chronological
order, not primarily to picture or to dissect them. But I have let them
come, each in its measure and its turn, upon the scene: and like actors
in a play, like themes in a symphony, they have spoken their parts. If I
could have my way, the pages of my book would come unto my reader as a
drama he sees acted in an evening, or as a work of music he hears
performed in an hour. I cannot command this proper and impossible
hearing. I can but pray my reader, in some such spirit and attention, to
take the book which lies now in his hand. Let him do this for me, and I
shall gladly leave to him the judgment of my failure or success.
W. F.
_New York, December, 1925._
_CONTENTS_
PAGE
PRELUDE: THE SKY OF SPAIN 5
PART ONE: _Spain_
CHAPTER
I. HINTERLAND IN AFRICA 11
_a._ _Oasis_ 13
_b._ _Moghreb_ 24
_c._ _Ishmael and Israel_ 34
II. HINTERLAND IN SPAIN 43
III. ANDALUSIA 49
_a._ _El Andalús_ 51
_b._ _The Eye_ 57
_c._ _The Bowels_ 64
_d._ _A Goddess and Don Juan_ 70
_e._ _The Gypsies Dance_ 80
_f._ _Spain Dances_ 82
IV. ARAGON 89
_a._ _The Atom_ 91
_b._ _The Way of the Atom_ 96
V. CASTILE 101
_a._ _The Castle of the Cid_ 103
_b._ _The Stones of Wisdom_ 110
_c._ _The Water Bridge_ 117
_d._ _The Miracle of El Greco_ 121
_e._ _The Tomb_ 132
VI. THE DREAM OF VALENCIA 137
PART TWO: _The Tragedy of Spain_
VII. THE WILL OF THE CATHOLIC KINGS 141
VIII. THE WILL OF SAINT AND SINNER 155
_a._ _Irony and Honor_ 157
_b._ _The Mystic_ 159
_c._ _The Jesuit_ 167
_d._ _The Jurist_ 173
_e._ _The Rogue_ 178
_f._ _Velázquez_ 183
IX. THE WILL OF DON QUIXOTE 189
_a._ _The Birth of the Hero_ 191
_b._ _The Career of the Hero_ 201
_c._ _The Book of the Hero_ 218
X. THE WILL OF GOD 227
_a._ _The Bull Fight_ 229
_b._ _Man and Woman_ 239
_c._ _Madrid_ 250
PART THREE: _Beyond Spain_
XI. THE RIFT IN BARCELONA 255
XII. THE COMEDY OF THE BASQUE 261
XIII. TWO ANDALUSIANS 273
_a._ _The Sleepers_ 275
_b._ _The Awakeners_ 280
_c._ _The Sleepless Spirit_ 287
XIV. THE PORT OF COLUMBUS 293
_PRELUDE_
_THE SKY OF SPAIN_
_The sky of Spain is high. It is above earth very high. It is above
Spain very high. It is separate from Spain.... It is a clear white sky.
Sunlight is white in it. And the clouds are white.... It is a still sky.
The clouds stand still in a great height and fixed as in a crystal....
The light of the sun becomes the light of the sky, becomes the light of
the clouds, far from the dark red earth of Spain. Spain is her earth and
her sky.... I am within the pasture plains of Extremadura. Behind me
lies Badajoz...._
* * * * *
_I have walked at dawn upon an ancient bridge of granite across the
summer-shrunken river. The water curls and swerves through gold sand. In
little steel-blue pools it lies deep; then it runs off in thinning
saffron ribbons. Soldiers sit on black horses who drink the water
silkening at their knees. The bridge swings in yellow arches. There is a
bastioned gate cut with the conquering arms of Leon and Castile._
_In the east, a low sun. Its horizontal hand touches my face. It is hot,
striking across cool dawn. Badajoz is houses gray and gold over shut
streets around a Gothic church. The sun is outside the cool city. On the
Cathedral porch sit two old women. Their day has begun: it is to sit
with open claw and to close on coin and to bless the giver of coin._
_In my pocket is naught but the moldy paper of Portugal and the silver
duros of Spain. I shake my head at the two aged women. “No tengo suelto.
Lo siento.” I smile. She to my left smiles back. The other frowns and
mutters. They are one, save for the difference between a frown and a
smile._
_Hairy goats clatter, swinging creamy udders. Burros pass with men and
women, stolid, on their haunches. Through the crevice of leaning walls
the sun lays a hot finger on my brow. My body is chill._
_The bread in the fonda tastes coarse. It is sour and hurts my mouth.
The coffee is tasteless ... a sort of gray heat ... good. Now I have a
pocket full of coppers. I cross to the Cathedral porch. The two old
women ... one, split by a frown and a smile. To the frown, I give five
coppers, to the smile I give one. The smile and the frown do not change.
I am in Spain!_
_The shut town is expanding. The sun is still outside; streets twist to
avoid it. But the sun works. The city expands. Men and women are a
melting on the street. Men and women are motes of life within the
melting city...._
* * * * *
_Badajoz is behind. The sun is high, and here the pasture plains. The
Guadiana treeless wanders to the south. It is a thirsty river. It is a
river homesick for the hills of its youth; moved by a dream of coolness
southward, languidly stirred to win this dream in the south. Cities have
no sky. Beyond the walls of Pax Augusta which centuries have mellowed
from the Roman Camp holding harsh soldiers to this Badajoz ... now the
sky of Spain...._
_I have never seen a sky so far from my head: I have never seen a world
so sharp in my eye. The sky lifts me to a realm of visions. And as I
pass into its moveless search, still I stand fixed within this graphic
world.... Sheep bleat in a wave of dust.... The dust is dense. Curling,
swirling, puffing, streaking down, the dust is clear as glass. The sheep
are solid masses of tempestuous wool; each sheep is a writhe about four
feet, about stalks of sinewed bone jerking it on. Here’s a man. A solid
body. Hands crustaceous; face crisp skin drawn on a gaping skull: and
over the skin porous as soapstone, bristles of separate hair, sweat,
huddles of dust. The smoke from the cigarette cuts rising through the
air. Over his shoulder, miles and miles away, a ruined village rests on
the hump of a hill. Barbary figs stand at the walls of a splintered
chapel. Solid Spain! The earth is clotted, corrugation, furrow. In a red
gulch a blackish water drips. And there are flowers, purple like shreds
of morning._
_Everywhere sky. So far away, and everywhere. Its apartness is a force
lifting the broken things of Spain as in a great dance Godward. Dust and
sheep-hoof, ash of cigarette, pound of the shepherd’s staff on the
earth, swish of his chaps, the dog’s soft pads against stone ... rise
all in this various clarity, as in a dance, to the sky._
* * * * *
_I have a vision which has not left me. I shall love this people and
this world. For in my vision I have been born as they.... There is a
Funnel. Its walls are the round, white sky. It is thewed together by the
rays of the sun. And at the Funnel’s mouth is the mouth of God, speaking
the words which are the things of earth. Down this Funnel as in birth,
we fall. Until we strike upon the land of Spain._
_PART ONE_
_Spain_
_CHAPTER I_
_HINTERLAND IN AFRICA_
_a. Oasis_
_b. Moghreb_
_c. Ishmael and Israel_
_a. Oasis_
In the desert, night is reason; the day is magic and madness. This is a
law of the desert, and of the desert dwellers.
The light of the sun turns air into an incantation; it is dangerous to
man as the sharpest steel or the fire. And the air possessed makes
marvels of the land. The sky is opaque like a baking stone. The sterile
hills are in perennial motion. They are not hills docile and quiet for
the feet of man. They are enactments of geologic drama. By æons they
displace not man alone, but the first life that crawled. Each rim of the
hills is an age; they gyre in cosmic emotion.
Under a cloudless sky that is too still, earth veers; and under the
hills, sand by some magic teems with forms of flesh. The light on a dune
turns it into a thigh. Far off the waste becomes a sea, a snow-field.
But this exquisite flesh and snow and sea are aloof. Man is contemporary
only with the birth and with the death of worlds. And the hushed
counterpoise of life, which is his mortal span, is desert.
But with the night the world becomes a world that he can dwell in. The
evening star, sending its ray through opalescent dusk, is a sun he can
dwell with. The sky grows soft. The hills are shrouded like his body;
they are compounded like his soul of silences; they behold a sky that
does not sear and an earth he can walk. The moon strides like a master,
subduing the caravans of stars. The moon is male, and human.
The world of the day is a world of violence. It has no water and it has
no sweetness. It is the world of this life: best spent in marching,
passionate-shrewdly, toward dusk. Night is man’s kingdom, his dear
reality: it is a place of gardens under which flow waters: it is a place
of measurable fires: a place of shadows and of meditation: a place of
dew and of love.
Wonder therefore not at the triumph of Mohammed, master of lands of
desolation, who leads his peoples still across a day of flame to the
revealing sleep of his dusk paradise.
* * * * *
This magic of the desert day is ironic; at odd places the irony turns
smile. Just enough welcoming the smile to tempt man to live on within
the toils of the desert. The name of the smile is Oued--whence our word
Oasis. The Oued is a spill of water from the breast of a mountain.
Hidden springs converge and burst the rusty slope; and there is a tiny
river till the sands have drunk it. Where it flows, the desert smiles:
smiles date-palms, fig trees, thickets of oleander. So the desert keeps
its perennial victims living.
At the bottom of the Oued is the town.
The mountains raise their convolutions in a great struggle, ere they
break and die under these southern sands. The heights grow steep. Water
falls through rock, pours through curtains of brush that hang upon the
gorges. There is verdure: cataracts of stone with silver veins of water,
flats of sand where the palms rise seeking the sun above a precipitous
gulch, water mills hid in orange-groves, terraced houses with many roofs
and every roof a place for looms, for women. The water broadens, is
caught into a hundred irrigating ditches. The date-palms thicken and
camp like an army; the town huddles with its white walls windowless.
The morning sun comes late to the Oasis, for it must rise above the
hills. But dawn dwells already on the desert. It is a subtle radiance of
decaying night. Infinitesimal browns and blacks fleck the dim waste:
these are the camps of nomads who use the Oasis as a trading center.
Their tents are of undyed camel wool, strung low so that they look like
camels crouching. The great slow beasts are at anchor by the tent. Dry
grass is piled for them; they turn their delicate heads on the arched
neck that fronts the body like the prow of a ship. Camel grass burns
within. The Arab, swathed in his white burnouse, squats at the mouth of
the tent and strikes his brow to the dust, saying his dawn-prayer.
Unveiled behind him is his wife over the flame of twisted grass, and
cooks and watches her children. On the horizon stand two caravans of
twenty camels, bulging with dates. Now the thread of their approach
writes upon the desert. It is market day in the Saharan center. There
will be many caravans. And the wide scatter of nomads will close in like
fragments of iron magnetized; making an irradiant design from the town
to the horizons.
The market place is a low square, on the edge of the town away from the
Oasis. One side of it is a mosque, a Koran school, a string of Moorish
cafés where already merchants huddle with their coffee. The corner
breaks into a labyrinth of streets strident with tiny shops. Upon a
third side, the desert road cuts into the breast of sand-dunes; far away
is the white solitary shell of a Marabout’s tomb.
The crowd is the town and the desert: an Arab world, drawn by hunger
from far gold slopes, to make this thick and hardy organism. Most of the
men wear burnouses of unbleached wool; their heads are covered by the
ample hood and the skirt falls low over the inner jacket, over the naked
legs, to the feet which are either bare or shod with sandal soles of
grass thonged to the ankle. Time has dyed the virgin wool and use has
torn it; the shreds and rents are fantasies in dirt. Within the hoods,
sun-baked faces stare. The hands are talonous; the legs are like the
tendoned legs of some great bird. And yet the dirtiest garment falls to
the dust with grace; and the most squalid head is high.
The merchants sit on straw mats: they bake round acorn cakes on
brasiers; they sell dates gold-dry, bronze-rich; they measure
thimblefuls of palm oil dripped from reeking goatskins; they cobble
sandals; they sell liver of camel and _couss-couss_, a staple dish of
wheat, flaked with vegetables or with meat. (Donkeys stand mournful,
charged with juniper from the distant Atlas.) They sell dust and
fragments of silver, potsherds, amulets against devils, halters, tea;
they sell the dry leaf of the favorite henna. The crowd sways,
bartering, laughing. The Arabic is vowelless and the burnouse is proud.
The Arab is shrewd; his eyes glint, his fingers snap, his voice pelts.
He is the survivor of countless children who have died.
Children not yet dead weave through the intricate clamor. The boys wear
a burnouse over a naked body; the girls are bound in a thick wool
garment that will announce to the men when the breasts bud. They beg,
they snatch a date, they nibble. Half of them are blind in an eye. For
Islam makes no answer to the Ophthalmia of Egypt: is not Allah good to
the blind son, giving him fortune as a beggar, as a ballad singer, as a
muedzin to call the prayer from the mosque tower? Blind eyes, ravaged
flesh, hard voices--most of the children will die. And their survivors
are these hooded men at barter.
Therefore, the men are strong: it is the law that they eat first and
what remains may go to the women and the brood. Women are here, too.
Ancients with foul rags to bind their bulging udders and their bony
legs; ancients almost bald with hands and faces splotched in the henna.
They sell wool or weave mats from the coarse camel grass that bunches in
the sand dunes like the hair on a mole. Younger women hold the veil so
that a single eye peers at the ominous world. They buy wood, slices of
liver, oranges from the East. In the weave of laughter, guttural and
fleshless, of bray of donkey, of rumble of camels like the ebbed roar of
a furnace, twines the call of children ... the call of begging, the
life-call. A hand plashes a drum, a strain of song rises and binds this
chaos.
He sits between a cobbler and a nomad ebon-black with the drooped tender
lip of the Semite. He is the blind singer. He wears a clean tunic of
white and his head is swathed in the turbash. His bare legs gleam like
metal. His hands are delicate as prayer within the market clamor. He
clasps the shallow drum; and his fingers fall like rain.
He sings the deeds of the warriors of Allah. From Mecca they came, and
Al-Medinah; they spread from Araby to Egypt and down to Sudan and east
to India. They brought the sword of the Prophet to the hand of the
world. Like the sun, they went west; like Gabriel they rose into the
Spanish north, bridging the sea with minaret and prayer....
Metal he sings: his song is sparse like shreds of grass on a sand hump.
Five notes, naked, timbreless, make this intricate weave. They start
like arrows, like catapulted stones, like horse-hoofs on the desert.
This music is stripped like war; and like war single-willed.
The blind bard’s face is gray beneath the sumptuous swathes of his
turbash. His lips twist like cord; his face like an engine discharges
the song of Islam--single of key, terrible in singleness.
* * * * *
The sun stands beside the minaret that forms part of the west wall of
the town. The eastern mountain is gold and over it lies a pallid
crescent moon. There will be moon tonight upon the desert! From the
_fondoukhs_, camels are beaten forth. They are prodded to their knees
which are then bound so that they cannot rise. And the fragile humps are
heaped with the exchange of the mart. Great bags, here, oozed sugar of
the date: now there is wheat and wool. Fifteen camels, lashed and
hobbled, groan: then sway into the air like an armada moved by the wind
of guttural call and staff-blow. Fifteen camels swerve through a narrow
gate into the desert.
The town stands behind, low mosqued: the minarets rise from the flat
roofs like acrobats. Palms make a misty coronal to the east: thousands
of palms, mazed like a camel’s hair: and over all the sterile mountain,
a chart of ages, working to the sky. Now, from the minarets comes a
voice.
_Alláh acbar.... Echhed en la ila ella Alláh._
_Echhed en Mohammed Rasou Alláh._
_Haï ala Elsalat. Haë ala Elfaláh._
_Alláh Acbar.... La ila ella Alláh._
It is the call of the muedzin. Invariable his word, his key: invariable
the five points of the day ... dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and
dark ... when from all the minarets of town, in all the towns of the
land, in all the lands of Islam, the muedzin calls to prayer. The voice
is of iron. Myriad muedzin voices, like strokes of some intricate
machine, weave together, and bind Islam holy.
Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God save only Allah.
I affirm Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah.
Come ye to prayer. Come ye to adore him.
Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God, save only Allah.
Belal, first muedzin, crier for Mohammed, spoke these words. They are a
redolent poem: ecstasy was in them, and resolve. They have not changed
in syllable since Belal received them from his master, a year after the
Hegira, the year of our era 623. But they have hardened. They are a
terrible horizontal stroke upon a prostrate people. Harder than bells of
Christendom they are; harder than the Jewish plaint which Mohammed
hated, which Mohammed strove to wipe from the ears of the earth.
The caravan has halted. The camels stand docile, pathetic, shifting
their great loads; for it hurts the soft pads of their feet to stand
laden, it is easier to walk. The men scatter and squat, each by himself,
but each turned from the setting sun toward Mecca. The water of the
desert is the sand; and with the sand the men make their ablutions. They
place their sandals beside them; all that is unclean in the folds of the
burnouse they lay aside. Their mouths mutter fast; their hands perform
intricate gestures. To swerve from the immemorial forms, even by a
finger twitch, is to be in heresy and to be damned. Their brows touch
the sand....
... For man is earth. The brow is his highest and his noblest part.
Let his brow therefore, five times with each day, be lowered to
earth. This is ISLAM....
The camels fall into the rhythmic swing which will not swerve while the
moon swings over the sand and the sand swings under the night, and the
silent men round the ocean of the desert.
* * * * *
From the town, as from a smoldering fire, smoke. There are no chimneys;
Allah takes care of the smoke. After the bright street, the house is a
cavern. The eyes, refocused to the dark, observe a long, high chamber,
its walls black with ages of grime, its ceiling stanchioned by wooden
posts that shine like ebony. There is no table, there is no chair, there
is no bed. Dry grass is piled in corners, and serves for sleeping. Four
families live in this lower half of the house. Four women squat in its
several quarters; about them nurslings, before them a little brasier to
which the children feed chips of wood, shreds of rush. The women cut
turnips, bake wheat for the _couss-couss_. There is a stair that is
scarce a stair: ages of feet have worn it to an incline. The upper story
has more light; there is a hole in the center of the ceiling which leads
to the roof. If it rains, the water falls through the heart of the
house; but light comes in, smoke rises out. Here, too, there is no
furniture. A chicken pecks in the crumbled floor; an old woman weaves at
a loom. Her hands know an immemorial process of weaving, like the mouth
of her husband praying.
The roof is the domain of the women. The street is for the men and all
that the street leads to. But the housetop is the street and the
playground of women. On sunny afternoons of the cool season, here is
their escape from the drudge and dark of their homes. This house is
high among the houses whose flat roofs move away in waving whiteness. A
minaret thrusts up ... there is a gap, a square ... then the packed
counterpoint of roof and turning wall and wall again to the green dense
at last of palms, to the gorge of the Oued, to the sand-stretch
southward where the sun lies in a mist as in a sea of opal.
The white roofs are gay with the color of women. Veils are put aside.
Babes suck at ruddy breasts. Red shawls and red babouches touch the
color of laughter. Women are carefree. Even the onus of prayer that sits
on Islam is not for them. Let them but bear children and hold the good
will of their men.[1] One woman, the rich blood clear beneath the bronze
of her cheek, presses to her bosom a child who will soon die. Children
come and often children go. The way of the child, to manhood or the
grave, is in the hand of Allah. A girl, candid and great-eyed with a
flinty note upon her luscious flesh, like steel on velvet, holds to her
lovely breast which motherhood has not distorted from its apple-rondure,
a babe whose eyes are already shut with pus. She will have a blind
son--perhaps a muedzin, perhaps a poet: certainly a Seer.
* * * * *
When the sun is good, many women follow up the Oued, with their brood,
for a day’s washing. The river is gracious within its precipitous banks.
The winter sun, sweet like our sun of June, has yet the reverberant
Saharan weight. It strikes the top of the hills, it rolls down over the
clay-maze; it strikes the level sand, down once more it bounds into the
gorge, over drenched bushes, over hanging rock and fills the Oued. Here,
knee-deep, with their thin gowns lashed to the thigh and the rondures of
their bodies speaking, stand women: and the sun comes to them. Other
women lay the washed clothes on rocks and with bare feet dance on them,
mangling and rinsing in song. The sun and the vigil of the hills, and
the town distant, release the spirit of this flesh. Allah is far away,
and the pure violence of Mohammed. Women are pagans again, and the Oued
has gods. Children peal. Girls let fall their tunics and their breasts
dance with their feet. Old women have eyes hot with memories, as they
watch the crisp bodies of their daughters.
But beyond the Oued, beyond its walled mouth where the water disappears
in sand, and beyond the date-palms, lies another town. It is more drear
than its graveyard. So far, doubtless, in old days the river ran ere it
had clotted and shortened its way with silt. The town is almost a ruin.
A few children play, but the houses are silent. No windows break the
seared patched blocks of clay. The graveyard is higher, and it has a
wall. Here one can sit and watch the ruined town and the maze of gardens
by the Oued and the palms, and the present town and the desert sea. The
muedzin has thrust his call to sunset prayer. The muedzin is gone. The
sun is gone. The mountains are sapphires in a cornelian heaven. The
Sahara moves in copper from the town: grows argent: its dunes are
swathed in mist like women’s bodies in irradiant shawls. The desert
fades into a fume of opal under a bronze horizon.
Intricate designs stir in the graveyard chaos. Between the head stones
and the foot stones the thin earth is raised so that the body may
lightly rise to Heaven. (Jackals and dogs, as well as souls, find the
shallow graves to their taste.) And now, to meet this subtle stir of
dust, comes music. Common notes, sordid notes, between the sand and the
sky. Drone of men in prayer, sudden motley of boys who sit in a black
room and shout the Koran, girl laughter, donkey bray, banter--a music
secret as this world. It comes with the night, swift, like any
revelation. It fuses with the graveyard stones, with the world. The
labyrinth of walls, enclosing gardens down to the Oued, is one with it.
Fig tree, palm, volute Barbary cactus, winding path to the river, muddy
river stretch, litter of refuse, excrement, manure, fuse with the music
and the graveyard stones, rhyme in the oneness of Allah.
A late worker jogs past on a burro. A Caïd--Judge--swings with his
basket-saddle on a mule. Another worker sticks his rod into the open
sore on his burro’s haunch. On one side of the glimmering Oued is the
town--a wall with many breaks, cobbles on mud, that lead into alleys and
that grow into streets. The walls, within, flank out into a square from
which turn several streets. The houses here are open to the night, and
on the doorsteps before brasiers red with coal, sit women. Allah is one.
They wear gay shawls, striped skirts. They wear massive barbarous
bracelets, anklets, necklaces. Their faces, in the gloom, are heavy with
designs: brow, cheek, chin painted with henna or with kohl. From eye to
temple run delicate starry lines. And the hands are henna-splashed. When
man approaches they sing the song of invitation. Behind them crouching
on their brasiers, freshening their faces, gleams a room with a samovar
and a couch. Now, the classic song of lust from their still lips. The
crystal and the song of Islam! One note for all prayer, one note for all
begging, one note for lust. Allah is one.
The whole town has caught the day’s fair fever. A man sits with a metal
pipe whose saccade cadence flies ... splinters of steel ... into the
night. And women dance. They move in strange reply to the music. For it
is violent, swift and lean; it is the clang and charge of martial hoofs.
But the women are slow, almost imperceptible their feet; almost moveless
their thick bodies. The arms wave languid like branches of the willow.
The whole town in the dead day’s fever. Dance and laughter and flame
blossom in the shadows of the street. A ballad singer sits among the
girls: he sings of the chieftain whose head was left upon the field and
how the Prophet came and joined it to his body, for the Resurrection.
But girls dance in a rising tide of Spring. His hands upon the drum make
running of swift steeds, his voice is a javelin: the girls move like
their breathing breasts.
Here is a large blank house. The court is high, and all about ring
little doors of oak. Below is a hall. Its walls are muffled in rugs, its
floor is far under carpets. Before the divans are tables, and the tea is
spiced. Men in white squat and play upon pipes, and their black eyes
gleam. The music’s shrillness shrieks. Now come women. They are four.
Unminding loveliness moves within thick brocades and clashing gems. The
faces are exquisitely painted. Verdant and nervelessly, they dance. The
body is quiet as a tree, the hands are pliant and susurrous like leaves.
The male music works.... A stomach wrench, violent as childbirth,
shatters upon the mellifluous woman’s body. Above the music comes a cry
from her mouth; it is a piercing call made pulsant with the hand clapped
periodically to the open lips. It dies; the elemental bodies stir again
within the dress and a sleep. But the male music works. The women pause.
The musicians turn about, so that they cannot see. With unfeeling hands,
the dancers loose the bonds of their thick robes. They step from the
splendor fallen to their feet; they are naked. Only the jewels flash and
bite upon their musing flesh. They dance. The muscles of their thighs
flow upward toward their breasts; the arms twine sleepy. The male music
works. The stomach, sudden, as if in unseen violation, wrenches,
cascades, in passional response. The shrilling pipes are visited whole
upon the naked women. They shriek: their cry, overtoned, fluted,
pulsant, marries flesh and iron: blots out the music, and the music
falls.
The town is asleep. Swarming reeking streets of the town are gray and
are shells. The walls stand white under the sky, and over the depths of
brooding human darkness. The crescent moon, with the dark sphere visible
within its horns, sends scimitar rays into the sleep of Islam.
_b._ _Moghreb_
A semi-desert land holds well the squalors and the splendors of its
past. This edge of Africa is the western end of the world whence the sun
slides down to the sea. The bleak steppes, studded with sage and cactus,
rise to sudden mountains; snow fields balance palm groves. It was a
harsh place for a great world to grow in. But glories long since dust in
Bagdad and Damascus have still their form in the cities of Morocco.
The prehistoric source lives in the prehistoric mountains. The Moor here
is Berber. No one knows who is the Berber save that his speech is kin to
the speech of Abyssinia and Egypt. His villages are perched on the
slopes of the Atlas and in the stony fastness of the Rif, much as the
Roman found them--and the Phœnician. Squat rectangular houses with
thatch roof form a semicircle on the crest of a divide. Below is a
thousand feet of air and a torrent; above are the clouds. The houses are
of mud and grapple like goats to the earth. In the low, flat lands
between the tiers of mountain, the houses are round. Closer to them than
the houses of Europe are the huts of the Congo. They form a full circle
within which dwell the cattle at night and sleeps safety.
The archaic world lies whole in the stratified history that is the
Moghreb. Ages before Christ the Semite scattered markets on the coast
and Carthage grew great. Rome became a mere machine for periodic taxes.
Roman order and Vandal havoc left the Berber untouched. He is a hard,
dark, leathery man. His head is close-cropped. He is prone to silence.
Despite the myth of the Moroccan Sultanate--that feeble creature of the
French and Spaniard--he is still unconquered.
Between the coast and the valley of Meknes and Fez he has lived, sullen
and declining. The spark in his eye, the curl of his black lip tells
that as he has outlived a long parade of empires, he will outlive this
French one. In such mood, he dons his woolen tunic broidered red or
blue, loads his olives on his donkey’s back and goes down to effete Fez
or Marrakech for barter. Yesterday he bartered with the Arab, with the
Vandal, with the Roman. Earlier, he knew the men of Carthage, the silver
lords of Tartessos. _He_ is a Berber.
Islam alone has won him. But not until Islam had passed him many times,
conquering half the Mediterranean world. The first Arabs converted some
Berbers and took them along, not loitering in these mountains. Berber
horsemen were soldiers and captains in Spain. But the Berber at home did
not stir from his stone somnolence. Córdoba and Toledo kindled fires
that warmed the monastic cells of Italy and England. Egypt awoke once
more. Mecca and Bagdad grew great. Morocco, halfway between the east and
the west, was invaded by new waves of Arabs. Hillalians and Idrissides
built fine towns in Algeria and Tunis. Morocco was surrounded by
splendors. The mountains remained mountains.
Three hundred years the streams of culture flowed through this frustrate
land, from Spain to the east and from the east to Europe. Now came a
Berber tribe from the southern desert: the Almoravides with their great
chieftain Yusuf. Twenty-two hundred years since the Phœnician had
builded in the Moghreb, and now the Moghreb in its own name grew great.
Fez, Marrakech, Rbat bloomed and their power spread to Tunis and to
Spain. Many ages did this stubborn world take to blossom; many ages has
it taken to die. The greatness of the Almoravides, of the Almohades, of
the Merinides lives still in Morocco.
* * * * *
Fez is the metropolis of a world that is gone: the head of a missing
body. A hundred thousand Moors in Fez-el-Bali live in an age synchronous
with the Crusades and with the Gothic. The modern world is here like a
mirage--or like a curse of Allah.
A river, plenteous in water for Morocco, makes of the hills a single
grove for olive, fig and eucalyptus. The town lies solid, within them.
Most cities are a crust of houses split into streets and squares. Old
Fez is a solid carapace of roofs, its rise and fall like the
articulations of a body.
Underneath the roofs are the _soukhs_, intricate like the wrinkles on an
old man’s face. These are streets of myriad and tiny shops. In one
section there will be only goldsmiths--hundreds of men squatting before
their little bellows and their little gems. In another congregate the
sellers of fish, the vendors of soap and grease, the ironmongers, the
makers of leathern ware. The typical _soukh_ is not more than three
paces wide; and each shop is an open box, slightly above the level of
the walk, and large enough for a single squatting man. Overhead, is a
roof of grapevine or of rush, joining the two sides of the street
together and letting in mere crevices of light.
Back and forth in this myriad-textured warren move the Fasi. The rich
swathe through on mules; asses laden with produce are led by uncouth
Berbers from the mountains or by black slaves from the south of the
Sahara. The human pigment is bewildering. The city Arab is pale as a
dweller of the northern towns of Europe: the Kabyl is dark-skinned,
blue-eyed: the Ethiop is black as the shadows in the tiny shops.
Burnouse and turbans are pied. Vendors shout for the passers-by to stop.
And from time to time there is a break in the ceaseless lineage of
bazaars: the carved, closed shutter of a Koran school shields
the incessant coil of adolescent voices, strident, wild,
unmeditative--shouting the words of their Prophet. Along the bare walls
of the mosques and the medersas, beggars are posted. Their stintless
catch-word weaves with the beat of ass-hoof, with the thresh of human
feet, with the shop-calls, with the chanting of students.
Each beggar has his phrase. It invokes alms with the patronage and to
the glory of a particular saint. It guarantees to the almsgiver a
saint’s word in Heaven. He sits in the shadow of the holy buildings. The
carven door leads through a passage of mosaic to a court, gorgeous with
tile and woodwork laid perhaps with mother-of-pearl. The holy students
of the medersa live in cells, mounting in honey-comb mass to the
minaret.
From the crowded _soukhs_, streets toweringly high and sinisterly narrow
twist in all directions. A band of Moorish minstrels moves from dark
door to dark door. The voices of drum and pipe give forth a ghost of
music. The voices are shrill like the calls of mountain life. Arab music
was lean and violent, a gray fusion of thrusts. This song of the true
Moor is almost disembodied. It has accent, but no texture. It stands
against the intricate mellow noise of the city, enfolded in the liquid
sconce of hills, like a savage summons. A door opens, a copper falls in
a drum. The leader of the band gives his toned blessing; the slender men
move on, weaving with their song a pall on Islam.
On a hill stands the mosque of Bab-Guissa (one of the 785 mosques built
in Fez by the Almohades, exclusive of monasteries and medersas). By this
mosque is the north gate through which the Berber from the Rif passes
with donkey-charge of olive or of grain. Each donkey-load pays duty to
the Sultan; and each appraisal calls for threats from the custom
officer--degenerate Moors who are truly slaves of France. The Riffian
pays his pence in sullen silence. And his non-resistance maddens the
Fasi. Nearby is an olive market, _Fondouk el lhoudi_. The olives ripen
in winter. Vast rush troughs and baskets hold the black fruit in the
open Square, under the sun and the flies, and the sweating men and
donkeys. With the barter come blows. A negro catches a bargainer with
his teeth and is flung off with a ripped cheek. The crowd buzzes, deeply
unmoved. The open baskets of olives, black-gemmed in the air, give an
intenser note....
On the heights above Bab-Guissa are the ruined tombs--the _koubbas_--of
the Merinides. Their crumbled arabesques look down on the long valley of
Oued Fez. A spirit of those ancient rulers could still find his
Fez-el-Bali: know this shut and terracing carapace of stone, blue tile,
gold ceramic, fumy beneath the sun. The old walls are there, too,
although time and cactus have splintered them. And the mosques rise like
a thousand claws toward Allah--the hold of the pious town on the One
God.[2]
The sun is sinking on the Almohadian wall that forms a corner with the
mosque Bab-Guissa. Soon will come from myriad minarets, the call for
evening prayer. The mountain donkeys no longer lurch through the Gate;
and the slaves of the imprisoned Sultan are gone. This rocky height
studded with moldering tombs, this wall and this tower form a natural
amphitheater. It is crowded with Moors. They squat on the ground,
swathed in burnouses. Water-boys thread silently. All indeed is silent,
facing down to a central point within the wall where sits a man.
His beard is white and his voice is gentle: he is a man with exquisite
hands and manners of the Court. And he is speaking so quietly, that the
massed crowd must hold silent indeed, if it would hear him. He is the
Chronicler of Fez--poet, historian, journalist: one of the great sons of
the Moghreb. Each day at nightfall, for an hour, he bespeaks in his own
verse the glory of Islam. Each of his tales lasts three months: there
are four of them to the year. His unemphatic words give to the men of
Fez two realities of Islam: the splendor which was, and the splendor
which is eternal. He speaks, not without humor; his immobile body
radiates peace. He tells of the gardens underneath which flows
water--the Garden whither Islam somnolently moves through this demonic
hour of wireless, guns and rail-ways....
* * * * *
The capital of the Sultanate is Rbat. From here, the Almohadian troops
set sail for Spain; and after the triumph of Alarcos in 1195,
Rbat-el-Fath--“Camp of Victory”--received its name. Fez, in hills, is
gold: Rbat is a dazzling white over the sea. The bou Regreg slopes down
within its sands, between two gentle promontories. On one of them Rbat,
on the other Sla--ancient cities, equally white above the sea, equally
proud, equally hostile. You can row from the _soukhs_ of Rbat to the
palaces of Sla in a minute. But these are worlds kept separate in an
ageless confrontation. Time was when the two cities were independent;
blood stained the sands of the Regreg. Each town slants to the sea upon
a mighty dune; and this dune is a divided graveyard.
The ocean has opened Rbat. Its bright streets run with the breeze. Its
masonry is less delicate and more resolute than that of Fez. In its
soukhs is a tang of salt. The Moors themselves are less shut up. Though
their burnouses swathe them and the women walk as hidden in their veils,
an Atlantic rhythm has crept within these folds; the somnambulance is
brighter.
“We have lived fair days
In Granada, house of delight.
Among its roses and its roses budding
We have sped many a silver night.
Alas! no more for our enraptured use
The dwellings of Andalús.....
Hush! do not make me suffer more.”
We are the guests of a _Cherif_.[3] Two slave girls crouched on the
carpet sing for us. The house is modern. But in each detail it is a copy
of the classic Moorish style whose glory is Al-Hambra. These might be
the days when Al-Ahmar, king of Granada, was friend of the Catholic
Fernando; and when Christians were entertained in the Andalús even as we
in the Moghreb.
It is a long and narrow chamber, run round by a divan yielding with silk
cushions. To a man’s height, the wall is mosaic. Above, it is white
plaster exquisitely laced in arabesque. The ceiling is carved wood,
textured and painted like a maze of flowers, with mother-of-pearl and
gold within the toolings. Outside the door we see the court, and hear
the song of the fountain. The mansion rises to four stories: upon each
floor the balcony goes round and all the windows open in upon it. A girl
brings subtly painted goblets; tea fused with mint is poured. Another
slave places brasiers of sandalwood. The monotonous wail and rending
song has ceased. The singers go in silence, as if they had left with us
all that they had. We hear the pulse of the sea: an indeterminate murmur
of voice and feet. Two little slaves, with eyes too far to be either
friendly or hostile, linger and change our glasses, ere we have half
drained them.
“It is because we have disobeyed the Prophet.”
A young man speaks. He is the eldest son and his burnouse is white,
undecorated wool. He has laid aside his babouches and his feet are bare.
He reclines on the divan, resting his languorous head upon a hand more
exquisite than the lacework on the wall. The features are subtly virile.
There is fire in them, and cruelty. He is a man fine-drawn--but
altogether metal. He is twenty: not yet married. His life is the study
of Lore at his _zaouïa_ and the writing of verse.
“In Al-Koran it is written that we should work--we have not worked. It
is written that all Islam should live in peace--we have fought each
other. It is written that we should shun luxuriance and vice, that we
should cultivate our soil and our minds. We neglect them. It is written
that we should raise up our women--we keep them down. Therefore our life
is disaster. Therefore the French are upon us. We have been the highest
of peoples. Islam and Culture were one. In the old days, among a
thousand men, there was not one who did not read. Within a thousand
homes, there was not one but had delicate rugs, handsomely carved walls.
Now, our houses are dark with smoke; our minds are dark with ignorance.
Like the pest unto the unclean body, the French have come.”
My host smiled, fearful lest the words of his too serious son should
bring discomfort.
“It is an evil hour: and it will pass.”
“Are you acting,” I asked, “to make it pass the quicker?”
“When we are ready, we shall act. Even as a child when it is ready to
walk.” The son spoke. And his friend, a philosopher from Tunis, nodded.
“Islam has been cursed with a new childhood. We are not decadent. I know
that your historians call us decadent. It is a lie. Measure us by the
Law of the Prophet. If it was ever good and great, it is still so today.
Perhaps you would find that it was never good. It has been studied by
intelligent men--the Jews--and found wanting. We can understand that.
But it is not changed: it is not decadent.”
I thought of the world fringing the Power of Rome, before Mohammed: a
chaos of repellent parts, giving no light. The Arab kindled this anarchy
and made it one. I thought of the reeking _Kasbah_ of Algiers; of the
swarming, inert Marrakech and Fez. I thought of the Monastery city in
the Sahara and of the holy Marabout whose Word Arabs came weeks on
camel-back to hear. I had felt everywhere a Body, flaccidly receding
from its accumulate splendors.
“You are a poet,” I said. “Tell me about the forms and the spirit of
your verse.”
“We have sixteen forms,” answered the son. “We have but one Spirit.”
“Poetry,” said my host, “is more plentiful than trees, in Islam. It is
our water-bearer. It is our forest.”
“And your greatest poet?”
All three spoke as one: “The Prophet.”
The Tunisian explained:
“Amrolkéïs, Antsar, El Bassiri, the poets of El Hariri and El Hamadaín
were great. How could there be poetry like that which the Prophet
dictated unto his disciples? In those days, Zoheïr was the greatest poet
of Mecca. The Prophet had escaped to Al-Medinah. At the annual contest,
when all the poets posted their work on the outer wall of El Kaabah,
there was none to vie with Zoheïr. And Zoheïr was an idolater, a man of
the tribe of the Koreishites--deep haters of the Prophet. But a Sura of
the Koran came to the eyes of this man who had been crowned. And he read
it, and he tore his victorious poem. And he said: The crown belongs to
Mohammed, son of Abd-Allah, son of Abd-El-Motalleb.”
“Who are the great poets, now?”
“How, in a low age, can there be high poets? We follow the great humbly.
The best of today--whatever it is--in poetry and in philosophy--is found
in Egypt.”
Mine host led us to the roof of his palace.
“It is night,” he explained. “We are not indiscreet.” He referred to the
custom of Islam which gives the roof as the inviolate playground of the
women.
There was no moon. The stars were a swarm of golden bees within the deep
blue meadow of the sky. From a hundred open courts, hid lights of houses
were thrown up. Each house was a muffled lantern; Rbat was a cluster of
hidden lamps peering into the turbulence of stars. The sea slept. Beyond
the city walls, the ancient tower of Hassan mused, a gray ghost.
The man from Tunis spoke:
“It is said, O my friends, that Morocco is the tail of Islam. Let it
then be known that Islam is a peacock.”
Outside the inner city, in the direction of Hassan, there was a small,
low group of open lights. Here the houses were not dark lanterns; the
houses had windows out upon the street. A trill of horizontal fires came
against the upright monotone of Islam.
“It is the Mellah,” said mine host, “the Mellah of the Jews.”
We went into another chamber. Slave girls brought fresh glasses, candied
fruits, dainties from Arabia Felix. Through the open door, the wide
night air was a discord from this polyphony of silks and gems, of cedar
and spice and ceramic. And there arose the voices of distant women in
song. It was the women of the house, locked from the rooms where men of
the profane world might come and drink tea with the masters.
The song drifted palpitant and humble. My thought went out to the
Mellah--to the place where windows faced outward, where women showed
their faces....
_c._ _Ishmael and Israel_
Forty men, women, children fill the room with a voice. They are Jews,
Jews of the Moorish Mellah. The unveiled faces of the women are fertile,
less metallic, harder than the faces of their sisters. The eyes are
deeper, their consistency more solid. Gaunt determination holds the
warmth of these women like an armor. The men are more variant and less
harmonious. A burnouse or red fez in place of the black would pass most
of them as Arabs. In their eyes the same cunning, the same swift
hardness. Yet underneath dwells a distinction: an enduring spiritual
source--a quiet water--of which the agitation of their external lives is
tributary.
After the song of the Arab minstrels; after the singers of Fez beneath
the Merinidean tombs shouting to the twang of a string; after the fakirs
of the Socco in Tangiers who bounce and prance their monkey shines to
the lilt of an apish cry, to the crash of a scissors; after the mystic
monotone of the Darwish whirling his soul into the Absolute; after the
service of the Ouled-Naïl who sway like trees deep-rooted and who shriek
like Liliths--now, this Jewish music. Ten women step to the center of
the room and squat in a circle around a copper cauldron. They sing, and
as they sing they beat with open palms upon the upturned cauldron. Their
song is in Arabic; it has similitudes with Moorish songs: there are the
ceaseless verses, the narrative design with rhythm and note recurring.
But the women are ample-breasted, leoninely gay. The beat of palms upon
the copper drum rises like a copper wall about the women and the women’s
song.
As a mountain torrent carries the rigor of grim heights through a low
tropic zone, so this music moves through the Moorish Mellah with its
prophetic past. For all its tides of blood and wandering, it is still.
The music of Arab races like stripped steeds; that of the Moor jangles
like bone, snaps like sinew. Here is a song that dwells wide over
fields, tops the cedars of Lebanon, swings with the sun--and yet is but
a prayer. Its immobility has voyaged. The prophets are here; and Ruth
with her eyes fertile as the wheat; and Judith scabbarded in beauty. And
Babylon to which, as Tangiers now, the scum of peoples rose; where magic
parded with penury, coins glinted in blood. Spain is here, a
perpendicular starkness rising from the low tide of the music--Spain,
with her singing seers. And Araby has dropped her gold into a humble
song. As in the streets where the street women sing, here is the
cry--shrill, lithic: dangling but a moment on the plaint like a
barbarous dart upon a mother’s breast.
* * * * *
Like the Jews, the Moslems are the People of a Book. The Bible is the
compiled and edited remnant of a literature ranging from epigram to
epic, into whose making went a thousand years. The Koran is the work of
a generation, and of a man. Whatever divergence from the prophetic mouth
is due to the disciples, Omar and Ali,[4] it is sure that before
Mohammed there was no Koran and after him his text has changed only
through processes of natural error. Before the Koran, the Arabs
possessed an anthology of verse, lapidic, utterly objective: poems
singing the loves and tribulations of the desert. These did not go, like
the ancestral heritage of the Hebrews, into their holy book. After the
Koran, this strain, celebrating passion, thirst, hospitality and war,
went on. The heightened activity of the Arabs enlarged their letters.
But the Koran, unlike what came after as before, is subjective. Pictures
of Paradise, explicit laws, ways of the wrath of Allah, pleadings and
campaigns, float in the swim of an inchoate exhortation. There is no
reason to doubt that the Prophet did dictate the Koran--and revised it
little. The book’s substance is an anarchic potpourri of what Mohammed
must have thought out for himself, together with what he heard in
synagogue and church. There is a canny set of laws: there is an endless
repetition of the delights of heaven “where are the gardens under which
flow waters” and of the miraculous nature of the virgins there, who are
never unclean, being perpetual lovers and perpetual virgins. There is
great harping on the unpleasantness of Hell. There are periodic
outbursts against the Jews and much gentle reproval of the Christians
whom Mohammed wooed with worshipful references to Jesus and to Mary.
There is, above all, ceaseless plagiary from the Old Testament tales,
whose beauty and significance are usually scrapped in Mohammed’s zest to
get to his main point. And the point, as a rule, is that Abraham, Moses
and Jesus were all true Moslems, that the Hebrews knew full well the
ultimate prophecy of Mohammed, that their Book tells them so, and that
only their wickedness keeps them from avowal. Finally, the book holds to
a running comment on contemporary events and neighboring peoples; and
the effect of this, within the holy Script, must have been vast since
here was virtually God himself dictating an editorial page on headline
stories.
Such matters lay in a great jumble in Mohammed’s head; for the Prophet
was too great and too busy a man to keep a clear literary mind. And in
such jumble they poured forth to make the verbose, extraordinarily
rhythmed mosaic of the 114 Suras of the Koran. The book is above all an
impressionistic portrait of Mohammed; in Mohammed, of the greatest
figure and of the greatest era of the Arabs. Even in translation, it
reveals the intense afflatus of a man who, from the age of forty till
his death at sixty-three, conquered a world, prepared successors to
conquer others, ruled savagely and wisely over a race as unruly as it
was naturally keen, won the love even of his foes and the submission of
almost countless maidens.
Mohammed was a great statesman, a great captain, a great lawmaker, a
great poet: he was not the creator of a great religion. Innumerable
mystic and religious men have worshiped Allah and performed the
ceremonials of the Prophet. But the Mohammedanism of Mohammed, of the
Koran, of the _source_ is not essentially a religion at all. A religion
is a revealed experience of the relation between a man and his cosmos.
If it is not experience, it may be philosophy but it is less than a
religion. If it is not revealed, it may be an ecstatic or poetic state,
but it is less than a religion. Its conclusion may be suicide for the
human spirit, as in some religions of India; its field of consciousness
may be narrowly naturalistic or animistic as in the religions of the
savage. But no plan for life on earth, however exalted, is of itself a
religion; no scheme for reaching heaven. Nor is a system which exploits
an already existing sense of God as a means toward a determined human
goal a system of religion. This, moreover, is the system of Mohammed. It
employs the latent religiosity of the Arab world to a pragmatic end. It
exploits the idea of God as modern pragmatism the idea of progress.
Mohammed uplifted a race. Where, in this, is his equal? At his hand an
anarchy of tribes filling the desert with internecine blood: and from
this anarchy he prepared the force which mastered half Africa, half
Asia, Spain--which bound with great houses and great culture Bagdad to
Toledo. The religious energy of the Arabs had for ages straggled and
fumed in loss; creating but a variety of impotence. The religious energy
of the Jews had thrown forth light in the world, and left the Jewish
body desolate. Rome? The immense creature, camped about the Latin Sea,
accepted Christ in its senility. Its principle of growth had not been
Christ; Christ was to help to rot and to transform it. Mohammed studied
Rome. He observed this one live element in that immense decay. The
religious element. He took it, as the modern pragmatist takes the idea
of progress and of science, to express himself and to advance his
people.
He lived in a religious age. God for seven hundred years had made a
wrangling and a shambles of the marts of the east. God alone, in all
Rome, seemed alive. God served to energize Mohammed’s act. In the Koran,
Allah is a voice bearing no fresh body of eternity or love, bearing no
experience of Nature or of a spirit that transcends it: Allah is at best
the charged echo of past holy voices, here applied to spur the Arab on.
The quantity that gave Islam weight was the force of its leader and the
latent might of his race: God was the _n_ by which the Prophet raised
this quantity to the pitch of action.
And Mohammed is the full rich presence in the Koran. Though God speaks,
Mohammed has the eye, the answer, the blessing and the curse for all the
ambient world. Mohammed tells the Arab about God chiefly that God is
telling the Arab about Mohammed. What else he says is not the crux of
the matter. Mohammed is Prophet, to obey him is good, to disobey him is
hell, the Jews are a bad lot, Allah is ruthless but to the believer
kind--such degradations from the old rationales of faith are not
dissonant from religion. Mohammed proceeds, after Moses, to instruct the
faithful in diet, in justice, in commerce, marriage, war. His plan of
success generates its power shrewdly from the normal appetites: man’s
dream of heaven, his fear of hell, his love of woman, his thirst for
water, his need of forgiveness whenever he has burned his fingers. Here,
too, there is no divergence from the usual theocratic Code. But the
Koran is distinguished by the relative place of God and of man’s
experience of God within the system.
Go back not to the Mishna, and the Prophets; but to the barbarous Torah.
Science and method are as demoded here as ethics. Blood and corporal
anguish are obsessive symbols. Justice is a matter of plagues and
trumpetings. Yet is God present. These old fathers would be abstract
save for the dwelling in them of a universal principle, called Jehovah.
It is He who moves these semi-savage tales. Hunger for a common
experience which, being both true and beautiful, is divine, informs the
acts of these men, directs their faltering passage. In the suicidal will
of the Buddhist, in the Dionysian dance of the Greek, in the metaphysic
of Paul or of Plotinus, dwells ever variant this single purpose: the
will to fuse (though it be to fuse with loss) man’s personal act and his
experience of the universal. This is religion. It is not in the
religious mechanics of Mohammed.
The Prophet invites Heraclius, emperor of Rome, to join or to
acknowledge him. He is denied, of course. But Islam is a “carry-all.” It
assimilates Mary and Jesus quite as it has garbled the Talmud. It places
Mohammed at the top of an agglomeration unified by him from the whirling
chaos of the east. Energy, thus drawn from a hundred confusions, thrusts
in a hundred directions.
* * * * *
If classic Islam is not essentially a religion, it is an Idea. An Idea
in motion. Its motion is horizontal; and its premiss of departure is
success. The follower of the Prophet cannot lose. At the worst comes
death: death in holy warfare means beatitude and houris. But Mohammed
does not lean too heavily on so dim a guerdon. He has genius in the arts
of diplomacy and war. He fights innumerable battles, and nearly always
he wins. When he does lose, he turns defeat into a strategic triumph. In
his first lean years as a Prophet, he has garnered a rare capital for a
religious leader: that capital is material success. He loans out his
prestige at a usurer’s rates. It is clear, soon enough, that to follow
Mohammed means victory in arms, means booty, means fresh women.
Health in Islam became a state of profitable war. From the mobile chaos
of the desert was created this intent mobility of advance. Islam was a
perpetual raid. Its health meant war: and war meant expedition,
conquest, ultimate death. The contrary of war, of health, of Islam--was
then the dwelling in the present life, and was Peace.
What contrast to the Jew in these brother Semites! Their mobility of
steel to the chemic mobility of Judah! The Idea of Islam has indeed for
matrix the unrest, physical and spiritual, of the Roman world. Peoples
stirred, because the great People were broken. The interior displacement
acted like suction on the peripheries of Rome. Dreams of power, opiate
creeds went through the windy world, creating new currents, creating and
moving new masses. Araby was drawn, so: and awoke. But this Idea of the
Arab could not have lived so well within the womb of the world had it
been alien to the Arab soul. In the Arab, as in all desert people,
worked the impulse of expansion.
Here Arab and Jew are one. Who has seen the desert understands: this
indomitable urge born of the sand-sea, to be moving, to pass horizons,
to be moving forever. The desert impulse in the Hebrew was sublimated.
Not his body, but his god should pass horizons! When the Jews’ body
migrated, Jehovah became static. Only when the body took deep roots--in
Palestine, in Spain, in the Talmud at worst (in America perhaps
tomorrow)--could the transfigured Jewish God pass the horizons. But the
balance held: as the Jews’ spirit spread, their body remained an atom.
With the Arabs, it was the body that expanded. Before the Prophet, it
had expanded impotently in civil conflict. Mohammed brought this energy
to order. But even he knew of no principle of expansion higher than the
raid and the empire.
Arabia expanded. Persia, Abyssinia, India, Egypt, the Sahara, Spain
became parts of Islam that was Araby in motion. The Jew discovered that
to spread in the spirit was to be immobile in the life. Not so the Arab.
The Jew learned that only an unmoving and an unmoved God could pass
horizons. But in Islam, to expand still meant to move. The law of
balance between inner and outer energy was not transcended. The Idea of
Islam became all body: all moving, conquering body. Here went the
Moslem energy. The energy that dwelt in that hid precinct of creative
thought was sapped to a low ebb. In the person of Mohammed, there was
energy both for conquest and for the subtler dominance of law and
wisdom. He elected that the ideas, the forms, the rituals, the
experience, and truth which he created should suffice for all time for
his peoples. All their powers might hence be transformed into the
stupendous business of outward conquest.
Of course, this was not strictly to be. Many ideas of Islam were born
after the Prophet’s death. Even the Koran may have been amended. The
Moslem architectures, the Moslem philosophies both mystical and
materialistic, much of the Moslem ritual, would have been strange to
Mohammed. But independent growths of the spirit could not become organic
within Islam. For in the Idea, there was the law that only Body of Islam
could expand: its thought and vision were create, forever. In
consequence, the few new crystallizations called forth by the new needs
of Islamic empire became endowed at once with the old principle of
fixity, with the sanctity of intransigent stagnation. The body moved.
The forms of the body did not move. Wherefore, as soon as the body
ceased to add unto itself by outward conquest, it began to rot.
This is the tragedy of Islam. It is writ large in symbols of the
present. Fez and Rbat and Bagdad are fetid relics of gone loveliness.
Their life has no virtue of rejuvenation; there was in Islam no autonomy
of method for the creating of ideas whereby life is recreated. The Arab
literary language is identical with the Koran’s. Dogma declares that the
hodge-podge splendor of Mohammed’s script is perfection: who shall dare
change perfection? So Arabic literature today is an archaic grimace: a
spirit muffled by the masque of thirteen hundred years. And the spoken
language, as divergent from the classic as French from Latin, is noisy
and yet mute. Moslem architecture has not evolved. The mosque of today
is a faithful imitation of some antique model. Prayer has not changed.
Science has not changed. The Idea of Islam has forbidden its own growth.
But if this death from inanition is patent in modern Islam, it is
implicit in the source. The fruit, only, of the religious impulse lives,
for it alone holds the rounding of life’s circle. The religious act--be
it art or be it ethics--cannot exhaust itself, because each forward step
is an approach to the beginning. The man possessed of religion is
possessed of a universal principle; and what he does cannot die. The
forms and words of his activity may grow archaic--like the sculpture of
Egypt, like the gods of the Rig-Veda. But the activity itself is forever
an approach to the Source. The farther the religious man goes afield,
the closer he will come to the Primordial Fountain, since all his life
is plotted to a circle. And if he lose his life, then will he win it.
But with the unreligious will, each act is a severance from source. The
unreligious is the incomplete. And its symbol is the unreal straight
line which moves away from its beginning.[5]
Even in its classic mosque, Islam betrays its unreligious essence. The
mosque is a patchwork of details, a mosaic of finery for the senses. The
very character of the mosaic is unreligious. For it represents the
analytic, not the One. The minaret has no relation with the aspirant
Phallus, or with the sublimated Phallus of the Christian church. The
minaret is a down-tending structure upon which the muedzin stands, not
to send prayer to Allah, but orders to the people.
The religion of the Koran is a caricature of God drawn in the lying
lines of time and space.
_CHAPTER II_
_HINTERLAND IN SPAIN_
The sun is hidden from this dawn. The snow range is a crest to the south
and east. Air, pouring over, cold and hard like pearls, is the dawn upon
Spain. Tidy huertas are green crystals in the dawn. Villages,
orange-marged, make a pied flash in it. Fig and olive march in armies up
the slopes of the Sierra, toward snow, toward dawn. When the sun stands
at last in the ridge, the day is hot.
This is the south. After Guadix, toward the eastern sea, the human world
grows dim. The carretera, at the entrance of a town, slides in a slough
of mud. Rain is rare and violent; it becomes a torrent from the
impervious mountain. Dark men in black grimed capes walk beside laden
donkeys. Women herd goats; the tuberous udders sticking on the mud.
Children are rhythms in a maze of rags. The eyes of humans are like the
eyes of burros.
The Sierras have disappeared behind the depopulous hills. The verdant
valleys of Granada are folded back. Villages here are hard like the
parched clay. The carretera is a swathe of dust, glittering in the sun.
The land is sere as if a flame dwelt on it. The eyes of humans are
velvet dark, like the eyes of a dream.
Murcia, now. Even the sparse irrigated huertas disappear. The barbarous
abruptness of the soil turns to desert. Villages are a single eyeless
street of houses, abject under the eye of the sun. The world is a
turmoil of yellow waste. The villages are splinters of the waste. Only,
to break the yellow, walls of cactus--a Maya-like green sculpture
matching its lush planes with the harsh planes of the clay. Goats, dusty
and crabbed, crop an invisible herb. The Barbary fig is the olive and
the grape of this land. Villages grow lower, sparser--merge with the
desert. Villages disappear.
Under the sky huge mounds of sterile hill rise now; and on their slopes,
red and advancing with the mirrored sun, are serried shadows. Caves.
Villages of caves. This is below Phœnicia in time. This is Iberia. A
Spanish folk still dwells here.
The hills are steep. There is a row of caves, horizontally curved. Above
each cave is a tiny aperture for smoke. Then comes another row. In the
foreground, the cactus is cultivated for its fruit. There is a hooded
well.
It is not yet noon. But the summer sun has turned the heaven into
irradiant steel. Light and heat strike like solids on the solid soil, on
the intricate levels of the hills. In their rebound, light and heat
become polyphonous, weaving the world into their image.
The sun, rising, faints into its own immensity of heat. And the cave
villages grow larger. Between them, the sterile hills leap in a monotone
against the day’s pressure. A cave town flings sheer to the ridge of a
pyramidal mountain. A hundred threads of smoke thresh the air like
filaments of wire. Caves are dark eyes that hide from the steel heaven.
The eyes of the dwellers are caves.
Shadow is cold. Here is a town with houses. Where the sun strikes the
street, horses, donkeys, moving forms of people gyre and funnel and
become a fume in the sun. Signs on shops, blue shutters, yellow parasols
of women tremble and swerve as if they were in flame. But shadow is
cold.
Outside, there is desert and the sky has melted. All the steel strokes
of the sun, beating down, beating up, are melted: heaven has fallen into
waves. Villages live in this fierce element. Men and women, donkeys and
goats live in this radiant sea.
Over the brow of a _despoblado_, the sun goes. The desert flattens, like
a sea after storm. The sterile hills are farther away, and on the even
plain there is grass. The desert becomes a moor. Salt wort suggests the
ocean. The road circles, catching the sun again. The sun splinters and
breaks on the moor. Huge masses of dried dung, the fuel of these people,
catch a last ray. There is a hill, dark-mottled. The hill is a city. At
the height, there are caves and dwellings cut in clay. At the base,
there is dust: and in the dust are streets.
Sordid wineshops, stores, squat in the dust. All is dust save the people
who are clay; clay black-baked in the sun.
_CHAPTER III_
_ANDALUSIA_
_a._ _El Andalús_
_b._ _The Eye_
_c._ _The Bowels_
_d._ _A Goddess and Don Juan_
_e._ _The Gypsies Dance_
_f._ _Spain Dances_
_a._ _El Andalús_
In the year of Islam 89 and of Christ 711, an Arab host recruited with
proselytes from the pagan Berbers and the Christian Copts, and captained
by Târik whose name is a fossil in the rock Gibraltar (_Jebel Târik_)
crossed the strait from Africa to Europe. After seven summers, all
Spain, even to the Galician mountains, was in the sway of the Prophet.
To their new conquest the Arabs gave the name Andalús, which means the
land of the west.
Their first pause was in a smiling world. Southern Spain, roughly the
part which is Andalusia now, for many ages had drawn the wandering
hungers of the nations. Here had been Tartessos, the Tarshish of the
thunder of Isaiah, a realm near the present sites of Seville and Cadiz,
known as the Land of Silver and whose greatness was synchronous with
Crete. Here had been Phœnician Malaca and Gades, cities famous for their
gay vice. Here had been Bætican Rome, birthplace of Seneca and of the
Stoic mind which in reality was Spanish. Here, from Babylon, came the
urgent Jews among the indolent Visigoths. A smiling world. On the
breasts of the Sierras, groves of olive and of cork. In the valleys
rivers that were veins of wealth. Luxuriant crops, fat kine, orchards
and vineyards: shade: and by the alternance of sun and cool a natural
culture. Now within this mellowness, the harsh Idea born of the desert
dearth.
Historians will give you the facts: how Andalusia did not hold the Arab:
how he swarmed the mesas of Castile: how he fanned east to the Ebro and
west to the Asturias: how only stubborn knots of Basques withheld him:
how he scaled the abrupt wall of Spain and poured down the suaver
Pyrenees of France; and how at last, near Poictiers, he was stopped by
Charles Martel and driven back forever. The truth is otherwise. Not the
Franks, but the smiling south of Spain stopped Islam. When the Arabs
faced the French at “Tours,” they were turned back already. The desert,
the mountains, the incessant war could not weaken Islam. These were its
food and its health. But Andalusia was poison. A luxuriant land worked
on the spirit of the Arab, causing in the rear a flinching and
dissension. This, several years after the “defeat of Tours,” caused the
return from France.
Often is the question asked: what Islam did to Spain? The first response
must be another question: what did Spain make of Islam? Spain was there
when the Arab came. She was far older than Islam, far more populous.
This Celtiberian base which it is simple and safe to call the Spaniard
is a strange people. It is warlike,[6] yet submits to conquest: it is
indolent yet dwells in a harsh land: it is inarticulate and savage yet
transforms its masters. Carthage has come and gone. Rome has faded,
after creating in Spain a spirit that is not found in other parts of
Rome. The Visigoths make their easy conquest. They are touched by urban
Rome already ere they come; they are no longer the rude Germans of the
Rhine. Rome has annulled their savagery. Their nature is rural but their
will is urban. Their nature is the foray, but their will is Pax Romana.
They have no metaphysical hunger, yet they spend their might defending
Arianism against the cross-fires of North Africa and Europe. Their
history in Spain is their dissolution; their complete absorption in the
mute, indefeasible mass of Spain which they are supposed to rule. When
Târik defeats Roderick, last Visigothic king, the business is done. But
henceforth, German blood suffuses like a golden glow the flesh of
Iberia which has already drunk the Celt, the Semite, the Greek, the
Latin.
There has been no drama. This process is instinctive. Spain lives like a
tree with her roots close and her branches harboring the seasons. She
has taken to herself the nourishment of wind and rain, the steadfastness
of sun. All Spain takes in is Spain. In her own vague life, an Idea has
been born, expressive of her chaos. Now, she takes in an alien Idea to
work upon her.
The Arabs found their kingdom. In 755, but a generation after their
arrival, Abd-er-Rahman I who sits at Córdoba breaks with the Moslem
east. Almost at once, the Islam that came to Spain assumes a separate
being, grows into a body independent of Bagdad and Damascus. This
separation means a transformation. And the cause of it is Spain.
The nature of Islam, we have seen, is like the nature of the pioneer.
Pioneer values--motion, violence, acquisition, conquest--bear the Idea
of the desert race, moving toward horizons. The Idea is not the horizon
nor the water beyond it: it is the moving forever _toward_ the
unmastered goal. Earth, in such psychology, takes on the delusive aspect
of a flying road. And mortal life is synonymous with earth. It is a
passing stretch. And it is close to death; for it is unreal and it is
dark. The true life, the life of the Idea is that forever unattained, is
that toward which our mortal days are an incessant moving. True life,
then, is beyond that death which this life truly is. And to attain it,
this life should be trampled like a road.
The Idea has its adornments: as in pioneering, they will be simplicity
of living and of thought; violence, cruelty, intolerance for all that
bars the goal; and the equally violent reflex from these--the narcotics
of sleep and sensual relaxation.
Islam’s Idea now comes in the land of Spain. And the Moslem hosts who
bear it and live to nourish it, settle in the south where settling is
easy. And having settled down, they build a culture whose like the
world sees seldom and whose causal spirit is essentially opposed to the
Idea of Islam. For the Idea of Islam cannot settle down.
Mohammed and his captains knew no such world as this that sends its
radiance from Córdoba. Nor would they have found it good. The Prophet
would have thundered: “This is blasphemy and failure. This is turning
from the commands of Allah. Rather than invent new forms of splendor for
your mosques, ye would do well to push on. What? Ye consort with the
Jew? Ye are tolerant with the Christian? suffering his monasteries to
abide in Islam? Ye turn a peaceful back on the Frank and leave to the
Christian Basques the holy labor of driving Charlemagne and Roland from
Roncesvalles? And ye study Aristotle? when the Koran holds all wisdom?
Ye tolerate schools who explain the creation of the world by natural
laws? when I have taught ye of the Hand of Allah.” Mohammed was wise. He
knew that the nature of the Arab, the Idea of Islam, the conduct of the
people must be one, else the Idea would fall. But if Mohammed was wise,
this kingdom of south Spain was luminous. Jews collaborated in
government, science, art. Christians brought their mysteries and their
music; and those who chose to pray in convents were not molested. An
architecture was developed. Poetry and thought flourished like grass of
the fields.
What had happened to Islam? The Idea born of the desert had become
detached from the life of the desert people, when it lay down in this
smiling southland. Life relaxed from the stern rigor of the Faith and
took unto itself new forms, consonant with its relaxation: Islam whose
health was war desired peace.
Meantime, Spain’s absorption of invading bloods went on. Christian,
Arab, Berber, Copt--each with a past mingling--mingled. There lived soon
again in southern Spain, one people: but there lived now three Ideas.
The Christian was the least self-conscious, the least active; the
Jewish was an insidious minority; the Moslem was dominant. These three
Ideas were fleshed in human beings; and the human beings were virtually
one. There were Moslem lords, whose ancestry counted Visigoths and Jews;
there were Christian bishops in whose veins flowed Yemen and Berber
blood; there were Jewish poets whose mothers had been reared in a Harem.
Under all, there was the immemorial base outnumbering the rest. It had
been pagan, Catholic, Arian, Catholic again. Now for a while, it was
Moslem. Within a hundred years of the African invasion, Spain was once
more inhabited by Spaniards.
Yet a new element had arisen, which was destined to grow tragic. The
Idea of Islam touched into new intensity the Ideas of Jew and Christian.
Jew, Christian, Arab, settled down and married. But the three Ideas,
grown virulent, did not marry. They made war.
* * * * *
Islam, meantime, moves from Andalusia north. And as it conquers Spain,
the Catholic Reconquest which for near eight centuries holds Spain in
blood is cradled in the tiny mountain kingdoms of Asturias and Aragon.
Where the Moslem settles, the land becomes Moslem. Often it changes
hands in the long war’s tides. But the people, like a tree, stays with
its roots. Fresh Moslems may perhaps come to live in a province soon
reconquered by the Christian. They will become Christian, too. It is one
people. The struggle is between a Cross and a Crescent. And the hands
which bear them are of a single body.
Islam, battling in the desert north, has settled to peace in the south
and fallen from the Idea of Islam. But battling in the desert north it
takes its Idea along--its temper and its nature. And these, it gives
unto the Christian foe! Rigorous desert traits flourish in Christian
Aragon and Castile. For here is desert again, and violence as the matrix
of the world. So the Christians of the north, facing Islam in battle,
live ever closer to the Idea of Islam. War is an embrace fertile like
love. Traits of Christian and Moslem pass in osmosis. And there comes
the day when warlike Catholics from the north press on the gentled
Mussulmans of the south with true Islamic rigor. And the Moslem south
must look to Africa for Moslems close enough to the Idea of Islam to be
able to withstand these northern Christians. And the war has no cease,
being a war not of bloods but of souls.
We are still in the first scenes of the play whose tragedy begins only
when the clash of arms is over. Let us dwell awhile in Andalusia, first
home of the Moslem and his last in Spain.
_b._ _The Eye_
There are places of earth like eyes. They have more than a proportionate
share of the light and the fire. They hold, within a fragile cup of
space, measures infinitely deep. Córdoba is an eye within the face of
Spain.
But Córdoba is dead? This whirl of houses is a husk of splendor, a strew
of ancient ash here and there speaking still in remnant eloquence of
arch or Square? Córdoba is not dead. Its life is impalpable like that
within an eye. Something has lived on in Córdoba. There was vision here:
that quickening of the nerves to the spheres of life which we call
vision. Here was an eye that saw; and it still sees despite the
catalepsy of the ages. Perhaps no eye that truly sees is ever blind.
Perhaps if within this cup of the Sierras there was today no Mosque, no
subtle nerve of house and street, Córdoba still would be an eye; and if
our sense were sharp enough to meet it, there would rise to us yet the
Word of its incarnate knowledge.
* * * * *
The Mosque is open to a _patio_ with orange trees, palms, fountains
whose pallid water runs in counterpoint with the fervor of mosaic and
tile. Women with their children stand about, filling their huge earth
water-jars, setting them down in the shade of a palm to talk. A girl
sings quiet and incessant: like the cool water over the stones her notes
diverge from the hard hot day. On the medieval _Puerta del Perdón_ the
Christian saints and regal arms set up their theme against the Moslem
mass of the Mosque. To the sides are colonnaded cloisters. But to the
south under the blare of sun in the white sky is the Mosque itself.
Nineteen arched gates make way into its open forest.
Hundreds of columns various like trees. They are all low: from their
smooth shafts the arches of red and white rise agilely to the ceiling
which once was a maze of lace-like wood, inlaid. The movement of the
columns becomes horizontal. Pillars of many marbles, of jasper, of
porphyry, merge in the sweeping spread. There is no Gothic aspiration.
There is a maze of delicate shafts with their heads arched and
arabesqued, prancing in cohorts between a dull floor and a dull roof. In
the heart of this battalioned whirl, stands the Catholic Capilla Mayor
which the Cathedral Chapter placed there in the sixteenth century. It is
a formless embryon of gilt and marble. It replaces sixty Arabic columns
and its heavy flesh rises far higher than the legion of shafts about it.
It is perhaps the greatest monument in Spain of the inæsthesia of
Spanish consciousness. But with the worst intentions, it has not broken
the spirit of the Mosque. The dance of the pillars moves toward this
obtrusion, swirls before it to the right and left, sweeps graciously
beyond into the shadows. Svelte and exquisite columns with
their double-arched head-dress, with their fleet ankles and
shoulders--marshaled like an army--move with the undulance of earth to
the _Mihrab_ of Abd-er-Rahman and Al-Hakim. The Mihrab is the cynosure
of prayer. Before it sits the Master to direct discourse with Allah. The
Mihrabs of Córdoba are gems so bright that they make a ghostly swirl of
the columns. Individual vibrancies of gem, of mosaic, of marbles frail
as sea-shells, fuse into fixity. The Mihrab is the goal of the columns.
So, within Córdoba, stands and lives today the Idea of Islam. Though the
Spaniards call it a Cathedral, it is still the _Mesjid al-Jâmi_, open to
the fountains and the _naranjeros_, open to the skies. It is a place
whose spirit in racing columns bespeaks the horizontal swarm of Islam to
the ends of Spain. Islam speaks; and Córdoba, which is far more than
Islam, answers. The Córdoban streets press and swerve to the north of
the Mosque. They are a compact of stresses doubly held together: the
Guadalquivir turning back upon itself and the rim of mountains in whose
heights still live the fertile prayers of hermits, hold the streets.
Córdoban streets are not like those of Fez, of the Kasbah of Algiers, of
Lisbon. Fez, within its translucent hills and vales, swarms like the
entrails of a body. Algiers mounts sinister from the gleaming sea, its
streets a blackened coil within the white sepulcher that strikes the
sun. Old Lisbon is explosive, gyrant, tragically repressed in its march
upward, losing the sky as it comes closer to it. Córdoba is proud. Its
pride is intricate as the Talmud; hard and abstruse as the mystic creed
of the Sufi; open as a page of Aristotle. This eye that is Córdoba is
neither secret nor flinching. And its pride is not willful. Córdoba is
unassertive. Its light speaks for it: Seneca the Stoic, Averroës the
Commentator, Moses ben Maimun first rationalist of the Jews, Lucan, and
Spain’s greatest lyric poet, Luis de Góngora ... such are the light of
Córdoba. It is the home of the most perfect Arab Knight, the quiet
Al-Mansor who, ruling Spain, decreed Sunday to be a day of rest in
deference to the Christians.
Córdoba lies within tumultuous mountains and a lazy river. It is a poise
of mountains and river. It is a kingly city within chaos; it is
masculine in a feminine land. The Christian Copts brought their woman
worship to Seville; the gypsies found haven in Granada for their Black
Sea spells. Córdoba forbids such fascinations. It is quiet as its river,
dense as its mountains, open as its mosque. The streets turn just enough
to throw shade to the patios. Ox-teams survive, yet splash no mud on the
immaculate walls. Here a miracle of life has overtaken the lunge and
death of Islam: here grew a kingdom of balance and of peace.
For Córdoba is not the rock of Seneca, not the intellectual play of
Averroës and Maimonides, not the deep current underneath of mystical
devotion. Córdoba is the balance, and the contemplation, of all its
parts.
* * * * *
The summer night is cool as wisdom; it is a poise against day like that
of Seneca the Stoic against the fever of life. When the sun falls behind
the roofs, the town opens as northern towns with the dawn. Day indeed is
often fiery night on Córdoba. The good folk have gone to bed; houses
have been swathed to keep this white night out. Now, houses are opened
wide. Air from the world is permitted to come in to the shut courts
where geese patter and women seat themselves at looms.
The people are dark and silent like the dusk. The sky is pale with a
glow of convalescence. The houses, serried in the curving streets, are
hot. The evening has a magic, it throbs and swells with tacit fervors.
The whole of Córdoba is quick under the glow of night. The stone streets
are flesh, willfully rigid, of a spirit possessed with the desire to
dance. And in the dance are darker intimations: cries, ravage, conquest.
But the slow streams of men and women are the sole expression. Are they
puritans, then, these Andalusians? They wear easeful masks for faces.
The women are clad in black, and their soft flesh within the shrouds
seems not the flesh of lovers but of matrons. Even the girls, sinuous
walking lilies, promise a snare of momentary passion: their will of men
is not to be initiates of love, but to be mothers. All is easeful--the
masks on the faces, the dark women’s weeds. They have been worn so long!
They are like the streets whose stones are mellow and whose curves and
windings have the fatality of forest paths. If these be puritans, these
men and women, with their heritage of war, privation, pioneering--they
whose ancestry is Islam, the Cross, the promised Zion--long since has
the hard fruit ripened. They are firm and condignly whole within their
city whose maze of streets is whole within the mountains....
This evening, Córdoba, released from day, is going to the Bull-Ring.
There is no moon; the bowl of the arena holds a winey night in which the
stars are bubbles of effervescence. The seat tiers are deep. Men and
women clamber noisily from perch to perch. But the thousand voices and
footbeats are segregate and aloof within the Ring holding this wine of
the night. Upon one side, the seats have been roped off and are empty.
Below hang two electric lamps and cast their naked glare upon a stage
improvised with unpainted planks. The stage is a little tongue thrust
into the arena.
The crowd has come and paid for a good time. But it is
self-sufficient--the strong willed, resourceful crowd of Spain. Myriad
calls and shreds of laughter, play of hand and foot twine about the
Ring: agglutinate: the groups of clamor thicken and grow wider: the
entire Ring is joined in the enterprise of shouting, shuffling,
clapping. No Spaniards blackening the tiers, but this one sudden Spain!
It has many means of making itself live. Boys scurry over the laps of
matrons: men sing falling cadences to girls: babies shout. The _aguero_
with an earth-jar large as himself, the vendor of _pastas_ and of Arabic
sweetmeats, weave through the mass. But still the Bowl holds its uncanny
silence. The night bubbles at its brim.
On the stage step forth two figures: the lamp-glare sharpens and deforms
them. A man, stout and short, clad in black broadcloth with a wide
purple sash and linen that is green in the electric glare: he carries a
guitar. A woman, slender and tall: her black _mantón_ is like a subtle
fur over the angular brightness of her shoulders. She wears a large
_sombrero ancho_, black as the two black eyes in her white face.
They stand within the night, within the crowd. The man takes a chair:
the woman remains isolate beside him. The man’s hands brush the strings
of his guitar. The woman’s mouth opens, and her breast rises. Under the
laced clamor of the crowd she sings unheard--under the silent night....
A note, hard like silver, high and sharp as an arrow, rises above the
clamor and is heard. Far up, it soars, surrounded by the stars. It
falls. And as it falls, reaching the crowd, it links itself within the
vast confusion. This rough-hewn Spain falls along with the note: is
drawn by it down to the naked stage, down to the red mouth of the
singing woman. The crowd is transfigured. The woman’s voice fades into
rest, within an utter silence.
The hand of the guitarist is not lean: yet his fingers make a murmur
like a breeze: clear in the silence is the music’s breathing. The music
has conquered: it is the night’s silence, speaking; the night’s quiet,
moving. The woman’s body stands rigid, her heels beat a tattoo of subtle
restraining: her voice is confident and exultant.
Burden heavy with ages of flesh, bright with ages of dream. Plaint of
spirit, rush of blood miraculously woven. A body in dance, rigid as a
column; a voice in song, light and swift as a bird. Many Orients are
here. In the form, a slender mystic draughtsmanship--Byzantine; a clamor
of soul, a submissiveness of body with all its sweetness and its joys
merged in the ecstasy of an ideal--Jewish; an intensive thrust, lean,
fierce, hunting--Arab. Rising like revelation from the Córdoban Plaza,
this Andalusian song of many wills becomes the drama of Spain.
The woman’s body scarcely moves. Even as she circles the stage, her arms
slowly rising and falling, her heels in periodic showers of sharp
strokes, it is as if she did not move: rather the stage, rather the Ring
and the crowd move than this plastic fixity of dance. Torment, passion,
vision, ruthlessly compress in a thin body.
The music cadence is vertebral. There is a time counterpoint of two
adverse factors: a rising lilt, a falling plaint. And they become the
skeletal arabesque which is the backbone of the Spanish music. All the
voices of Spain’s world are laced. The Jew’s sensual mysticism, conflict
between his homely passions and his cosmic fate, rises in a line more
Arabic than Jewish. And the tendency of the music to transcend its scale
is Byzantine; it bespeaks the North African shores of Porphyry and
Plotinus, of Origen and Augustine. But the stress is more barbarous than
platonic. And the _form_ is forever Spain. Its elements do not suffice
to make this music great. It is greatly moving, because its moving parts
become articulate, not in moments, not progressively, but all at once:
in restraint, in defeat--in the triumph of the artist’s will upon them.
The passion does not depart; a woman’s body holds it and we are moved
not by the passion but by the unmoved victory over passion. This cadence
is a plaint of agony. It does not bend her. This peal is pathos. The
high head, the arms crushing the breast, the torrent of heel-notes rivet
a triumph over pathos. The mouth sings languorous desire; but the body
is hard. Sudden the song flares like a vision from that mouth. But the
body circles the stage in a crisp gayety, the eyes smile, the knees dip
in courteous bestowal.
At the other end of Córdoba, the night lives among the columns of the
Mosque. With arched head and heel of arabesque, they dance their
mystery--a forest of willful movement under the will-less stars. This
woman is a column too; rigid, and stone-like and adance. But the dance
of the Arab columns is horizontal; it is an easeful running with the
earth. The dance of this woman which is a dance of Spain, is deep and is
high. It is not horizontal. So calm, it touches hell. So still, it
reaches God.
_c._ _The Bowels_
The Spanish is the fusion of the warring elements of Spain into dramatic
wholes. As the proportions of these elements change, the wholes change:
and yet are Spanish. Granada, then, is the least Spanish of the towns of
Spain; for, with all the elements there, they have remained disparate.
Even physically, Granada does not resolve its discords. It is cast in
confusion. Two steep spurs come down from the Sierra Nevada. They are
divided by the gorge of the río Darro. Smaller, arid gorges break them,
they expire in a plain. And within this broken sea of rock and ridge and
wood, Granada sits uneasily. One height is Al-Hambra, palace of kings.
From its towers the precipice cuts to the river; and in the west rises
Al-Baicín, a populous suburb. North, beside the river straggles a gypsy
village. And eastward, on another height, is the cascaded, terraced,
tawdry splendor of the Generalife. Physically chaos; culturally,
spiritually chaos.
For near five hundred years, Granada was the capital of a Moslem state.
After the fall of Córdoba, it was independent. And in 1492, when Boabdil
fled from Ferdinand and Isabel, there died the last political body of
Spanish Islam. For close three hundred years, Granada was the richest
and most populous state of Spain. Castile, Aragon, Catalonia were
rustics beside it. But the barbarous states spread; and Granada had
energy neither to spread nor to glow. The barbarous states had fused
their differences in the terrific lust of religious conquest. Castile
and León were closer then to the spirit of Mohammed than the Andalusian
Town in which the muedzins called his name and the people spoke his
tongue. Toledo, Valencia, Badajoz, Seville, Córdoba fell: Granada came
to be the last resort in Spain of the driven Moslems. A veritable city
state it was, going north to Baza, west to Málaga, east to Almería.
Meantime, Spain had converged into an austere camp. Her forests became
deserts, her towns were empty of men, her women suckled warriors, her
churches were the centers of recruiting. And Granada shone with ease. In
Granada, the wide lands were gardens; husbandry was an art. The cities
sang with ceramic and jewels. The mosques were models for the mosques of
Africa.
Córdoba had been the seat of Arab Spain. Granada was the heart of the
Moor. When the Arabs were too wasted by peace and thought and quarrel to
withstand the pressing Christians, they turned to the south whence four
hundred years before they too had come, clad only in the harsh will of
the Prophet. In the Moroccan mountains and the deserts, dwelt still
virgin tribes in whom the Idea of Islam worked with the virulence of
birth. This was the need of Spanish Islam. So the Moors came to Spain to
do what the Arabs had done and could do no longer. The Moors drove back
the Christians. Then they turned and subdued the Arabs. Arab Andalusia
was Moorish.
(And here we must digress for definitions.... The greatness of Granada
came with the Nazrite dynasty whose founder, Al-Ahmar, captured the town
in 1238 from the Moorish Almohades. And Al-Ahmar, born in Córdoba,
claimed descent from the pure Yemen Arabs of Kharzrej and Ansár. Which
is important, since it displays the dangers of speaking, biometrically,
of a _race_. The family that reigned in Moorish Granada was perhaps as
Arab as the dynasties of Córdoba and Seville! And of course, the very
first Arabs in Spain brought with them Berbers, negroes, Copts. Why then
was Córdoba Arab, and Granada Moorish?... We require the names, and for
them there are reasons. The first Moslem invasion was _Arab_: for its
impulse, its energy, its leadership came straight from the Arabs. And
that first Moslem culture which from Córdoba held all Spain north to
Toledo, south, west, east to the seas was also _Arab_ for the identical
reason. Now come fresh leaders to defend Moslem Spain; and when they
have driven back Castile they disperse the Arab masters who bade them
in. These hosts come in two waves: the Almoravides--_men of
religion_--are Berbers from the Senegal, and the Almohades--_men of the
Unity_--are Berbers from the Atlas. It is right to call them Moors since
they rose to power in Morocco. And it is right to call their dominance
in Spain the Moorish epoch since, after their coming, the culture of all
Moslem Spain not only differed from that of Córdoba but was deeply
homogeneous within itself despite political chaos.) ...
In the towns of Spain lived still the Spaniard with his absorption of
Semite, African, Latin, German. But the difference of the Moor from the
Arab was a change in his Idea and in the ways of life begotten by it.
The Christian forces were vastly stronger than they had been. Their own
Idea had been enhanced by Moslem contact. They were come a long ways
from the invertebrate Christianity of the Visigoths. The first Moslem
sweep to Biscay and the Pyrenees had planted a germ of resistance which
with the ages grew to be this vital Christian body, a body stripped and
ruthless as ever had been Islam. So the Moor could not, like the Arab,
dismount from his saddle to invite his soul. The Moor did not become
tolerant under pleasant skies. He welcomed no Jewish thinkers and
statesmen, he housed no Christian convents. Under the benignity of peace
he made no introverted, rational culture. When the Moor rested, it meant
that he was weary; and then he invited his body. Arab refinement became
voluptuousness; Arab ease became prostration. The energy of the Idea of
Islam had by the Arab been transformed into a _contrasting_ culture.
Under the Moor it became at best a _reposing_ culture. And indeed, the
Idea did not change. Christian armies saw to that. But the need of
Islam--to expand--could not be fulfilled. The Christian armies saw to
that, as well. Here then was a warlike energy that could not spread and
yet could not transform. It turned against itself. Moor fought Moor.
Granada alone held long to the appearance of a dignified state. And the
appearance was false. Moorish Granada helped the Christian San Fernando
to march against Moorish Seville, as a century before Moorish troops had
helped the Cid win Moorish Valencia. A hundred years ere its fall,
dynastic quarrels had split Granada into a chaos of tiny states; the
Catholic Kings needed to take it piecemeal in a series of raids on petty
princes.
* * * * *
The Idea of Islam is no more within this lovely world. But high and low,
strewn through the summits and the troughs of the Sierra, lives the
wreckage of the Moorish body. Across a gorge, Al-Baicín and Al-Hambra
face each other. Al-Hambra! all that may be said of the skill of the
goldsmith may be said of this Palace, with its scores of patios and
halls. It brings to mind, not other architectures but the triumphs of
the Cellinis of the Renaissance, the delicate perfections in Pompeii and
in Egyptian tombs. In minute and marvelous grace, it transcends them
all: and yet it is a building!
Within the _patio de los arrayanes_ there is a pool enclosed in myrtle
as a sapphire within emerald. Overhead is the soft pale sky. Beyond the
_sala de la barca_, arched like a ship, is the Ambassadors’ Hall, its
dome an incessancy of carven woods, columns and walls so tooled that
they seem lace threaded with gems. Myriad patios on either side are
myriad surprises of wood, plaster, stone that flows with arabesques and
softens to the creaminess of linens.
Some architectures make one think of man; some make one think of God;
some, of the tragic struggle in men’s flesh between the man and the god.
Al-Hambra exiles both the earth and heaven. That a palace lacks high
poetry, movement of aspirance, is not amiss. But Al-Hambra lacks as well
the sense of being made for men to dwell in. It is cold as a jewel and
as a jewel hard. Yet unlike other jewels, it adorns no breast and no
altar. It is faëry. Yet unlike other visions of surprise, it does not
entice the mind. It is no outward form of the old dreams. Nor is it
strong, save as some stellar gem, fallen in the mud of our world, has
its impregnable strength. It is immaculate of men. It is too far from
man, too far from God. It is not strong, yet it is not poetic. Poetry
must pay its tribute. If it sing a blade of grass, a kingdom, a
divinity--yet it must make its tribute to the world: man in giving music
gives himself. Al-Hambra, for all its matchless grace, is incarnate of
no warmth, no joy, no agony, no love.... It is a jeweled monster; a sort
of dissociate birth of human will. Although its tints are magic, its
curves delicate as a woman’s mouth, its forms courteous, and its stuffs
transfigurations of the elements into the radiance of silk and the
sweetness of wool, yet it is but a fragment. Its rapture parts not from
itself. It is Narcissus. It is a _Golem_ of the Moors.
* * * * *
The rock of Al-Hambra falls into the river and on the farther side rises
Al-Baicín, antiphony of Al-Hambra.
In the days of the first Nazrites, here was a place of noble mansions.
But when the Moslems, exiled from conquered towns, poured into Granada,
Al-Baicín became what it is now--a swarming city. This is as near to the
Kasbah of Algiers, to the dense Attarine of Fez as you may come in
Spain. The town is a lay of alleys maggoting up the breast of the
Sierra. The throngs are dark, aburst with energy. Eyes are gentle and
give forth no light. Faces are locked as if in obscure struggle of
themselves. This folk is neither gay nor sad, savage nor kind. It
partakes of the ineffable nature of the houses. What it is, what it has
to say--as with the houses--is detached from the hour, is a minglement
of nostalgia and obsession. An incommunicable town, knowing no tongue
save an archaic one: its houses speak not to us but to their own old
shadows.
A patio stable with its mangy mules, a gigantic oven where bread in
memorial Moorish shapes is thrust at the end of a pole ... such are the
words of the streets. Beneath the language which the people speak, this
rhythmic word of the streets.
Al-Baicín has a soul. What Al-Baicín lacks is body! Groveling life
within an ancient molder of walls, patios, wine shops black as
warts--this life so halted, so disgraced, so blind is life that lacks a
body. And there, polished clean of the clamors of the spirit, shines the
body on the opposite hill--soulless Al-Hambra.
_d._ _A Goddess and Don Juan_
The air is spiced with murmur, throat call, peal, with stirring of feet,
clink of earth-jar; it is a weave through which the horse’s hoof, flick
of whip, _ar-r-ra_ and _shuh_ of driver make a swathe. Singing cry of a
girl, crying song of a girl cascade to church bells.... Silence.... A
little square (Castilians say _patio_, Andalusians say _compás_) holds
an alicatado fountain: thin water within a sapphire bowl wavers,
splinters, fades like stars at a dawn. All about, the wings of a vast
Church. Fortress-like they rise, rise in terrace, in forest of
sculpture, in buttresses that sweep out of sight. And straight above, a
tower. It is the old prayer tower of a mosque--_al-minar_: the muedzin
post which the Christians call Giralda.
In the compas, it is cool; high overhead within the well of the walls,
the heat of afternoon is writhing. Heat cannot pierce the eight foot
walls of the tower. A pavement, so gradual and wide that a coach could
follow it, climbs to the peak. There are windows to tell how you climb.
The Cathedral, resonant with statues; the stucco palace of the Bishop
beside a compas sleepy and cool like a virgin at dawn; a slant of street
with houses dodging sun.... Cathedral roof, a groined and columned
symphony with transepts trilling in overtones away; a knot of buttresses
that scale a higher wall you could not guess was there; a grove of
turrets against the town, green trees; a line of river; town itself keen
in the gyrant air ... guitar-like music under the voice of the sun. A
scarf of hill, treeless and red. A court within the sapphire day like
rubies and emeralds--the _patio de los naranjos_--a frame of creamy
walls holding the rows of orange trees. The top of Giralda.
Seville: No, this body is Isbilíya. Town of the Visigoths, the Yemen
Arabs and the Copts, alcázar of the Moorish Yusuf who built Giralda,
town whence Ferdinand of Castile with the aid of his friend the Moslem
of Granada drove countless Moslems in 1248, bringing in other men who
said Christ, not Allah--said it in the same Mosque rechristened, in the
same town, under the same sun, from the same Giralda.
The repeopling, the christening could not avail against the might of
this past. Christ dimmed again; Our Lady grew. Our Lady who was Isis ere
she was Mary: consort of Osiris, Horus, Khem, ere she sat with Jesus.
And in her hand, through Seville, through Andalusia, a lily that does
not grow in Spain but grows indeed on the Nile ... lily or lotus or more
simply still _la flor_ in all heraldry, all holy craft of the land. For
Islam had passed to Egypt and won the Christian Copts who were in heresy
for that they adored a living Trinity and had no Christ on the Cross, a
trinity older than the Pyramids with the new Christian names. And now,
for an age, their trinity disappeared. But Our Lady became Fatima,
daughter of the Prophet and virgin although she bore miraculous sons.
And Arab and Copt march on to Spain. And the Christian saint comes
south. And the mosque of Seville is again the church of Our Lady. And
from Seville to Rome goes the first urgency to make a dogma of the
Immaculate Conception....
The town is so very thick with houses, where are the streets? Those
sharp cracks weaving through the roofs are streets? The roofs are live,
bewildering planes. White flat roofs under dominant chimneys. Roofs that
run with their walls. Roofs that are clusters of rush. Roofs that are
little gardens for goats and chickens. Roofs that are vineyards. Roofs
that are nurseries. Roofs that are streets on which stand huts of turf.
In a court, is a palm; its round head sends green star-rays to the sky.
The town is so very wide; solid it rings you. The breaks are breathings
for a palm, or a wide wall with crenellated top or a tiled dome like a
jewel in the breast of Seville. Thick town ... intricate, turning
roofs. Until the sudden stop! Seville does not linger. There is thick
town, then huerta. Country gardens are perfumed brasiers. A wandering
ribbon of low trees marks the sleepy river creeping down to the copper
wall of sunset....
It is cool now. They have drawn to the roof tops the canopies that
shield the streets. Now let you go down into Seville.
* * * * *
Varying weathers fall upon Seville. In summer days, she smiles resilient
and cool within a fire that shrivels the river. In winter, under a
slatey sky with her streets drenched, she is smiling still. Weather and
invasions come upon Seville; she masters them all.
She is an Eastern goddess unknown of the Greeks, whose cult is sung with
cymbals and in blood. She is no Semite; she is the antistrophe in this,
as in all things, of her great brother of the north: Toledo. Within the
huddle of her streets, lives clarity; within her sudden and esconded
curves, glows coolness. She is immeasurably far from the hot Jew and
Arab. Seville is Pagan. But her pagan spirit is uniquely hers. It is not
dark and carnal like the Sumerian; not analytic, open-eyed like the
Greek; it lacks the Italic will. Nor is it Berber. This spirit has a
spirit; the Giralda. To see Giralda from the town is to see both the
tower and Seville. Everywhere al-minar follows. It is cool in the sun;
in the damp of winter it is gleam. On the river’s margin where vessels
coal, it is a yesterday when ships had sails. Its simple face is
strength above the prone complexity of life. Variant, it is constant,
sovereignly self-contained. It mirrors men’s perceptions, who can see of
it at each moment but a flash of time. It stands for Seville whose
traits and deeds are facets of a Crystal.
This fixity, this intricate appearance within fixity is the deep trait
of Seville. Her genius, her emotions, her religion are in fixity for
they are held unwavering to herself. She looks not at Spain nor the
world. Not like Venus does this goddess walk and give herself to men.
Not like Astarte, thirst for the blood of others. Not like Isis is she
concerned with the cycles of sun and planet. Seville loves only herself;
and the moon and stars are brilliants for her hair.
* * * * *
The narcism of Seville is fecund. The gorgeous litany of the Semana
Santa is but the most famous of her arts. Religion is but the most
obvious pretext of her self-worship. Seville abounds in dramas and in
altars of her self-delight. Wander through her streets, commune with her
churches and cafés, watch her ample daughters dance to the splendor of
their own high breasts; read the legends--Don Juan, La Macarena. An hour
will come, perhaps at dusk in the park along the river, when she will
tell her secret:
“The Guadalquivir is my scarf of saffron; the orange blossoms sing
the chant of my flesh; the sky is a mantón of rose and purple on my
white shoulders. Church and God, love, blood and death are
castanets! I am Real. I am the dancer. I am Isbilíya.”
* * * * *
Sierpes, chief street of the town, is a bit of a way with a crick in its
middle: too narrow for horses and mules: the lines of shops and clubs
face each other across a slender sidewalk. When the good weather comes
the doors open; the clubs and cafés pile chairs pell-mell upon the
street. And Seville sits down and looks at herself. Drinks coffee,
Manzanilla wine, and looks at herself. Eats mariscos and looks some more
at herself. Athwart the Sierpes, other streets are a maze of tiny shops:
shops small and delicate like toys, shops secret and uncommercial like
the good Majas[7] who keep them, shops with too deep modesty to display
their wares and too little will to have much wares to display. Reticent,
charming shops like the hearts of simple folk, so full they are of warm
darkness. In such a passage, crammed with stores (for these central
streets are merely passages), in the very heart of a world of dolls,
lottery tickets, pastries, newspapers, umbrellas, fans and pipes, is a
Chapel. It is open to the street and it reveals within a long recess its
garish bower of candles. The throng crowds by. Dark clad, the women;
drab, the men with wide stiff hats and a clank to their high heels. They
talk of little things; eyes hold to the unconscious rhythm of the
throng. And as they pass, they shift their talk an instant into prayer;
or they make the sign of the cross; or they kneel. So Seville prays to
herself.
In the Parish church of San Gil, there is the figure of a woman. Is it
some crude artisan’s idea of a prosperous Maja? The dress is modern on
La Macarena--idol of Our Lady. And La Macarena is the most vaunted, the
most puissant goddess in Seville. At Semana Santa, in her garish dress,
she parades the town. The Majas of Seville throw themselves before her;
and sing; and pray. And as the Doll, who is both Mary and Maja, moves
through Seville, the streets are paved with the breasts of the
Sevillanas, loving their own image.
The Gardens of Alcázar are a geometric maze of tiny verdant patios. Each
stands at its own level, a gradual step lowering with the flow of water.
Each is a little bower with tiled floor, an intimate garden holding to
its charm in the great sum of gardens. The patios make a mosaic. The
design is severe; it is a heritage of the analytic Moslems. But in
Seville, the mathematic form is snared into an idyll.
Hundreds of churches in Seville. Many of them are bleak rococo monsters
and their interiors gross piles of gilt and scarlet. They are not bad
taste in Seville. Murillo is not bad taste in Seville. They are parts of
a ceremonial. Seville’s love is great enough to hold and to transform
them. So, in the compas of the Convento de Santa Paula, a noble Gothic
portal stands with a palm tree; so the rococo dome of Santa Catalina
blazes to ceramic; so the Plaza Santa Cruz becomes a faëry quarter, its
rows of ancient houses painted like the flowers and the birds that hang
from the low casements; so, even the Casa de las Dueñas, home of the
bloody Dukes of Alba, winds behind its iron gates into quaint patios and
palms and archways.
Each street has its garland of self-praise. A color of façade, a jewel
of ceramic, a tiny unsuspected court elbowed between the blank backs of
two houses, from which oak doors lead into other courts--communities of
painters, artisans, teachers of the dance. And each season has its
pretext for self-song. The Semana Santa and the Feria are the most
famous rites: in Holy Week, the spirit of Seville meets Seville’s body
in orgasmic climax. But other seasons have not less typical embraces.
The Velada de San Pedro comes in summer. There are no foreigners and the
rich townsfolk are north in the Basque country. Night follows a day’s
fever. And now the people open their doors, throw wide their canopies
and go into Seville. The servants carry great hampers of _fiambres_:
cold sea food, mostly, with jars of Jérez and Manzanilla. They proceed
to the popular squares, Alameda de Hiércules, Plaza de León, Plaza
Encarnación, near the Mercado where with cool night comes the stir of
odors ... greens, fruits, cheeses. They spread themselves, the good
folk: they eat and play.
La Plaza de San Juan Bautista de la Palma is not as large as it sounds.
A dozen families fill it: it is a pretty stage for the Sevillan drama.
Overhead are the crisp stars. The houses, painted cream, blue, pink,
fade in unlighted shadow. In the center is a pavilion cut into tiny
booths for _churros_, _pasteles_, _bombones_, _patas_, _mariscos_,
_bocadillos_, _fiambres_, _vinos_, _cervezas_, _gaseosas_--myriad
tidbits _de media noche_. Nearby sit three men and a woman. They play
the guitar, the mandolin, the fiddle; and the woman sings. She wears a
buff shawl that is caught tight over one shoulder and tighter still
under the other armpit. Rondures of breast and stomach press the lashed
silk. She is a _gitana_: she comes of an immodest race, but ere she goes
among the crowd for coppers she will place a black shawl over the
revealing buff one. Each of a dozen groups has its place in the Square.
They eat, drink, dance and court within their private precinct. They are
as unconcerned as if they were in their own private compas. But their
gayety is richer; this open sharing of a public place is the sharing of
a rite.
You have seen a young girl in some peasant road step _endimanchée_ from
her house to the sun. The velvet bosom of her bodice rises. A jewel at
her neck, a ring on a finger, an eye gleam brighter than the jewel make
of her a song that runs with the Spring sun and the grass. You know that
the peasant girl loves and is loved. Love has wrought this miracle on
her flesh. And so, in Seville: the miracle of her streets is the same
alchemy. She is adance with the magic of fondness; she is gay in a
perpetual Spring of self-delight.
* * * * *
Near the Guadalquivir and not far from the Torre de Oro, a dodecagonal
relic of the Moors who built their castle on the waterfront, there is a
baroque structure. It is the _Hospital de la Caridad_. In the
seventeenth century Don Miguel de Mañara was a caballero in Seville; a
knight so dissolute that legend makes him the Burlador, the true Don
Juan. This the nuns of the Caridad deny. But the day came when the Lord
miraculously spared his life from the assault of a noble seeking to
avenge the honor of his sister. Don Miguel avowed the will of God and
his sins; and caused to be built this Charity as witness, through
perpetual good works, of his atonement.
Above the chapel there is a chaste stone hall; a stair, spreading from
above like the train of a regal robe, leads to the carved door of the
Consistory. Here hangs the portrait of Don Miguel de Mañara. The face is
darkly sensual and brooding. The chin is obtrusive, the eyes have the
rigidity of a madman’s. He sits at a table, and behind him in the room
there opens a fantastic landscape. It is radiant and nubilous, a
landscape of vapors rather than of earth. And on the floor beside the
table and at Don Miguel’s feet, squats a boy and looks at him and
smiles. Pedro Salinas, the poet, has a theory about this portrait. Don
Miguel is mad, says he: the landscape, so amazingly like the “spirit
paintings” of our day, is his vision of madness. The boy is the sane
boy--the Sancho Panza--laughing at the madman.
Whatever the painter meant, whatever the historical connection of Don
Miguel with the legended Don Juan, here at least is his true
interpretation. Don Juan is the most conspicuous symbol of Seville.
Since Tirso de Molina in the seventeenth century made a play from the
old ballad and folklore sources of Don Juan, poets and playwrights of
many lands have retold his story.[8] The modern mood has freshened him
again with new psychology into a modish legend. But it is futile to
approach Don Juan save through the spirit of his town. The Don Juan of
Tirso, the first, remains the greatest. For Tirso placed his hero in the
proper setting. Tirso was no analyst, but he was a poet ... a great
dramatic poet. And his plastic presentation needs no analysis to reach
the truth.
Seville--auto-erotic, self-rapt goddess--has a god. Her streets, her
churches, her festivals bring you her lord. Don Juan is not the
full-grown lover. The true lover dwells within the spirit and body of
his woman as within a world holding heaven but earth too and hell: and
he enfeoffed to them all for that they all are the true world which he
loves. The true lover is constant; he has seen his woman so deep that he
has found infinitude within her; and how could he desire to transcend
it? What holds him to her is not pleasure: pleasure is but a moment in
this eternity of love. Anguish, anger, the black shades of
disappointment are also in his woman and he accepts them also. The true
lover is rare, rarer than genius. But Don Juan is one who loves in
woman his own senses, his own victory, and seeking ever these fleet
constants of himself moves ever on from breast to breast. The true lover
is rare because the full-grown man is rare. Don Juan is common because
infancy is common: the state of seeking only oneself, of taking life as
a flowered highway along which appetite and ease run gayly in pursuit of
their own image.
Like his mother Seville, Don Juan is restlessly pagan, hunting in
countless dramatic scenes a tribute to self-adoration. Each woman is a
mirror to himself; love of each woman is a pageant in which he enacts
his triumph. When the glance has been enjoyed, what is the mirror for?
When the pageant is past, what are its faded garlands? The real is Don
Juan! That he may be forever fresh, that his triumph may be forever
clear, undulled by custom, there must be new mirrors, new pageants--new
women.
Under Don Juan’s lyric words, there is coldness; under his exploits,
there is abstraction. His passion is but the spark, ere it has kindled
life and made life passion. And his deeds are fantasies, for only he is
real and the women whom he meets he never knows, knowing only his
desire. Therefore, his deeds like the landscape in the portrait of
Mañara are abstract.
All the elements of Don Juan are in Seville. But Seville is greater than
her son. His worship of himself in the white bodies of women is true
Seville. The constant shift of his deeds, like facets in the crystal of
desire, is true Seville. His orgiastic use of blood, of mysticisms, his
encounters with statues, necrophiles and ghosts--are Seville of the
Semana Santa. His ultimate sinking into the peace of self-absorption is
Seville. But the town is ampler, deeper. Don Juan conquers only women.
Seville conquers Spain.
This is her ultimate secret. She too--like Córdoba, Toledo, Greco,
Cervantes--is a living whole fused from the hostile elements of Spain.
But the peculiar chemic proportion of Seville makes all these worlds and
wealths the single gesture and the rite of her self-adoration.
She is the pagan goddess, ample limbed, with hair in which brood
darkness and the laugh of the sun. She leans over her Giralda. She stirs
her head and her arms in a half somnolent, half ecstasied dance, seeking
her own image in the water....
_e. The Gypsies Dance_
Below Al-Baicín the bodiless soul and Al-Hambra the soulless body, there
is a gypsy town. The sparse waters of the Darro run at the level of the
road. And on its other side the land mounts like a wall. Here, under the
hill are caves, the dwellings of _gitanos_.
Heavy women, their bare arms clinking with metal and stone ornaments,
their breasts slung in crass colors, call out for gain. The eyes are
shallow and sly; the mouth that smiles is like the straining of an
unsmiling substance; the oily hair throws off the glance of the sun. Men
are rigid and yet slender; they lack the easy harshness of the women.
Their bodies have melancholy and fatigue; as if an endless joust of
appetite and song had worn them.
The cave becomes, inside, an ample room, narrow, cool, long. Walls are
white plaster. Floors are fine-beaten clay. Chairs, tables, lamps, make
this modern ease fantastic against the crude stone mouth of a cave
within a hill. Men take tambours and sing; women dance.
It is a cave of storms. The blasts of many roads, the seas and forests
of untempered passions shriek in this music. Tambour, castanet, foot
stamp, hand-clap, raise the world in a maelstrom. And the Spanish
cadence gleams like a strip of sun upon the barbarous clouds.
The _gitano_ music is impure, and heavy. It has crude curves and broken
surfaces. Its timbre is inexact, its form aimless. “Time” is the best of
it as if this race had its true ritual in the beat of feet upon the
endless highway. Time becomes a hurrying _crescendo_ that splits, turns
back, gallops against itself so that it never really moves. The women
have an easy grace upon the easy floor. Full bodies swing and swerve in
a sensuous complacence. They step to the singing men. And the song of
the men swirls like a colored smoke about their hair, about the eyes of
the women.
Foot-beat under song ribs it, volumes it, controls its wild delight:
holds the _gitanos_ together: is their soul. But this softness and
spirit of the music is within; it speaks soothing to the _gitanos_,
making their faces good. The outside of the music is coarse and motley.
We ... all the world ... know but the wrong side of the weave.
_f. Spain Dances_
Andalusia is the youngest part of Spain. Its land came last from the
receding waters; its Christian culture came last from the receding
Islam. Its tongue is the youngest of the many forms of Spanish.
Galician, Valencian, Catalan, were sister languages of the Castilian:
like the dominant form, they sprang from the medieval Latin and for long
were rivals. Andalusian stems, not from the mother tongue, but from the
Castilian. It is of a later generation. Immigrants from the north gave
birth to the fluid, fresh speech which is still heard from Almería to
Cádiz. For in the days when writers like Rojas were consecrating
Castilian prose, much of Andalusia still spoke Arabic.
There is a reason therefore for the vigor of this land. The cells that
make the newborn body are old as the world. Youth inheres in the fresh
fusing. In new environment and combination, they are renewed. So
Andalusia, ancient of parts, has this organic youth. In this birth, the
great factor is Castile. Castile came down with its fanatic will to make
Spain one--to make Spain a theodicy in Christ. Castile turned Moor and
Jew into the sea: and replenished the fields with farmers from the
north. Coming down to make this youngest Spain, Castile caught the
rejuvenation.
The body of Andalusia is bright with morning. The ancient capitals
reflect this dawn. But the small town is its best image. Villages in
Andalusia are gems of white and orange on the green breast of the
huerta. Men and women live in a mirage of which their houses are the
crystal setting. They seem to know that any day their Saint (or Our
Lady) will lift them into heaven. (These villages would fit well into
heaven.) They live--and their stone world lives--in an expectant mood.
Life becomes a symbol and a pageant. Passion is the breath of a prayer;
blood is the paint of a picture. The _pueblo_ entire is platform for the
Dance.
* * * * *
Far worlds bespeak us, before the dancer herself. The music plays; and
in the distance, the click of castanets. These castanets are gypsy; they
came to Spain from regions of the Black Sea. The dancer walks quietly
forward, playing an obbligato with her castanets, not to the music (she
has not been married to the music), but to the march of her feet, to the
swing of her hips. She wears a yellow silk mantón: a mantón de Manilla
that went from China to the Philippines and thence to Spain to become
the Andalusian shawl. The _bailarina_ bows and listens to the music. In
her hair, like the crest of a mythic bird, stands a _peina_ of tortoise
shell. Most Andalusian--this arrogant Gothic comb. She hears a
cadence--Andalusian too--whose strain is of the Jews and Arabs. Her body
is still; the torso faintly turns and the arms wind upward to her head.
There is no mistaking this rigorous control. She has answered Semitic
song with a gesture of Castile!
Her dance begins as this response, almost this opposition to the music.
Sinew of the north confronts the fluid south. Two dominant forms embrace
in warfare: a music, limned like prayer, rhythmed like heartbeat, and
this fierce coldness on a woman’s body, which is the Word of Castile.
The dancer is a column, articulate of spirit: a live plasticity: with
the moods of eye and waving hand flung like a largess to our sense.
There is a pause. The two dominants of the dance (the north and the
south) fall momently apart and reveal a third. It is the personality of
the dancer herself. She is woman: very woman. She is large, almost
heavy. Her arms are full rounded; her head is poised; her bare shoulders
are a magnificent molding of firm flesh. From the waist, the skirt
thrusts almost at right angles. It is a cascade of gold down to the
ankles; and as the dancer whirls it flares out wide, revealing the gray
stockinged legs which are a minor almost girlish note within the
sumptuous dress. Her feet stamp; the skirt flows; the torso, lashed in
purple, stands heroically still, its silence an articulation not alone
of the tempest within but of the will to subdue it. The arms float
languidly to the head. The castanets click their dry commentary.
Purring, shrilling, silent, they are a gloss subtle as Talmud page, as
Arabesque, upon this whirl of sculpted fire which is the dance of Spain.
The castanet came, probably, with the gypsy from the ruined culture of
Byzance. It was known to the Greeks and Romans. In the hands of the
_gitana_, it is--as perhaps it was in the Dionysian rites--a heightened
bloodbeat to the music: simple, single dimensioned, metronomic. Here it
is an instrument subtle as a voice. It is a running, rhyming prose. Like
the arabesque--a decoration evolved from the written language--it
retains an intellectual power. The line and music of the castanets are
apart from the dance. While the arms flow like birds wheeling, while the
body becomes a throat of song, here is analysis forever present.
The action in the dance is drama. The bailarina moves in a tiny square.
She draws intensity from subtle signals of torso, shoulder, limb, hand:
this intensity she transposes to an undulous swing carrying her now far
about the platform. She is horizontal and relaxed. She turns her naked
shoulders forward; the castanets click almost silently beside her hips
that roll in a slow ruminance. She faces about; her caress comes full
and forward. The music tears with its down cadence against this mellow
mother. Plaint and passion weave a subtle net that draws her forward
(the castanets are still). Suddenly, she is held in rigor. The fertile
mother of the south is sacrificed to the harsh north. The gorgeous
breast, the hips, the arms like songs of love, are tortured in a vise of
passionate control. She is the drama of women giving up their sons to
the Reconquest, giving the man of their marriage bed to battle with the
Moor.... But the mood does not last. Castanets trip lightly. She dances
fluidly, widely; her heels strike high; her golden skirt rises and frees
her legs. The castanets are become as the chatter of children. From the
new relaxation of delight wells more energy, and comes again the tragic
transformation. With the emotion, rises the ruthless will locking at
last this pleasaunce in its hostile grip. The music is now a battle.
Song, body, castanets fuse in the war of passion and will, of nature and
of reason breaking on each other. And above this symphony, the dancer’s
face is silence.
So do all the motions of this drama converge into a plastic
movelessness. The dance itself is not drama; is less kin to the dances
of Europe than to the sculpture of Egypt. One thinks of the stones of
the Nile in whose unsubtle substance live flame and intricate vision.
One thinks of the Maya reliefs of Yucatan whose myriad planes twine to
harmonious flatness.
* * * * *
Since the dance is a true classic art, the need of personal genius to
express it is reduced. The true genius here is the tradition. Spain
dances. Unlike the other dances of modern Europe, the dance of Andalusia
is a norm: and the true dancer is a normal woman.
The good bailarina conforms strictly to the type of the good _andaluza_.
She is handsomely stout, with broad pelvis, full-developed breast,
strong, regular features. She lacks sensual erethism. She is indeed the
matron, rather than the prostitute. And the matron is fitted for the
classic dance, precisely because of its normality, because it has been
purged of the romantic, the brilliant, the superficially sensual--the
accidental. A “romantic” Andalusian dance is nonsense.[9]
The classic bailarina is, then, a quiet woman. Her body is splendid
without obvious incitements. Her costume is lovely in form and color,
but it is too heavy and too complete to be sexually arousing. She
conforms to an ideal of plastic motion in which all the romantic
elements of the dance--lust, madness, nakedness--are sublimated into
social symbols: love, prayer, vision, sacrifice. And all her movements
(again unlike the dances of Europe) merge into an almost static mold
that has the ultimate finality of sculpture.
The true Andalusian dance is solitary; and except in the special case of
the _cuadro flamenco_ it is an æsthetic error for more than a single
dancer to occupy the stage. The true Andalusian dancer (with the same
exception) is a _woman_. The true Andalusian audience is a _man_. The
relation, however, is not sexual, save perhaps in a remote Freudian
sense: it is matriarchal. And this too is normal, since psychologically,
Spain is matriarchal. The dancer is mother, teacher, priestess. She
holds the stage alone, and smiles on the men who sit beyond the music.
This smile is a physical caress, reticent, unconsciously restrained like
the caress of a mother. It must win her men, else her ultimate word as
teacher and as priestess of Spain’s mystery will go for naught. The men,
with the brutal candor of the Spaniard (and of the child) will turn from
her and make a clamor of talk to drown her out. But the true _andaluza_
wins her men; and gives her message which is the message of all Spain
and Spain herself: this quickened fusion of many hostile worlds into a
single Beauty.
* * * * *
The cuadro flamenco is a brilliant dilution of the Andalusian dance.
_Flamenco_ means Flemish, and is applied strictly to Andalusia. The use
harks back to the age of Carlos I and Felipe II when Flanders was part
of the Theodicy of Spain and the best will of Castile and the best blood
of the south went into the wars with the Low Countries. It became
Andalusia’s pride to share in this mad religious struggle.[10]
The _cuadro_ is a “team” of perhaps two men guitarists, four women and
one man dancer. The men are clad in trousers that rise like cylinders to
a high black band above the waist. They wear white shirts and the coat
(which is often absent) is cut in the front like our evening dress, and
tailless. The women are soberly gowned. The shawl is brown or black.
Only the slippers give a flare of red. The hat is the stiff _sombrero
ancho_ of the farmer whose more romantic, more flexible offshoot is our
“cowboy Stetson.” The group sit in a half circle. The guitars thrum
almost absently. The men and women seem to be examining one another. A
woman rises and goes to the center of the group. She dances. The other
women and the single man from their chairs with clapping of hand and
foot-beat mark a skeletal obbligato.
To the more pigmented music and more volumnear forms of the other
Andalusian dances, this dance bears the relation of a steel-engraving to
an oil painting. It is a climax of the bare Castilian _motif_: the
warrior will of the Reconquest which lived on, after the Moor had
disappeared from Spain, in the Inquisition, in the Holy War against the
Dutch, in the rapt butcheries of Mexico and Peru--in this flamenco. The
dance makes saccade angles against the lush weave of the music. It is
too graphic, too linear: it remains in the realm of draughtsmanship and
drama.
The dancer does not move from her central square. Feet beat intricate
tattoos, the body is poised stiffly, the head turns, arms swerve up and
down in a sort of wistful memory of ease, while the fingers click an
osseous pointillation that is a shadow of the castanets. The lyrical
release of the arms is held to the verge of vanishment. The guitars make
a music like dry wind in autumn trees. The maternal verdure of the
women, fixed in their chairs, is sacrificed wholly to the stripped will
of the dance. One thinks of fields turned into the desert of Castile.
The fertile and the pagan are almost gone. And the protagonist of the
flamenco is a man.
He comes from his chair only after each woman has danced and has
retired. He is short, neither stout nor slender; there is no gallantry
about him. His face and his dark body are stamped with seriousness. He
has watched the women through their arid figures with eyes like the eyes
of a master. He is no lover: he is the priest of a rite. Now, he stands
moveless within the weave of the music. Sudden, his feet break in a
shattering tattoo from which his body rises in subtle suppressed waves.
Even the lyric holiday of the arms is absent from his dance. They are
still at his side, or they are held in fixity near the shoulder. The
body is vised; the head does not swerve. Feet and legs make a dance,
perpendicular and juiceless: bereft of rhetoric and gesture, they
bespeak the hoof-beat of armies, the vigils of the desert, the absolute
symbol of the Arab Darwish. All of Spain that is not this male message
of Castile has been crushed out....
* * * * *
The distinction of flamenco is only of degree. The Andalusian dance is
impersonal and abstract. All the movements of the soul and body of an
intricate race are essenced here into a ruthless form. The appolonian is
channeled; the dionysian is mastered; the dramatic is cleansed of
episode; the lyrical is exploited as a mere carrier of life to
sculptured unity.
The Andalusian dance is the converse of the art of the Russian ballet in
which the pure materials of plastic movement are exteriorized and
denatured into the melodramatic. In the Russian dance, the means is the
art; the end is the personal, the pathetic. The Russian dance is
analytic, episodic, realistic. The Spanish dance is organic and
essential. It is the one great classic dance surviving in our modern
world.
_CHAPTER IV_
_ARAGON_
_a._ _The Atom_
_b._ _The Way of the Atom_
_a._ _The Atom_
From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the north boundary of Spain is
mountain. To the east it is called the Pyrenees: a wall of snowy rock
that falls, save for a space above the fertile fields of Catalonia, into
the desert of Aragon and Navarre. Westward, the wall is lower and has
another name: Cantábrico. It too is wild, but the more moderate moisture
covers it with pine and its fall southward is but a step to the high
meseta of León and Castile. Within this barrier that like a jagged knife
cuts Spain from Europe lived the Christian Remnant before the Arabs. And
from two fastnesses of this wall--where the Arabs never gained a
foothold--went forth at once the _Reconquista_ which for eight hundred
years, thrusting, expanding, retreating, made war upon the Moslem and at
last after innumerable shifts of fortune drove him out. The western
point of the Reconquest’s birth lies in the perpendicular rocks of the
Asturias. This is the cradle of the Kingdom of León, which, thrusting
from the Cantábrico, became Castile. To the east, the nucleus of the
long “push” south was in the bleakest and highest Pyrenees of Spain: the
Ribagorza and Sobrarbe whose hard squat Iberian chieftains were the
first kings of Aragon. Not till the last decades of the fifteenth
century, at the end of the long battle, did the two Christian forces
join and become Spain. During seven hundred years, they had waged war
against Mohammed; they had grown great in Spain; they had flung their
power northward across the mountains, eastward across the sea to Italy
and Greece: but they had lived--Castile and Aragon--separate from each
other and for the most part hostile.
Within the Pyrenees--the stratified chaos north of Huesca and
Barbastro--the atom of Aragon lives above the splendor it has given
forth. Here, if anywhere, is the aboriginal Spaniard--unchanged as his
mountains. The Iberians who were pushed north from the desert or south
from Acquitaine into the Sobrarbe and the Ribagorza found themselves in
a sort of Continental crow’s-nest, high above invasion. The Romans did
not tarry here, nor the Visigoths. The Arabs were beaten back, south of
Jaca, and had to veer to the east to enter France. For countless ages,
these primeval men beside the river Aragon lived uninvaded, until their
atomic energy grew to be explosive and they became invaders.
But they are still the atom. They live in the crannies of mountains, in
the steep stretches of valleys torn by torrents. The sky above them is
shut in by rock. Northward the Pyrenees stand ordered and columned upon
France. But in their southward march they become a delirium of broken
walls. They symbolize the cacophony of Spain. The little villages perch
on a precipitous bench of mountain or are lost within the immense sweep
of a moor. They too are stone. The houses are gathered fragments of the
heights. Often there is no wooden door. Windows are tiny apertures of
space. The houses huddle so close that they appear to be a single rock,
whence rise the blind walls of the church--fortress rather than
church--like an irregular edge. Another such obtrusion seems the entire
village upon the high face of the mountains. If it is low in a valley,
still the monotone is there. For the moor is gray and mournful like a
stone; and the furze of summer makes it but faintly fluid as if from the
blaze of the sun. The rushing river sends splinters of gray fume over
the teeth of its rapids. Stone....
From these stone towns come the creatures who have built them. Small
weazened men they are, with heads like nuts and eyes like iron. They
have no sensuality and no art. Indeed, they too are fragments of the
fragmented mountains: atoms of rock who have detached themselves and
learned to walk about. They are silent, impenetrable. They have the
mineral virtues. They are strong, they are steadfast, they are
inexpugnably honest, they are brave. To dislodge them from the inertia
of their world is as hard as to lodge an idea in their heads. And as
they walk about, their slow and clumsy gait perfects the sense that they
are walking stones: that this human venture is a masquerade: that
presently they will cast their uncouth manhood and go back into the
eternal mountain sleep.
They wear black leathern breeches slashed at the side and ending well
above the knee. In the split at the side and below, the drawers bulge
white or gray. The calf is enclosed in heavy leggings of white wool,
doubly lined with buttons. The feet are wrapped in a cloth and shod in a
sole of wood or wool that is thonged with leather, and bound about the
ankle. About the waist is a huge sash--_faja_--coming down thick on the
buttocks and serving as the pocket. The jacket is short. The aboriginal
Aragonese wears no hat: a handkerchief slanted athwart his head absorbs
the sweat of his labor and leaves the cropped crown free. When he wears
a hat, it is an adaptation either of the _boina_ of the Basque or a
lumpish variant of the pie-shaped hat of Castile. His invention has not
gone so high as his head.
The effect of the costume is farce. It is elaborate, intricate, unmanly.
The bulging drawers, the sash so fat about the buttocks exaggerate the
shortness of the body. The man is lean, hard, small. And he drapes
himself in clothes that are centrifugal and fussy. The sense of
masquerade persists. This man is a stone--an atom of the horizons. With
his assumption of a soul, his body has felt cold and he has elaborated
this uncongenial mess of wool and leather. His head, however, is still
too mineral to need a hat.
His woman is not stone: rather she is the clayish soil that with the
stone makes up the slopes and moorlands. She is the earth--dark brown
and gray--from which the stone is hardened. She is the earth, the
earth-bed of her man. She is silent: when she is young, she has the
savage and swift mellowness of the mountain Springtime. Her dress is
black. On feast days, the black becomes vermilion, deep blue, green. The
thick, rough wool, dyed to one color, falls from below the armpits where
it is caught in a tight bodice: falls widely, unheeding the waist, into
a flaring skirt. It is a dress that has the dignity of the primeval
Springs: its mood is fecund; it is not human enough to be aware of
waist, of hips, of breast. Unluxuriant, unvaried, it has the bloom of
wholeness. The women of these mountains are the loam on the wastes.
Here is a better model for Adam and Eve, than the pretty Italians, the
mystic lovely Byzantines: this rudimentary pair, the man decking his
stone simplicity in a clownish gape of drawers and breeches, and the
woman, earth-mooded, earth-whole, chording her man and bearing him
along.
They have left paradise, and now the world works on them. Christianity
has come. They build monasteries--mountain fortresses for God. Strife
has come: invasion or threat of invasion. And for these, chieftains,
nobles have sprung up who are no longer content to shelter in the little
villages of stone. Walled towns make their appearance: such towns as
Jaca, pure Iberian name and indeed but a medieval structure for the
Iberian blood. Jaca looks up the valley of the Aragon toward France. It
sees the primordial hamlets clustered in the moors and on the heights.
But Jaca itself crowds sophistications within its turreted walls. The
walls themselves are the same gray granite and the streets, narrow and
high, are stylizations of the passes northward. But Jaca belongs to
history. These houses know of treaties and rebellions. Life has moved
into Sobrarbe: now Sobrarbe moves. The mountain citadel is the sign of
its moving. It will go south to the valley of the Ebro. It will flow
with the Ebro and be part of Spain. It will challenge the world....
The valley of the Ebro--Nile of Spain and historic artery of all her
bloods--is still below. The way from Jaca down is short but steep. The
wall of the Pyrenees, in a few miles, drops seven thousand feet: but
drops, not as northward upon smiling France--drops to desolation. Aragon
which began as mountain wall becomes a yellow waste: and save for the
narrow corridor of the Ebro, all Aragon is this. It is the bottom of
what was once a sea. The rocks of the Pyrenees, of Catalonia, of
Valencia and Castile are the rim of the dry bowl through which the Ebro
trickles. The soil is still subaqueous: marl, clay, gypsum, alkalis make
its sterile surface. Salt lies free on it. Even the heather and grass of
the upland moors do not live here.
But the Aragonese lives here: and here is the second stage of his
progression. Sere towns lie in the sere waste. The houses are clay.
There are wooden doors, but windows of glass are still rare. The peasant
chooses the desert bottom for his house. South and north rise the walls
of the Sierras, naked as flint: and the winds sweep through his narrow
passage, bringing the rigor of the rocks into the air he breathes.
This low tier of the world of Aragon has no clement weather. It has no
spring and no autumn. Winter is a rigid siege: summer is fire. When the
weather shifts between the seasons, the winds make a runway of the
valleys. Frost, flame, storm are the angry cycle. And its dwellers are
worthy of their weather. They are not degenerate like the inbred natives
of Las Hurdes between Extremadura and León. Nor are they spiced and
strained with eastern bloods, like the cave-dwellers of Murcia and
Almería. They are simple human stock extraordinarily coarsened.
Dull-eyed, crude-lipped, slow-moving, slow-talking: they lack the
mineral sheerness of the mountain men. The air that they breathe is not
snow-swept. Their flesh has no crystal tarn for neighbor. They live in a
roadway of unleashed elements. Dust, clay, salt, drug their air and clog
their pores. But there is something else. There is the roadway, and the
mobile spirit of the roadway. Movement and action infuse this brutish
people.
_b._ _The Way of the Atom_
The men of the mountain and the desert store up great energy within
their core: the outer world harries, arouses: the virgin force grows
aggressive. East of Aragon are two rich and fluid lands: the Christian
Principality of Catalonia, the Moorish Kingdom of Valencia. Frankish
Barcelona rivals Marseilles and Venice, in ships. (Ramón Lull, Spain’s
most original schoolman, lived here: he wrote in Latin, Catalan and
Arabic, books on love and wisdom. Chasdai ben Crescas, Spain’s most
original Jewish thinker, lived here: he founded a new Prophetic lineage
which three centuries later grew to be Spinoza.) Farther down the coast
are the lush huertas of Valencia: a great port facing south as Barcelona
east, a seat of Moorish culture.
As Rome once the subtle nations to her east, tough Aragon comes to
control these affluent worlds. When in 1149 Ramón Berenguer IV of
Barcelona wedded the daughter of Ramiro II of Aragon, the mountainous
kingdom did not lose its sway. Catalonia became part of Aragon: and the
currents of its open life the veins of the uncouth inland realm. A
century later, Jaime I of Aragon with Catalonian help conquered
Valencia. Valencia had been in Christian hands before: El Cid had won it
rather by treachery than arms. But after the great freebooter’s death,
the Moors came back. Now that Aragon sits down within its valleys,
Valencia is Christian forever. It loses even its name of tributary
kingdom. It becomes simply part of Aragon. Catalan blood has helped win
it--for Aragon. Now Catalan, Valencian, and Castilian, led by the Great
Captain of Córdoba, win Sicily and Naples--in the name of Aragon again.
Aragon of the desert and the mountains has in its stone-like men an
energy which informed the mental mobility of the Catalan, the sensuous
fervor of the Valencian: prevailed upon them, dominioned them and made
them tools at last to its own activity in Europe, to its ultimate
partnership with Castile in Spain. Within itself, Aragon has little
else. It lacked the elements for the creating of an indigenous culture.
Aragon the core remained prehistoric: its history is its power to
accumulate forces about it.
But this elemental virtue through its very neutralness served to fuse
the diverse natures upon which Aragon worked. The initial urgency was
Aragon: and Aragon was the name of the amalgam which resulted. When at
the close of the fifteenth century the nation of Spain was born, its eye
toward Europe was Aragon. Isabel of Castile was the spirit and the
religious motor of that birth. Ferdinand of Aragon, with his infusion of
Frankish-Catalan and Jewish bloods, was the diplomat and politician who
turned the mystical Castilian dream into a European fact. Aragon took
its place in that polyphony of elemental fusions which was Spain. But
with this difference. That fusion, in Castile, Galicia, Portugal,
Andalusia, had a preponderance of parts native to these provinces. In
Aragon the fusion was of outer elements. Aragon was the port of Spain:
it had become a power in Europe. But its own integral rôle in the
cultural life of the Aragonese nation was that of a catalyst in a
solution.
* * * * *
Although historic Aragon is dead, in the capital city, Zaragoza, the
process is revealed. Zaragoza is Spanish: yet its parts speak all of the
east, of the south, and of the north. The streets have a dark fluidity
which suggests Naples. They are not rigid and bright like the streets of
Castile. Their warmth is freeflowing like a blood under the swarthy
stones. They brood, they rot: they are not transfixed in contemplation
of their unity, nor in rapt service of their own high fate. They are not
noble, not inspired streets like the most sordid in Avila or Burgos.
Italy’s ageing paganism darklies them: and the Moor’s mobility which
lifts Valencia into a dance gives them an elusive charm, a play of light
and shadow which Naples lacks.
Upon the dusty shores of the Ebro where the trees bend in a gray burden
to the tawny waters, Spain speaks through Zaragoza. Here stand two
monsters, the cathedrals. Nuestra Señora del Pilar is a long pile, drear
as a Jesuit college, dull as a bull-ring: and from its mournful mass
rise suddenly, inappositely, the huge _azulejo_ domes, their
hypertrophic rhetoric gleaming of Andalusia and Morocco. Within is a
church in the style of Louis XVI of France! The other cathedral is more
mellow, but not less hybrid. La Seo is Gothic. There is a Romanesque
window: the façade is rich in Moorish bricks and tiles. The columns are
Gothic; the walls are exuberant tissues of plateresque. Yet the whole is
harmonious, is impressive. It is Aragon. There is here something at once
pagan in mind and Christian in mood. The cathedral indeed is like the
Latin Sea: a converted heathen whose thought holds to the limits of
youth and from the Christian infinite has taken a boundless and vague
melancholy. This crossing of sun and shadow is Aragon. Light is here--in
eclipse: storm--sun-tinged. The immutable atomism of the Aragonese
shivers in contradiction. The sun of Italy breaks into motes, dancing on
a grave: the Spanish burden of death becomes the irrational refrain of a
gay song.
In La Seo, Aragon works its transformation upon elements chiefly of
France and the east. In the _jota_, the basic material is Spanish. What
is known as the first jota is a birth of the defense of Zaragoza in 1808
against the forces of Napoleon. It swears to the Virgen del Pilar that
the men and women of Zaragoza never will be French. Jota songs and
variants of its dance are legion throughout Spain, and its musical
elements hark back to Arab days. The formation of the jota is the
couplet; the music is an adaptation, in three-quarter time, of
Andalusian _cante hondo_. The classic southern song becomes romantic.
Its abstract lines, devoted to the elemental passions, become vehicles
for commentary verse in which religion, politics, wit and satire are
barbarously mingled. The tragic music of Spain is lightened, aerated and
then, by the ultimate twist of Aragon, it is once more sicklied with a
haunting gloom. But the gloom is pagan, not Christian. It is empiric.
Its fluidity is of the east, but its will is a release come from the
north.
The dance of the jota is a diluting, a quickening, above all a
flattening of the sheer pure figures of the southern dance. The body
loses all relationship with sculpture. It is given up to that easy
dynamism whose language is the leap, the skip, the pirouette. It has
abandoned the dynamism of the soul whose infinite motions conform into
an almost motionless figure. The classic dance of Spain, drenched with a
facile nervousness from Europe--this is the jota of Aragon.
* * * * *
So the prehistoric atom begets this baroque romanticism of Aragon. There
is nobility here. These are the people who fought the establishment of
the Inquisition: the heroic defenders of their land against Roman,
Visigoth, Arab, Frenchman. But the toughness of Aragon is vulnerable, if
not to its invaders, to its own conquests. Valencia and Barcelona become
conduits through which a motley of elements pour in. The alliance with
Castile brings another bewilderment of forces. The primitive stuff of
Aragon has no _organic_ response for these racy cultures. They overwhelm
it: they form an amalgam _about_ the rigid core. And the harmony of
Aragon is indeed one of flashing dissonances: brilliant, appealing,
evanescent. It is a surface fusion, and its charm is flight from an
impenetrable center.
Triumphant Aragon disappears in the living peoples it absorbs, in the
great neighbor with which it is allied. As cultural beings, its vassals
all survive it. Its own primal core survives it....
These men of the Sobrarbe and the desert have been too ruthlessly
hardened by their world to receive the juices of spirit. Like a steel
mirror, they reflected for an hour the suns of Italy, of Araby and
Spain. This is the greatness of Aragon--a swift reflection in which
affluent worlds were fused in the reflector and took on the form of the
reflector’s contour. But the worlds swung past, life shifted: the light
no longer fell on Aragon. Its surface becomes dull once more, and
unillumined.
_CHAPTER V_
_CASTILE_
_a._ _The Castle of the Cid_
_b._ _The Stones of Wisdom_
_c._ _The Water Bridge_
_d._ _The Miracle of El Greco_
_e._ _The Tomb_
_a._ _The Castle of the Cid_
The valley of the Ebro is a vein of green, deep within wastes of earth
and tiers of mountain. Northward the Solana, sudden as a fort, stands
before the snow-clad Pyrenees. Southward the sierras of Aragon and
Castile are walls of flint upon a yellow floor. Slender and sinuous, the
Ebro leads up to the head of Spain.
This way came the Romans, met by the nut-hard Aragonese and the Basques
of Navarre. Here the Visigoths were fought and were absorbed. When the
Arabs faced north of Andalusia, they veered to the east: and the Ebro
was their path back to Spain’s center. Commerce and nurture went this
way: but were the servants of War. Signs of War still mark the valley
for its own. Encased in desert and rock, the towns rise above the
plethoric vineyards like parts of the stone world. War has brought the
desert ranges down and has made cities of them. The Valley, pressing up
through Aragon, through Navarre to Castile, is clad in armor of rock
towns. So weighted, it could not keep pace with the world. It was great
when mountains were barriers and when a river was a highway. It has
remained as the past sealed it. North of Zaragoza no great city lies
within the valley. It has become an agricultural, above all a
viticultural center. Haro, Logroño, are towns of the wine-growers. But
even when new houses are put up, they are made of the eternal rock--the
warlike rock of the past.
At Miranda the invader leaves the Ebro, and stands at the climax of
Castile. The south is a breakage of treeless moor. In the crevices of
heights, small towns hide, and church steeples are indistinguishable
from the rock. But the earth mellows. Angles are replaced by curves.
Wheatfields plaid the rolling slopes of hills. There are dingles,
copses. This is the head of Old Castile--the part of the hard land where
men lived best, and where they first united against the Moslem to call
themselves Castilians. This is Burgos: _La cabeza de Castilla_.
* * * * *
Bristling castles, castle-like sierras exist everywhere in Spain. Why is
just this portion called Castile? Look at Burgos, nestling in the bosom
of a hill and green with springtime. The río Arlanzón has leaped from
the savage Pico de Lara. But when it reaches Burgos, it is gentled: it
is an idling pleasant little river. And the folk of Burgos have built
along its banks an esplanade, a park of meticulous shrubs and gravel
walks, a street of clubs and cafés where music, at nightfall, answers
the tripping water and the wheatfields bending in breeze.
The town goes up from a seven-sided Plaza. It is stone, but mellow. Its
streets are criss-crossed with surprising squares, irregular in shape
and level. Old houses bearing shields seem to stoop as if time-softened
in the mounting swirl. The cathedral stands waist-high among roofs. Its
grandiloquent splendor is town-bound. Only the loftiest windows catch
the free heaven for the nave. The doors of the cathedral open on many
levels. Far up in the transept is a golden window topping a stair of
carven oak: and this window is a door upon a street. Burgos begins to
terrace up less gently. Houses, streets, arched galleries over steps are
all one stone: but everywhere the gray walls crack: lilacs bloom in
every crevice. Windows are open: flowers wave in them. Black-gowned
women make shadows. In the gutters which are clean, play children, warm
like their mothers, lyric like the lilacs.... A running bloom in Burgos
mounts with the streets until they match the steeples of the churches,
until the harsh high churches are engulfed. A green hill dappled with
cherry is the height of Burgos. And here is a castle.
It is a famous Castle. It belonged to the first Counts of Castile, ere
Castile was a kingdom. It witnessed the marriage of Ruy Díaz de Vivar,
_el Cid_, to Ximena: and in its shadow stood the Cid’s _solar_, his
“city dwelling.” It dominates the town. But it is ruin. It appears to
have no importance. A paltry mass of rock it is, weeds in its cracks,
gashes in its sides, and its top agape with earth and shrubs. It stands
alone upon the top of the hill and crumbles into dust. Behind it are
shanties: asses, dogs, hens possess the theater of its glory. The walls
that once enclosed the city go down irrelevant now from the castle ruin:
their cubos and bastions droop into a row of modern tenements, one spot
of which is a tavern--a noisy mouth--filled with the red coats and red
calls of soldiers.
What is this castle in the life of Burgos? A disused memory. It stands
above a town whose fluent smile is turned away from it. Surely, it is no
symbol?
Nor does the Cid’s spirit, more than that of Burgos, appear to chime
with the ruin. The Cid lived in the eleventh century. Shortly after his
death, he was immortalized by the poet of _El Cantar de Mío Cid_,
probably a Christian menestral, residing in the Moor country of
Medinaceli. The _romancero_ painted the Cid afresh. He was a mobile
scoundrel. His king, Alfonso of León, distrusted him and ordered him
forth from his seigneurial seat Vivar. Ruy Díaz was penniless: but he
possessed a trunk whose iron-thonged flanks you can still admire in the
chapel of Corpus Christi of the cathedral. He filled this coffer with
rock and sand, and sealed it. By his friend, Martín Antolínez, he caused
it to be carried to Raquel and Vidas, rich Jews of Burgos. “These are my
treasures,” he told the wily Jews. “I am exiled. Guard my wealth for me
as security and loan me six hundred marks. The contents of my coffer are
worth vastly more; but I am a simple knight and I need cash to pay my
people at Vivar, and to lodge my wife with the monks of Cardeña. Six
hundred modest marks.”
The Cid crosses into the Moor country of Aragon and begins his raid on
the Moslem. Like the Jew, the Moslem is free game--a wilder sort of
boar. God sent him into the world for Catholics to prey on. The Cid is
out for spoils. It does not occur to him to convert a Moor: he strips
him. But he is canny: he never quite strips him bare. He wants him for a
friend as he turns his back to go on other raids. At last, the Cid
captures Valencia, by guile rather than arms. He is a rich man now! He
has sent gifts to mollify Alfonso, and to Ximena and to the monks of
Cardeña. (Of course, he does not repay the Jews.) But he imports a
bishop to Valencia del Cid, one completely fitted out with all the
latest golden implements of worship--quite as a millionaire of
Pittsburgh imports a chef from Paris. Listen to mío Cid reflecting on
his luck.
All these winnings the Campeador made his.
“Thanks be to God who of the world is master!
“Before I was poor, today I am rich;
“I have money and lands, I have gold and wide possessions,
“And for sons-in-law I have the Counts of Carrión,
“All battles do I win, it is the will of the Lord.
“Muslim and Christian hold me in great fear.
“Yonder in Morocco where are the Muslim mosques,
“They might open to my attack. Who knows? perhaps they have
“The dread that I may come: but I am not so minded.
“I’ll not go seek the Moor; here in Valencia I’ll stay.
“And let them bring me their wealth: with the help of the Lord
“They’ll keep on paying me--or whomever I delegate.”
This is the constant temper of the first hero of Castile whom the
changing mood of Spain was to turn at the last into a fanatical
crusader. He has conquered another Moorish town:
“Hearken to me, Albar Fánez, and all my valiant knights!
“With this castle we have won great spoil;
“Many Moors have died; few do I see still living.
“As to survivors, both the men and the women, there’s no
one who will buy them
“If we cut off their heads. Nary a bit would we gain.
“Let’s save them for ourselves; now that we are the masters.
“We’ll lodge in their houses; we’ll make them wait on us.”[11]
The Cid reminds us vividly how far his Spain was yet from the ultimate,
classic Spanish character, four hundred years after the battle had begun
between the Moor and Christian. In the Cid are all the elements of that
character--in their raw, chemically unfused state. But in the sense that
Isabel was Castilian, and that the Castle is Castilian, he is not
Castilian and he is not Spanish. His spirit is pagan and is European. No
such light-hearted, almost comic bellicosity exists among the Semites to
whom warfare was a solemn, religious matter. The Cid is the
knight-errant, the medieval sportsman, stripped, however, of the mystic
and amorous sentiment which Christianity later put upon the freebooters
of the northern forests. The Cid is cheerful and fluid as any pagan: but
he has a trait which no true Teuton knight possessed: his extreme
concern with money. The Cid fights like a Goth: but he figures like a
Phœnician. And, like an Arab, he keeps moving.
From time to time, the Cid is minded that he is fighting for the Lord,
that Christ is his captain, and that the Moor (aside passing alliances
and friendships) is his spiritual foe. He gets this notion from the
Moor himself: and it is well to realize how weakly the Christian has
adapted it after four centuries of fighting. Meantime, the Arab who had
crossed the Strait in a flame of religious passion, cooled and lost his
sectarian, desert ardor. Spain was become a simmering chaos with no
clear elements. Christian and Moslem were often in alliance. The Ideas
of Cross and Crescent resided unalloyed only in monasteries. The process
of osmosis whereby the Christian was to inherit the religious fanaticism
long lost by the Moslem did not reach its climax until the Age of
Isabel.
The Cid--gay, ambulant, fluid, mercenary pragmatist of arms--lived under
the shadow of no Castle. The Castle of Burgos had as yet no spirit for
its bristling body. It was not yet Castile. But though the Castle’s body
is a ruin over Burgos, and Castile is wrecked among the modern nations,
their spirit lives. It created a hard kingdom to tower over Spain, to
dominion the world, and stratify at last the Spanish soul.
* * * * *
What is a castle?
It is a shut place that commands by its shutness the open place about
it. A castle is builded of the stone of its world: it rises from the
stone of its world: it _is_ the stone of its world. A castle is austere
toward the world which it defends. It is invariable, forbidding: its
strength is that of a perpetual shutting-out of all which lies outside
it. Sun beats on the castle wall: inside it is dark. Moon melts on its
bastion and bathes its county blue: it is harsh and rigid. Water and
wind make song of the green hills: the castle is silent. It is lord of
its county because it is apart from it. A castle is hot in a cold land:
a castle is cold in a hot land: a castle is high in a low land: a castle
is full in a land of dearth: a castle is dry in a land of verdure.
Within the castle walls, anarchy may flame: the walls are law enough.
The walls are spirit and sanctity enough, so that within life may be mad
and fleshly. A castle draws on the affluence of its world to save its
world: it lifts itself into a desert peak, that the low lands may
flourish: and then it sucks the land.
Castile becomes a castle. The chaos of running passion and idea hardens:
Christian Spain, weary at last of ages of dissension, steals the
discarded fervor of the Moor: becomes one passion, permanent and
crystal, to withstand all others. Upon the crest of Spain forms this
stony essence of her will. The actual struggle dies: the Moslem world
droops away toward Africa. But the spirit of the struggle becomes rock.
A castle to defend the soul of Spain; and Spain’s soul at last a castle.
The walls raised to minister to an open land grow higher, grow ever more
remote from the reason of their being. Become at last a reason unto
themselves.
See the castle now, stirred from its mooring in a fertile world! The
fertile world itself must turn into a castle! This will of service
destroys the served. This vision is so intense that it is blind. The
castle is become an unleashed monster, mobile as the Arab or the Cid. It
lives--to be a castle. And it devours the spirits and fields of men
which raised it up in order to protect them.
The castle, become Spain, moves through Europe: moves across the sea.
Its shut erectness is the measure of good. Its sunless cells are the
measure of light. Its turrets are the church. Its trampling march over
the pliant earth is music. Its dream is to make a castle of the House of
God.
_b._ _The Stones of Wisdom_
The Province of Valladolid in Old Castile is fertile. The plain has the
aspect of a verdant sea swept by long tides, the hills. In Spring the
fields of wheat and barley unfurl their delicate green illimitably to
horizons where white clouds stand like enchanted caravels. In the soft
grass and the turf, velvety with rains, the flowers sparkle like myriad
splinters of sky. And on this vastness, under a solid Dome, towns stand
as sudden islands.
Such a town is Medina del Campo--City of the Field: a huddle of clay
huts about a bastioned castle where Isabel the Catholic loved to live
and where at last she died. The plains are at low ebb against the walls
of Medina. They recede with their lush rhythms from this ruined
arrogance which once housed Glory. Medina is like a penniless hidalgo.
The town’s pride--the Castle--is a molder within the walls. And the town
itself is a lay of sordid houses on mud streets, a conglomerate life of
stamping peasants and braying mules and women occult like the hidden
fires of their kitchens.
West of Medina del Campo lies the Province of Salamanca. It is the
southern spur of the kingdom of León which Castile absorbed in the
eleventh century, and it is contiguous with Portugal. It is less fertile
than Valladolid. That sea-like plain roughens and grows abrupt. The
Castilian _borrico_ is less frequent; and likewise the crude _carro_
which it draws with the driver bouncing on its rump. Here is a land of
oxen. Slow and inevitable as the day, they swing and steam beneath their
wooden yokes, drawing the stone plow through the rocky loam or the cart
with axleless wheels on the harsh ruts of a road. The cool young
grain-shoot trills less in this land. It is a world of flocks. Sheep
fleck the hills; goats cast their jagged shapes like living stones
within the stony valleys. It is a world of ranches--of _dehesas_. Bulls,
reared for the bull-ring--_toros bravos_--browse in great sweeps of
meadow.
The ranch house is of stone. It is large and bleak; if the dehesa breeds
good bulls, it is rich. _Toreros_ come to study their victims, for when
the bull is not “game” the _espada_ is helpless. There are many bedrooms
for guests: the dining room is a long hall in mahogany or oak with
crystal candelabras, lofty leather chairs, sideboard glittering with
colored glasses, a bull’s-head over the door and portraits of great
toreros on the walls. But the house is cold; rustic and crude it is,
like the harsh earth of León. The livable room and the living room is
the kitchen. The owner, in _zamarra_ and _calzón_, smokes his rank pipe
by a vast open fire. (There are few stoves in this land.) A medieval
spit, great enough for the whole side of a beef, stands in the
blue-black chimney. And through the Castilian winter, when the wind is
unbroken from the Cantábrico to the Sierra Morena, the ranch house is a
cavern, but the kitchen is warm.
The hidalgo has changed little from his ancestors who fought the Moor at
Zamora. With him is his son, who incites the savagery of the bulls as a
gardener incites the color of rare flowers; and his son’s wife, a mellow
creature, quiet as the low flame of _encina_ that heats the _garbanzo_
jar upon the hearth; and her child, also, taking the breast of a nurse.
The other servants sit, too, before the fire in that equality which
alone a feudal sense of caste makes possible.
Salamanca is a land of little cities, of tight, insulate worlds with a
thousand or five hundred souls. A crude land and a people whose spirit
the land encases. A crustaceous people.... A tiny river is nearby, else
there could be no town. The houses ray out upon the turf like regimented
snails. Windows are spots in a chalky shell. The door, within a
triangular cut of the house (as if the reclusion made it less
penetrable) is massive oak impounded with iron or with copper. It is
divided horizontally, so that the housewife can open the upper half and
talk and trade, and yet be locked within her tiny castle.
She is locked ever within herself. Her garb is black. When she goes
forth to market in the village square (here bulls are fought on
holy-days), there is a black shawl over her black hair and very close to
her eyes. The face is beautiful. The skin, color of parchment, ages
silken soft. The jaw is round and unassertive. The nose is straight, the
mouth is thin and large. Passion, here, and right are not separate
claimants to her soul. All this peasant woman’s will and all her duty
unison from girlhood to the grave. Service to God and service to her
man, the sacraments of communion and of love, the tasks of household and
of motherhood ... are one and have one word in her plain mind. They are
life itself: like God a unity which miracle divides into three persons.
And she is like her hearthfire, this woman of Old Castile: fecund and
ensconced. She is the light of her shut home. She has jealous distrust
of sun and of the open air. They are her rivals and she bars them out
with her tiny windows and her divided door.
Her man moves slow through a strange outward world; for he is wholly
embraced by the close of his home and his woman. He wears knee-breeches
of hide that are tight as a skin and box his rump into a rigid square.
He wears a coat of raw sheepskin with a gap for the head and gaps for
the arms. For shoes, he has a bundle of rags cased in sandal-soles and
thonged. His hat is either the black skull boina of the Basque or the
true sombrero of Castile--pie-shaped, velvety black, with the center
pyramiding up to a peak. You see him best when he goes astride his ass.
A crude plaid muffler (_tapabocas_) stops his mouth. The woolen manta
regally folds from his shoulders to the flanks of his brute. The burro
trots sharp and perpendicular. The man is movelessly erect, untinged by
the mount’s rhythm. Even a peasant, even on an ass, he seems a
caballero. His head is sternly forward; his hands do not stir; he is
silent. His world is a coarse world. Winter is a blast and summer is a
blast; the short spring covers his field with mud more than with
flowers. This his encasement. And within, a balance like a tree’s of sun
and earth and weather. He wages an intricate but instinctive warfare
within the Hand of God. For God makes the sun a sear or a dim mockery;
and God makes foes of the men of the world. Unto the bloody Moor of
yesterday there has succeeded the bleeding Noble. Yet he has won of this
complexity a peace simple and deep. He lives in a profound seclusion.
Love and work are his hearthfire. And from their secret place he can
look out, his eyes old in understanding, his eyes bright with the irony
of distance.
* * * * *
Within this land of unkempt fields studded with encina, land of wild
bulls, of towns shut from the sun and the wind, there glows a jewel that
has warmed the world. It is the city of Salamanca. It lies in treeless
mountains. Northward Zamora bristles warlike, westward Portugal turns an
unfriendly back: and all about, Castile. Sierra de Gata, Peña de
Francia, Sierra de Béjar, Sierra de Gredos ... from such wild quarries
has come the mellow stone to build a scholar city: the city of the
Wisdom and the Love of God within the crude dichotomy of Spain.
Salamanca is its University. Here in the first splendor of the
Reconquista, Christian kings foregathered wise men of Israel and Islam
and joined to them the aspirant scholars in Christ. The school was
founded by a king of León and chartered by a saint, San Fernando of
Castile. For two centuries, learning here was universalistic. Here, in
spirit, Ibn Gabírol the Jew became Avicebron, and his book _Makor Hayim_
the Latin _Fons Vitæ_ which nourished Saint Thomas of Aquinas. Here the
teaching of Averroës the Moslem was absorbed for Rome. The Mussulman
Avempace and Tofaíl--Platonists--here went down before the Stagyrite
phalanx which included Ibn Ezra, Ben Maimun and Gersonides. Here was
prepared food that later fed Albertus Magnus; here were married east and
west as a thousand years before in Alexandria. For the body of Catholic
Europe was bone of Greek logic, flesh of Jewish faith and eye of Arab
science.
Here, ages later, when the medieval unity of Rome drooped and split,
when Protestant heresy was annexed by the new State wills of the north,
the Church of Rome was saved. From Salamanca came the theocratic polity
of the Catholic kings which fused the modern will of the State to the
old idea of the Church. From Salamanca spread the religious energy which
won all South America and part of North America to Roman Doctrine.[12]
For here above all, were nurtured the Spanish mystics who made possible
that last great conversion: Cristobal Colón, Pedro de Alcántara, Juan de
Avila, Luis de León, Luis de Granada, Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Jesús,
Iñigo de Loyola--that various athletic group who by book or preachment,
by crusade or compass revived Rome. In Salamanca, at least in spirit,
the Medieval Synthesis was reborn: and in spirit has subsisted to our
day.
The earlier, more liberal Salamanca which had so immediate a share in
the real splendor of that Synthesis is not this town still glowing by
the River Tormes. The Salamanca of today is that of Isabel and
Ferdinand, of the sixteenth century--of the Jesuits and the fanatical
revivers.
Unlike most of the great cities of Castile, it rises gently from the
meseta. And heroisms of the mind, rather than of blood, speak in the
smolder of its ancient body. The River Tormes is urbane, almost
European. It passes waving willows and lush fruit trees; washes the
shaded soto where the monks met to platonize with Luis de León upon the
Names of Christ. A Roman bridge leads low to the city. Here once stood
a granite bull by means of which the wily beggar knocked wisdom into the
head of Lazarillo. And the streets climb up through the mud. Walls
crumble with the hillside under the town. An ancient church stands on
the bank surrounded by the mire; and houses, foul with age, their carved
seals moldered, limp like proud beggars up the sharp incline. The
Cathedral is a soft gold crest in the sun: at its feet are waves of
convents, consistories, churches, schools. The central streets are paved
with cobble stones. The houses are low and the glass of their windows is
out of place, so new it gleams within the soft senility of walls. Dogs,
children, refuse clutter up the streets. Everywhere one feels the
elemental base--a hill--on which this young culture of Christian Spain
has builded. In the churches, five centuries are confused. The Old
Cathedral is Romanesque; with its chaste columns and its nave a
petrified forest, it stands beside the scintillance of the plateresque
New Cathedral. Nearby is a Dominican convent in which a queer mariner
named Columbus found refuge and support in a scheme rejected by most of
the Crowns of Europe. The seventeenth century baroque of the
Churrigueras flaunts its high monstrosities beneath ornate ceilings.
Much of the gold arrogance of this convent is a result of that mad
scheme of Columbus. But the man himself is closer to the streets; for
here one still encounters at least in spirit the pícaro, the monk
half-saint, half-satyr, the immortal Celestina. A Jesuit convent rears
its chill harsh walls in the town’s heart: a symbol of the ruthless
might of the Company of Jesus, of its enormous logic. And everywhere,
the alleys limping up, limping down, between the homes of the Church.
This Salamanca, fixed in the eras of Isabel, Carlos, Felipe II, has
aged; has not changed. The dirty streets are the same; the low blind
precincts of the poor (Cervantes lived here once) and the dominant
recurrent periods of church and tower. Life’s anarchy is here controlled
by learning. Every crooked street is righted by a convent; every lurch
of alley is stopped by a square. And the whole town is mastered by the
Plaza Mayor--a square as correct as a schoolman’s syllogism. Its sides
are unvariant four-storied walls; it is colonnaded equally and equally
façaded; it is the noble, proper heart of a town which has argued unity
in Christ through seven rank chaotic hundred years....
The buildings of the university are the least of it. In the Library you
may find manuscripts by Alfonso the Wise, glosses by thirteenth century
Jews, Arabic illuminations of Gazali. You may sit in the same chill
lecture halls where once great masters taught humanities and where but
yesterday Miguel de Unamuno “explained” Greek after the universal
measure. But Salamanca is an ancient seer whose word has gone forth to
the world, while the body shriveled and the blood grew bleak.
More of the university is the tropical gold work of the Dominican
altars; is the stupendous grace of the two Cathedrals; is the immense
glower of the Jesuit on the hill. More, the sedulous symmetry of the
Plaza within the coil of gutters. More, the glow of the yellow mellow
stone within the desert fastness of Castile.
_c._ _The Water Bridge_
The æsthetic sense of Spain is social, instinctive, unconscious. Her
master works of art rise like isolate acts from the trammels of her
life. Her cities are among them: and none more perfect than the ancient
towns bristling upon rocks within the Castilian desert.
Choose your day well for visiting these communal works of Spain.
Salamanca needs sun: its warm gold stones speak graciously within an
azure sky. The Escorial is best in rain: its chill stones shrink from
the blue-gold of the Spanish day, but under the drift of breaking clouds
it glows like fossil fire. Segovia sings most clearly in a wind. Great
clouds like armies plunge from the Sierras and invest the Castle. The
sun makes sudden sallies on the Cathedral. Then gloom once more on the
town, like repentance after violence.
Castile, here, is a chaos of mountain and of desert. The Guadarrama is
steep over the lofty town. The desert leaps and dips in a cacophony of
planes. Elsewhere in Spain, it is Spring. But April in Segovia is
stormy. The mountains are still clad in winter. In the pockets of the
surrounding valley almond trees and cherry are in bloom, making little
perfumed furls of mist against the barren earth. The sky is neither
spring nor winter. A great wind rages. Momently, heaven changes. Titanic
mounds of cloud are flung like eiderdown from peak to peak: the sun is a
swift flash between dark purples. Rain in melted diamonds glances across
the valley in the oblique shaft of the sun: is gone: a copse of poplar
sings suddenly green and yellow under gray. The volumnear motions of the
hills seem to be waves of a seismic sea, swept by the wind and roaring
with its might.
* * * * *
Segovia fills the height of a long rock shaped like a ship within this
stormy earth. Below one side pours the Eresma, with its melted snows.
The valley rises on the other beam, purple and bronze soil, blue sage,
rock ... rises to a village that lies flat like a dory on the breast of
a wave ... rises again to the sky where the clouds drive wildly.
Segovia’s ancient walls are bastioned, pierced with knotty towers and
gates, and topped with the typical round cubos which Rome gave to Spain.
The walls bind the precipitous rock which holds a park and the Alcázar,
the usual pile of tessellated towers that gave Castile its name.
This is one end of the town. The rock goes higher toward the center.
Houses are a clutter, unanimous like an army in the moment ere it comes
forth to attack. A romanesque church, a feudal tower rise from the stony
mob like leaders. And in the town’s heart, stands the Cathedral. Its
interior is intricate and cold. But in the façade of the city, it is
perfect. It is the climax of Segovia rising to meet it. To the right
Alcázar is alone, facing the waste of the meseta; alone above the river
and the rock like a lord of the city. But now, the streets mount, an
aspiration makes them one: their goal is the Cathedral. Its base is lost
in the streets. Rise free and clear only the two thick towers and the
crest of the gigantic nave. The Cathedral is a ship breasting the sea of
the town: even as the town is a ship, breasting the hills.
Down from the Cathedral in the direction away from Alcázar, once more
the city falls. No regular descent. There is no metric rhythm in
Segovia, save for the mind that stands outside of it. An Olympian eye
sees the vast bowl of the Guadarrama: and on the tide of turf and rock,
the city riding like a frigate: and in the town, this regular rise to
the Cathedral. But each of these general units is a chaos. The plateau
is an intricate context of heights, villages, farms and valley-spots
suddenly sweet with orchards. The wave on which Segovia rides is itself
broken into rising, falling crests. To make a hundred yards of
horizontal progress, the voyager must go up, go down: slipping through
alleys that swerve, climbing steps that lift him into hidden _plazas_
where an old church spreads its romanesque cloisters like wings, or a
palace with faceted walls stands aloof from a plebeian throng of houses.
So, laboriously the voyager makes his way to the other end of town.
There is a Square. The Aqueduct of Rome, immemorial and chaste, rises
from the Spanish market. _Plaza del Azoquejo_: it is a name that recalls
the soukhs and bazaars of Islam. Within its sordid taverns, fish-shops,
stands Rome.
Segovia’s chaos disappears. Segovia becomes a drama rigorously styled.
As the town bristles under the wind and the mountains, so has passion
run riot in this town. Here lived Juan Bravo, leader of the _Communeros_
who arose through Spain, in tragic presentiment of disaster, to oppose
the Austrian Karl who became Carlos the Great. Here lived the stubborn
burghers who shut their gates against the young Queen Isabel. Segovia is
crude, coarse, anarchic. But Spain’s unconscious art has made it
perfect, weaving the elements of its cross-grained will into a living
balance.
This is the work of the Roman Water Bridge. Two thousand years ago, the
Empire built it to carry from Fuenfría to a reservoir not far from La
Granja. The distance was great, so the Aqueduct was long. No aspirance,
here, no thinking about symbols. The pragmatic, confident Roman thought
not of miracle: the passionate Segovian, building his chaos beneath
these Roman arches, looked for miracle elsewhere. And the miracle is
born of the unwitting marriage of these wills....
Roman aqueduct and Spanish town offset each other and create, once more,
the complex unity of Spain. The Square is a boil of braying burros,
muddy motor-buses, lottery vendors, beggars, drinkers. Above it and
across it spans the double tier of arches. They are vast granite blocks,
pieced without clamp or mortar into a soaring lacework. Hundreds of feet
above, swings the upper rim. The town clambers after it on steps,
becoming at the top level a hidden maze of low houses. The Bridge,
dwarfed here, disappears into the wall of a convent. Its massive granite
shelters a patio with a pump, grapevines, geese--and a young girl
stringing red clothes on the branch of an encina. Upon the other height
from the Plaza del Azoquejo, the Bridge grows gradually less steep as
the town rises slowly. Rome’s cool stones run ever closer to the Spanish
streets, singing against sordid wineshops, almost touching a schoolhouse
dismal as death, skirting a square where boys play at _pelota_. Rome is
now a single-tiered, a stolid marching music. It turns at right angles
and runs along a road lined with indigent shops. A _bodega_ opens its
dark fragrance as it passes: pigskins filled lifesize with wine sprawl
like bloated corpses in the shadow of this march of Rome. The town is
behind: the sedulous arched mass moves like a resistless army into the
ground that rises toward La Granja....
The Aqueduct of Rome is Segovia’s youngest life. Its stones are immense,
but its grace makes wings for them. Its tiers and terraces are an
ordered song. Horatian is the balance of these pragmatic blocks. The
mountains of Castile are old. The barren soil of Castile, stripped of
its loam, is old. Segovia is old. It is a spilling of energy, a thing of
chaos. Segovia comes to dark and tragic life within this Measure, sure
and at ease, of the cool will of Rome.
_d._ _The Miracle of El Greco_
South of the Guadarrama lies New Castile. The world flattens to the vast
plain of La Mancha. Towns stand like tiny toys on a table. It is a calm
before storm: vineyards and wheatfields stop against the wildest pass of
Spain, Despeñaperros of the Sierra Morena. Here Don Quixote like his
idol Amadís went into penance and prayer; here the Arabs passed from
Andalusia to the high Plateau; here at Las Navas de Toloso they were
pushed back and down five centuries later. Within a land of fierce
extremities, none is more telling than this sudden chaos rocking to the
sky between two mellow plains. In the upper one, La Mancha, the eye is
lost between the infinites of earth and heaven: it ceases to feed logic
to the mind and the soul starves in a waste of vague realities or, like
Don Quixote’s, leaps to the realm of visions.
North of La Mancha, another climax. The Tagus flows lazily west,
carrying silt and loam from gradual hills serrated with the olive. The
land is wide-browed. Its lack of trees gives it essential peace, as if
it were in contemplation of its own fortunate ease among the embattled
mountains. Now, swinging westward with the river, the land catches a
spiritual fever. Fields grow rockier, hills abrupt. Rondure sharpens to
angle; horizons shut. Something like a geological convulsion takes the
body of New Castile and turns it into a steep, a tumultuous storm. The
land becomes a maelstrom, swirling into a single rock--Toledo. The Tagus
maddens too. Bending south, it cuts into a canyon, one of whose walls is
Toledo and the other a rocky world to rim it. The river circles; deep in
a notch of stone it becomes a purpling torrent. It cuts a precipice, it
leaps a rapid, it reverses northward seeking again the long plains that
lounge westward to rocky Portugal and to the sea.
Toledo is cold upon its sudden height. Across the gorge that makes it
almost an island, olive groves, symmetrical as in the ancient prints,
draw verdant stripes in the red face of the hills. The country houses
and the chapels mark the swift slopes like little steadfastnesses
nailing their chaos. But in this geologic gyre and husbandry, Toledo
stands unmoving.
To the north where the plains lead to Toledo and where alone there is no
fending water, are walls. So an unbroken rigor belts the high town. Here
is the ancient Puerta de Visagra, unchanged since the Arabs put it up
twelve centuries ago upon a Roman stronghold dizzily maintained by the
Visigoths Athanagild and Leovgild to capital all the land. Gigantic
stones not polished by time. Three separate tiers of bastion and of
turret. And within the Gate’s shadow like a womb of rock, delicate Arab
arches. Behind, the street leads with a promise of gentle curves into
the harbored city. Children gambol in these monstrous walls; their calls
are flowers suddenly alight in a bleak winter. Women sit before painted
doorways and send voices like velvet strands into the silent granite of
Toledo. But life cannot prevail against this protecting death. Nearby is
a new Visagra (a mere five hundred years). Arms of Carlos V and a statue
of San Antonio furbish its forbiddance. Through its round arch, you see
two pointed towers with their _Mudéjar_ tiles aflash in the sun. But the
tiles are not verdant and skyey like the tiles of Granada and Seville.
They are colorless, and they are cold.
Toledo is a coil of streets, like the Tagus stormy and like the rocks
precipitous. Men and women live in Toledo. But they are void within the
intricate death of convent walls and church, and convent and convent
again. Rather than men and women of the sort who come together in the
ache of flesh, and of their ease bear fruitage, there seem to live here
creatures of prayer and dogma. Children indeed are scarce in these
streets that are the bodies of a Creed and a Rite. When there is open,
there is waste. When there is color, there is irony.
San Juan de los Reyes ... church, college, convent ... stands on the
westward buttress of the Toledan mountain. The rock cuts to the river.
The ancient bridge of San Martín loops high above the rapids, thrusting
its road away into a waste of dust. The Gate of San Martín stands in a
slanting square; and it is naked for the walls are gone. So desert comes
into Toledo. Within the city Gate, here is the face of mountain. The
streets stand on it, despite their ages, insecure and shallow. Desert is
not hostile to them, so they have let it in. Was it not there before
them? Let it come back to serve as the refrain of their bleak rigor--of
their denials. And the Church which the Catholic Kings projected and
then forgot--San Juan of the Kings--shrills with its painted statues in
this desert: Gothic, Arabic, and baroque against a hardier silence.
Farther on is the Judería--what is left of this Borough of Jews who
ruled Toledo when the Arabs came, and who throve thereafter in Toledo
for seven hundred years. The rigid mood goes on. The Castle of the Jews
has disappeared: but where it stood, beside the Paseo of a synagogue,
falls the escarpment, dark and sheer, into the rushing river. On the
farther side, the mountain is a wall. Water foams through the notch.
There is a tower standing on a thrust of rock just above the waves.
Halfway between the river and the Jewish homes, this ancient prison has
survived and fronts with its bars the desolate interstice of stone.
Churches and chapels stud the variant heights. And all about, the rise
and fall of streets, shut in and clamorously silent, cold in the neutral
tint of the Sierra.
You must cross the river. The Puente de Alcántara is a bridge whose
subtle dichotomy of arch and gate marks in plastic terms the way from
Moslem Musa to Christian Philip. Best strike down from the Cathedral to
the ferry. These are the oldest and the poorest streets. And here are
children--naked children, and naked patches of rock and turf within the
filth of alleys. Dark, over-ripe, mute. These streets on the
mountainside are as the hive of some subterraneous bee whose honey is
bitter-black. The people are blind. They behold neither the river below
that flows to the sea, nor the Cathedral above that touches God. They
live compressed within the surging forces of Toledo. They live in a
limbo of balance. Their obscurity is poignant, within so aspirant a
world. The ferry is a round and ancient bark with a carved prow and two
unwieldy oars to pilot it, for better or for worse, athwart the current.
And above the precipice of the other side, is the rocky chaos where El
Greco sat to paint his city....
Rigor, rigor inflexibly holds. Toledo’s streets are stone veins
imbedded. The Alcázar is a higher rock above the rocky huddle of the
town: its rectangular loom is a peak of the mountain, polished by the
sun. At the summit bristles the Cathedral. Towers, turrets, crested
pediments, flying buttresses and chapel roofs are pressed aloft by the
Toledan wave, and rise from it like foam. All of the sharp volutions of
the streets, even the sheer Alcázar, converge and aspire into this jet
of granite. And over the Cathedral is the sky--God’s empty answer to
this blast of icy aspiration.
* * * * *
This is one Theme of Toledo: the word of traditional Castile and of its
castle towns. The mountain is refuge of friend, menace to foe. The face
of the Christian warrior is set. Moor and Jew are driven out. And all
the Toledan world becomes a symbol of the mood that drove them. The soul
of the Spaniard becomes a castled mountain; masters its chaos by turning
it to stone. And what will not ply to immobility, it shuts without the
drawbridge.... One theme of Toledo. But a typical Castilian town--no
more--is not Toledo. Castile surpasses itself. Spain grows universal.
Color, flame, live too in the shut town. They are everywhere. And in
their protean form, they are one. Halfway up from the Puerta Visagra
stands Cristo de la Luz in a rough field of rocks. In 1085, the
conquering Castilians passed through the Arabs’ gate. Their titular head
was Alfonso VI. But Ruy Díaz de Vivar, the Cid, rode first. The streets
then were not different from now. Crude stone paved the steep, and the
gray houses hid their eyes about the inner verdure of their courts. The
Cid came to a little mosque. His horse fell to his knees and the
Campeador could not avail to budge him. At last, he dismounted from the
rapt steed and strode into the mosque. He beat away the gold-encrusted
Mihrab and disclosed a Visigothic chapel. In the altar place, before the
Christ, was a brass lamp; and it was burning even as it had burned three
and a half centuries before, when Musa walled it up to make his
mosque.[13]
The mosque stands first in the unkempt garden. Its entrance is
double-arched. Through the three columns topped by a lyric arabesque,
lies the round depth of the altar. Upon the walls are paintings of
ascetic Christians, lean with the Byzantine projection of their color
into the life of their forms. These paintings were recent when the Arab
came to Toledo in 711. They are recent today--in the Toledo of El Greco.
Cristo de la Luz is delicate. Its counterpoint of German, Byzantine and
Arab themes makes it a song wavering flute-like from the stiff music of
the Castilian town. On the other slope, in the Judería that leaned so
fatefully over the gorge of the Tagus, are other dissident jewels. Two
synagogues have survived. One of them consecrated as a church under the
tutelage of Santa María la Blanca, later became the asylum for penitent
prostitutes, later a barrack for cavalry and a stable. The other was
made over by the Catholic Kings to that most unjewish of cults--the
death (Tránsito) of the Virgin Mother. Builded by the Jews, the houses
speak across the stormy ages of the Jews, their builders. The sultry
masquerades to which they have submitted fade away. This is Toledo
indeed. The Toledo of Abraham Ibn Ezra, descendant of Gabírol and
forefather of Spinoza; of the munificent and tragic Samuel, treasurer to
Spain’s most cruel king; of Ibn Daud, Talmudist, and of his great foe,
Jehudah Ha Levi.
At the time of Paul, there were already Jews in Spain. Like the
Phœnicians and the Greeks before them, they became protagonists of
Spanish urban culture. The Visigoths who inherited the land upon the
Roman death, were an agricultural folk. Their will to control this
peninsula of cities failed, because they lacked the spirit of the city.
At the end, when disaster neared they oppressed the Jews--masters of
urbanity--for economic reasons. It was natural, that the oppressed
should welcome the Arabs: and that the Moslem captains, aware of the
possible ally in a hostile land, should overlook the chief hate of their
Prophet by welcoming the Jews. Jews were placed in control of Seville,
Málaga, Córdoba, Granada, Toledo. Under the Córdoban Caliphate, they
throve and Spain became their land. Jewish Wisdom crossed the sea from
Babylon and founded the first Academies of Europe.
During four centuries, the Jew was a master in Spain. But it is doubtful
if his number ever equaled half a million. He was a leaven and an enzyme
in the land. He was artisan, tradesman. No guild of the cities failed to
count him in. He was physician and teacher. He became scientist and
philosopher. The majority of Jews lived, of course, in the humble
circumstance of a farmer or a weaver. But a few grew great. Jews became
diplomats and statesmen for Moslem and for Christian princes. As the
modern economy gradually evolved, they became ministers of finance; they
waxed wealthy. And with their power they builded in the towns of Spain
centers of liberal, luxuriant culture whose like was not then in
Europe. They were masters of many tongues, masters of many
illuminations. When Arab Córdoba had rotted and the courts of Italy were
yet swarming knots of bandits, the Jews of Spain dwelt in a world which
embraced Asia, Africa, Europe. Indeed, they were among the eyes of
Portugal and Spain, yearning across the seas. They were cartographers;
they were promoters of trade. And from Gabírol who was born in Málaga in
1021 to Hasdai ben Crescas who died in Barcelona in 1410--a period of
time nearly as great as that which separates the Discovery of America
from our day--they traced an incessant thought in Spain.
The modern State sounded once again a Jewish doom. With the birth of its
fanatical will came persecution. The Jews’ internationalism was a
subtle, psychologic poison. The servants of royal unity became aware of
an enemy in their household--of an enemy in their blood. In 1391,
Spain--the liberal theater of ideas whose like had not been known since
Alexandria (for here argued men who believed, not in abstract gods, but
in flaming Prophets and in Incarnations)--lurched to one modern way of
progress. Massacre rose from Seville to Toledo. A century later, the
Jews were ordered to give up either their faith or their home. They had
been in Spain for centuries; their urban genius had helped build Spain’s
cities. They had kindled a fire to warm the world and to illumine
heaven. They were artisans in the body and in the mind of their land.
They were ordered to die. For to leave the home of Spain or the home of
Bible and Talmud was no mere uprooting. Probably not much more than a
hundred thousand left. The moiety stayed and were lost in the great
Catholic amalgam. Their organizations for action and for thought were
reft from them. They had no halls or synagogues. They had no language.
Worst of all, they had to abandon--those who stayed--the immemorial
_forms_ of feeling which were Jewish and in which they were beginning to
mold (witness Crescas and Leon Hebreo) a new Enlightenment, a new
Naturalistic religion! An end ... not the first, not the last ... came
to Jewish Wisdom. And while Europe whose spirit they had nourished rose
in Renascence to the bloody dawn of our “liberal” age, the Jews sank
down into the very night of mumbled ritual and superstition from which
they had upraised their oppressors.
As they pass from the stern city or are lost within its rigorous stones,
the Jews give to it a color and a theme without which it would not be
Toledo. By their acceptance of death, they have won life unceasing: and
here in Toledo which once gave them death, they have bestowed a spirit
which has not died.
The house of Samuel Levy stands, gracious and simple, in its garden. (El
Greco lived here.) The arched columns of Santa Maria are unhurt. The
Tránsito still breathes, darkly, like a rose over-ripe. It is a
rectangular building, higher than wide. Its walls are white under the
cedar ceiling. Around runs a frieze, margined in Hebrew texts. Above are
arches in relief, _rejas_ that suggest the Arab, and a higher line from
the Old Testament. But the base wall of the synagogue is its full glory.
It is a façade wholly of Hebrew. (Two Castilian seals thrust in to mar
it have no more effect than a spot on a sublime illumined page.) The
letters of stone make a warm intricate music. The æsthetic inspiration
is Arab. But how these Jews have deepened and dimensioned it! The
arabesque is a delicate, wavering line; without denseness, without
integration. It is like a silhouette, against a desert sky; it is like
the trail of life on desert sands. The Hebrew letters are slower, less
emphatic, more volumnear. They are far mellower in curves; they are far
deeper. They build, in this façade of a Toledan synagogue, a poem that
is history. They march on the stone surface of a wall, resolute,
self-effacing: symbols of a world whose spirit seems by miracle to
survive its body.
Color and aspirant light, throughout Toledo. How has it
survived? Not alone the Cristo de la Luz: not alone the Judería.
Athwart the Cathedral, in a little Square, is a building--the
_Ayuntamiento_--bright, warm, almost fancifully gay with towers. (El
Greco builded it.) There are Churches like San Vicente, Santo Tomé, in
which a wall grows suddenly glorious in color and sings above the
dolorous shadows. (Here, El Greco painted.) Even the Cathedral turns
traitor to its stones! The cloisters are a perfumed close. The choir has
rows of wood-carved stalls that shout their sensual delight against the
heavy columns. And in the Sacristía hangs an altar piece--an
_Expolio_--that is a sunny jewel. A genius--from across the sea--has
infused this conventional matter with prophetic spirit: space moves,
spirit grows manifest in flesh. A red-robed Christ becomes a ritual
flame, transfiguring the human shapes about him.
And this, in Catholic Toledo, the stone grim city! Because there came a
man to dwell here in whom dwelt the old Prophecies, and who resolved
them into shapes which Catholic Toledo could not deny. Color against
stone, fire against rigor--this had been the Argument in Toledo, until
Isabel and Cisneros put a stop to it, by blotting out the one in favor
of the other. A simple resolution. Moor and Jew go forth. Dogma and
Conventual remain. The Cardinals of Toledo--Popes of Spain--espouse the
iron purpose of Castile. And the long blank walls of the streets with
their hidden monks and nuns--these seem the victors of Toledo.
Comes, now, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century a young Cretan
painter to make his home in the town. His name is Doménico Theotocópuli.
He has studied in Italy with Tintoretto. He is a wanderer. He learns
that there is much gold to earn in Spain, and little talent to earn it.
A handy place in which to make a fortune. He comes and stays: and
although the fortune proves shy, Toledo becomes immortal.
The question of the actual blood which flowed in El Greco’s veins is of
no consequence. Child of the Mediterranean _Völkerchaos_, there must
have been echoes of many voices in his soul. Maurice Barrès[14] plays
with the unestablished notion that he was a Jew. The certainty is the
prophetic spirit of his work; the certainty is the vision of the East
with which he dowered Spain. He came to Toledo, disciple of a realist in
Florence; and he produced an art as opposed to the paganism of his
master as it is close to Isaiah.
The spirit of Israel and Byzantium does not die in Spain, because a
Catholic has come to make it flesh of the body. The Jew may go into his
alien ghettos; the Arab may rot in the Levant. Here is a man to blaze
their truth upon the walls of churches--and with a color so wise, that
the walls crumble ere his word grows dim.
The work of El Greco was misunderstood by his own age and scouted by the
criticism that came after. The wonder is, that it was tolerated--the
invasion in it of a world condemned. Manuel Cossío[15] has explained
this plausibly by the personal prestige of the man. His contemporaries,
failing to grasp his apocalyptic and “inaccurate” art, were moved by the
deep power of the man and by his own self-confidence. His work is the
crowning plastic of the West. More and more, as the walls of his stiff
world molder, El Greco is seen to express not alone Toledo, not Spain
alone, but the Christian Synthesis of Europe at its highest luminous
pitch.
His æsthetic is one of incarnation. He possesses an idea, dynamic,
mystical. He makes his figures immediate forms of that idea. Not
symbols, not representations--not even emanations in the separatistic
sense of the Brahmins. The spirit _informs_ these heads and torsos, much
as the spirit informs the Substance of Spinoza. This is an æsthetic to
be found in Egyptian sculpture. The archaic Greeks knew it and the
classic Greeks, growing analytical, abandoned it. It has come closest to
the West in the word of the Hebrews. Isaiah, Hosea, Job, the Song of
Songs, the Psalms, and the Alexandrian Pseudepigraphia rose, all, from
a like æsthetic law. Byzantium rewon it wanly in its painting. El
Greco’s idiom is close to the Byzantine. In his essence, the fierce
passion of its flaming, he is far closer to the Hebrews. This does not
mean that Doménico Theotocópuli had Jewish blood. It proves rather that
Christianity had Jewish blood, so that the Toledan ambiance of Semitic
rhythm and Semitic thought could call forth for Rome a vision very close
to the old vision of the Prophets.
El Greco must be regarded as a partaker, crucially, in the Toledan
scene. Thus only can the mystical culmination of his work be understood.
In Toledo, two antithetic Themes: a will of rigor and a flame of the
East. What mystery shall fuse them? In El Greco, two dominant traits:
volumnear color, movemented form. The mystery is at hand! Color creates
plastic mass; mass, formed through configuration into bodies, creates a
flow. But the flow is not of fluid; it is of fire. Fire flows and is
steadfast; an essential object and an immutable circumambiance mold its
motions to immobility. So now the flowing of El Greco’s forms. Massing
colors, thrusting shapes, parabolas of expression round spherically into
a balance _with no outlet_. Ecstasy lies within itself. Life aspires--to
life. Here is the vision of a Mystery which like flame flows forth from
God, is held to God and is a form, in its commotion, of God’s immutable,
immobile essence. Here is a Mystery not transcendental, not
neo-platonic. But Dante and Spinoza would have hailed it. And Toledo’s
stones could be transfigured to express it, without loss of their own
nature.
Thus did the essence of El Greco’s art resolve the two themes of his
city. Once again, the God of the East upon the body of the West creates
a masterpiece....
_e._ _The Tomb_
The ultimate Word of Castile....
A gray rectangle on the bleak Sierras. Behind, upon three sides, the
immense mountains. Below, the rock and clay that join Madrid to Avila.
Four stories of gray granite. A delicately arched slate mansard roof.
Upon each corner a tower and three more tiers of windows tapering
through the slender roof to a ball and a cross. Within, sixteen patios,
making the design of a Gridiron: symbol of the gridiron upon which San
Lorenzo, patron of the Escorial, was roasted. This Gridiron is cold. A
mighty central patio, its walls of invariant granite broken by the
church façade which rises within the building like a prayer wrung from
the rigor of that stony life. Doric columns, gigantic and harsh figures
of the Hebrew kings standing upon the pediment. Two towers at the
corners, and within, a Dome lifting above the building like a Tomb and
making death the dominant of this invulnerable music.
The Escorial stands on a stone platform whose inelastic might is
emphasized by the severe cropped hedges. The green of the box, the green
of window-sills and shutters chimes faintly against the silence. To the
south, under the granite terrace, is a little pond. Its square surface
mirrors only granite: that of the monastery walls or of the Guadarrama.
Within also silence. A monastery with its cloisters and chapter halls, a
church, a college, a Palace ... in square stone rigor. Walls are thick
like fortress walls; rooms are vaults; floors are bare. Below ground is
an octagonal chamber of vermilion marble piled to the peaked ceiling
with coffins of kings. And beyond, like the streets of some lugubrious
town, are the vaults of the Infantas--a procession of marble mansions,
body-large. This city of the dead holds the Escorial.
Eastward slopes a little park, and south from the artificial pool there
is a lawn. It ends in a granite front flush with the grass. This brief
pleasaunce is like a spot of verdure within desolation. Against it rises
the Escorial, framed by the scoriant Sierras, based and topped by
death--the profoundly stylized and essential form of the bleak Coronal
of Castile.
It is the masterwork of Philip II. And Philip is a masterwork of Spain.
The Spanish will to forge a unity from the warring elements of its life
won no darker victory than his. He was the great grandson of the Most
Catholic Kings. He was the true heir of their impossible purpose. His
Empire spanned the world. Never has there been its like. Portugal,
Holland, Franche-Comté, Austria, the Americas were bulwarks of his
House. He strove to make of this delirious chaos a unitary Word to
bespeak Christ. He gave his country’s blood and his life. He took at
their full value the accoutered lists of his imperial titles. He was the
Catholic King; let his land express God. He was Monarch; let him know
his children. His personal correspondence immensely regarded every city,
every hamlet, every estate in his realms. Each curate of each parish was
invited by the King to send detailed reports of the persons of his
flock. But the curate might err in perspective. Each report was tested
and criticized by another. Philip lived in the scaffolding of a Dream.
The Dream was good, for it was to create and rule a unitary world. But
the scaffolding was warfare, intrigue, laborious documentation. For
peace, he went to war: for light, he plowed the dark. He spent his years
and his people: and at the end he felt death.
This was the hour when the Escorial shaped in his dark mind. The pretext
was the desire of his father Carlos I, that the kings of Spain possess a
worthy tomb; and was the victory over the French on San Lorenzo’s day.
But the work that grew was strangely different from the plan, and far
profounder.
The will to unity must come to this? Philip had dreamed of a monument of
Life: a Spain that was to be the symphony of continents and seas, of a
hundred peoples and a hundred tongues fused in the grace of Christ. Now,
in the ardor of his maturity and in the glamour of his bloody conquests,
Philip knows he has failed. Unity ... the health of Unity ... must be
sought elsewhere. Not in the piling up of worlds but in their giving up;
not in life but through death.
Many-mooded death. Death of the senses, death of the mind, death of
glory, death of the will to live. From his imperial splendor and from
the ranges of his kingly sway Philip steps forth an ascetic. He will
have his Solution within the ken of his eye--this master upon whose
realm the sun does not set. He is the lord of the earth; and lives with
one last mastering desire: to build a tomb for his glory.
Philip searches the waste fastness of Castile, until he finds his site:
this barren spur of the Sierra below whose rock spreads the desert. Now
he calls his slaves--they are the painters and the architects. Juan
Bautista de Toledo and his successor Juan de Herrera, builders of the
Escorial, are tools in the fever-cold hand of the king. Their plans are
studied, revised, rejected. Their ebullient moods are flayed, their
dignity is slurred. They are slaves--mere cutters of stone--they are
tools.
And so, in a land of bastard architectures, where the Gothic is
deformed, where Renaissance and baroque and Oriental forms are puddled
and hypertrophied and belied, rises this masterwork. In its brutal
chastity, speaks the tragic spirit of him who made it. The Escorial is
to unverdant, fanatically ordered Spain what the green tragedies of
Racine are to open, sweetly measured France.[16]
* * * * *
Across the valley on a wooded height is a rocky bench known as the Seat
of the King. Here Philip comes each day and watches the Escorial grow
before him. He fears he might die ere it is done. He drives his slaves
the artists; imports whole corps of them from Italy and Flanders. And
when he is stricken with the illness which he thought his last, he is
carried in a litter from Madrid, eight dolorous days upon the bleak
meseta. He seeks the bare cell that is his Palace in the Escorial
basement; he lies in the bedroom built beside the Altar so that he may
hear Mass from his pillows. And so indeed he died. But still he sits
each afternoon upon the _Silla del Rey_, and watches.
Below him, the sun goes down and a cold moon rises. Below him a patch of
lawn and a flume float within this world splintered of granite and
twilight. A wood of encina stands like an army of cowled saints. They
are gnarled, gray-armored in moss, and their leaves are little
refulgences of prayer, holding the sunset above the sodden ground. They
look up, as Philip looks, toward the Escorial. It is matriced in jagged
rock; it is sheer from the sun and the moon light....
_CHAPTER VI_
_THE DREAM OF VALENCIA_
Spain, with face turned east away from the sun, takes her afternoon
siesta. She has dined well. Soup of seven meats, codfish, the seven
meats, cheese rich as manure, Galician greens, Toledan mazapan, Sevillan
_dulces_, wines from Málaga, Jérez and La Mancha, heroic tobacco from
the Canary Islands, fill her. She was hungry. For her day had been
active. She had served and fused the wills of many peoples: swift
Phœnicians, heavy-headed Romans, meteor Greeks, Goths with wild hair and
tender eyes, intricate introvert Jews, Arabs with convictions about the
materiality of Cosmos, Moors whose blood was fierce like Atlas
avalanche, sportsmen like the Cid whose charity was of the sword, whose
religion was of the moment, mystics of Castile parsing Christ with
Horace, Spaniards at last ... Torquemada, Isabela, Celestina ... makers
of the dominance of Castile. So Spain was hungry and heartily ate: was
weary and heavily slept. And her dream was a city of the eastern coast.
Its name Valencia. Its streets a Carnival. Its life a Masquerade.
Medieval towers stand over streets that shrill with modern shops. Great
Gates of Rome pinion the labyrinths of Orient. Arches of Islam throw
into shade white mansions built by American concerns of sewing machines
and fountain pens. All masquerade. The people speak a tongue close to
the French languedoc: they ride in Citroens and Fords. Put no trust in
this, they are not European. These open knots of barter, these entrail
alleys, murmurous and fluid, speak of Fez and Tunis. Fraud again: this
is not Africa. Islam puts a mockery on Rome. Judah redargues the
Castilian dogma. Moorish marts belie the modern measure. Avenues of
villas stretch straight from the town in gleams, and end in rice swamps:
near the bungalows toss galleys on the tide, with sails like the sails
of Carthage. Masquerade.
Here is the market place. _Lonja de seda_, the silk exchange, is Gothic.
(The mulberry trees are thick upon the huertas.) But the base from which
the Gothic rises is a Moorish palace. And from the noble height hangs
Arab ornament. The gargoyles indeed lean down like muedzins--fossil
muedzins with a frozen Allah on their lips. Under the holy walls, upon
the floor, squat merchants: they masquerade for Greece of the
Völkerchaos, for Talmudry of gain. And their commercial heads bathe in
the light of a fairer east--the Sun.
Outside are throngs. A church façade, rococo over-blown from the French
Renaissance, echoes the shouts of women at their sheds. Oranges in tons,
winesacks like human bodies, dates from Elche, potatoes, flowers,
donkeys towing _tartinas_ ... all produce of the lush Valencian huerta.
The women wear great red aprons and have purple eyes....
Valencia in chaos is a masquerade. Greece, Carthage, Rome, Alexandria,
Mecca, Fez annul each other here. Turbulent Valencia does nothing, says
nothing. It is a dream of Spain, laden with her ages.
END OF PART ONE
_PART TWO_
_The Tragedy of Spain_
_CHAPTER VII_
_THE WILL OF THE CATHOLIC KINGS_
Young Isabel, sister of the king, sits in her castle tower at Medina,
and looks beyond Castile: looks south to the Moorish realm, Granada;
looks east and north to the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre; looks west
to Portugal. “Let there be Spain,” says Isabel of Castile.
Her own land is riven in chaos. Ferdinand the Saint who won Córdoba and
Seville from the Moslem was a strong monarch. But Alfonso the Learnèd
was not wise in ruling. There have been two hundred years of banditry,
of baronial insolence, of royal wavering. Castile is a quicksand upon
which no will can march. Only the penniless submit to taxes. Nobles are
outlaws. Rome parcels out appointments in the Church to alien lackeys.
Prelates of Spain go their own way with their own crimson armies, or
sulk in arrogant safety in their fortress-churches. Tolerance has
begotten anarchy. Ideas annul each other in the too free sun. And God,
with many faces, turns against Himself.
Isabel, looking from the bastioned windows of her tower out upon Castile
is a luminous quiet heart in the storm. King Henry, the Impotent, is
fertile of disaster. His favorites juggle with the scepter, scribble
upon the royal parchment commands of idleness and of ambition. One of
his favorites, Beltrán, has begotten on the Queen a daughter: and
Joanna’s growth is the growth of fresh dynastic war. Alfonso, the king’s
brother, claims the throne and writes his claim on the sparse
wheatfields of Castile, making them desert. Portugal pushes: France
plots and watches. Each fortune has its army. Each church is a castle.
Each mountain is either an ambush or a throne. “Let there be Spain,”
says Isabel of Castile.
She will be queen: but in her own way. And her way, like her will, is
her rapt possession by the spirit of her land. Her brother, Alfonso, has
died: his faction demand of her that she assume the Crown and drive out
the impotent king. Isabel refuses. She bargains with Henry. While he
lives, he is to rule. But his pseudo-daughter shall renounce: his
adulterous wife shall return to Portugal: Isabel shall be acknowledged
heiress of Castile. Henry gives his word, and breaks it. He is neither
friend nor foe. He is a symbol of Spain’s brackish chaos. Isabel holds
to her castle. She is almost penniless; but she has for confessor a
couched eagle, Cisneros, who is to second her mysterious work. Isabel
learns that her brother the king plots to imprison her for the sake of
Joanna whom the heir of Portugal has married. Isabel summons Ferdinand,
heir to Aragon, to come and wed her. She is thinking of Spain; and her
articulate will has convinced the old King Juan of Aragon, Ferdinand’s
father, that she is going to win--and that the union is good.
Disguised and penniless, Ferdinand crosses the hostile land and reaches
the princess in Valladolid. He is seventeen: a lissom, romantic knight,
the impact of whose bloods--Latin, Goth and Jew--has kindled a swift
fire in his face. He sees this girl, tall and stately and one year his
elder: her ruddy hair is a braided glow about her brow, the great blue
eyes are a sky for the large rigor of her features. He enters the
mansion of her love, to dwell forever within the sway of her will. For
her will is Spain. He is brilliant, sharp, ubiquitous: but her will has
place for him. Let him move from Italy to Peru: he will yet be within
the will of Isabel.
The married boy and girl are fettered by penury in Castile; and like a
breath to move them wait the death of Henry. He dies when Isabel is
twenty-three. Portugal marches eastward for Joanna. His great army is a
shadow in León. Isabel’s faction dwindles. Ferdinand, wise consort,
proposes peace with Portugal at the price of Zamora and other bastions
of the west. Isabel refuses. She is pregnant. She makes long night
journeys on horse, to her recalcitrant towns. She pleads before rough
communes and proud _ricos hombres_. She spends her woman’s strength--she
and Spain will suffer for it--but she does not entail her still shadowy
queen’s power. She makes recruits. She has a good field general in her
husband. Portugal loses heart before this hearty mother of unborn Spain.
The stubborn towns of Castile rally to her. In 1479 Juan of Aragon dies:
Ferdinand becomes king: Castile and Aragon at last are wedded with their
monarchs.
“Let there be Spain,” is the rhythm of Isabel’s thought.
“We have not yet won Castile,” she tells her husband on the march to the
long, last war for the conquest of Granada.
From ages of invasion and dissent, Spain has become this throbbing swarm
of aroused centrifugal impulse. Ideas, races, communities, men: a
boiling tumult to be summed and stilled. Spain longs for peace: Spain
longs to become Spain. From her multiverse of wills, she has willed a
symbol: this person, fair and strong. She has willed Isabel who is the
flesh of Spain’s will.
Isabel is one possessed. Her vision, thought and sense move in one
cycle. To her, physical love is not this tenderness between herself and
her man: it is a joining of Aragon and Castile. To her, physical
fecundity is not her woman’s flower: it is the providing by a queen of
counters for dynastic matches.
But she is deliberate and wise. She has more than her will and the
weapon of her body. She has ideas for weapons. The modern State
functioning under an almighty monarch, the medieval Church with its
source in Rome and Christ, and for her people Justice: this is the
triune tool whereby to weld the anarchies of Spain into her Spain at
last.
Strabo already wrote of the separatism of Spain: Rome suffered here as
nowhere else to unify her conquest. Spain lacked a nervous system and a
base: she had to be subdued bit by bit--and so held. Since the Romans,
twelve hundred years have stratified the chaos. Each new strain of
blood, each fresh disposal of culture and of faith has become a
claimant. The Spaniard bears in his nerves the variance of a past--all
anarchy of dissent and self-assertion.
The Catholic Kings sit weekly in open court and dispense justice. The
nobles are leveled down: the commoners are lifted. Finance is once more
farmed from plenty, not extorted from indigence. Rome is compelled to
relinquish to the Kings the right of nomination to high office. In all
of this, the monarchs meet Spain’s intricate problem with the
conventional measures--those which are unifying France and Britain.
In Spain, this is mere prelude. Spain’s chaos is more organic, and is
unique in Europe. Isabel follows the logic of her weapons. What disrupts
Spain is not banditry, not the insolence of nobles: but Spain’s free
life of inimical ideas. All else is consequence, not cause. To the south
is a whole kingdom of the Moors. Everywhere live Mussulmans and Jews.
More insidious still, there are the converted Jews--_los conversos_--who
under cover of acquiescence spread the poison of their immemorial
discord. When France was truly Catholic with Saint Louis for king, her
Dominican friars backed by Pope Gregory set up an Inquisitional
Tribunal. France showed her mettle against the Albigenses. Isabel has
even a closer precedent to hand: Aragon defended herself against the
heretics in 1242; and six centuries before, the Visigoths made
protective laws against the Jews--the accursed Jews who freed themselves
from oppression by letting in the Arabs! They are the same Jews still:
few in number, but with the strength of ferment. They turn Christian:
they achieve power and wealth: they marry with the nobles: they become
princes of the Church. And their anti-national nature, their passion for
free thought and independent action rot the weak royal fabric. Isabel
applies for a Papal Bull: the Inquisition is set up, not against open
Jews and Moors, but against the subtle and treacherous _conversos_.
Granada, decomposed under the affluent Moors, falls to the Catholic
Kings. The Inquisition, captained by Torquemada, sends thousands of
souls upon their way to Heaven and fills Spain with the anguish of torn
bodies. Her roads are safe, her nobles and churchmen buckle under; the
last Moorish prince has crossed the Strait to the Moghreb. And yet Spain
is not One. Spain must become a Being, rapt and single, serving Christ
and conquering for Christ. She who is the symbol of Spain’s will strives
to make her land in her own image. Spain, like her, must become chaste
and absolute: a Catholic people as she is a Catholic woman.
The Jews are offered a merciful alternative: to be Catholic or to quit
the land. Isabel argues that the _conversos_ will lose their secret
virulence if they have no nourishment from open Jewish neighbors. In
1492 a goodly fraction of the Jews of Spain “exchanging a House for an
ass, a Vineyard for a coat,” leave the cities where they have lived for
ages. Ten years later, the Moors of the conquered kingdom of Granada,
meet the same fate. Again, a host of intellectuals, artists, tradesfolk
is bled away. The peasants do not stir: they become Catholic with the
same inert response which had made them Moslem seven centuries before,
or Arian under the Visigoths, or pagan under Rome.
Isabel looks at her work--and nods--and is not satisfied.
She says: “We do unto the body of our beloved land as Christ did unto
the possessed: we have cast out devils. But this is not enough. True
disciple of our Lord, Spain must take up her burden and go forth: must
forsake comfort and family and the long-sued peace: must bring His Word
to all that dwell on earth. Spain is Christ’s true apostle. France turns
away in trickery and ambition. Henri IV, Louis XI--how far they are from
Saint Louis! Italy is helpless. Spain is the well-beloved: Spain is
Israel, and Rome’s right hand. Let my king, Ferdinand, go with his
hardened troops to Sicily and Naples.
“But even this suffices not. The Apostles did not stay among the Jews:
they went out to the Gentile. There is more than Europe. Can this
strange religious mariner, Cristobal Colón, be right?”
Isabel ponders what she has heard of Columbus. He is the author of a
book of _Prophecías_. He has found and plotted in the Old Testament his
rationale for a westward route to the Indies. God perhaps wrote down in
Isaiah, not alone Christ and the Word of Christ in Europe, but Spain and
how Spain shall bring the Word to the East. Columbus a prophet? (He says
there is gold in the Indies. Spain needs gold, for her crusade.) He is
the friend of holy men in Spain: the Dominicans bespeak him and his
cause. He has been rejected by Juan II of Portugal, by Henry VII of
England, by Anne of Beaujeu, Regent queen of France.
“Let Colón go westward to the heathen east,” the Catholic Kings ordain.
“Let him carry the Christian word to the heathen, and bring back gold to
carry the Word farther.”
Isabel’s will is religious. She is a woman incarnate of an idea:
passionately eager to make all her realm, all the world flesh of her
purpose. This means that her design must be practicable, also. Kingship
is acceptance of the immanence of God. Isabel thinks she understands,
looking over the turmoiled centuries of Spain: those of the Reconquest
from Moor and Arab. She knows that the _mind_ of these shifting wars was
of this world and for the spoils of the earth. She knows that the Cid at
times fought Christian, and that Saint Ferdinand could not have won
Seville without the aid of the Moslems of Granada. God used mundane
weapons for His purpose. No archangel did He send to drive Târik and
Al-Mansor from Santiago, but mercenary treacherous knights who knew of
the Infidel that he had gold, rather than that he spat upon the Cross.
And unto this day, the Moor is respected in Castile! He is learnèd,
liberal: he has fought well and lived well. Isabel accepts the strange
ways of her Lord. She, too, must use mundane weapons. Ferdinand is
ambitious: let his lust be a weapon. He is sharp, swift, hard like
Toledo steel: no king of France can outwit him, no Italian cardinal
withstand him. Isabel cherishes the good tool. A more conscious tool is
Columbus. His ships have blundered on a new rich continent. His fortune
has foundered: he is in chains--as were the older prophets. But the
wealth is Spain’s! His mariners are bullies--worldly tools of the Lord:
yet even by them the Indian can be saved. Even by them and their greed,
Rome can bring grace to the Indies. Isabel accepts the immanence of God,
in the lusts of her servants.
She is a tall, fair woman. In the camp, in the castles that raise her
constant journeys across Spain--Córdoba, Valladolid, Medina, Burgos--she
lives the frugal life of the campaigner. She has paid for her forced
night rides: the heaviest price, perhaps, is the feebleness of her
children, none of whom survives to inherit or give an heir to Spain,
save the mad second daughter, mother of Carlos the Great. The queen’s
splendors are reserved for display that shall bespeak her greatness to
the world. When she enters Avila or Seville, it is upon a tide of gold
and rubies. But when the doors shut upon her castle and the drawbridge
rises, when she is alone with her family or her confessor, the jewels
and the cloth of gold are gone: a woman, resolute and stark like the
Castilian mountains, looks within herself for God’s next message.
She is the spirit of Spain. Her husband, often unruly, often rebellious,
is muscle, skill, craft--he is not the spirit of Spain. Her spiritual
father, Ximenez de Cisneros, whom she chose for confessor because he had
no respect for a queen, and whom she exalted to be Primate of Toledo
because he abhorred all greatness--he is the nude projection of her
conscience upon the widening splendor of her realm. Beneath the
sumptuous robes of Cisneros is a shirt of hair. Deep in his vast castle
is a cell, a bare and bedless floor on which the Primate sleeps after
the penitential rope each night has lashed into his flesh the words of
Christ. He is a formula of her immaculate will: but he is not the
spirit of Spain. His fanatical asceticism is too simple. Spain, like
Isabel, is turbulent and complex.
What pouring of flesh and spirit upon Spain, since the Phœnician, the
Berber and the Celt first made the Iberian fecund! A subtle chaos. For
Spain is a diapason of hostile forces, needing each other to survive:
the embattled parts have long since found their balance, and each is in
love with itself.
Isabel works like an artist. She has her vision. Her instinct and
experience evolve for it a form and for herself a method. She takes her
material ruthlessly and transfigures it with a cold passion. But for a
deeper reason, Isabel is an artist. This design which is her vision and
her will and to which she conforms her world is her world’s will and
vision. The creative circle is closed. For he alone is the true artist
whose personal will is the will of his land and of God: only in this
marriage of wills can there be true creation. Isabel makes Spain over
into the image of Spain.
Behold the saintly, the murderous woman! She is the face of irony, and
her smile is tragic. With what tender hand she sets up the Inquisition:
“Unity in Christ, enforced by the power of the modern State.” With what
warm eyes, she bids her marauding mariners godspeed: “America brings
recruits for Christ--and gold for the winning and holding of more
recruits.” How fondly she gives her insane child, Joanna, in marriage to
the heir of Hapsburg; how resolutely furthers her husband’s ambitions in
the east. Spain, kingdom of God, surely cannot embrace America and
neglect Europe? Infidel Africa, false France must be surrounded and
crushed--“Austria, Artois, Netherland, Africa, America,” she counts the
organs of her embodied Christ.
And the heart of the Body, Spain herself, with Portugal long since
joined by blood alliance: it must be pure and solid like the heart of
the Queen. This is the kernel of her work. Isabel looks back upon her
life and finds again her measure and her method. She will create a race
of Spaniards whose every unit, man and woman, in intimate thought shall
strike a single note: so that this note, myriad-repeated, fill the
world. Spain, mother and child of chaos, shall become the archetype of
unison on earth.
Isabel is ruthless, she is unafraid: she is certain. Such feeble virtues
as tolerance, freedom, joy of life--Spain was celebrated for them beyond
all Europe--must be given up. Shall Isabel spare her land, when she has
not spared herself?
She was young and tender. She has known what it is to lie in a man’s
arms. She has been a mother. She has sacrificed love to become a
captain. She has lost her children, unborn or born, because of her
forced marches in the saddle. She has mortified not alone her lusts and
vanities, but her gentleness and sweetness, to become this Weapon of the
Lord.
Let Spain do as much. Let there be laws against the wearing of gold
braid: against display of luxuriance and ease. Let there be laws against
the idleness of doubt, against the vice of willful search of truth.
(Rome has the truth!) Let there be laws against any wavering whatsoever
from the pure unity of Spain. And what element offends against this
white simplicity, let it be cut away--though the land bleed.
Above all let there be no peace. Isabel’s art reaches its ironic climax.
Spain’s hunger for unity was the hunger for peace. Disunion and
multiplicity had made perpetual war. Now unity was achieved, the Spanish
rhythm--which was war--went on. The new ideal nourished the old mode.
Spain is the apostle of Christ. Spain has become a state to establish
Christ on earth. Let Spain not rest. Christ brings not peace, but a
sword.
* * * * *
The vision, a theodicy: the form, the Church of Rome: the dynamic means,
a State. In the impossible marriage of these three elements lies the
tragedy of Spain.
For seven centuries Christians have fought Moslems. Their motive was
conquest of power. But their pretext became the Cross. The opposing
Crescent determined this. The Cross grew, because of the faith of the
Moor. Very early the Christians found it well in their raids against the
Mussulman, to enlist the Presence of the Church. The priest became an
auxiliary soldier: he brought the poetry and spirit of a religious
slogan to enhance the fleeting motive of the Raid. And now at last the
slogan has come true! Saint Ferdinand took Seville because he wanted
more land. But Isabel sends ships to the Indies because she wants more
Christians. A millennium of brutish restlessness has mothered this
religious restlessness of Spain which would embroil the world till all
the world be Christian. Ages after the Crusades of France and England,
ages after the decadence of the Arab, the troops of Isabel become
crusaders.
A modern State with a medieval God. In France and England, the medieval
God has already vaporized away. England breaks literally with Rome.
France dissolves her bonds into mere gesture. _The modern State must
have no God but itself._ It must create its own pragmatic, its ethic,
its metaphysic, finally its religion upon the unitary plan of its own
health and progress. France knows this: henceforth the State of France
will act unhindered by any ideal external to its future. And England
knows this. Two mighty States move forward with a unity of program and
of control born of the need of the State.
But in Spain, the State is not cause and effect, not ideal and goal, not
master and dispenser. In Spain, the State shall be the tool of a Vision
hostile to the State’s essential nature.
The State must be materialistic, possessive, selfish. Spain’s ideal is
visionary, creative, altruistic. The State must steal and hold. Spain’s
ideal spends. The State murders to enhance itself. Spain’s ideal murders
to enhance Christ. The State is anti-individual. Spain’s ideal makes and
controls by law the yearning of each soul.
Isabel is an artist: she has the logic and the integrity of the artist.
But in the form of her work live elements that disrupt and that belie
each other. She makes of Spain a modern State: she sends this monster,
lustful, treacherous and dull, upon a Christian errand....
_CHAPTER VIII_
_THE WILL OF SAINT AND SINNER_
_a._ _Irony and Honor_
_b._ _The Mystic_
_c._ _The Jesuit_
_d._ _The Jurist_
_e._ _The Rogue_
_f._ _Velazquez_
_a._ _Irony and Honor_
The Catholic Kings have builded ruthlessly: absolutism, the grace of
Christ, intolerance, universal justice, arms and prayer were to make
Spain one. Now each of these qualities takes form and grows personified
in Spain. Each is imbued with Spain’s imperious will to be whole and
one: each grows great with this spirit: each wars upon them all. Spain
was chaotic and diverse. Her will to be one serries her into antitheses.
Her will to union breaks her into extremes. Irony works on Isabel’s fair
fabric.
Perhaps the land itself is symbol of the process. Spain is desert--and
garden; flat plain--and mountain; great heat--and winter. Spain is
Europe--and Africa. In her events, she reveals this first ironic state
of fusion--the splitting up into opposites of action. Columbus, mystic
captain who charted his voyage in the Prophets, becomes enchained in the
lust of avarice. His men, sent to Christianize the Indies, enslave the
courteous American and sack his cities. Spain’s past transforms! The
Cid, that playful knight, becomes crusader. Saints turn knight-errant.
Moderate Stoics (like Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius whose father was a
Spaniard) inspire the ascetic fury of the hermits. And the humane
Arcipreste de Hita, Castile’s first poet, is turned into an apologist
for license.
In her pageant of extremes, Spain’s Middle Class is crowded out. The
land has warriors--and beggars; nobles and rascals: saints and
scoundrels. Charity is practiced with the sword and the mystic walks
with the thief. Santa Teresa answers La Celestina. Don Quixote sallies
forth with Sancho Panza.
One spirit moves them all. They have each the same whole pride in Spain,
the same faith in her destiny, the same mind that Spain is their
inheritance. The Spanish mystic is no aloof and transcendental man: he
works for Spain. The Spanish rascal is no shallow rascal: he has the
almost metaphysical conviction that Spain must feed him. And every
Spaniard, from prostitute to saint, from king to beggar, moves within a
sense which reveals this terrible will to _social unity_: the sense of
Honor.
* * * * *
The Spanish sense of Honor is the need of Spain to resist the social
chaos of her land. The member of an integrated world completes it with
self-approval. Self-approval the Spaniard does not need. He was a
person, long before he had a nation. The Spaniard knew what was right,
what was true. His need was to make others know as he did: for in this
social conformity, he would feel himself at last the member of a group.
The _pundonor_ was the point of contact whereby he graphed, not his
place in Heaven, but his place in the world. The stress was upon others.
And this was the trait of a land in which individual unity was achieved;
in which rights of personality needed no insistence; but in which social
unity was lacking and was longed for.[17]
This need was so intense that it inspired a literature and informed a
religion. Æsthetic worlds were built upon this impulse and it infused
the writings of mystics as well as the histories of rascals. Spain in
her great Age--a pattern of sharp-limned individuals--was symphonized in
the key of Honor.
_b._ _The Mystic_
The mystics of Catholic Spain who in act and word gave utterance to the
will of Isabel rose from a high tradition in the land. They were indeed
the fulfillment ... as was the Queen ... of a religious vision older
than Spain herself. When Salamon B. Judah Ibn Gabírol was born in Málaga
in 1021, there was not yet Spain. Gabírol looked about him at this land
in which three continents and three religions were embroiled. And he
said:
“Thy Glory is not diminished because of them that worship aught
beside Thee. For the intention of them all is to attain Thee. But
they are as the blind: they set their faces toward the way of the
King; and they wander out of the way.”
Gabírol the Jew wrote hymns which were included in the Sephardic ritual.
But the book which sets forth his vision of God and life reveals no
specific creed: it was too universalistic for the Jews who neglected his
philosophy and soon lost even the Arabic manuscript of his work. Two
centuries later, the _Makor Hayim_ reappears in the Latin version _Fons
Vitæ_: Aquinas combats its intuitionalism, Duns Scotus leans on it. The
Arabs Ibn Sina and Ibn Roshd were naturalized in Europe as Avicenna and
Averroës: now Ibn Gabírol, stripped of his race and sect, becomes
Avicebron: one of the sources of platonic faith in modern thought. But
it is an error to confound Gabírol with the followers of Plotinus who
supplied the principal attack upon those fossils of modern rationalism,
Maimonides and Aquinas. There is an element in Gabírol which the true
neo-platonist lacks: an element both Semitic and of Spain. It is the
element of Will, immanent and purposeful, in his conception of
divinity. Life to Gabírol is no mere fated emanation of the Godhead as
to the true North African and Hindu mystic: nor is it an unreal envelope
about truth, as to the followers of Plato. Life is the form of God in
matter: the willful imprint of divinity on earth. This concept gives to
the rapt activity of the mystics who embrace it an earthward, a
practical direction. If the world is pattern of God’s will, the highest
human spirit cannot in the highest vision transcend the earth or grow
detached from it: he must work in earth and through earthly deed enact
God’s revelation.
Gabírol, first of Spain’s literary mystics, founds this tradition which
at the end is to produce in Spain a lineage of mystics who are men of
action: a lineage far removed indeed from the commoner progeny of
mystics who, as they approach God, leave the terrestrial life. The early
Moslem thinkers outdid even their Jewish partners in the great Courts of
Córdoba and other Andalusian towns, by this tendency of their doctrines.
But their universalism became materialistic. Stressing the monism of
nature, they lost sight of God as the _informer_: the Prophet Mohammed
shrank to a sort of intellectual agent of the will, what the Spaniards
called _intendimiento agente_, a power more physical than of the spirit.
There were exceptions. Avempace, the Moslem platonist, for instance, who
was born in Guadix a little later than Gabírol. And his disciple,
Tofaíl, whose novel _Hai-ben-Jochdam_ is a spiritual _Robinson Crusoe_,
an extraordinary proof of the immanence of God. Hai, an infant, is
abandoned on a desert island. A doe nurses him. The bare demands of
material survival sharpen his reason: and from the purity of
intellectual understanding he achieves religious revelation. His body
has evoked reason, and reason evokes God. Now, at the end of his days,
an aged saint comes to the island. He has reached by simple faith the
same religious certitude as Hai by the exercise of mind. The circle is
rounded. God is the end of all ways, and is the way of all thoughts.
But the rational monism of the Moslems was not protected, like that of
the Jews from a sheer materialism which made many thinkers at the Court
of Abd-er-Rahman contemporaries at once of Democritus and Haeckel. The
immediate plateau from which arose in Spain the Catholic mystic heights
was Jewish.
For many ages, the Spanish Catholics[18] contribute little to the
medieval Scripture whose prophets were men like Abelard, Albertus and
Aquinas. The long line of Spanish Jewish worthies droops: while in the
north the subtly variant seed of Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus flowers at
last into the twin rebellion of Protestantism and of rationalism. It is
with the age of Calvin, of Francis Bacon, of Erasmus, that Catholic
Spain finds voice at last: and in a way which is an act. By means of
this late flowering in the south, modern Europe is a natural issue from
the womb of the medieval Church. Rome is saved until the seed of Rome’s
successorship is planted: international law is founded: America is
discovered and is peopled.
The tradition of such men as Gabírol and Tofaíl seemed dead, when it
spoke suddenly afresh in the work of a Spanish Jew. And of this man’s
influence, Menendez y Pelayo says in his classic work on the Ideas of
Spain: “All the Catholic mystics, from the Dominican Fray Luis de
Granada to the Jesuit Nieremberg accepted the æsthetic of Leon Hebreo
integrally, knowingly.”
His true name was Judah Leo Abravanel and with his father, a statesman
and a thinker, he left Spain in the exodus of 1492. He was a young man
when he settled in Italy, and it is very possible that his _Dialogues of
Love_ were originally written in Italian.[19] The oldest text of this
epoch-making work is an Italian prose full of Castilian uses.
The originality of the work of Leon Hebreo rests chiefly in the fact
that here for the first time ancient and medieval thought achieves a
modern form. The stuffs of the _Dialogues_ come up from Plato, Plotinus,
Crescas and the Kabbala: but the grace of the Renaissance, the humanism
of Venice and of Florence are within them. Here is the doctrine of the
Eternal Recurrence which Nietszche strove to incorporate in European
thought. Here in germ is Spinoza’s explanation of the union of the
individual with God and of the unity of substance. The _Dialogues_ are
so universalistic that they do not refute the legend of their author’s
conversion to the Christian faith: and they are so poetic that they
constitute indeed a lyrical threshold to the Pantheism which Spinoza was
to architect for Europe. To Crescas and Leon Hebreo comes Descartes to
produce Spinoza: comes the spiritual body of the Spanish will to produce
the Spanish mystics. Castilian grows to be the literal and literary word
of a nation resolved to win the earth in order to establish God upon it.
Perhaps the most powerful writer among these mystics[20] was the
Augustinian monk, Luis de León, whose lecture hall with its narrow
wooden benches honeycombed with the knife-marks of his students, one may
still see in Salamanca. The prose of Abravanel is luminous, pigmented,
mobile. His dialogues remain a string of separate gems, variously
valued, inorganic. The prose of Luis de León--far superior to his
verse--is integral and substantial as the will of Spain. Abravanel was
an uprooted speculator. León was a Spanish Catholic immersed in the
business of his age. He is indeed a mystic only by reflection: a
classicist at heart. His work is less parabolic, has fewer flashes than
the _Dialogues_; it is indeed less open to the sun and stars. But it is
far more plastic. Spain herself moves in his sentences and knits them
whole. The author is a passionate believer: so is his land, so is his
Monarch: so becomes his people. There is no separation between the
dreams of the close of Salamanca and the sea-bridging policy of the
Castilian State. Luis de León, preaching to his students in a narrow
hall within a narrow city, is linked with Italy and with America.
The process of art is the endowment of a particular experience with the
full measure of life. The work of art is a fragment of word or substance
informed with the wholeness of spiritual vision. The mystics of Spain
were fated to make art, or to make deeds. For here theology was heir to
centuries of universal vision. The mystic remains a Catholic and a
churchman. The Inquisition narrows his forms of speculation. He is a
part of Spain. But all Spain’s cosmic will is in him.
This will is in the great work of Luis de León: _Los Nombres de Cristo_.
Three Augustinian monks set forth from their convent across the river
from Salamanca. One of them has found a shaded grove on the río Tormes:
here, shielded from the fever of the sun, they rest and exchange
discourse on the names of Christ. The subject is rigidly dogmatic: the
treatment of the virtue of names has the Pythagorian and Kabbalistic
note which Plato and Aquinas equally would have rejected. Yet in this
stifled frame, an artist quickens a magnificent world. The monks with
their conventional background, the old town in flame of summer, the
river panting through its fringe of trees, the athletic freedom of the
mind in search, the passionate reality of God--all Spain is in this
antiquated book. Her extremes of waste and verdure, her turmoil of race,
her traffic and speculation, her panoply of vision--Jew, Christian,
warrior, priest--converge into the substance of prose. The delirious
delights of logic scaling the battlements of God, the southern arabesque
whereby the abstract thought becomes design make it glamorous and
moving.
León’s career was action. He was a teacher, and his words were on the
quick of deed. This is why the Inquisition took note of him and
subjected him to five years of imprisonment and torture. The
Inquisition, for all its folly and corruption, was the coefficient of
Spain’s unity. In any organism, thought and act are joined. This was
true of medieval Europe: it was true of Spain alone in Europe after the
modern dawn.
A younger man than Luis was Juan de Yepes whom Rome later canonized as
San Juan de la Cruz. Like Luis de León, like Teresa and Loyola, Juan met
with persecution not because he was a mystic and a poet; but a man of
action. Haggard, fanatical, almost disembodied, this spirit had body
enough to pass like a scourge of flame through the dark cities of
Castile, cleansing monastic evil; and like a breath of sweetness,
comforting the sick. He, too, is incarnate, in his particular phase, of
Spain’s whole will. He is a saint: rapt and ascetic. His voice is the
voice of spiritual vision. Yet it, as his life, is marvelously fleshed:
a sort of slender fire. The peculiar plasticity of Spain is clear in
Juan if one contrast his life with that of Saint Francis of Assisi, or
his work with that of Porphyry and Plotinus. Grace here has a hard edge,
is the handle of action. This reforming flesh fuses the sweetness of
Saint Francis with the acumen of Savonarola. Juan is very close to
Christ. For he is ruthless and practical. His charity like Christ’s is
sharper than a sword.
John of the Cross shares the _graphic_ quality which Spain
through her unitary will breathed into her various parts. He is
abstract--plastically; he is Idea--incarnate. In no wise is he
transcendent. Chained down to rot in some hostile convent cell, he is
still concerned with persons and with convents. A titanic
pressure--Spain--seems to have columned all the world into this lean,
bright figure.
His song is like him. The simple words hold an immensity like the deep
nights of Spain. Love of conquest, of gold, of glory and of power--the
turbulence of Spain is not within them. Yet the essence of will and
power, making this intricate turmoil, lives in his poems like a
resolution of many chords in silence.
Juan’s preceptress and ally in their task of purifying convents was
Teresa de Ahumada, known to religion and to letters as Santa Teresa de
Jesús. Teresa’s town, Avila, stands for her: stands for the woman of
Spain. The unbroken walls, the elliptical towers, the crenellated
parapets and gateways, symbolize her virtue. Within, Avila is mellow and
is fecund. Her walls shut her safe from the thrusting mountains of
Castile. Avila is ordered, within chaos.
Santa Teresa is the mystic, as organizer: she is yet another part of the
will of Isabel and Spain. The religious houses of the land are dissolute
and weak. Against the hostility which her sex aroused, against the
distrust of the Inquisition, Teresa moves through Spain, cleansing and
creating hearths for the luminous life. The world, to her, is a
household. The Master is Christ and he requires service. Her imaginative
powers ... in which the Arab glamour is not wanting ... make so vivid
the delights of service that the convents of Spain become as magnets,
sapping the humbler households of the land. To Teresa, the soul also is
a home; and her book _Las Moradas_ is a picture of its chambers. “As
above, so below.” Christ, the bridegroom, enters the household of the
soul: and at once, the humble household becomes Heaven. Teresa’s
convents are literal heavens upon earth: they are the dwelling of a Lord
whose passion fails not. Spain’s will pours a sea of energy into this
fragment of her deed. Teresa’s work is homely; and so is the rough
plastic language of her books. _Las Moradas, El Libro de su Vida_
articulate the sense of the common Spanish matron who makes of her
bridal bed an altar, and of her religion a marriage.
* * * * *
Teresa is no merely powerful reformer: she is a creator. In her hand,
the broom and the account-book become mystic weapons: even as in the
hands of Torquemada the wrack; and in the hands of Columbus the rudder
and the compass.
He was born in Italy; and the question of his descent, Italian or
Spanish or Jew, is unsolved and has no bearing. Christopher Columbus in
his historic rôle belongs with the Spanish mystics. We have lost his
book of _Prophecias_. But we can reconstruct the trend of the argument
which, having failed to convince the “practical” Courts of England,
Portugal and France, won over the clerics of Spain and at Córdoba moved
the Queen to send him westward.
Like the platonic Jews, Columbus idealized his route and made a symbol
of his navigating passion. Like Philo, he mapped out his scheme in
Scripture. Yet another phase of Spain’s organic will was served by this
devout seafarer: and through Spain, yet another need of Europe.
Medieval Christendom is in dissolution. Much energy is released; and
needs an outlet, and cannot find it until this mystic mariner, Christian
and medieval, finds America. Down to earth pours the energy of Europe:
the Vision and Body of a Gothic Christ no longer hold it. Down it
clamors, seeking earthly forms--seeking an America, indeed! But Columbus
is a Catholic. And Isabel, the Catholic Queen, smiles on his adventure,
aiming to spread the Church to India. And what they do--this mystic
seafarer, this rapt good monarch--is to give to Europe an escape for its
too-long stored Catholic might: to give to it a land in which the blood
of the medieval Christ may be sluiced, may be lost forever!
Irony marries with heroic Spain.
_c._ _The Jesuit_
In 1491, there was born to a family of noble Basques in the Guipúzcoan
castle of Loyola another mystic instrument of the Spanish will. Iñigo
Lopez de Recalde had the crude upbringing of the gentlemen of his race.
He learned to write Castilian; he served in the Court of the Catholic
Kings; and he became a soldier. He was a good soldier and the eyes of
his superiors were on him. At the age of thirty he took part in the
defense against the French of Pampeluna, capital of Navarre. A cannon
ball shattered his leg. During the long convalescence, grace came to the
Basque captain. He renounced worldly arms and took the staff and habit
of a religious beggar. He pilgrimaged to Rome and to Jerusalem. At
thirty-three, he began to study Latin. His austerity and that of a few
comrades whom he had attracted and whom he held for life brought him the
usual displeasure of the Holy Office who discouraged any swerving, even
in the path of piety, from the common norm. Loyola met distrust in the
University of Alcalá: on his arrival at Salamanca, he was jailed on
general suspicion of being either too holy or a fraud. Thence, still
seeking theology, he went to Paris and to London. Everywhere he was
coldly received, and forbidden to speak on religious topics. He was
forty: he had abandoned a career of arms: he was not even a priest. But
he had friends: they formed a band of seven including another Basque,
Francisco Xavier, a Frenchman and a Portuguese. In 1534, they took a
private vow of chastity, poverty and devotion. Three years later, Loyola
was ordained a priest. Since his conversion at the age of thirty,
eighteen years had passed, and they had been for him a constant wrack of
suspicion and of impediment to his purpose. He waited eighteen more
months ere he judged himself worthy to say Mass. And not until then did
he put forth his plan of a Company of Jesus--a cohort of religious
soldiers--to defend Christ in the world and to spread Him. Pope Paul III
recognized the Order in 1540. Loyola against his will was elected
General in 1541.
Like its name, the _Compañía de Jesús_ was military in form and method.
One year before Loyola’s conversion at Pampeluna, Martin Luther had
burned the Papal bull of excommunication. Europe made this simultaneous
gesture of antithesis. The north lurched from the medieval Body: and
Spain took its fate unto herself, girded her loins to save and spread
the Church. Born to war, converted in an experience of war, surrounded
by the strife of faction, Loyola never ceased to be a soldier. He
conceived Christianity in martial terms. The Church needed defense and
aggrandizement. The nature of the man’s career and the will of his
nation shaped the Company of Jesus.
At its head was a General, with power as absolute as that of a
commander-in-chief in war. The Church was at war. Monastery and convent
were Christ’s infantry. They did not suffice. They were even losing
ground. The new Compañía would be the cavalry: an arm best fitted for
skirmish and attack.
“Let us think all in the same manner; let us speak all in the same
manner,” said Loyola. His Spiritual Exercises were the drill of his
cohorts. So the militant ideal of Spain, serving in her armies the will
of Isabel, found this new and compact body. The sword had become a
mystic instrument. Now a body of spiritual fathers turned themselves
into a sword: took on the traits and ethic of the sword. Like Spain’s,
the forces of Loyola spread at once to Africa, America and Asia. And at
the end, the Society of Jesus, like Spain once more, locked in too
perfect oneness: its strength hardened and grew brittle: its heroic
faith became a stifling armor.
* * * * *
About a hundred years after the founding of the Society of Jesus, a
young Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, wrote a series of Letters which have
focused all the distrust and misconception aroused by the aggressive
Body, and from whose subtle blows it never has recovered. _Les Lettres
d’un Provincial_ is a great literary work. A man of genius, spokesman of
his race, exposes the presence in his land of an organism monstrously
alien to the spirit and rhythm of France. His intuitions are
metaphysically deeper than his logic. Pascal does not know that the
Society of Jesus is a formulation of the will of Spain: his points often
are departures from false premises as in his invidious handling of the
Jesuit doctrine of _probabilism_ or of the famous Jesuit sentence: “The
end justifies the means.” Small matter: Pascal wrote a brilliant
laughing prose whose beauty has not faded; and more, almost unwittingly
he defended France against the invasion of an alien will. Although his
arguments were often false, although his irony was unscrupulous, Pascal
from his vantage-point was right.
The will of France has been adverse to that of Spain: France has worked
from a social sense to the creation of a personal conscience. She has
moved from the group-mystical to the personal-rational; from the Gothic
church to the modern realistic; from social vision to the individual;
from Substance to Essence; from France herself to man. Blaise Pascal is
an exemplar of this pattern of his people’s progress. He and the
Jansenists reveal the effort of the conservative French to transform the
old Catholicism into an individualistic faith that shall be consonant
with France’s future. Pascal’s sense of Grace as a determined individual
gift of personality places his conflict with the Jesuits on its fairest
ground: it is the will of social France for personal autonomy, at odds
with this invasion of personalized Spain whose will is to create a
social spirit.[21] Pascal, Racine, Descartes are the last great minds
of France to believe in the persistence of their nation’s progress
_within_ the Church. Calvin, greatest of the Protestant thinkers and a
true Frenchman, marks the break. France accepts a destiny outside of
Rome which, in this logical people, swiftly leads to a destiny outside
the whole structure of Christian revelation. Pascal and Racine within
the Church, Calvin in a church of his own, Montaigne the skeptic, begin
not by accepting man--but by the desire to create him. The social body
exists: the individual soul does not. All French classic literature
converges in this effort to establish it ... converges, indeed, upon
Romanticism (Diderot, Rousseau, Stendhal). In Germany, the same trend
passes from Luther to Goethe, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche. The
French problem of creating the personal conscience above the accepted
group marries with the will of northern Europe to break up the social
synthesis of medieval Rome by the creating of individual souls that
shall be _atomic_, _anarchic_, but once more creative. The antistrophe
is the tragic will of Spain, and the heroic Jesuit effort, to revive a
Body that was doomed.
In the domain of education, the Society of Jesus does not swerve far
from Spain. And the will of Spain accepts man as he is found. Isabel
creates her empire by use of her countrymen’s frailties and lusts. The
Jesuit proceeds in the same spirit. He will work, not from the departure
of an ideal concept of what man should be: he will work with man, with
this miserable, forkèd, naked son of sin--and build from him the City of
his God. Man in his weakness, man in his vice and blindness, will be a
note in the cosmic Song: his muddy heart will be strong as marble. There
is a magic to enact this. Its name is Faith. There is a philosophy to
enact this. It is the traditional sense, in Spanish thought, of God’s
immanence and of earth as the immediate pattern of God’s will. The
Jesuits are not pantheists: but their tolerance and their practical
acceptance of _the fact_ are the unconscious fruits of five centuries of
pantheistic feeling. The Jesuits are not Evangelists. But in their
attitude toward Faith as a universal magic, they are close to the
Apostles. They take the Christian mystery as a present truth. The age of
miracle is eternal. God is here and everywhere: the assertion of a magic
Word--as in the Kabbala--transfigures immanence to revelation. The
doctrine of Grace, as an inborn personal trait to be achieved (if at
all) only by spiritual acts, is too hierarchic. It is the doctrine of
peoples tending toward individualism. (In the East, it becomes the
doctrine of Caste.) Moreover, in accepting man as he is, the Jesuit
cannot place the magic virtue in any of his inherent traits. The divine
virtue must be at once impersonal and social. Man is frail and corrupt:
his will is frail and corrupt. His life is only in God, even as God’s
life through Christ is eternally in man. There is no work to be done,
beside the assertion that the work _is_ done. If grace depended upon
man’s efforts, we should all be damned. If reason or will or any
personal trait had been sufficient, why was Christ crucified? No: the
commonest human stone is holy, when it becomes a stone of the House of
God. Likewise, man’s corruptions, however vile, can be architected by
faith into the Church where they are sanctified and transfigured.
The philosophy of the Jesuits explains their methods. Does the builder
of a house consult the stones? What can the stone do but put itself into
the hands of the builder? The builder must be aggressive, dominant,
ruthless. But the Jesuit is more than an architect: he is a soldier.
When he sets aside the sword for the word, the cause is strategy. His
tactics remain warlike. War is pragmatic. Subtlety, surprise, mobility,
deceit are warlike arms.
The world stands at a crisis. The grandiose structure of medieval
Rome--the highest spiritual Form ever achieved by Europe--crumbles and
sags. Spain strips to save it.
_d._ _The Jurist_
At Salamanca a Dominican monk teaches theology. His name is Fray
Francisco de Vitoria. Salamanca, fostered by the Catholic King, becomes
the leading university of Spain. Spain becomes Austria, Artois, the
Netherlands, Franche-Comté, North and South Italy, Sicily, the Balearic
and Canary Islands, Africa from Ceuta to Oran, the Moluccas, the
Philippines and the Americas from Florida to Tierra del Fuego. Carlos,
son of the mad daughter of the Catholic Kings, becomes head of an empire
like the dream of Isabel. He, too, is a creature of her will. The
vastness of his realm has blotted out his sense of time and space. His
religious fervor blurs his vision of mortal values. He will ride Spain
as he might ride a horse in battle. He has inherited Spain as a weapon
to be wielded. Spain is his, in order that the world be Christ’s.
The Dominican monk at Salamanca moves within the will of Carlos and of
Spain. The blood of Isabel’s empire is justice. Justice nourishes and
cleanses. Carlos must be ruthless, but he must not be wrong. He will do
what he desires: it must be proven right. The Americas make new
challenges of conscience. Vitoria in Salamanca meets the king’s need:
and modern International Law is ready for the world.
A full century before the Dutchman Grotius (Huig van Groot), Vitoria
lays down a rationale of justice for existing Powers, a structure in
diapason between their economic needs and their inherited morale. He
works for a modern state whose ideal is a theodicy of medieval Rome. The
ideal has become more abstractly ethical, more economic. But Woodrow
Wilson and the statesmen of the League of Nations are exact heirs of a
Dominican monk.
Vitoria studies the problems of America in his _Relectiones de Indis_:
the general problems of war in _De Jure Belli_. Both these works, it is
significant to note, form part of his _Relectiones theologicæ et
morales_. A true creature of the will of Isabel, he has turned
international problems into a problem of conscience. He denies
independent form to his subject. The law of nations and of peoples is a
moral law: it is outside the activities of lawyers. A question rises
between the king of Spain and the Indians of Mexico. The “savages” are
not subject to the king by human right. Their dealings with him cannot
be determined by human law. Only a divine law, moving Spain as a
theodicy, has brought about this juncture between the Indians and the
king. Only divine law is competent to rule.
Vitoria expands his thesis. There exists this same divine law--_jus
inter gentes_--between all States. The States are interdependent. There
is a _societas naturalis_, a natural Society of Nations. The link is
God. Free to the Spaniard to assume that God’s agent in the link be the
king of Spain. The world is one society: and between peoples of one
society peaceful intercourse may not be forbidden. France may not impede
a Spaniard from visiting France, even from settling in France, provided
he violate no law and cause no damage. If this is true between Frenchman
and Spaniard, it is true between American and European. Through the fact
of their civil rights in a society of nations the Indian cannot exclude
the Spaniard. There exists therefore _jus communicationis_: the right of
immigration. There exists also the freedom of the seas. Spain stands
justified in her American penetration.
We are at the mere beginning of Vitoria’s subtle structure. _Jus
commercii_--the right of commerce--applies not only to the exchange of
merchandise between free peoples, but as well to the exchange of ideas.
The Spaniard has the right to preach the Gospel to the Indian. The
Indian has the right to preach heathenism to the Spaniard. Either may
resist conversion (even as either may decline to purchase proffered
goods).
Since no State may prevent a stranger from settling on its lands, nor
even from becoming a lawful national, here are the Spaniards legally at
home in the Americas. But strong Powers must defend by arms the menaced
liberties of smaller States. That is a prerogative of a true society of
nations. How much more readily therefore shall strong Powers defend the
menaced liberties of individuals in every State! All States are “organs
of human justice.” Spain shall protect the innocent from “religious
sacrifice” and “from cannibalism in America.” If need be, to protect the
innocent, a State may subjugate wholly an unjust nation.
The theologian brings to Spain her “cosmic place” in the Americas as
Christ’s agent in the society of nations. But this is not enough. That
she may be at peace in Zion, she must be alone. So Vitoria evolves in
1500 the modern theory of “spheres of influence.” Pope Alexander was
_divinely_ just in submitting to Spain and Portugal, as God’s best
tools, the mission of Christianizing the Americas. But the Pope had no
_human_ right to partition the property of the red man. Vitoria with all
the Dominicans behind him stands against Pope and king: declaring that
“the Indian has as much right to possess property as the Catholic
peasant.” The Indians, he holds, are potential equals of the Spaniards.
They have the right to plebiscite. A majority of their votes alone can
justify America’s _annexation_ to the empire of Spain. Beyond the divine
and human privileges that are general in a society of nations, “Spain
must commit no act in the New World, except by treaty.”
The Dominican legists part company with the deeds of Spain. Already,
Isabel had been misled when her adventurous “tools”--the
Conquistadores--instead of saving the Indian, enslaved him. Now the
followers of Vitoria raise their voices against the behavior of Cortés
and Pizarro. Bartolomé de las Casas in his _Brevissima relación de la
destrucción de las Indias_ writes pages that are good reading in our
own epoch of a “Society of Nations.” But the abstract logic of Vitoria
was more useful to the State of Spain than the ethical conclusions of
Las Casas. That supreme apologia for villainy and greed--International
Law--is born and baptized under Christ.
Thus Vitoria: “War is justified when it is forced on a State in the
rightful pursuit of commerce, in the rightful propaganda of ideas--and
_if the Spaniards have observed all precautions against taking their
interests for principles, and their avarice for duty_.” What empire
since has not “taken these precautions?” Christianity had been
theoretically pacifistic. Jesus was reported to have declared against
all violence and the resisting of evil. Being the Son of God, of course,
His words were not to be literally construed. Yet such men as
Tertullian, the Manichees, Saint Francis, Wyclif, More, Erasmus, had
declared unconditionally against warfare. Chiefly, that prophetic
Berber, Augustine, took war to be a usable weapon of the just. Vitoria,
his neighbor in race and land, leans on Saint Augustine. The anarchic
and endemic sin of war is lifted at last from Europe’s conscience. Spain
invents the Moral War.
“War,” says Vitoria, “is justified to right a wrong.” But Vitoria is
careful:
“Difference of religion is no just cause for war.
“Aggrandizement of empire is no just cause for war.
“_Principis gloria propria, aut aliud commodum, non est causa belli
justa._ The Prince may not wage war to further either his glory or his
own interests. And the wrong to be righted by war _must be commensurate
with the results of war itself_ (death, confiscation, rapine) ere a just
war can be induced to right it.”
The friar seems to be going too far. Hear him:
“The end of war must be, not evil to the foe, but good.
“And victory must be enjoyed in Christian moderation.
“The people shall not suffer through the faults of their princes.
“_Finally, a treaty imposed by force--even after victory--is not
valid._”
Modern International Law is after all no growth from these uncomfortable
precepts of a monk: it is a lapse and a decadence. The legal dicta of
Vitoria are of an old tradition: they are a birth of the old breaking
Synthesis of medieval Europe. International Law is the theoretic shred
of what was once a spiritual Body.
_e._ _The Rogue_
The Spain of Isabel and Ferdinand, of Carlos and Philip II--wherein is
she great? In her idea and Will. These prove the Globe and bind it:
these in their own way prove and make her one with God. But Spain, the
body of men living in towns and huertas, is indigent and disordered.
At her spiritual climax, under Isabel, Carlos and Philip II, Spain was
squalid. By contrast with the state of England, of France, of the German
towns and of the cities of Morocco, she was an economic laggard. Her
nobles with their retinues cut swathes of gold through the landsides.
She was full of heroes and of saints. But the land was arid with
neglect. War had razed her forests. Seven centuries of Reconquest,
making labor despicable beside the guerdons of battle, had sapped her
burghers. What the long wars began, the Inquisition and Expulsions
carried on. Jews--a solid class of craftsmen and middlemen--were
expelled. The Granadan Moors--ablest of Spain’s cultivators--were making
homesick songs about their Andalusian farms, in Fez and Marrakech. There
were more vagabonds in Spain than farmers, more soldiers than laborers.
There were more hidalgos and caballeros than artisans and merchants.
There were seven million Spaniards--and nine thousand convents!
Some men are poor because they are weak and dull: some are poor because
they are men of genius. Amsterdam and London grow rich, because such is
their will. Avila and Toledo remain dingy, because their will is
elsewhere. Spain is virile, brilliantly equipped. But Spain has resolved
to be a hero and a saint. Spain has no time to pave streets, who paves
the way for Christ beyond the sea. Spain has no time for natural
science, for agriculture and for the tricks of trade, who is so expert
in theology.[22]
In the extremes of her life, none is wider than this between the Spirit
of Spain’s enterprise and the fact of her condition. The crass and
earthly elements of Spain are not destroyed nor repressed by her
religious will: they are engaged. They must serve in her armies, even
though the fight be a crusade. They must man her ships, even though the
mariner’s compass be divinely pointed. They are intensified indeed, like
all the parts of Spain. And like the other elements of her world,
brutality and lust assume in a particular form the wholeness of Spain’s
will.
Spain is adventuring. Now the sheer impulse of adventure is embodied.
The pícaro is born. He has in him the aboriginal Spaniard: that unruly,
lusty, atomic man whom Rome encountered, whom the Cid personified. He is
an anarch, brutal as the Iberian of the north, shrewd and subtle as the
Phœnician of the south. He is this aboriginal, complex man of Spain
shaped by the Spanish will. The pícaro is not lawless: he is an outlaw.
He reacts from Spain’s social purpose, from Spain’s social structure,
from the mysticism and heroism of this later Spain. Like all reactive
bodies, he resembles his opponent. And it is this union in him--the
direct issue from the source of Spain and the direct response to Spanish
culture--which makes him so true an element in that culture.
The pícaro was long in coming. The Cid promised him in the twelfth
century, and the romancero on the eve of the age of Isabel. The genial
Juan Ruiz, archpriest of Hita, in 1300 came close to his spirit in the
graphic form ... a mingled piety and license ... of his great _Libro de
buen amor_. Fernando de Rojas who began _La Celestina_ in 1499 did not
create the pícaro only because he created something deeper. Like _Don
Quixote_ at the end of the cycle, _La Celestina_ ere its beginning
transcends the pícaro and contains him. Now come the Castilian versions
of Amadís de Gaul. The spirit of errant adventure waxes so strong that
it invades the hagiographa: Spaniards of the age of Carlos read
histories of the saints fully as marvelous and picaresque as the
profaner tales in the library of Don Quixote. Finally, after these ages
of annunciation, the pícaro arrives, full-fleshed. His name is Lazarillo
de Tormes: his date is 1554: his author is unknown.
In this pattern of antithesis whose symphony is Spain, the response to
Santa Teresa is the procuress of Rojas, the Celestina, that most tender,
robustious, scoundrelly, womanly woman. The response to the flame-like
San Juan de la Cruz is Lazarillo. San Juan personifies Spain’s purpose,
which is divine. Lazarillo embodies Spain’s methods, which are brutal.
San Juan is not abstract: he is an embodiment of purpose. Lazarillo is
not mere flesh: in his trickeries and thefts, there is an inverted
consciousness of Spain which makes his path through Old and New Castile
almost as luminous as the path of the saint.
This consciousness is marked by irony: and irony is in the weave of
every picaresque design. For the Spanish rascal is no mere reaction from
heroic gesture. He is reversion as well. He is moved by the same energy
that has uprisen in the forms of asceticism and crusade. His antiphony
is but a subtle swerving back from the life he wars on, to Spain’s
common base. The pícaro has the resource, the intensity, the method, of
conquistador and crusader: he preys on his own land. He has the
passionateness of the saint: it is directed toward woman. He is a
casuist like the Jesuit: his aim is to filch a purse. He navigates
uncharted wastes like Columbus: to fill his belly and to save his skin.
This continuous awareness of Spain’s noble world, this subtle swerve
transforming it into villainy and lust, make the ironic pattern. The low
tricks of the pícaro, weaving through the high fabric of his land, once
more limn Spain in her fullness.
Lazarillo is but the first of a long line. The book that tells of him
has scarce a hundred pages: yet it seems wide and deathless as the land
from Salamanca to Toledo which its hero crosses. Lazarillo is a lad born
of poor but unworthy parents. A blind beggar teaches him how to survive
as a rascal in a rascally world. The young virtuoso outdoes his master.
He becomes the servant of a starving, haughty knight, of a parsimonious
churchman, of a shrewd and lecherous canon with whom he makes a treaty
which includes the sharing of his wife.
Lazarillo encounters Spain; and the land grows alive at his touch.
Disorder, corruption, folly beneath the façade of splendor. But now, an
acute principle synthetizes the chaos: the pícaro like a wistful agent
of intelligence, envelops Spain and makes Spain one with pity. This pity
is of a new order, among the emotions of art. It is neither mystical nor
sentimental. It is the child of a modern autonomy: it is the pity of
reason.
The author of Lazarillo does not insist. He has created an engine so
revealing that he can afford to rest within his quiet prose. He writes a
tiny book: plastic portraiture, tender and bitter humor, sweet spirit,
dark flesh--all Spain indeed is in it, as is the tree in the seed.
Lazarillo is a seed, from which has sprung a forest. In Spain, the
picaresque merges quickly with profounder worlds; loses its æsthetic
sharpness, and has its share in the birth of a book which is a
Scripture: _Don Quixote_. The true form shrinks to formula. The symbol
of the rogue, preying on society and so divulging it, is exploited by
minds more analytic than creative. In the hands of such masters as
Quevedo, the pícaro becomes a concept of pessimism: a chemic force with
which to test and to destroy the world. The pícaro voyages to France.
But in Le Sage and Marivaux (to name but the greatest), the physical and
intellectual movements of the rogue are stressed. France veers backward
toward Scapin--toward the scamp of the classic comedy--whose essential
difference is great. England borrows more deeply. The pícaro’s animal
joyousness, social revelation, bitterness turned sentimental come back
to life in Smollett, Fielding, Sterne. But they unite in no one work
comparable with _Lazarillo_. Even De Foe wants the luminous poetic
atmosphere whereby the crass materials of the tale have their dimension.
No master outside Spain can recreate the pícaro entire. For the Spanish
rogue is sterile without the aspirational afflatus of his race, in which
he adventures, from which he reacts, and which he embodies in ironic
contrast. That is why the greatest heirs of the pícaro of Spain are not
his direct sons in eighteenth-century France and England. They are his
collateral and remote descendants of a modern world in which once again
energy has become aspirant and religious. They are the heroes of
Stendhal. Above all, they appear in Russia--that other extreme of Europe
which touches Spain in the domain of spirit: they are the hero of _Dead
Souls_ of Gogol, the mystic criminals of Dostoievski....
_f. Velázquez_
Antithesis even within the personal will of Isabel and her king. Isabel
looks to Africa and the west. Mysterious horizons claim her. Africa is
the home of Origen and Augustine--Berber Christians and true Spanish
minds. America casts a parabola of search alluring to her mystic
appetite. But Isabel is wedded to a man who looks toward Europe. The
Aragonese king comes from the most assimilated part of Spain. In him, as
in his realm, lives the spirit of Catalan, of European Trader. His
hungers strain toward Italy and France. And this dichotomy within the
will of the monarchs--Europe and the south, politics in Europe and high
adventures across the western sea--is stamped upon the classic will of
Spain. The concept of the State which Isabel and Ferdinand adapt is
Europe. Louis XI and Machiavelli would have hailed it. The purpose of
that State would have been better pleasing to Mohammed or Saint Paul.
The spirit is Isabel’s and is accepted by her husband. But the form is
Ferdinand’s and here his wife is disciple.
Now, of this division within the will of Spain, that term which is
Europe finds a canon. Velázquez, better than the policy of the kings,
better than the victories of their captains in Sicily and France,
incarnates Spain’s desire to be Europe.
But here, too, irony is at work. Velázquez is the favorite painter at
the Court of Philip IV. He lives at the Palace; he is sent on diplomatic
missions. His career corresponds almost literally with the reign of his
king. And this reign marks the rapid ebb of Spain’s affairs in Europe.
Her will toward Europe has flung her power high into the north and
clear across the Latin Sea. Now, while Velázquez molds that will into
organic form, his king loses Portugal, loses the Netherlands, loses the
Roussillon, half the Pyrenees, and faces insurrection in Barcelona,
Spain’s European port.
The will of Velázquez’ art is objective form. Bodily substance becomes
real. Man’s moods and passions in themselves suffice. They have their
value not in some rapt design beyond man’s body or in employing it to
mystic ends: the world of appearance _is_ the world. Velázquez’ traits
are traits of modern Europe. Mysticism disappears, both in immanent and
transcendental form. The beauty of spiritual strain, so eloquent in
Ribera, is replaced by the beauty of physical poise. The hot fluidity of
El Greco which recalls the Prophets, the creative incompleteness of the
Byzantines, becomes a static peace. In El Greco, as in all mystic art,
the moving materials reach the immobility of form only through the focus
of a world beyond them. But in Velázquez, there are no colors save those
of face and fabric; there are no forms save those of the body. Velázquez
is a realist in the restricted modern European sense. He is
impressionistic and he is mechanistic. The vast autonomy of the
subjective vision is renounced in him. He makes his eye a literal
_receiver of impressions_: whereas the mystic eye (and the Spanish eye)
has ever been a _creator of expression_.
This type of æsthetic will which, from the Renaissance to Courbet, is to
reign in Europe wins perhaps its highest triumph in the alien Velázquez.
What tribute to the energy of Spain! For this is not Spain, this is but
a fragment. The vision yearning to become complete, the mystic marriage,
the parabolic search, the lyric plaint, the ceaseless _cante hondo_, the
arabesque which transforms words to body--these, too, are Spain: these
are the virtues which create El Greco, Calderón, Lope, Ribera,
Cervantes. Velázquez will have none of them. Velázquez will be wholly
European. Europe, accepting the world of appearance as the entire world,
pours all its energy to the creating of the immense material universe
which is our shambles of the machine and applied science. Spain does not
follow. But Velázquez leads.[23]
Velázquez was a great lover of El Greco. Manuel Cossío tells us that in
his private chambers at the Palace, the court painter had works of the
great mystic. His love and study of his antithesis helped to confine him
within his own domain. In his religious subjects, Velázquez shows the
direct influence--chiefly in composition--of El Greco. And in these
works, the graphic might of Velázquez fades: they are the least of his
pictures. Where Velázquez is great, El Greco is excluded: the younger
man seems willfully to avoid what he must have felt should denature his
æsthetic. And in this response, Velázquez achieves once more the miracle
of Spain: the infusing of a part with an intensity and essence of the
Whole. El Greco is Spain of Africa and of the Semites, Spain the High
Priest of Rome, the mystic Spain. And Velázquez is Spain of Europe: the
land of analytic grace, of luxuriant elaborations, of immense
exclusions.
Spain’s craft goes far, when Spain resolves to be “efficient.” Study
_Las Hilanderas, Mercurio y Argos_, the portrait of Margarita de
Austria. This grace is the ecstasy of cool and obvious metals. It
suggests the modern æsthetic of the Machine. Modeling and texture are
composed of immediate masses which are self-sufficient. Neither in part
nor in whole are they transmuted into the subjective. Or take the
portrait of Mariana de Austria, Philip’s second wife. Of the woman there
is naught save the weak face and the flat hands. But the black and
silver gown is volumnear. Its fringes and its lace hold power that
appears almost to be a symbol of this Court--this Court of Spain
striving to hold a world within its forces.
The will of Velázquez, at least, does not falter. _Las_ _Meninas_ is
forever a shut and earthly room. No glimpse here of the arcana of the
soul, of the soul’s subtle modeling of arm and face. Think what El Greco
would have done with that group: the royal family, the painter, the
dwarf, the dog. How they would have flamed; how heaven and hell would
have come in and metabolized these bodies!
* * * * *
In the palace of the king of Spain, there were simpletons and dwarfs.
They formed part of the Court and Velázquez painted them. He painted
them so well because they were part of himself.
The forces which aspire beyond the body, beyond the domain of sense,
died not in Velázquez. His æsthetic will allowed them no immediate word.
This explains the cramped discomfort of his religious pictures. Here
within him were these instincts, these intuitions, unable to speak,
unable to die. And here were the twisted courtiers of the king. A good
court painter could portray them; for they were of the palace. And since
they were pitiful victims of Nature’s law, the despised and
dispossessed, an artist’s soul could use them as a symbol.
In the world there lives a spirit whose name is Christ and his saints.
When the world denies, that spirit ceases to be Christ: it becomes a
dwarf and a madman. Velázquez has discovered this: he sets down his dark
confession after all. Here is a record of the grotesque and the pitiful
world, born of his deep denials.
What a page it is! _El Bobo de Coria_: the simplicity of the inane
issuing from the breakdown of complex power: sweetness, candor, poetry
and grace surviving in the death of idiocy. _El Primo_: a little man
beside a gigantic book; pathos, tenderness, pride--the song of
frustration. _Don Sebastián de Mora_: a huge body squats, the head
empty, the outstretched legs short as a child’s--so eloquent, so
helpless. And the _Niño de Vallecas_, most poignant of all, for he
bespeaks fecundity without intelligence: he is the lush plasm of life,
purposeless, spiritually bereft.
This is the confession of Velázquez, enacting Spain’s will to be Europe.
This is a prophecy of Europe, whose life of mechanical perfection has
turned the Christ and saints of its soul into such twisted creatures.
_CHAPTER IX_
_THE WILL OF DON QUIXOTE_
_a. The Birth of the Hero_
_b. The Career of the Hero_
_c. The Book of the Hero_
_a. The Birth of the Hero_
Cervantes was born in a Europe more than three centuries beyond the noon
of chivalry. Knighthood north of Spain begot great books. The _Chanson
de Roland_ in the form which we possess is earlier than 1100. In the
last years of the twelfth century Chrétien de Troies--first master in an
unbroken line that perhaps closed with Anatole France--put into gracious
and fleet form the Arthurian cycle. A bit later, a profounder German,
Wolfram von Eschenbach, composed from French materials the transfiguring
masterwork of chivalry, the Poem of Parzival. Joinville’s portrait of
Saint Louis and of his two Crusades was written about 1290. Thereafter
Europe, north of Spain, begins the great decline into the modern era.
The last historic synthesis of western man lies in that Middle Age. It
rose from the chaotic impact of the Roman Empire and the Teuton with
Alexandria and Judah. Already ere the ancient world had fallen its
architects were building. Origen, Tertullian, Jerome, Anthony, Gregory,
Charlemagne--such were its foundation-makers. It reaches heights in
Abélard, Aquinas, Francis, Dante: in the creators of the Gothic, in the
great weavers of polyphonic music, in men of action--Godefroi de
Bouillon and Saint Louis. And already, at this hey-day, from the
disintegrant north come threats of dissolution in such figures as Roger
Bacon and Duns Scotus who, positing the primacy of will over the
intellect, declare Theology to be not science but revelation and
foretell Luther and Kant--creators of the modern chaos.
European thought, after the Cathedrals, Dante, and the great
scholastics, is a story of destruction. Men of as high genius as
Albertus Magnus or Saint Thomas proceed by vision and by dialectic to
take stone from stone in the dismantlement of Christian Europe. Here and
there in the vast liquidation a prophet throws up a scheme for a new
Synthesis--such a one was Spinoza: the world cannot accept him, neither
can it lose him, from cosmic prescience of a future need.
The towers of this great House in which dwelt the soul of Europe touch
the year 1300. Dante has devised his vision; Chartres lives upon the
Ile-de-France; Saint Bernard in Clairvaux and Saint Francis in Assisi
have filled the world with brothers; chivalry has brought war and love
into the sacred symphony of Europe; the German foray is Crusade; lust of
the flesh bears the Mystery of Tristan and Isolt, of Abélard and
Héloïse. Now, the divine Structure nobly curves back to earth. By 1400,
Europe dwells once more in the bowels of discord. By 1500, European man
is a congeries of atomic wills: the unity of Christ has scattered into
exploration, industry and science.
But in this destructive act, Europe is as creative as when the Fathers
builded, out of the Prophets, Plato, Paul, the puissant Organism of
medieval Europe. To tear down such a body is as divine an act as to
build it. Systole and diastole are equal. Schopenhauer and Kant are
brothers before God with Aquinas. The long ages of deliquescence from
that peak of Rome rightly seem rich to our enlisted eyes since they are
as full of saints and heroes consecrate to our work, as were the
anchorites of the Thebaid to theirs.
For this is the mysterious law of history: that the divine is present in
death even as in life, in the Nay equally with the Yea. God does not
build His revelation upon earth and then turn away His face while man
tears down. He is there, too, in the destruction. He was there when the
Prophets created the Jew: He was there also when the Pharisees and the
Essenic Christ destroyed the Jew. He was there when the saints and
Fathers builded Catholic Rome. He was there when Luther, Calvin,
Goethe, Blake burned Rome away.
We see Him in the despair of Dostoievski no less than in the joy of
Saint Francis. It was while the Jewish world drooped and retched, that
the gospels of Jesus flowered. From that nadir was prepared the Dantean
zenith. Once more an ebb of the Tide. Spain has become a befuddled
chaos. Home from her mad anachronistic dream of establishing on earth
what Europe has given up for centuries, she is already rotting. And now,
from the bitterness of her awareness rises a new Word. It, too, is
entextured of contemporary failure, and is implicit of revelation.
* * * * *
Spain did not conform with the Middle Ages of the north. Roman Iberia
received its dominant invasion from the south, whereas in Italy, Gaul
and Britain the coefficient of transformation from Rome to Holy Rome was
the same Teuton element which held the eastern marches beyond Roman
rule. León, Aragon and Castile were medieval in so far as the Visigoth
was strong in them. But even here, contact was as great with the Moslem
foe of the south as with the brother northward.
Medievalism is an idealism forced upon the world of Appearance. It is a
mystical conclusion by the Teuton will, drawn from the logical element
of Latin, and the naturalistic element of Semitic, cultures. It is most
powerful in the lands where the Teuton is strongest: Germany and
England. In France, where the blend was fairest between Frank and
Gallo-Roman, it is most balanced and most perfect. In Italy, medievalism
is never great. And in a land whose conclusive elements are Semitic or
harmonize with the Semitic, it is impossible. Such a land was Spain. The
ethnic Iberian base of Spain is more African in nature than European;
more aboriginally close to Semite than to German. Arab culture was
always naturalistic. Judaism and Mohammedanism are pragmatic systems on
different levels, yet both based upon empirical experience and natural
law. In medieval Catholicism, the natural laws and the experience of the
world are deformed by a mystic idealizing will. In Semitism, the ideal
sense is made to converge with natural law: the mystic will is regarded
as possessing its true form in the activity of nature.
Semitism in its several shades, or a spirit close to it, impeded Spain
from becoming wholly medieval. It was culturally too strong to accept
the neo-platonic House of the medieval God. But Semitism is politically
weak. Medievalism, repugning the natural body of the world, creates an
ideal Organism--a Church--which becomes politically real. Semitism,
accepting Nature as God’s organic body, has no impulse to erect
political substitutes for the wholeness of existence. Politically, it
tends toward fragmentation: even as in art it remains lyrical and forms
no such organic structures as the Gothic cathedral or the Dantean epic.
This political weakness of the Spanish Semite impeded Spain from
becoming wholly Semitic. Spain for centuries was in a state of
continuous flux and of osmosis between the medieval north and the
Semitic south. When at length there came a final issue the north won.
Ferdinand and Isabel turned toward Europe. A revised medievalism,
equipped with methods of the Renaissance, became the goal of the Spanish
will. And at a time when it was already dead in Europe.
This is the year 1500. The Holy Roman Empire is in full liquidation.
Luther and Calvin are rising. Copernicus is at work. America has been
discovered. Now Spain pours her ideal energy and her blood into the
tragic task of becoming medieval. Godefroi, Saint Louis, Parzival, Saint
Francis and Aquinas have been dethroned and denied in the countries of
their birth. They become the patterns and movers of Castile.
Lest the hostile--the Semitic elements, which in the noon of medieval
Europe held Spain from her part in that great Synthesis, hold Spain back
now, Isabel drives the Jew and Moslem from her realms. It is too late.
The dissident spirit is at work in Spain. And the heroic effort of this
land to revive chivalry, to recreate Christ, to re-establish all the
world as Christ’s Rock and Church becomes a divine farce, a sort of
comic Mystery--_Don Quixote_.
* * * * *
Perhaps Cervantes’ family was of gentle blood: but it had come to
pitiful fortune when Miguel was born to the poor surgeon in Alcalá de
Henares. The year was 1547: and the town upon the _llanura_ of Castile
was the rival of Salamanca. Naught is more eloquent of the poverty of
his people than the fact that Miguel was unable to attend the university
round the corner. At twenty-two, however, he was a poet. He went to
Italy as the body servant of the Papal Nuncio: later he rose to be a
soldier. In 1571, the ships of Philip II defeated the Turk in the waters
of Lepanto. A shot crippled the left hand of Cervantes. His officers
ordered him below. He refused to leave the deck, and in his blood and
pain fought to the close of the engagement. This is a better sign of his
unusual nature than his verse. A man of high sensitivity, he exposed
himself to physical suffering beyond the duty of a soldier. He was
devoted passionately to the Catholic cause. And when in 1575 he took
ship from Italy, he had letters to the king from Don Juan of Austria and
the Duke of Sessa whom he had served in Naples. He was full of merit:
and full of hope he went home for his reward. But the Berber pirates
took the vessel and he and his brother, Rodrigo, became slaves in
Algiers. Four times in five years Cervantes plotted to escape the
stiflement of servitude in the Kasbah of that town which rises within a
snow-crowned conch above the hard-blue sea, hiding its reek within the
gleam of roofs. Cervantes’ sisters and mother bestirred themselves:
scraped coin together, borrowed, and at last, ransomed Rodrigo. In 1580,
a mendicant monk came to the aid of the sisters, and Cervantes was freed
on the eve of his departure eastward. He went to Madrid. He sought
protection, and he failed to find it. He had been a hero and a martyr:
but such were cheap in Spain. The land swarmed with veterans of the wars
which had spread Spain’s glory to the Pacific Ocean. Cervantes performed
odd diplomatic jobs and tried to be a writer. From thirty-four to forty
he wrote thirty plays; he had no financial success. But he wed a landed
lady, Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano of Esquivias, a
town on the fringe of the Manchegan desert which after twenty years was
to be transfigured by a hero. At about the time of his marriage, another
lady Doña Ana de Rojas bore him a natural daughter, Isabel, whose life
was to be fateful in his own. Cervantes’ burdens were great as his means
were small. He placed all his hopes on a novel in which he believed that
he had lavished all his genius. _La Galatea_ appeared in 1585, and was
an unremunerative _succès d’estime_.
Now come twenty years of Gethsemane to Don Miguel de Cervantes y
Saavedra. The silence of oblivion--_el silencio del olvido_ whereof he
speaks--was their sweetest portion. We follow him hardly, for he had
reason to hold to his obscurity. In 1588 he is a commissary in Seville.
In 1592 he is in prison for a bungled sale of wheat. Later he is engaged
in provisioning the Armada. He tries to get out of Spain: he seeks a
post in Guatemala: but he lacks the influence to win it. Once more he
sues the stage. Lope de Vega is the master of taste; and once more
Cervantes fails. In 1594 he is a tax-collector in Granada: in disgrace:
once more in prison. In 1597 we find him released on faith of his word
that he will make good a deficit to the Treasury of the King. There is
no trace, however, of his payment. For five years, he seems to have
touched depths in Andalusia. An obscure actor, Tomás Gutiérrez (blessèd
be his name) supports him. In 1603 he is in jail again, the bank in
which he had deposited trusted monies having failed. He appears to have
been under lock and key at this time, in both Seville and Argamasilla de
Alba. This may have been the circumstance in which, judged by his own
words, he began to write _Don Quixote_.
In 1604, Part One of the work is written: has even been bruited about
Madrid either in manuscript or in an edition prior to the first extant
one which bears the date 1605. Lope de Vega is at his height. He is the
Stage of Spain. His name outshines the king’s: his portrait stands
beside a saint’s in myriad Spanish homes. Miguel de Cervantes is living
in Vallodolid. With him are the two sisters who helped ransom him from
slavery, a niece and Isabel; his natural daughter. His wife lives in
indifferent ease on her estate in La Mancha. Cervantes is penniless. His
labors as tax-farmer have earned him bread in prison and disgrace with
the world. He has been forgotten as a writer. And he lives with women
who support him. They are good women and he loves them: but they are
women, like himself disgraced by fortune. His sisters, Magdalena de
Sotomayor and Andrea de Cervantes, have been “kept” women. His niece
Constanza is living now with a man to whom she is not married. Cervantes
knows this, and eats their bread. His daughter, Isabel, is not of good
repute; nor is Cervantes perfectly cleared of implication in her
mercenary ways.
He is fifty-seven: he is broken utterly. And his bread is shame. Yet he
is still the proud hidalgo who served Don Juan of Austria in Naples, who
refused succor and relief at Lepanto: who led gallant sallies in
Algiers. He is not Cervantes. He is Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra.
* * * * *
This man looks out upon his world, with eyes of such a life, and
decides, after twenty adverse years, again to write a book. He has read
only the decadent offspring of chivalry’s literary flower. He does not
know the original _chansons de geste_ nor the native water-clear _romans
d’aventure_. The best he knows is the fifteenth century Romancero; is
Ariosto and the ornate Italians; is the Castilian version of Amadís de
Gaula which has come to Spain, over-blown, by Portugal out of Brittany
and Wales. These are relatively pure beside their spawn of dull sons
performing ridiculous wonders in a world of wooden magic. But the vogue
of these knights is past. The books of _caballería_, which tempted the
young Santa Teresa to go forth seeking martyrdom and adventure, have
already ebbed. On the other hand, _La Celestina_ which appeared along
with the first Castilian Amadis has thriven and inspired the pícaro who
lives still in Spanish and in European letters.
Vivid in Cervantes’ mind is the organic music--the first great Castilian
prose--in which Fernando de Rojas sang the sordid fate of his Celestina.
As with Amadis, this book has medieval roots. But unlike Amadis, it has
classic form, and independent greatness. Amadis is a fatty degeneration
of Roland, Parzival, Lancelot. La Celestina is a transfigurement of the
comedy of Terence and Plautus, as well as of the romance of Aucassin and
Nicolette, of Tristan and Isolt, of Romeo and Juliet. It is ironic,
realistic, ruthlessly tragic as the romance was never. Chivalry
expressed a childlike age which projected its own maturity into a Church
and a Heaven. The romance at best was an adolescent form. As the Church
dimmed and Heaven grew less sure and man began again to build upon
himself, it was transfigured into the modern novel. _La Celestina_ is
the first towering adult of the childlike race of the fabliaux and
romances.
Irony and a profound acceptance of natural justice--such are the
transforming elements of _La Celestina_. Love’s medieval idyll is rotted
and destroyed by the pragmatic world to which it has appealed for
fulfillment. Loveliness is killed by lust. The whole infantile fantasy
of the Middle Age is confronted with the fate of its own will: a fate of
evil and of sordid passion. And Justice is implicit in the nature of
events. This meeting of love and lust, of vice and beauty, this
hot-and-cold inmixture of vision and of despair gives to the book of
Rojas a dimension that relates it to Dostoievski and to Balzac.
The pícaro novels of Spain’s sixteenth century continue the novel of
Rojas and announce _Don Quixote_. Counterpoint of irony and naturalistic
justice becomes the theme, variantly construed, of _Lazarillo de
Tormes_, of Quevedo’s _El Buscón_, of Delicado’s _Lozana Andaluza_, of
the _Guzmán_ of Mateo Alemán.
This in the mind of Cervantes looking out upon his world. And with it, a
parallel domain of literary expression: one that is not unrelated to the
brutal picaresque and to the extravagant tales of chivalry: the mystic.
Cervantes knew the renowned _Diálogos de Amor_ of León Hebreo. And he
knew Santa Teresa, Luis de León, Luis de Granada.
This man whom adversity for twenty years has silenced is a bookish man.
But he has been a man of action. He has grown old with his own literary
failure. But he has absorbed a century of literary success. He is no
primitive. Mature in years and in events, he is the heir of a rich,
various heritage of expression.
When he was born, Carlos I was king. His youth spanned the age of Felipe
II. While he fought and was exiled, the Escorial rose, a last pinnacle
of stone, from the Castilian Guadarrama. Now, in Cervantes’ broken age,
the grotesque Felipe III leads Spain. Spain has gone on the Crusade
Isabel dreamed; and Spain has come to this.
Cervantes looks back over the glorious madness of his land; and he has
his earliest vision of the Knight: Quixote wearing a barber’s dish,
mounted on a nag. For Spain was not like Europe at the dawn of chivalry.
Europe then was dawn, itself. Old wines--the wines of the Prophets, of
Plato and Saint Augustine--had raged in the young flesh of Teuton
hordes. But Spain at this flush of her ambition was already old. Seven
centuries of war with Islam, endless ages of conflict with a desert
world have parched the skin and turned brittle the bone of this Quixotic
hero, abroad in the world to make the world into the House of Christ.
Cervantes looks at Spain. Outward splendor flings Spain’s canopy from
Holland to Africa, from Florida to Santa Fe. Paul and the Apostles who
voyaged over the world are dead fifteen hundred years; but Columbus
charts his way to the Indies from study of the Scriptures. Roland blew
his last horn six centuries since: but Cortés and Pizarro raze empires
in Peru. The hermits of the Thebaid are buried under millennial dust;
but Córdoba has its anchorites. Saint Anthony and Saint Elisabeth are
old in Heaven; but here yesterday were Saint John of the Cross and Saint
Teresa. Bernard of Clairvaux did not crush the Albigensians with more
blood than Torquemada the Jews. Saint Louis of France announces Isabel
of Spain. Pope Gregory has his brother--across seven hundred years--in
Cisneros, Cardinal of Toledo.[24]
Cervantes looks within Spain. It is a squalid land. Men pray while it
lies sterile. Old soldiers are vagabonds on the roads. Farms are waste
while the lazy lords watch for gold-filled galleons from the Indies. It
is a bloodless land. Women give themselves to Christ, and their wombs
shrink. Carlos and Felipe pour the blood of Aragon and Castile into the
Flemish sea.
Cervantes looks at himself. He, too, has been a hero. His maimed hand
recalls the gesture of Lepanto. He has been a poet--in prison; a servant
of the State--who starved. He has helped to provision the Armada whose
splendor sank under the modern iron of stripped England. And now, he
eats the shame-bread of his women.
Looking within himself or out upon his world, Cervantes sees one thing.
Spain and he are home, ashen and sober, from a high Crusade. Spain and
he are this single body of his bitterness. Such is the conjunction and
dark omen of the birth of a hero.
_b. The Career of the Hero_
Don Quixote is but the final name of the ingenious knight of La Mancha.
In Chapter One of his book, it is set forth that he was known as
Quijada, Quesada or Quejana. Four chapters later a worker in the
neighboring fields addresses him as Quijana, and as Quijano he made his
will at the end of his last journey. His Christian name was Alonso.
Quixote (Quijote in modern Castilian) was the choice of the old man
himself. And as Cervantes gives him birth, he is old--old for his fifty
years in a frustrate Manchegan village. He is noble but poor. He is an
eater of cheap meats. He is a cadaverous, lantern-jawed, brittle-boned,
deep-eyed fellow. His house, one room of which is stocked with the
chivalric books that have drawn his substance and addled his brains, is
cared for by an old Nurse and a niece. There is as well a boy servant
who disappears from the tale after the first chapter. Doubtless
Cervantes meant to employ him as Don Quixote’s squire: but when the
independent knight after his first sally made choice of Sancho Panza,
there was naught left for the poor _mozo_. Of course, in the stable
stands a splay-hoof nag. After four days of meditation on such names as
Bucephalus and Babieca (the stallion of the Cid), Quixote christens his
jade Rocinante. _Rocín_ means hack horse: wherefore Don Quixote meant
that his mount was _before_ all the other hacks of the world.
This detail, appearing in the first chapter of the Book, might give the
canny reader pause. “Why,” he might ask, “if the deluded eyes--as we are
told--of Don Quixote saw his hack as a mount equal to the steeds of
Amadis or Alexander, as he was soon to be equal in renown, did he
christen him with a name so comical and so revealing?” The reader will
be aware of a curious shift in this Don Quixote’s “madness”: a note
shivering in at once of self-conscious irony.
However, the madman to whom Cervantes introduces us seems on the whole
at first to be consistent. A poverty-struck Manchegan, finding his
treeless world too empty for his senses, lets them roam in a realm of
knight-errants, ogres, fairies, virgins, Magic. Until his senses are
strayed. Whereupon, deeming himself a Roland or an Amadis, he buckles on
his rusty sword, takes his nag from the stall and sallies forth into a
Spain sordidly realistic, sick of heroes, to perform adventures. He cuts
a ridiculous figure. And his fate is what a sane man might expect. He is
unhorsed, drubbed, pounded. He loses teeth as his molested countrymen
lose tempers. The ladies he meets are foul-breathed wenches; the lord of
the Castle in which he takes his rest wants his pay, being the keeper of
an inn. His battles are with goats, sheep, windmills and Biscayan
servants. It is clear that some day his madness will discomfit him
entire. At which time he will be forced back to his house where the good
Nurse and the niece will staunch his wounds, bathe the dust from his mad
eyes and put him to bed. Meantime, there is the tale to tell--with much
laughter--of his absurd adventures. Cervantes wishes to laugh at this
medieval scarecrow, jousting with the Modern. His fellow Spaniards, sick
like himself of gestures and heroics, will roar along--will pay _reales_
for the book--will put money in the purse of a scribbler.
Such a Quixote is the child of Cervantes, and is the subject of the
early chapters. And now a fundamental difference sets in, marking off
this character from others. Most literary creations remain their
maker’s. As he willed, modeled, developed them, so they live--or die.
This is true in great books. The evolution of the hero is explicit in
the poet’s mind or at least in the action’s threshold. But for the
analogue to Don Quixote we must go to biology, rather than to art. The
mother forms the baby in her womb. It is organically hers, and so for a
brief time it will remain. But she has endowed it with a principle which
will make her child recede ever more from being her creation. This inner
life, seeking substance in the world of sense and of impression, becomes
itself. The mother has created a babe--only to lose it. Similar is the
fate of Quixote with Cervantes. From the womb of his will and bitter
fancy comes the child. But Don Quixote is no sooner set on earth, than
he proceeds by an organic evolution, by a series of accretions,
assimilations, responses, to change wholly from the intent of his
author--to turn indeed against him. He does not lose organic contact
with his source, even as the man is child of his own childhood and of
his parents in a way deeper than the parents’ conscious will or than
biologic pattern. But above all, the child becomes himself. He has
transcended vastly the amorphous thing lodged in his mother’s womb. So
Don Quixote is transfigured beyond the sprightly scheme of his maker.
He was conceived and formed, as a broken writer’s bitter turning against
his heroic soul and his heroic age; he becomes the Body of sublime
acceptance--the symbol of what his misfortunes were to mock. Cervantes’
conscious will has no firm hold on Don Quixote. And this is plain almost
from the outset in the fact that the Manchegan knight, despite his
author’s assurance, _is not mad_. We had an inkling of this already in
the too conscious, too ironic naming of Rocinante. Soon the proofs
multiply; for the clown-blows that continue to rain upon Don Quixote in
Part One cannot hold him from his organic growth. With Part Two, written
ten years later, the blows and buffets are less frequent. Cervantes has
had time to catch up with and humbly to accept his son.
In the matter of the selecting of a Lady (that needed spur of every true
knight-errant) it is clear that Don Quixote knows the facts about
Aldonza Lorenzo, wench daughter of Lorenzo Cochuelo of El Toboso. Quite
consciously, he turns her into the divine Dulcinea whom henceforth he
will worship. Her he makes his “truth”; there is no evidence that the
_fact_ of the girl is ever hidden from him. He needs a helmet, indeed he
needs Mambrino’s magic helmet. A barber comes, riding an ass and on his
head (for it is raining) a copper bleeding-dish. This shall be the
golden helmet of Mambrino; and as such Don Quixote takes it. But in the
parley before and after with Sancho Panza, it is plain that the knight
accepts Sancho’s _fact_ about the dish: he merely turns the fact, for
his own purpose, into “truth.”
In the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote resolves to follow a tradition. He and
Sancho have reached the mountains that bar the smooth plains of La
Mancha from the fluid meads of Andalusia southward: mountains of rock
flung to sky, titanic gestures of rock, pourings of cosmic might into
the waste of rock. The Sierra, sudden beneath La Mancha, suggests
delirious excess. So here, Don Quixote will have his knightly spell of
madness, in anguish of his absent lady love. How does he set about it?
He debates the merits of two schools of madness. There was the furious
way of Roland after his Angelica had slept with the Moor Medoro. And
there was the quiet melancholy way of Amadis. Don Quixote is fifty: he
elects the quieter madness. He takes Sancho to witness of his straits,
ere he sends him off to beseech mercy of Dulcinea. Nor is he fooled by
Sancho’s meeting with the lady. The fact that Sancho has left behind him
the very letter which he describes as giving to Dulcinea does not
disturb Don Quixote. He is not dwelling with facts, but with truths of
his own conscious making. And he tells his squire, speaking in elegiac
temper of himself: “That if he did not achieve great matters, he died to
achieve them; and if I am indeed not disowned and disdained by Dulcinea
del Toboso, it sufficeth me ... to be absent from her.” Later he meets
the swine girl whom he has transfigured into princess. And since he
speaks of the magic making her appear as the facts (and Sancho) would
have it--a coarse and silly female with a breath of garlic--it is plain
that the facts are in his mind. He is not fooled. Nor is he lying when
he speaks of magic. Magic is the deep inner change of attitude. This is
the secret of the fakirs of the East. This is _true_ magic. Don
Quixote’s attitude changes the fact of the swine girl into his truth of
a princess.
The fooled is Sancho. For Sancho does not understand that fact and truth
may be foes. He takes one for the other. He believes that Dulcinea’s
enchantment, the Cave of Montesino, the Island which he is sent to
govern, the Empress whom his master is to wed are facts. As the tale
grows, poor Sancho is more and more enmired in confusion. He is in
danger of madness, losing his distinction between the world of shapes
and this world of ideas in which Don Quixote rides.
The old knight’s progress is willful. There is, for instance, the
wondrous ride on Clavileño, the wooden horse in the garden of the Duke,
upon which the pair are wafted through heaven and hell. Sancho claims to
have stolen a glimpse and to have seen them soaring through the
firmaments of fire. And Don Quixote answers:
“If you desire me to believe you in what you have just seen in the
sky, I desire that you should believe me in what I saw within the
Cave of Montesino. No need for me to say more....”
He is proposing to Sancho what is neither more nor less than a deal; he
will accept his squire’s lies, if Sancho accepts his own distinction
between a glorious truth and a drab world of facts. But Sancho’s mind
has no such athleticism. He is not Ramón Lull! He has never heard of
León Hebreo. He is forever mixing two insoluble realms.
At last Don Quixote meets his fate. In Barcelona, having been acclaimed
by crowds with mingled laughter and devotion which they can never
understand, he is challenged to combat by the Knight of the White Moon.
He is worsted, of course: and this is his end. For the _caballero de la
luna blanca_ is none other than the bachelor Sansón Carrasco. The goodly
Don Antonio cannot understand this medieval nonsense in his busy modern
seaport. Carrasco explains:
“My lord, know that I, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, am of the same
place as Don Quixote de la Mancha, whose simplicity and madness
have moved to tears all of us who know him: and among these none
has wept more than I: and believing that there lay his health and
peace, in that he should reside in his own land and house, I
determined to return him thither; and so three months since I went
upon the road as a knight-errant, calling myself _el caballero de
los espejos_, meaning to fight him, vanquish him without hurt, and
having put as the condition of our encounter that the vanquished
remain in the discretion of the victor: and what I thought to
demand of him (for I judged him beforehand already vanquished) was
that he should return to his home, and sally not forth from it for
a whole year; in which time he might be cured; but fate ordered
otherwise, for I was the defeated. I was hurled from my horse, and
hence my purpose could not take effect; he went his way, and I
returned, beaten, bruised, mashed by my fall which to be sure was
dangerous enough; but for this I did not give up my meaning which
was to seek him out once more and defeat him, as you have seen me
do this day. And since he is so punctilious in all that pertains to
the knight-errant, without doubt soever he will obey the order I
have given him, in honor of his word. This, my lord, is what has
passed, without my need to say another thing; I beseech you, do not
discover me nor say to Don Quixote who I am, in order that these my
good intentions may have effect, and that there may return to
reason a man so excellent in reason, when he is left alone by the
unreasons of chivalry....”
Carrasco reveals that his deep instinct against Don Quixote is
buttressed by a shallow understanding. When the old knight saw the
familiar face of his friend within the vizor of the defeated _caballero
de los espejos_, he was not troubled: he knew that magic had turned the
truth of the defeated warrior into the face of his neighbor, the
bachelor Sansón Carrasco. Had he now been told that the Knight of the
White Moon appeared to others as this same bachelor, he would have found
a similar solution--and obeyed the knight, though his heart broke.
So now, stripped of his harness, Don Quixote makes his ashen way
homeward from Barcelona. He does not yet know that he is vanquished for
good. His word binds him for a year: thereafter, can he not sally forth
again? Meantime, he need not stay idle in a gross world of facts. “If it
seem well to thee,” he tells his squire, “I should like that we turn
pastors even for the time I am caught up.” He makes his plans. “I shall
buy a few sheep and all other things needed for the pastoral life.” His
friends will share this new transfiguration which has the advantage of
being more sociable than the life of the knight-errant. He will become
the pastor _Quixotiz_; Sancho will become _Pancino_. Sancho’s wife
Teresa will be _Teresona_. The bachelor Carrasco will be known as
_Sansonino_ or _Carrascón_: being a learned man, he shall take his
choice. The priest (_el cura_) he might call, not knowing his true name,
_el pastor Curiambro_.
These persons, being facts, must change their names ere they can enter
his truthful pastoral Eden. Dulcinea remains Dulcinea: for already _she_
is of the world of his truth. With this last lucid statement of his
mind, the old man comes upon his home where soon he is to die. No more
may he be a knight, dispensing Justice in a real world inhabited by such
true concepts as ogres, virgins, sorcerers. Even the little interlude of
pastor is denied him. He languishes; and with his strength, his
creative will expires.
The child returneth to the mother. Don Alonso Quijano el Bueno lies upon
a death-bed and renounces Don Quixote. Again Cervantes’ child shrinks to
the arms of his parent. He abjures the careers of all knights-errant:
“Ya soy enemigo de Amadís de Gaula y de toda la infinita caterva de
su linaje; ya me son odiosas todas las historias profanas de la
andante caballería; ya conozco mi necedad y el peligro en que me
pusieron harlas leído; ya por misericordia de Díos, escarmentando
en cabeza propia, las abomino....”
* * * * *
Don Quixote, as he emerges unscathed from the mind of his author, is a
man possessed: not a madman. He is a man possessed as were the Hebrew
prophets, or Jesus, or Vardhamana, or Boehme or Plotinus, or any
poet.... The difference is subtle but is clear beyond the logical
distinctions of man’s reason. No atheist would call Amos mad, but a man
possessed. To Jesus saying: “When ye have lifted up the Son of God, then
shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself, but as my
Father hath taught me” no Jew would ascribe madness, but possession.
Quixote is possessed of an Ideal. And since this ideal was mothered of
the world struggling toward light, and since now it mothers him entire,
becoming his truth and his world, Don Quixote takes his place among the
broken and triumphant prophets. Even the alienist durst not call him
mad, for in the drama which he enacts he knows his part: and the more
fully senses what he calls the truth, knowing its bodily difference from
the facts about him.
Reality for the medieval soul was neo-platonic. The conceptual was real:
all else was merely fact. The bitter apartness of Jew and Arab from
medieval Europe was due to the failure of the Semite, despite Philo and
Al Gazali, to assimilate neo-platonism deeply. Plotinus, Porphyry,
Augustine, Iamblicus created the psychology of a thousand years of
Europe. The real is not this world. We are snared and mired in a viscous
web of seeming. All congeries of sense is this. And knowledge tends, not
to a translating of this factual film into the real but to the piercing
it, the abandoning it altogether. This attitude is far from the
naturalistic mysticism of the Hebrew, from the intellectual mysticism of
Plato; from the profound nihilism of the Hindu who recognized the unity
of the ideal and the factual, interpreting one always in terms of the
other. Medievalism is a child--and a childish offshoot--of all these. It
declares: There is a real world, and it is not this one. Man can reach
the real world, by various means. He must crucify the fact, he must
worship the saints, he must lose his body in order to save his soul.
Don Quixote moves through a world neo-platonically real. He is as aware
as Sancho of sheep, windmills, inns, country wenches. He chooses to
disregard these lies of fact. He erects a systematic symbol whereby his
senses vault the phenomena about him, and deliver him the truth.
Thereby, the windmill serves him as a giant; the sheep as enchanted
armies; the empty cave of Montesino as the scene of Glory, and
Maritornes the whore as the virgin lady languishing in love. He has
elected to do Justice upon earth. These giants, armies and disasters
serve him as means to that end.
By a similar process, the medieval mind made all history into parable
and symbol. The medieval mind is subjectivism carried to the intense
conclusion made possible by the barbarous Germanic will. Philo’s
allegories of the Scripture, the Book of Zohar, the way of Egypt and
India with all written words, treating them as intricate and recondite
symbols, obsessed the mind of medieval Europe. No act is simple, no name
is simply a name. The world becomes a dramatic Mystery, with every scene
bearing upon the central Plot: the soul’s salvation. For a thousand
years, literature and art, to be serious, had to be allegory.
The mood of medieval symbolism, while it was fathered by Plato and the
Jews, is neither Greek nor Jewish. With these two adult peoples,
symbolism held its place: it remained a relative and ancillary life
within the mastering testimony of the world. Already in Plotinus and
Saint Augustine, the balance is lost. When we are deep in the Middle
Ages, we are deep in an allegoric jungle: the paths of fact are gone;
there comes no daylight of reason in this tangle of monster foliage and
whelming branches.
Don Quixote’s world is medievally real. It is a hypertrophy of such
births as Chivalry, Romance and Sainthood. In its character of
wholeness, of deliberate disregard for fact, it springs from the
fountainhead of neo-platonic thought.
But if this transfiguring of the world to his own will is a medieval
act, Don Quixote’s impulse is not medieval, is not even Christian. The
medieval will, myriad in its flowerings, was childishly simple in its
seed: the soul’s salvation. Nothing else counted: or rather, everything
had its sole significance, indeed its reality, as it bore on this
monomaniac problem of each soul: to be saved. That a man’s soul might be
saved, all acts since Adam had been apportioned. For this, the Hebrews
lived, the Prophets preached, Christ died: for this, Peter builded his
Church and the Jews remained outside in perpetual testimony of
damnation. For this, men went on Crusades, conquered heathens, gave
birth to children in holy wedlock. For this there was love and justice:
for this there was life and death. But Don Quixote is no more centrally
concerned with his soul’s salvation than if he had been a Jew. He
believes in his soul; he hopes it shall be saved. But his acts are
motived by a will far less personal: the enacting of Justice.
Don Quixote looks upon himself as the instrument of Justice. He is the
embodied and moving will of Justice. The neo-platonic Christian lived
justly, that he might pierce better the Phenomenal Lie and win
salvation. The Arab warrior spread justice with his sword because the
Prophet was just, and he must serve the Prophet to be saved. The knight
of the Round Table of King Arthur performed deeds of justice--rescuing
the virgin, slaying the bad giant--because it was good sport and because
it was a way to his salvation. But Don Quixote wills Justice upon earth,
because he hungers after Justice, because there is naught else true save
Justice. If, by the sheer testimony of his words and deeds, we analyze
this passion of Don Quixote, we learn that for him instinctively Justice
meant Unity. The world must become One: and the means thereto is
Justice.
The symbols with which he works are medieval Christian; his mental
mechanism is neo-platonic: his knightly attitude is more Moorish than
Teutonic (as contrasted with the Germanic tenor of the freebooting Cid).
But this heart of his will is Hebrew. The parabolic line of its
enactment in his life links Don Quixote with the Prophets.
The words God and Christ are surprisingly seldom on the old knight’s
lips. He cites Roland and Amadis more often than the Saints. They,
indeed, are his saints. But his God is Justice. And so impersonal, so
monotheistic is He, that He wants more than a body; almost He lacks a
name. Or rather His body is the world: His name is Justice.
The eidolon-making Greeks said in wonder of the Jews: “They are a people
who see God everywhere and localize him nowhere.” So Don Quixote created
for himself a world that should consist solely of opportunities for
Justice. To this end he rejects, selects and builds in the world which
meets his eyes. His mind works like the instinct of an artist. But he is
a peculiar sort of artist. His ethical purpose, the intensity with which
he imbues every action with his vision and turns the social fact into a
spiritual Word, recalls the Prophets. Amos, too, looked out on a world
made wholly the matrix for the vision of God: and moved in Israel as a
flame within the burning wood. To Hosea, even the wife of his bed was a
symbol of the intention of the Lord. Every detail of the Prophet’s
life--even the silence and the dark, even the failure and the sin--is
caught in the unity of his vision and becomes a Word to express it. Thus
Don Quixote sets forth to perform Justice. He must perform it
constantly. The world must become material--a continuum of material--for
his performance. But like every artist and like every prophet Don
Quixote must translate his vision into the accepted formulæ of his mind.
In his case, these formulæ are the shoddy regalia of decadent
knighthood. Justice is to be performed by rescuing virgins, unseating
ogres, slaying giants, despiting necromancers. Don Quixote rides through
Spain. Along these highways graze sheep, trudge merchants: there are
inns but no castles. Don Quixote does not see the enactment of Justice
in such terms as these. So he transforms them.
His Justice is an attempt at unity. But it is very simple. The real
world of Don Quixote is no intricate entexture of hierarchic values. It
is not like the mazed affluence of life which the Hindu fused into One.
It has none of the deep involument of souls and states fused by Hebrew
and Hellene into God. It is a simple pyramid. At the base are knights
and villains, virgins and married ladies, angels, enchanters, demons,
ogres. And at the pyramid’s peak is the ideal of all this homogeneous
matter: freedom and liberty. This ideal is uncorrupted by any political
or sectarian dogma. It is never more clear than in the adventure with
the convicts. With clinking chains, this squad of scoundrels is led
south by the soldiers of the King, to meet the galley in which they must
serve their terms. Here are men in chains: Don Quixote’s ideal of
Justice demands that chains be stricken off. The soldiers protest that
these chains are virtuous and lawful: it avails not. The freed rascals
repay their liberator with a shower of stones and make off with Sancho’s
ass: this avails nothing. Don Quixote will not be swerved from his
immaculate conception of Justice.
In such episodes as this, we touch the core of the miracle of Don
Quixote. His nature is ridiculously funny, and is Christlike. The
freeing of legally judged robbers, the letting of lions out of cages,
is farce: and yet illumes a justice above laws whose vision is
Christlike and whose enactment brings upon the knight a Christlike fate.
In laughing at Don Quixote, we crucify him. Mockery and buffets create
the knight of the Sorrowful Figure: our own roars of glee at his
well-earned mishaps hail the ridiculous Christ.
And here we come back into the medieval. The Jesus of the Synoptic
Gospels is a dominant unbroken man. The Passion on the Cross is a mystic
interlude--probably an interpolation--which rends the Temple far more
than it does Jesus. His cry, about the ninth hour; “Eli, Eli, lama
sabachthani” is a shredding weakness against the serenity and might of
the historic Man. Jesus in his true character is almost wholly Hebrew
Prophet. With the Lord in his mouth, he is imperious, even overbearing.
The Hebrew spirit is as adverse from ill-health--from martyrdom as an
end-in-itself--as the Greek. But with the infantilization of the West,
with the upshowing of the childish spirit within the iron carapace of
Rome, Jesus becomes pitiful. Medieval art makes him lean and ugly;
asceticism borrowed from the Hindus and Egyptians mangles his body.
Within the splendor of the Gothic church there comes to live a shrunken
Christ. And as medievalism stumbled southward, the process gathered. The
baroque churches of Seville are fantasmagoria of tropic wealth, writhed
like a forest about the Sensitive Plant: Christ, milkpale,
blood-spotted.
So at the end, Don Quixote. He is laughter-spotted, blood-spotted.
Reason bespatters him and makes him comic. But since in the minds of men
this reason is profane, and his mad impulse holy, he is a Christ--a
medieval, an unjewish Christ.
* * * * *
His deeds get him into trouble. Part One abounds in buffets that unhorse
him, knock out his teeth, bathe him in blood and muddy him all over.
Part Two has a less rollicking mood. Cervantes has been affected by Don
Quixote. But there is worse: Don Quixote, enacting Justice, brings
trouble to others--and to the best of them. There is the boy whom he
frees from a flogging master, and who is flogged the worse, in payment
for the humiliation the master has suffered from Don Quixote. There is
the freeing of the convicts--a menace to every household in the land.
There is the freeing of the lion, to the probable disgrace of the poor
keeper. Don Quixote wrecks funerals: he maims an innocent Penitent for
life. He unhinges Sancho’s peace: brings the anarchy of ambition into
the breast of this sweet clod of the earth. He visits destruction upon
the unfortunate inns which he takes for castles. He robs a barber of his
copper dish. He drubs innocent servants. He smashes the sole fortune of
Maese Pedro--his set of puppets. He commits sacrilege even: plunging
full-tilt upon a pilgrimage of disciplinants, breaking legs and wresting
from the outraged hand of a priest an image of the Virgin.
Though he offends many and amuses more, he convinces no one. That a
prophet should inspire jeers and hatred is natural: but that he should
have not one disciple? and that at the end of his mission, he should
recant, and call his mission folly? How can such win the love of the
world?
The strong whom he encounters laugh at him. The weak flee from him. The
Nurse and his niece do not laugh: they weep and tear their hair for his
unseemly conduct. In the bachelor Carrasco he inspires a nagging
irritation. This man is common sense incarnate: he is ill-at-ease before
the irreducible vision of the artist. He goes out of his way to down
him: dons the armor of folly in order to bring home the fool. This must
not be construed as altruism. Carrasco pays tribute to Don Quixote, in
despite of himself. It is his own peace he is after. He is aware, albeit
far too rational ever to admit it to himself, that this utter idealist
stalking La Mancha robs his small reality of ease. Common sense--the
sense of approximation and of compromise--is fragile and is nervous. It
must sequester the poet-prophet in his home town.
Perhaps the ugliest episode in the book treats of the knight’s
entertainment in the castle of the Duke and Duchess. They are the
worldly-wise, the worldly-cultured, even as Carrasco is the pragmatist.
They take Don Quixote in; and make him a show for their own genteel
delectation. They are the perpetual patron of the artist. They feed him,
flatter him, serve him: everything but believe him. Their minds hold him
safe from their hearts. And nowhere does the knight of the Sorrowful
Figure appear so pathetic, so ridiculous, so disarmed, as under this
ducal roof where he is lionized and where whole pageantries are enacted
to pander to his need of enacting Justice.
Quixote survives the sophistical salon of the Duchess and of her
lecherous ladies. But while he is among them, he is shrunken. He goes
forth at last, aware of the subtle poison of their praise, to seek the
adventure of Justice--to be laid low by the bachelor Carrasco.
But there is his squire? are there not moments at least in which the
squire is a true disciple? Sancho Panza seems to have come latterly to
Cervantes. Indeed, this loamy son of the Manchegan desert is less
immediate altogether to the world illumined by Don Quixote. That
treeless, sapless plain whose horizons are beyond eye, whose winters are
blasts of ice, whose summers are fire, whose indeterminate panorama of
details--dust, men, towns, roads--is chaos, is the true mother of Don
Quixote. La Mancha is a defeated desert: neither waste nor garden, it
imposes the way of gardens upon the mood of the desert. Don Quixote
transfigures its inns and sordid villages, its hard-fist peasants and
its heavy girls into a ruthless psychic unity; much as the son of the
true desert drew its vast horizons and its breastlike slopes into the
body of God. But how in this world was Sancho Panza born? For not
Falstaff of verdant England is more robustly gay, not Panurge of
luxuriant France more subtly sensual.
Sancho is wholly the creation of Cervantes. Don Quixote, born of his
author, outgrew him. Sancho, too, grows organically. Contact with his
master determines this. But none the less he lies ever full within
Cervantes’ will: he is the sheer miraculous birth of gayety from the
frustrate desert of Cervantes’ life.
To Sancho, the “phenomenal” world, the world of facts is everything.
Since he conceives no other, and since his master continuously lives
within another of his own conceiving, Sancho is held busy translating
into factual terms the entire adventure which he rides with Don Quixote.
A vertiginous effort it is, and it ends by making Sancho more nearly mad
than his knight. He believes factually in his Island. He believes
himself its governor, though he has crossed no water to attain it. The
maid who is to wed Don Quixote after he has gone to Africa to slay her
foe is factually to him the Princess Micomacoma. This enchantment must
be a fact, like the one which befell Dulcinea, turning her into the
wench Aldonza. Sancho vacillates forever between the credulity and the
skepticism of the literal mind: ignorance is so clearly the matrix of
his sanity that the delusions of his master become wise by contrast.
There are no dimensions to his thinking. Don Quixote is mad--or he is a
true knight-errant: the adventure is wild,--or there will be a veritable
island.
His dominant impulse, either way, is greed. Greed makes him doubt: greed
makes him trust his master. Yet underneath, there works subtly upon
Sancho a sweeter influence: his indefeasible respect for Don Quixote.
Howsoever he argue, howsoever clear he see, howsoever he sicken from
constant thumpings and sparse earnings, howsoever wry are the pleasures
of his Island, Sancho cannot altogether free himself from the dominion
of an idealizing will which he can never understand. In a directer way
(since he is no intellectual) than that of Sansón Carrasco, he is held
and haunted by Don Quixote. When he is absent from his master he is
lost. When, in a scene more touching than the pathos of two quarreling
lovers, Don Quixote gives him leave to depart homeward, promising him
reward for his past service, Sancho bursts into tears and vows that he
cannot forsake him.
He loves his master. Not greed alone, or if so, the greed of devotion to
an ungrasped grandeur, holds him astride his dappled ass to follow Don
Quixote to the sea. And yet, he despises him; and he betrays him. He
judges him, and he exploits him. He makes sure of his reward in Don
Quixote’s will, and he gives up the comfort of his wife to follow him
through ridiculous dangers. He is this sensual, lusty, greedy oaf of the
soil. And yet in the love that masters him he is Cervantes, himself:
Cervantes who created Don Quixote to laugh and to mock--and who remained
to worship.
For this is the crux of the matter. Cervantes needed Sancho to keep Don
Quixote in the perspective for laughter. “Common-sense” rides along with
the “madman,” and constantly shows him up. But here is Sancho, shown up
himself! Here is Cervantes, shown up! For Cervantes accepts Don Quixote.
And that is why we accept him. Cervantes builds up these countless
reasons for rejecting him: the havoc wrought by his acts, the shoddy
stuff of his dream, the addled way of his brain. It avails naught.
Cervantes ends with love. And we--the more humbly in that we have mocked
and roared--avow our veneration.
Of such stuff is made the holiness of Don Quixote: mildewed notions,
slapstick downfalls. We laugh at his unfitness to impose his dream upon
a stubborn world: we see well enough that Rocinante is a nag and the
knight himself, helmeted with a dish, a mangy addled fellow. And we
accept, in order that he may live this nonsense, the disruption of inns,
the discomfiture of pilgrims, the routing of funerals, the breaking of
bones!
Cervantes strives hard to snuff out the aspiring hunger of his soul. For
this, Don Quixote is bemuddied and deformed. But Don Quixote lives: and
his chief enemy--Cervantes--gives him his blood and his passion, in
order that he may triumph.
_c. The Book of the Hero_
_Don Quixote_ is written in a prose majestical, dense, warm, lucid,
still. It is the fulfillment of the Castilian music which Rojas’ _La
Celestina_ promised a century before. The tempo is slow. More correctly,
the organic movement of the prose is slow; and the facet movements are
swift and nervous. The Cervantine prose is a portrait of the soul of
Spain whose cadences of desire and will resolve into an immobile whole.
The accentual music of this prose had already become the innate quality
of Castilian. Cervantes heightened his inheritance. The natural genius
of the language was already, in the mystics and novelists before him,
one that made for a muscular, slow yet sharply surfaced prose. In _Don
Quixote_, the music has as its base an almost cosmic beat, within which
as in a firmament, the swifter, brighter, more fleeting qualities stand
forth. Cervantes makes good use of the agglutinated verb and pronoun, of
the syncopations within the general prose rhythm. Above all, he makes
use of the loamy expressions of the people, transfiguring them, however,
into a tonal design not remotely naturalistic and more akin to the prose
of the religious writers than of the pícaro novelists who also helped
themselves to the vernacular of the soil.
In the great novel of Rojas there is a like marriage of pungent and
ironical stuffs in an exalted orchestration. The difference is one of
quality and quantity. Cervantes’ instruments are more varied; his themes
and the materials that build them are more numerous, even if no one is
richer than the central form of _La Celestina_. Indeed, the earlier work
is the intenser; its colors are more hot. There is in Cervantes a
strain of the north which the Jew Rojas lacked; and which made his
æsthetic action longer and slower. The art of the Semite is more
lyrical, less architectonic. _La Celestina_ is a bomb-like organ; a
piston-strong machine driving hard and singly. It is the tale, moreover,
of a city where life is vertical and packed. Its form is true to its
theme. But _Don Quixote_ is the story of a journey--of three journeys
rather--over the plains and mountains of La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia.
Its basal movement is panoramic, horizontal. Its loftier dimensions are
attained by the associative power of its hero who, riding the roads of
Spain, touches incessantly the spiritual realms of a people, of an age,
of a soul. The formal values of _La Celestina_ are more manifest. Very
consciously, an intellectual, nervously coördinated man bound together
the counterpoint of his design, so that each element partakes
_immediately_ of the whole. This is not the case in _Don Quixote_. The
materials of the book--persons of the road, interpolated stories,
situations--stand end to end, flat for the most part and quite episodic.
The knight enters them organically. He transfigures them as a new
element in a chemical solution. He enacts a continuous catalysis upon
the parts of Spain which he encounters. The result of this is two-fold.
There is created for the entire book a _surface of action_ and a _line
of action_. These hold the attention of the reader: these, indeed,
caused the book’s popularity when it first appeared. The surface of
action in the large is the Spain to which the Spanish people through the
picaresque novel had been accustomed for over fifty years. The line of
action is the pilgrimage of Quixote and Sancho.
But each of these two actions is complex. In consequence, their organic
synthesis is often subtle and hidden. This synthesis gives to the work
its unity: and one can enjoy _Don Quixote_ without awareness of it.
Indeed, the synthesis may take place in the reader’s mind, long after he
has absorbed its elements and put the book aside.
Consciousness of the organic greatness of _La Celestina_ must come at
once; since that greatness is the result of a design preconceived and
implicit in the book’s several scenes. Consciousness of the greatness of
_Don Quixote_ came late even to its author and not to Spain until a
whole century had passed. For its parts have an immediate life of their
own; only after they have become lost and merged in one another does the
book’s unity, as a synthesis of all these parts, dawn on the reader.
The knight himself is not so much an organ in this ultimate synthesis as
a dimension. The synthesis is not articulate in him alone, any more than
in the episodes. But it is articulate in the book’s language. And the
rare individual who understood the æsthetic nature of prose might tell
from the first page that _Don Quixote_ was a stupendously formal work of
art.
This prose is a _becoming_ prose. It is heavy and pregnant. It is the
antithesis of the immediate prose of Santa Teresa or of the lapidic
absoluteness of the verse of Luis de Góngora. It is attuned at every
moment to the whole of the book. It lacks swiftness and often sharpness.
It is frequently clumsy in the projecting of little scenes. The book
abounds in episodes that Quevedo would have fleshed more brightly or the
author of Lazarillo pointed to more effect.
Cervantes is forever after deeper game. If, for instance, he describes
the cozy dinner at which Quixote and Sancho shared the meat and acorns
of six goatherds, the prose is not fundamentally focused upon the
_genre_: but upon the tragic implications of Don Quixote’s presence and
upon the irony of the attitude of the goatherds.
But Cervantes never _states_ these deeper implications. His prose
_creates_ them. And creates them, by the immanent and abstract nature of
its music. This immanence runs throughout the work, and thereby
Cervantes is permanently saved the unæsthetic makeshift of statement.
His direct attention goes unhindered to the presentment of the action.
The action’s significance, one might say its _soul_, is implicit as is
the significance of life implicit and _unasserted_ in material substance
and in specific action.
But as in all great art, this deep effect is won at sacrifice of a
lesser. Analogously, El Greco maintains the larger anatomy of his vision
throughout the details of his paintings, although he loses thereby the
grace and accuracy of the anatomy of his subjects.
There are still cavilers at El Greco’s drawing; and there have always
been depreciators of Cervantes’ prose. Lope de Vega whose prosody was an
immediate lyric flow of two dimensions, was perhaps sincere in his
denigration of Cervantes. And even today Miguel de Unamuno, for all his
adoration of Don Quixote, decries the language of Cervantes, for a
similar reason: Unamuno’s lyric mood can not span the parabolas in which
the figure of Don Quixote is limned.
These parabolas are the _lines_ of the prose: and they are not, like
simpler curves, to be plotted in the segment of any specific action in
the book. But they are to be _felt_ in every page. That is why the first
chapter of _Don Quixote_ announces the inscrutable tragi-comedy,
although Cervantes when he wrote it had no knowledge of his undertaking.
The music of his prose is the mother of his book. It is the beginning of
the book’s significance, and it is the conclusion. Nor can it be
translated.
* * * * *
A work of art in whose making significant forces have not played is
inconceivable. The veriest trash, the most incompetent effort must in
some wise have issued from a man’s life, from a people’s will, from an
epoch’s spirit. What lies between such work and work significant in
itself is not difference of material, but form. The poor work is one in
which the elements of life are inchoate and, failing to achieve a unity
of form, cannot be said to achieve life itself. The real work of art is
that in which these elements achieve a body: is that of which these
elements _are_ the body. But the bodies of men and age whence its
elements of life have sprung will rot away. Other men and other ages
will succeed; and these in their will to know essential union with all
men and all ages preserve the true work of art. For in it only, do those
moldered lives of other men and ages touch them. The real work of art,
builded of the substances of time, therefore alone does not exist in
time. And a consideration of the work of art, whose basis is not equally
beyond time--is not metaphysical or religious--is inadequate to art’s
function in the world of time.
Before all else, _Don Quixote_ is in form the life of Cervantes.
Toward the end of his last adventure, on the way to Barcelona, Don
Quixote with Sancho attempts to hold the road against a herd of bulls.
But they are overturned, trampled, bemudded. They find a limpid spring
garlanded with trees and wash the blood and mire from their sore bodies.
Sancho brings food from the saddlebags. But his master is too
disconsolate to eat. Sancho waits patiently: seeing no end to Don
Quixote’s sorrow nor to his own hunger, he falls to.
“Eat, friend Sancho,” says Don Quixote. “Sustain the life which means
more to you than to me, and leave me to die in the embrace of my
thoughts and in the power of my disgraces. I, Sancho, was born to live
dying; you, to die eating. And that you may see how I speak truth in
this, behold me printed in history, celebrated in arms, commended in all
my acts, respected in principles, desired by damsels; from end to end,
whilst I awaited the palms, triumphs and crowns merited by my valorous
deeds, you have seen me as this morning laid low, outraged and ground
down, under the hoofs of obscene and filthy brutes....”
The roars and blows that greet the Sorrowful Knight might, in the jargon
of our day, be termed Cervantes’ masochistic satisfaction. Cervantes
ridicules himself for the dreaming fool he has been. But the strain is
too deep. This figure that he sets going to make mock of is after all
his soul. He grows away from his embittered pose. He can still laugh at
his creature; still gather him at the end back into the logic of his
story. But in Part Two, he is seen defending him against the laughter of
others. He is seen regarding his knight, for all his folly, as purer
than the sensible world: and at the last, more real.
But the times were out of joint. Spain and Don Quixote were pitted
against Reasons: the logic of their ideal against the reasons of a world
breaking from the unity of God which once had been the Roman Church,
into a multiverse of fragmentary facts which is our modern crisis.
Frustrate brilliance, seeking to be healed, is the one unity of the
modern story. Since Columbus voyaged, we have voyaged and bruised
ourselves in spiritual chaos: seeking the salvation of wholeness and
seeking it in vain.
From our search has come the national concept of the State, for
instance: a degenerate medievalism, this--a wistful effort to achieve
the wholeness of Rome without the holiness that informed it. Has come
the Marxian Internation--an inverted idealism which put up the economic
process in place of the Hegelian Spirit. Has come the faith in science
as Revelation. Has come with Rousseau, the seeking of salvation through
the return to the unity of man’s primordial needs: with Nietzsche, the
same seeking in the but seeming opposite direction of the superman. And
finally, Darwin inspired us to hope that God might be inserted as the
principle of flux in biologic process. All these prophecies and dogmatic
actions strove alike to enlist mankind once more in a full unity of life
and impulse. All who believed in them, to the extent of their devotion,
have been Quixotes.
Don Quixote gave himself to make the world One, through the application
of measures that strike us as shoddy and unreal. His were the old
“magics” of chivalry--of a Europe peopled by Germanic children and
schooled by adolescents from Athens, Alexandria and Rome. The magics no
longer _worked_: had indeed not worked to build a universal House, since
Dante. But we, laughing betimes at Quixote, patronizing Dante, have for
five hundred years been struggling to construct our house with
materials equally inadequate. The primacy of reason or of subjective
intuition, the autonomy of science or of economic purpose, the ideal of
the State or social interstate, the dream of communism or the return to
nature--one and all are magics as impotent and as unreal as those of the
old knight who rode La Mancha on a bony nag, with a barber’s dish on his
brow, and in his head a neo-platonic vision.
* * * * *
Don Quixote and Faust are the great antistrophes to the Commedia of
Dante. The body of Dante’s poem had the same elements as the body of
Dante’s world. They were the Judæo-Christian revelation, Aristotelian
logic, Euclidean Nature, the Ptolemaic cosmos. They cracked, and with
them Catholic Europe passed. Only in Dante and in certain other art
forms, like the Gothic churches, has that body lived.
Don Quixote and Faust are bodies of Europe’s dissolution--forms of our
modern formlessness and of our need to be whole. They are perhaps the
most vital æsthetic organs of the activity into which modern man was
thrown by the deliquescence of his medieval world. As a poem, the
Spanish work is the greater. Faust is the child of personal lyrism and
speculative will. His sources, like the Knight’s, are medieval. He seeks
knowledge and through knowledge personal redemption. He knows that he
cannot be redeemed, save by a cosmic understanding; and his sense of
understanding is in this, the mystic’s: that it implies possession of
what is understood, and a dynamic act. But Faust remains the atom, the
unfertile seed of human will. His way to unify the world is to dominate
and absorb it within the complex of personal volition. This is heroic,
but it is savage. It ignores the fundamental wisdom of the Jews and
Hindus which taught that the health of the personal will lies through
the threshold of its death. Faust seeks knowledge through its extended
acquisition. Mefisto is the symbol of his faith in the reality of
extension. If he can garner the right catchwords, he can swallow the
world; and the world will become one within him. This bluntly is the
means toward a new synthesis adapted by all the centuries of Europe that
intervene between the Renaissance and us: and it is Kabbalistic! The
personal will, in its endeavor to achieve fusion with the world, has
concocted formulæ that were to act directly on the world, and by magic
to control it. These formulæ of course became external organisms: they
became a machine, an empire or empiric law. Instead of lending
themselves to a solution, they spawned a multitude of problems. They
could not fecundate the personal will, from which they issued. For it is
the Law that from personal will, alone when it is rendered fertile by
its own disaster (like a rotted seed) can cosmic will and a cosmic
synthesis arise.
The legend of Christ was deeper: deeper the blundering way of Quixote.
For he sought the grace of union not by absorbing the world into
himself, but by transmuting himself into an impersonal symbol of the
world.
He failed; but his book lives; for with the failure is the triumphant
impulse that led up to it. The effect of the crusade was death; the
cause was life.
The magics of Don Quixote are as absurd as our own. But his impulse was
as true as the Prophets’. The Old and the New Testaments also are a tale
of sins and follies. But these are visible, because the light of God
shines on them. In the effect that passes, all the prophets and all the
Christs have failed. None of them has failed, in the cause that remains.
The cause of Don Quixote’s life strikes us as truer than the realities
which brought about his death. This is the pitiful best that we can say
for him--or for any of the prophets.
One and all, they encountered _reasons_ which put their _truth_ to
flight. And the world was able to live whole within their truth only in
ages which willfully made reason servile. In the violence of his divorce
from the world which he aspired to unite, in the ridiculousness of his
discord from it, Don Quixote stands the last prophet of our historic
Order. He bespeaks our need: a dynamic understanding which shall enlist
ideal and reason, thought and act, knowledge and experience; which shall
preserve the personal within the mystical will; which shall unite the
world of fact in which we suffer all together, with the world of dream
in which we are alone....
_CHAPTER X_
_THE WILL OF GOD_
_a. The Bull Fight_
_b. Man and Woman_
_c. Madrid_
_a. The Bull Fight_
The bull fight is older than Spain; the art of the bull fight has little
more than a hundred years of history. Perhaps Crete, which gave El Greco
to Toledo, gave the bull worship to Tartessos. Perhaps the Romans turned
the bull rite into spectacle. The Visigoths assuredly had bull fights:
and the medieval lords of Spain jousted with bulls as Amadis with
dragons. The _toreo_ was held in the public squares of towns,
alternating possibly with _autos de fe_. In the one sport, the actors
were nobles and the victims were bulls. In the other, officiated
captains of the Church and the victims were Jews. In both, the religious
norm was more or less lost sight of, as the spectacular appeal grew
greater. But no æsthetic norm had been evolved to take its place. The
bull fight was a daredevil game to which the young bloods of the
Court--in their lack of Moors to fight--became addicted after the
Reconquest. It was a dangerous sport, and it cost the kings of Spain
many good horses and not a few good soldiers. Still, it throve until in
1700 a puritan, Philip V, ascended to the throne. He disliked the bull
fight. It lost caste among the nobles. But its usage was too deeply, too
immemorially engrained. The gentleman _toreador_ went out: the
professional _torero_ and _banderillero_ came in.
Francisco Goya has recorded in genial sketches and engravings the nature
of this bull fight. It was still chiefly a game of prowess. If an art,
it was more allied to the art of the clown and acrobat than to the dance
or the drama. The professional torero was a gymnast. He had to risk his
skin in elaborate ways: and skill was primarily confined to his grace in
going off unhurt. He fought the bull, hobbled on a table, or lashed to
a chair, or riding a forerunner in a coach, or saddled to another bull.
Only after the War of Independence against the French and after the
lapse caused by Napoleon, whose generals disapproved of so barbarous an
art, did Spain’s popular tragedy arise: the modern, profound _corrida_.
Its birthday was the same as that of the jota of Aragon which sprang
directly from the incitement against the French. Like the jota, the bull
fight was new only as an integration of old elements. And like the
ancient bull-rite of Tartessos it reached its climax in Andalusia: more
particularly in the Province of Seville.
* * * * *
The _plaza de toros_ is of course the Roman circus. Rome created no more
powerful form for an æsthetic action than this rounded, human mass
concentered on sand and blood. With its arena, the bull fight wins a
vantage over such western spectacles as cricket, baseball, the theater.
In all of these, the audience is a partial unit: it is not above the
action, but beside it. The arena of the bull fight is a pith of passion,
wholly fleshed by the passionate human wills around it.
The _plaza_ is too sure of its essential virtue to expend energy in
architectural display. Here it scores another point over the modern
theater whose plush and murals and tapestries and candelabras so often
overbear the paleness of the play. The plaza has tiers of backless seats
terracing up to balcony and boxes. The seats are of stone: the upper
reaches are a series of plain arcades. The plaza is grim and silent. It
is stripped for action. It is prepared to receive intensity. The human
mass that fills it takes from the sand of the arena, glowing in the sun,
a color of rapt anticipation. These thousands of men and women, since
the moment when they have bought their tickets, have lived in a sweet
excitement. Hours before the bugle, they are on their way. They examine
the great brutes whose deaths they are to witness. They march up and
down the sand which will soon rise with blood.
Bright shawls are flung on the palcos. Women’s voices paint the murmur
of the men. A bugle sounds, and there is silence. The crimson and gold
_mantones_ stand like fixed fires in this firmament of attention. The
multitudinous eyes are rods holding in diapason the sky and the arena.
Two horsemen (_alguaciles_) prance forward through the gates. Black
velvet capes fold above their doublets. From their black hats wave red
and yellow plumes.
They salute the royal or presidential box; circle the ring in opposite
directions and return to the gate. The music flares. They proceed once
more on their proud stallions, and behind them file the actors in the
drama. The toreros are first: four of them: they wear gold-laid jackets,
gold-fronted breeches backed in blue, rose-colored stockings. The
banderilleros in silver drape their pied _capas_ across their arms. The
_picadores_ follow. They are heavy brutish men, with chamois leggings
and trousers drawn like gloves over their wooden armor. They are astride
pitiful nags, each of which is Rocinante. The shoes are encased in
stirrups of steel; the spurs are savage against the pitiful flanks.
Behind the picadores are the red-bloused grooms, costumed like villains.
It is their task to clean up entrails and gore. And the procession
closes with two trios of mules, festooned and belled, who draw the drag
to which the bodies of slaughtered bulls and horses will be attached.
The cavalcade crosses and salutes. Toreros, banderilleros, picadores on
nervous nags, scatter along the barriers. Again, the bugle sounds. Doors
open on the interior passage which two high barriers hold as a
protective cordon between the audience and the arena. A bull leaps into
the glare.
His massive body is a form for the emotion of rage and for the act of
plunging. The forelegs are slight beneath the heft of his shoulders
whence he tapers down, so that the shoulders and head are like a
swinging turret. The brute is all infuriated flesh pivoting the
exquisite ferocity of horns. They are slender and curved, needle-sharp,
lance-long. The bull is aware of the strange ten-thousand-headed
creature that shouts at him and drives its will upon him. He understands
that the mob is his foe. He bellows, circles, plunges at last to reach
it. The barrier jerks him up, splintering with his onslaught. He is
bewildered and stopped, pawing the sand, while the mob prepares to send
its single emissaries to engage him.
The first act of the drama is formless and ends in farce. Toreros and
banderilleros toy with the bull. They fling capes, side-step, dawdle
with him. But gradually they withdraw the brute’s first fury from the
indeterminate mob ringing him round to the accessible lives in the
arena. The bull sees a horse. It capers before him in a blind
presentiment of death. Its ears are tied, its eye is bandaged. Upon it a
picador levels an enormous pike, steel-pointed. The bull charges and a
horn sinks in the belly. Horse and rider rise and are flung in a clatter
of bone, in a drench of flesh, against the barrier. The bull draws out
his ensanguined horn and charges a banderillero whose cape is there
protecting the picador. The crowd roars. The horse is whipped to its
feet by grooms. The picador is hoisted back. The old nag’s entrails hang
in a coiled horror within a foot of the ground.
The horse is the comedian of the drama. The bull tosses him. He lies on
his back and his four anguished legs beat like drumsticks on the
barrier. Or, losing his saddle, he plunges mad and blind around the
ring, kicking his own intestines, until death takes him. Or the bull
mangles him at once, and he disappears in a swirl of flesh. This is
farce; and also this is the sense of the immanence of danger. The bull
is drunken with his victory. The crowd, beholding the fate of a horse,
laughs with a tinge of terror. For what has happened there, may happen
to a man.
Enough horses have been slaughtered: their poor flesh shredded into the
gleaming unconquerable sands. A bugle summons the second act of the
drama.
This is the scene of the banderilleros. They are the critics, the
epigrammatists, the _graciosos_, the chorus of the accelerant play. They
bespeak the bull. They test him. They show off his subtle points--and
their own. If he has faults--clumsiness, cowardice, lethargy--they
correct him. They call forth his finest rage; and as he plunges on them
they leave gay ribboned darts within his flesh. If he is slow to anger,
they will employ darts that explode beneath the skin of their victim.
They enrage him. But all the while, they sober him as well, making him
realize that the holiday of the horses is no more: a harder enemy is on
the field.
Often the bull is put into a meditative mood. He stands, panting in the
center of the arena. Blood drips from his mouth. His horns are carmine
and the laced _banderillas_ dance on the scruff of his shoulder, biting,
nagging. He wants to understand what his life has become. The fields of
Andalusia--the good grass, the warm care--have been wiped out in this
blare of terror. That background of pleasaunce merely serves to sharp
the tense present--this delirium of men and sun. A banderillero dances
up. The bull faces him, asking a question. But the man will not tell.
His smile is false; that swing of his cape is treachery. There is
nothing to do but plunge--whatever it means. The cape of red and blue
folds over the eyes of the bull and vanishes like a cloud: a dart bites
his flesh. The crowd roars. The good life behind and the peace beyond
are mist: life is this glare and this roar and this goad of steel.
The second act is over: the bull is chastened. He has been cleansed for
the tragedy, after his brief triumph. Once again the bugle: the torero
to whose lot this bull has fallen, selects his slender sword and his red
_capa_. He steps forward for the ultimate tragic scene.
Toreros are of many kinds. This one is called Belmonte and he is one of
two great _espadas_ of recent years in Spain. He is a small man, smaller
than the average and more swarthy. His body moves rhythmic and slight
into the hard glitter of the sand.
The elemental glare of Spanish sunlight makes that body, striding so
quiet toward the bull, frail and helpless. Could this man run away, as
do so many? could he, if need be, vault the high barrier to safety just
as the bull splintered the wood beneath him? The head is heavy. The nose
is large and sharp; the mouth is wide; the lower jaw thrust out. But the
brow is sensitive and smooth. Close by, this is the face of a neurotic.
The arena’s flame bakes it into a brooding gloom above the body so
ironically decked in gold and silk.
Belmonte in this instant has already awakened in the crowd the troubling
emotion of pity mixed with fear. He salutes the bull and spreads his red
mantle (the capa) across the fragile sword. He steps in close; and while
the arena hardens into silence, he lifts the mantle toward the eyes of
the brute.
Within an instant, breathless save for the breath of the bull, something
goes forth from Belmonte to the beast and marries them. The bull is the
enemy, and they are joined more close, more terribly than love. He
plunges. Belmonte, motionless, swings the mantle to his side and the
bull, as if attached to it, grazes the frail body. The mantle lifts. The
bull lifts and turns, as if ligated by the mantle to Belmonte’s will.
The cloth thrusts to the other side. The bull along. Back and forth they
go, in rigorous dance. The torero’s body does not break from its repose.
He is as cool as sculpture; he is as fluid as music. The bloody beast is
attuned by a will, hard and subtle as Belmonte’s sword. His clumsy
movements are molded into grace: his rage is refined into these
exquisite feints. He, too, like the torero, leaves the plane of nature,
and becomes a symbol.
As the torero stepped out to the sand, his rôle was god-like. His
minions had played with the great innocent victim: fed him victory and
blood: taunted him: taught him. Now he, to enact the ultimate rite of
life ... the ultimate gift of the gods ... the only gift which they
give unstintingly ... death.
But this dance has transfigured the torero. Meeting the brute upon the
plane of danger, he becomes a man. Those hypnotized horns graze human
flesh: where they touch they rend. That gold-lined body is a sheath,
holding the blood of a man. The bull could plunge through it ...
plunging so near, so rhythmically near ... as if it were indeed the mist
and dream of mortal life.
And now another change in the beauty of their locked encounter. The man
becomes the woman. This dance of human will and brutish power is the
dance of death no longer. It is the dance of life. It is a searching
symbol of the sexual act. The bull is male; the exquisite torero,
stirring and unstirred, with hidden ecstasy controlling the plunges of
the bull, is female.
The crowd acts its part. The little man is but a gleam of fire, the bull
but a tongue of dionysian act within this dark flame of ten thousand
souls. From them come dream and desire and memory of sense: concentrate
upon this spot of drama: merge with it and marry it to themselves. At
every pass of the bull from side to side of Belmonte, the crowd is
released in a terrific roar. So silent the dance of the two coupled
dancers: so vast the response of the crowd. Now, Belmonte kneels and his
mantle rhythmically wipes the furious bloody head, making the plunge of
horns diagonal athwart the torero’s breast. _Verónica_ is the name of
this classic gesture. And the allusion is to the handkerchief of the
Saint, which smoothed the sweat from the forehead of the Christ. The
ancient orgy of Dionysius and Priapus is tinged with Christian pity. The
commingled symbolisms of many Spains meet in the dance: become
abstracted and restrained. The whole is the silent balance of the wills
of Spain.
The bugle signals for the final action. Belmonte has risen; has
exchanged the capa for the small _muleta_ with which he covers his
steel. Now he withdraws the muleta from the slender sword. It is a
flexible two-edged steel, dipped at the end. He stands still before the
brute whose sweat rolls red from the heaving rugose flanks. He stands
with heels clicked together, holding the brute with his eye, and raises
the blade deliberately forward. The steel points not at the head, but
slightly above it. In that mountain of flesh beyond the deadly horns
there is an unmarked spot which the sword must find. It is the tiny
crutch formed by the bones of the shoulder. Within its aperture the
blade can strike, unimpeded, to the heart. Anywhere else, the blade will
not bring death but a mere ugly plunging rage.
Belmonte has chosen to stand and make the bull plunge on him. He is
frail and erect. His shoulders are flexed; his head is slightly forward.
Grace becomes subtly rigor. The bull obeys. He leaps. The blade sinks to
the gemmed hilt. A wave of blood gushes to the sand, as the dead bull
sinks.
* * * * *
This is the archetype of the Spanish bull fight. It describes a
masterpiece. And in an art so profound and dangerous, the masterwork is
rare, even as in other æsthetic fields. But if great toreros are rare,
one actor in the play is constant and is always masterful. The crowds of
Spain, against the agitation of intellectuals and of Church, hold to
their dear drama. In the _corrida_, all the desires which history has
bred and then denied an issue, find an issue. Conflict is the stratified
peace of the Spanish soul. For too many ages has the Spaniard lived on
war to be able to do without it. In war, the lusts of the world and the
lust for God became one. Christ and Priapus were joined in its full
ecstasy. And in this dumb show of a man and a bull, they are conjoined
again.
Gross comedy of blood; sex, dionysian and sadistic; the ancient rites of
the brute and of the Christ meet here in the final image of stability.
Spain’s warring elements reach their locked fusion--Spain’s ultimate
form. For although everything is in the bull ring, and although anything
may happen, _nothing happens_. Circus, blood, dance, death equate to
nullity.[25] Like life in Spain, this spectacle is self-sufficient,
issueless....
_b. Man and Woman_
Queen Isabel may rest in peace. She is having her will although she
would not recognize its way. Her conscious will was to make Spain one:
it has become the unconscious will of every Spaniard. Her concept of the
State of Spain has become a universal state of mind. Here was Spain,
this sea of elements tossing and titanic. Here was the Spaniard, pressed
by the amorphous world in which he lived to establish unity within
himself: to become a person, in defense from the chaos that was Spain.
In his will to create Spain, he could not change the theater of his
action. He must create Spain _within himself_. The first stage of his
endeavor was that of the intense crystallizations which made Spain’s
_siglos de oro_. These saints and sinners are not fragments: they are
entire forms of Spanish energy. And the elements which they personify
exist in every Spanish soul. If, therefore, Spain was to be unified
within each Spaniard, La Celestina must be equated with Saint Teresa,
Quixote and Amadis with Lazarillo and the Cid.... Although the energic
sum of all these forces might in each individual soul add up to zero!
To the intensely individual Spaniard, Spain became more and more
subjective: until at last the boundary to the outer world was lost.
Politics, war and church became subjective. The Spaniard saw the world
only in terms of himself. This is why he strove to make the State the
mentor of conscience: this is why he strove to make the domains of the
State a sort of spiritual body. To inculcate faith by Inquisition; to
establish truth by the sword; to drive dissenters in spirit from the
soil--these were the mad and logical acts of a man who beheld the world
in his own image. Willing to create a Spain, each Spaniard remained the
anarchic personal creature whose separatism Strabo had noted and Rome
endured.
The tragedy of Spain--her reaching of success! First her energy broke up
into dominant forms of will: then she equated these forms into the
equilibrium she desired. And no energy was left! All of her opponent
tensions merge to rest in every Spanish soul. The titanic efforts toward
conquest, toward art, toward God which have made Spain great balance
each other at the end. The energy is not gone, not weakened: it is
equated. And the result is sleep.
The energy of a people is the sum of its personal propulsions. The
dynamic race is that in which the individual _as an individual_ is
incomplete. Consider the United States. The immigrant in losing his old
land loses the completion which he achieved in his own share of its
life. As an American he espouses America’s incompletion. He injects his
restlessness into America; and conversely America’s lack of final form
becomes his lack and his need. The result is a social body moving toward
completion, and energetic in so far as it is barred from completion save
in the act of moving. In Russia, the incompleteness of the individual
soul is a paradoxical result of its consonance with the land. Russia is
vast, uncharted, indefinite. The Russian spirit, identified with the
soil, becomes imbued with a symbolic sense of vastitude and longing.
Spirit is therefore national in Russia: and spiritual energy floods the
land, precisely because the land is an incomplete experience in each
Russian mind.
There are indeed permanent forms of spiritual incompleteness, and one of
these exists in every energetic people. The Frenchman’s soul is part of
a social soul. The Frenchman is organically incomplete, in so far as his
mind and sense know themselves integral components of the nation. From
this knowledge comes the automatic flow of individual energy into social
channels: this is balanced by the impersonal character of the French
nation which receives the energy it requires and discharges back into
the individual life a transformed power: the protection and unity of
the enveloping organism. This perpetual interplay between the Frenchman
and his group is an equilibrium in incompleteness: it makes permanent
the impermanent achievement of individual and nation, the need of each
for the other, the flow of energy between them. The Jew possesses
another form of permanized incompleteness. The Jewish soul yearns for
Zion and for God. The Jew’s intelligence successfully places both Zion
and God beyond his reach. His incompleteness is hence perpetual: and the
Jewish energy has not ebbed.
But the Spaniard elected a form of achievement and a form of truth which
he could reach: and as he reached it, he stopped moving. Truth became
the Church of Rome: he attained that truth and rejected every other. His
ideal of unity was homogeneity: the simple fusion in every Spaniard of
thought and faith, according to a fixed ideal. To this end he
impoverished the elements of his psychic world into sharp antitheses:
these he balanced against each other: the result was indeed simplicity,
homogeneity, a neutralization of energy summing to zero.
The Spaniard is not decadent: neither is he weak. There is as great
force in him as in the days when his still unfused power conquered half
Europe, discovered America and poured the vision of Cervantes, Rojas,
Calderón and Velázquez upon the world. But now, all this energy is
_locked_ in its own willed equation. Its original dualisms are not dead;
they are controlled and neutralized. The equilibrium is complete: and
what energy is left from it the Spaniard must expend in holding the
equation. There is no energy unemployed: and it is precisely the excess
energy of man, the energy that is unable to find its goal within the
organism, which creates intellect and which creates creation.
Had he been less heroic in his will, or more objective in his way to it,
the Spaniard would not be this cripple: this giant shattered by his
success, this giant imprisoned in the reality of his ideal.
The most willful of men, he appears will-less. For his power of will
goes to dominate himself--and to hold his dominion. So that no power is
left wherewith to dominate the world. The unity of Spain exists,
subjectively and multiplied by millions. In consequence the Spaniard is
not adhesive: he is too complete: the motive toward adhesiveness is the
sense of incompletion. The most secret impulse of the Frenchman or the
Jew has its social dimension. No Jew can people Zion in solitude. No
French mystic or philosopher is an anchorite. Pascal and Descartes are
Catholic: Paul Cézanne strives to create a new museum art. The rebel in
France is a rebel against monarchs. But the Spaniard is an empire and a
god unto himself. The perfected Spanish person makes permanent the
social Spanish chaos.
The most intellectual of men, he appears unintelligent. He lives so
wholly within his Idea, that no energy is left for further ideation.
Creative intelligence is the birth of conflict between the personal will
and life: it is born of the pause between impulse and response and of
the excess energy which remains after the instinctive action. In the
Spaniard, this excess energy is small: he is too self-sufficient to know
richly the pauses between will and deed; and in the relativity of values
which springs from a chaotic or incompleted conscience he is poor.
Having achieved his Idea, he is weak in intellect: having created his
imagined world, he is weak in imagination.
Therefore he understands vaguely the causes of his incompetence, and
struggles weakly against them. His contemporary literature is strong in
plaint: it is wanting in self-knowledge and constructiveness. It is
weak, also, in creative imagination: even as it is strong in fantasy.
The Spanish mind has become like the mind of a child. The child’s
intellect is not inferior to the man’s: it is merely too preoccupied
within itself to have achieved the power of association and of objective
experience which comes with maturity and which begets analysis and
imagination. The child is credulous, because its belief is subjective
fantasy and finds no opponent in the real world. Also, the child is
cruel because it cannot imagine pain in others, it is anti-social
because it has not associated its life with the life around it. The
Spaniard is still the victim of the infantile beliefs of medieval
Europe. He accepts the literal Heaven and Hell, having no imagination
strong enough to make them real, and in consequence to reject them. He
is cruel. And his separatism, his want of the adhesive impulse make him
a ready victim to tyranny in government. Unable to organize a social
body, he accepts the simple body of the King or the alien body of the
Church of Rome.
He has the virtues of his state. His personal development brings him a
personal integrity, a true personal pride unknown in Europe. He has
natural dignity. Whatever his rank, he is a _caballero_: a true
microcosm of the Spanish nation. There is no artifice in him. He is
clean, self-controlled and independent. In his veins lives the impulse
of heroism; in his mind is the knowledge and the acceptance of heroism’s
price. Cowardice, compromise, hypocrisy are traits more common in more
social races. And cant requires no word in _castellano_. Even the
Spanish thief is sincere: the tradition of the pícaro has not died. And
the power of endurance, of sacrifice, of devotion is developed in the
average Spaniard beyond the dream of the romantic north.
The once furious and unleashed elements of the Spanish soul have been
woven into this counterpoint of rest: they make a quiet music. It is
natural that the Spaniard’s love of music and gift for music should be
supreme. This art of vigorous abstracted balance, so subjective, so
ruthlessly legal, is the symbol of the Spanish nature. And as with his
classic _canto hondo_, the effect in counterpoise and control is almost
that of silence. By the same token he is a great dancer: his dance is a
synthesis of movements equated to rest. And he loves the drama: where
the torrential forces of mankind are fused into a unitary form.
* * * * *
The world nurses two myths concerning Spain. The first, that she is
decadent, Spain believes herself, and thereby proves, if other proof
were lacking, her failure in self-knowledge. The other myth is that
Spain is romantic.
The first myth rests upon ignorance of psychological mechanics. The
second is a confusion of words. The philology of the term _romance_ is
clear. In the formative eras of modern Europe, the Latin dialects which
were to become French, Italian, Castilian, Portuguese, Galician,
Provençal, etc., were lumped as the _romance_ to distinguish them from
the pure tongue of Latin. They were popular vernaculars and despite the
early instance of such men as Dante and Petrarca, or the Arcipreste de
Hita, they were not deemed worthy vehicles of exalted thought. The
writer whose ideas were holy or philosophic was supposed to clothe them
in Latin. Only if he treated of such vulgar subjects as earthly love,
might he employ the vulgar language. By association, _romance_ was
transferred from the tongue to the subject for which it was disposed: a
story of profane love or profane adventure became _romance_; and
becoming so, remained trivial and vulgar. The essential attitude of the
Spaniard toward the subjects of romance was, however, the very contrary
of what we mean by romantic.
Now came the hour of confusion. The knights of Portugal and Spain fought
for God, for Mohammed, for the King: for anything but what we call
_romantic_ reasons. The Iberian north is Celt and is contiguous with the
Celtic cultures of Britain and of France. The Iberian knight went
northward out of Spain; and when he returned he had become what today we
call a “nordic.” He was sentimental, tender, monogamous, and chaste. He
was the very converse of the old Spanish knight, Arab or pagan-Christian
whose canny materialism speaks so clear in the _Poema del Cid_. He was,
indeed, Tristan, Arthur, Lancelot, or Amadís of Gaul. The books that
were written about him were published in romance: so that the qualities
of passionate devotion which in Spain has been confined to the
religious--to subjects too high for romance--became romantic.
The romance, therefore, is of the south: the romantic is of the north;
and they negate each other. It is the German metaphysicians who invented
the romanticism of Calderón; it is Byron and the French æsthetes who
created romantic Spain. But the best efforts of Schlegel, Goethe,
Mérimée, Gautier, Byron have failed to make the Spanish man or woman in
the least romantic.
* * * * *
She is serene and she is incurious. Her Anglo-Saxon sister would call
her inactive, even as the _Parisienne_ would find her dull.
Since sexual adventurousness is normally the result of intellectual
curiosity--sensual stimulation by ideas--she is chaste and
dispassionate. But if her lack of amorousness is due to her lack of
thinking, her serenity and her external inactivity are due to her
tremendous power. Women are most clamorous for “rights” in lands where
culturally they have counted least. Witness England or the United States
where for all her liberties woman is spiritually sterile. In contrast
witness France whose women are the subtle partners of all deep events;
or matriarchal Spain in which suffragists are as rare as they would be
superfluous.[26]
The Spanish woman is a pragmatist in love. Love to her is the means of
raising children in the grace of Christ. No less sensual, no less
amorous woman exists in Europe. As a girl she is lovely: a crisp
expectancy makes her flesh sweet and rounds her darkling eyes. She looks
to marriage as the highest and most powerful career. Once she is mated,
the natural coquetry of Spring falls from her like a season: she is
instantly sedate, full-fleshed, maternal. She has no instinct for the
game of love. Sexual virtuosity in woman is a slow process nurtured at
the expense of the maternal passion. This diversion is rare in Spain.
The French or American woman’s sexual science is an undeciphered, an
irrelevant perversion to the woman of Spain who wears upon her head an
invisible crown of matriarchal power.
For she is powerful: this discreet female in a land of furiously
dreaming males! Events have sobered her and made her worldly-wise. Her
man is the theater of opponent passions, ideals, hungers equating into
nothing. She is the compensatory act. She is steady, unemotional,
unmystical, canny. She distrusts excess--even of maternal service. Her
man has made magic of such words as State, God, Honor. Hers the task to
materialize these words which in his mouth bespeak inaction. The family,
the garden, the morrow; these become her Word.
The woman of Spain leans on the Church of Rome. No small part this of
her dominance in a land incapable of social institutions. Spain with her
separatist nature, her inadhesiveness, could never have created Rome:
but Rome has gone far toward giving Spain that minimum of organic body
which the millions of individual “Spains”--her men--required. The
Spanish woman by her massed support makes the Church Spanish.
If the Church belongs to the woman, ruling Spain through her, she has
remained outside the exhaustive activities of her husband. The Spanish
woman has been untouched by metaphysics: her heroine, Santa Teresa de
Jesús, is an ennobled _house-cleaner_, a glorified matron of Christ. The
Spaniard’s wife has not, like him, been split into intricate traits of
will and of expression: nor in the sequel need she spend herself to win
back unity from an inner chaos. She is naturally whole: she is the foe
of even the fairest anarchies of the spirit. There is in her an heroic
amplitude that recalls the poised women of the Hebrews. She is the
savior of Spain, for she is the Responder to Spain’s excesses of action
and inaction.
The land has become a matriarchy--by default. The Spaniard has been too
busy establishing theodicy on earth to rule Spain well: at last too
involved in the equating of his embattled impulse to rule Spain at all.
Imperceptibly, unofficially, woman has taken hold. She allows man many
liberties--trivial liberties of the sort she would call romantic, if she
knew the word. He may “govern,” vote, own; he may fight; he may drink,
gamble, whore. He may act indeed the perfect child thinking himself the
center of the world because of his exultant vices (of which politics and
journalism are the most absurd). Meantime, she with her compass Christ,
and her wheel, the priest, steers the slow ship of Spain. In her
disposal are the education of her children, intellectual and moral, the
molding of those customs which go deeper than statute. In her hands is
the family, and the family is Spain. She is the true controller of
finance. It is a common thing in Spain for the man to own the money of
his wife, and for the wife to distribute the money of her husband. In
the peasant classes, she is arbiter of culture and thought: in the
middle classes she is economic judge: in the noble classes the lineage
descends through her in equality with her husband.
The nature of Spain calls imperatively for the dominance of woman.
Woman’s mind is individualistic, and Spain is a congeries of consonant
parts rather than an organism. Woman builds her familial molecule from
the Spanish atoms: she erects a great simplicity in which her man can
dwell.
In Spain there are two kinds of women: the mother and the prostitute.
And both are mothers. The land is sensuous in its air, its flowers. The
Spaniard is not sensuous at all. In the nineteenth century, a group of
romantic Spanish poets endeavored to sing of Spain as had the Germans
and the English. No more frustrate coldness exists in all the literature
of failure. “_Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehen_” could never
have been written by a Spaniard about Spain. For the Spaniard is as
abstract in his bodily lusts as he is concrete in his ideals. Of his
wife, he seeks the haven of morale: of his prostitute, he seeks the
peace of respite. The Spanish prostitute with her Cross lying within her
breasts is the least mercenary, the most womanly of her class. She is
mellow and maternal. She bears with her a great sense of sin: and the
man who touches her lips touches pity. From man she receives two
treasures, bread and shame: she is eager to give, in return, her
humility and comfort. She has no delights of subtle sense to barter: but
he who comes to her, weary and broken, will find her arms mysteriously
soothing, as if her acceptance of sin were a Christian solace, as if her
acceptance of shame were heartening to his pride.
And the Spanish wife knows of the prostitute and suffers her. She brings
for the husband an escape from the chaste rigors of family and church
into the anarchy of unorganized affection and of Christian pity. She
makes the work of the wife less arduous.
* * * * *
Human happiness is the full deep flow of human energy. It has many ways,
nor is it rare. The madman is happy since all of his thought and sense
falls into the pattern of his will. The lover is happy. Children are
happy, eating or at play. Soldiers are happy in battle. And everyone is
happy in dream.
There are happy nations: nations at war, nations in the madness of any
enterprise, whether it be of growth or dissolution. But Spain is not
happy. Her energy does not flow. It stands locked in a diapason of
pause.
Nor is Spain unhappy. Unhappiness is the thwarted need of energy to
flow. Spain’s energy is not thwarted. It does not flow: it does not need
to flow. It is absorbed in its own perpetual balance.
Spain is a dark soul. Sun is a flame in her land, and her land is a
storm of color. But the soul of Spain is neither sun nor storm. It is
neither gayety nor grief. It is a dark contentment, midway held between
ecstasy and sleep.
Outside the tremor and traffic of spiritual movement, Spain moves like a
somnambulant. Her body moves: but within her shut eyes there is a vision
truer than her stirring: a vision stirless and composed.
Her mood is dark and stagnant. Yet it is pleasant, for it is not pain.
Her soul is caressed passively by this rhythmic swing between the
extremes of action: as if the long ages of Spain’s agitation had bred
this sensuous delight in their denial.
Within her heroic memory, within her heroic land, Spain wanders
unobtrusively and scatheless. She does not forget nor remember. Upon the
surface of her life, intellect pricks, passion stirs, action clamors.
But her depths are limpid in a dark and dreamless slumber....
_c. Madrid_
In the eighteenth century one Spaniard out of three is an ecclesiastic,
a noble or a servant. (This takes no toll of rogues and beggars.) The
special rights of Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia are annulled. Those of the
Basques are a dead letter, although they linger on the books until the
Carlist wars. Spain has become a receding unity, under a single monarch.
Her American possessions wait only the full tide of growth in order to
set loose. Castile’s will has leveled Spain. Her huertas give wine and
fruit just in the amount to balance the desert dearth about them. Her
high towns are fossils of recalcitrance, or backfires smoldering against
each other. Although the diapason of will has its home in every Spanish
soul, no one city is its symbol. Toledo, Avila, Seville, Barcelona,
Jaca, Murcia, Mérida, Oviedo ... they bespeak their pasts, their
individual dynamisms, whose sum is zero. To be the symbol of this
sum--Spain’s tragic consummation--there must be a modern city.
Madrid stands for the ultimate achievement--and for none of its factors.
It is the capital of Spain--and of no old Spanish region. It is a
pleasing town. Its populous quarters bespeak the eighteenth century. The
cabs blotched under gas-lamps, the shuttered stores, the sumptuous
theaters, the cobbled streets and alleys holding a bar, a flower-stand,
a beggar, recall old prints of Paris. The reminiscent age of Balzac and
of Daumier has taken refuge here. In Paris, the twentieth century has
jostled out the last; it seems to keep better terms with the Paris of
Louis XIV, of Henri IV, even of François Villon than it does with the
Paris of Voltaire. But in Madrid, the eighteenth century has mellowed to
the next; they strike together a plaintive reminiscence against the
modern city: the Madrid of broad Avenidas, of the Gran Via, of dapper
taxicabs and monumental banks. This Madrid is pleasant also: it might be
almost any provincial capital of central Europe.
Madrid is noisy. In the modern streets, the chauffeurs toot as if they
had just discovered horns and were intent, like children, to break the
new toy ere bedtime. In the older, more populous streets there is a
texture of ancient voices. Shut your eyes and the windowed walls of
Europe fade away: the breath of the desert and the steeps of the
mountain north, the watery chatter of the Catalan, the grunt of the
Aragonese, the gracious Andalusian palaver merge into a music of the air
and make Madrid a maze of memory.
Yet for all the noise and all the business, there is upon the town a
subtle and a gentle quiet. This assertiveness is only for itself: it is
a heightened murmur of assent to Spain’s rich past. Beneath the bruit,
Madrid is silent, like Spain’s history. Beneath its animal turbulence it
broods. And for all its mingled moods, its final one is a dream.
On Sundays, the _rastro_--the great city fair--boils down hill, a human
torrent through a canyon of tattered houses to the dry _Manzanares_. 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. At the Carnival of Spring, the gutters of the barrios de Toledo
and de Manzanares pour their lives into the Castellana. Rogues,
prostitutes, shopgirls, mothers with babes at the breast flow back and
forth under the statue of Columbus and the austere walls of the
Biblioteca Nacional: queer costumes grimace through confetti clouds; a
murmur of sexual release agglutinates the swarms; a glow as of rich
earth breaking to grass rises beneath the sere March sky.... And yet,
there is a silence, there is a stillness on Madrid. The songs of the
turbulent streets are songs of silence. This parade of pleasures and of
passions, of crimes and revolutions, is somnambular.
Populous Madrid falls from the Plaza Mayor fan-wise to the arid curve of
river upon whose treeless banks are stuck the shanties of the breadless.
And above the river and the shanties is the Palace of the King, a cold
and granite jewel set upon misery. If you would see it well, go down to
where the starving _madrileños_ stack their huts and air their tattered
shirts--ironic flags under the flag of Spain.
Through populous Madrid--a massive flesh--runs the artery of the calle
de Toledo. The cobbled streets are moist with sweat of lives. The high
walls rise, blind in a mood of siesta under the blazing sun. Winter
presses like icy steel upon the open wound of Madrid’s poverty. But even
in winter, the fever is there. It is damp in summer, in winter it is
frozen. These streets have a cellar mood. Their stones seem porous with
a fungus warmth or with a fungus odor. They are straight and steep--not
gyring Moorish streets; they funnel the dark song of life, or let it
escape like fume into the dry air of the meseta. Some of them are short:
the leisurely streets of the old inns--posadas--of the stagecoach, of
the itinerant milker with his flock of goats. Through a huge oak door,
one passes into a patio. A fig tree, old as a satyr, thrusts its
branches through the ancient iron balcony. Below is another patio with a
pump, a rose-bush, a pile of manure, a flock of hens and a woman
kneeling before a basin. Her hair and her gown are black, her lips are
scarlet. Vice and compassion rise from the old close like perfumes; for
this aged posada was once a convent, and bright fleshed maidens told
their rosaries where now this woman looks into her mirror.
All the people are emanations of the past. Girls in the street are
lovely and rank, roses over-blown. Women walk like wafts of a hot night
through the day. Men are lean, high-tensioned, and isolate as lusts. But
though they tide the streets, though their deeds are a storm, this
agitance and lushness of Madrid fades to mirage ...
It has become a very modern city. Its boulevards are superb; it is full
of smart shops and theaters; it has restaurants as expensive as the best
of Paris. Its traffic is dense and efficiently controlled; its wealthy
sections have the empty glitter of similar districts of Paris or New
York. Madrid cannot overcome the spirit of its being, which is a spirit
of stillness. Other towns in Spain grew from the needs of conquest, of
commerce, of defense. 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. A town of government--a
parasite town, it is the converse of such towns as London or Paris. For
in these, greatness came first, and made them govern.
There is this subtle melancholy in Madrid, this silence under all its
voices--of a life come to dark pause. And yet this same dark element is
fecund. Like a culture-bed, it nurtures even with its rot.
Beside the parasite, here is the thinker; beside the exploiter, here is
the creator. Along the Gran Via, the calle de Alcalà or near the Puerta
del Sol are the _tertulias_. They are cafés in which the men of the town
congregate each night. You will find each of them in his appointed
place, from close of work until nine, when the householder returns to
dinner. The café is dark and the smoke fumes are thick. The muscular
integument of the Castilian language is darker and thicker. It fills the
air with a heavy yet swift texture. It is fluent, agile, potent. The
plastic rigor of the Spanish world is in this tongue of Spain. The men
sip coffee or vermouth. They are small drinkers. One can live in Spain a
year and see no drunkard. They are too busy in talk, to think of
alcohol. They are talkers, neither brilliant nor dull. Their speech has
weight, acuity, vigor. It is too solid to be bright: it is like the
pigment of a Velázquez.
Most of these men in the tertulias are of the intricate army of
bureaucratic Spain. Postman or Minister, clerk, alguacil or General--all
attend their tertulia with a ritual devotion. They think that they are
“running Spain”--directing a State more or less modern and which, since
the choice of Ferdinand and Carlos, has willed to be European. But like
all Spaniards, they are unselfconscious and are actors in a drama deeply
beyond them. They are the tools of the Spanish will to remain in
equilibrium--to remain in sleep. All their conservative energy goes to
this end, whose symbol is Madrid.
But beside them, at other tables, in the tertulias of other cafés, are
other men who form the antiphony of their neighbors. These are the
intellectuals. They too are largely unselfconscious. They believe,
perhaps, that they are artists creating in word or color things of
intrinsic beauty, like their Parisian models. So they also put their
heads close together over smoky tables and drink coffee and talk “shop.”
But in truth, they are the inevitable response--the stir against and
within the sleep of Spain. They are the germs of dissolution. The
bureaucrats hold Spain together--in sleep. The intellectuals plot and
dream to burst Spain asunder--in a new waking.
END OF PART TWO
_PART THREE_
_Beyond Spain_
_CHAPTER XI_
_THE RIFT IN BARCELONA_
The cathedrals of Spain are splendors heaped by the hand of chaos. Well
they sing the discord of a world too full of life to find perfection
save in the dream of death. Most of them rise from stones that formed a
mosque; the mosque ofttimes was a converted citadel of Visigoth or
Roman. And here Spain brought her will to unity. Where could these rank
lusts of a hundred factions, these voices of continents and peoples
meet, save in death? The simple romanesque is buried under the aspiring
jungle of baroque, plateresque, Gothic, _churriguera_. Window, _reja_,
_retablo_, altar flourish like fevers and sum up to silence.
If this is Spain, Barcelona is of another land. The cathedral of the
great town of the Catalans is luminous and graceful. Although it could
be lost in the vastitudes of the cathedrals of Seville or Salamanca its
voice is clear and carries farther: it bespeaks the living.
Yet here, too, the church is dark. The brown-black stones are lifted by
the day of the deep windows into a rosy flush. The Choir is so low that
the line from _cimborio_ to _capilla mayor_ is free. Toward the Altar,
the Choir is open. Its sides are exquisite spires that rise in tremulous
shadow. The windows are small. They hold light in their stained glass
like eyes. The church is a reticent life gazing within itself. And what
it sees is an inset of twenty columns making a sort of inner body, a
dark and mystic body in the gaze of the glowing outward walls.
The loveliest monument of the Catalans, their church bespeaks them. It
is a thing of beauty: but unlike the beauty that resides in Spain, it is
not tragic. Beauty is consummation: in Castile the goal is immobility or
death. Here the perfected mood is wakefulness. The grace is gentle and
assured: it is not tortured, neither is it prophetic. Close is the ease
of the fields of France, of France’s churches. Close is the balance of
Attica....
Islam had short shrift in the Catalan Province which rests upon the
Pyrenees and faces east across the sea toward Italy and Greece. When the
Moslem came, the Catalan retreated into France. And in less than a
hundred years (in 797) the great town of Gerona (you can still see its
walls and its fortress-church) fell to the Frankish Christians. In 801,
the vassals of Charlemagne drove out the Crescent forever. Barcelona
became Frankish: Catalonia was apportioned to Frankish nobles. This
strain of alien blood is a symbol of the wavering dissonance that has
endured in Catalonia forever. For the yearning of Spain was to be Spain:
and the will of the Catalans was to be part of Europe.
The Teuton element in Spain is Visigothic. With the Franks there came
across the dwindling spurs of the Pyrenees the Gallo-Romans of
Provincia, a different intensity of the Idea of Rome from that of the
Ibero-Romans. Catalonia straddled the mountains, mingling in spirit and
in affairs with France. Almost at once after the Reconquest, it took the
lead in the Mediterranean trade of the Provincian littoral. Feudalism
flourished here, as it never did in Spain--a true French feudalism,
heritage of Charlemagne who indeed had held Spain clear to the Ebro. The
domains of the great Counts of Barcelona were as wide north of the
Pyrenees as south. And already, sharing this participance of France, in
the eleventh century there are Italians (Pisans) fighting under the
pennants of Barcelona against the Valencian Moor. Even today, the spirit
and the tongue of the Catalans bestrides the Eastern Pyrenees from
Lérida to the French Roussillon, from Tarragona to the French Port
Vendres.
The Catalan of Spain is an outsider within the gates. Ere Spain
stratified her chaos into locked unity, Catalonia was free to be
exploited by the hardier will of Aragon. But as Aragon was set within
the grip of Isabel of Castile, Catalonia became an irrepressible
motion--needing to be repressed. Its flow of energy in an immobile
State meant anarchy: its lyrism was discord within Spain whose
counterpoint of themes summed into silence. Spain achieved her union.
Madrid on the roof of Castile became the symbol of union: Barcelona, at
the half open gate which led to Italy and France, to Greece and Africa,
became the symbol of disruption.
Castile tried to woo this province, as it wooed Valencia, Galicia,
Extremadura, Andalusia. But the Catalan blood could not respond to the
immobile ecstasy of Castile: nor could the winds and the songs which
blew in at the door of Barcelona be shut out. The Catalan remained
light, moving, gay. When the unity of Spain was strong, the Catalan was
a tonic discord. Now that Spain’s unity is flaccid, the Catalan is a
menace.
But if Barcelona is not Spain, neither is it France. The Catalan is a
unique organic compound of the Mediterranean, of the Mountain and of
Spain. His cathedral is set in a town that beats with a rich fervor. The
_Ramblas_--wide, gay avenues--descend to the sea and the town faces with
them from the wooded hills. It is an old ripe city: a labyrinth of
streets that are fresh with the salt, dark with the feudal yoke, yet
glamorously flowing as if in cognizance of the genius of this people to
outlast all yokes. This is no strong race, as the Aragonese or even the
Basques are strong. It is a subtle and a gracious people. Its secret of
survival is manifest in the women: delicate daughters of Eve, perhaps
the fairest of all Europe, hued like April orchards, and with eyes like
twilight. They have the permanence not of the eternal, but of the
evanescent which returns. The flower that was Greece has been cast here
upon a coast of Spain and has grown afresh. This life does not resist:
it returns. France mastered the Catalans: and they returned. Aragon used
them ruthlessly in war: they returned. Castile stifles and racks them:
they are returning. For they are like the Spring, the evanescent
Spring--which returns....
Their rising song begins to be heard over the shut land. It is not
heroic song: it is after all the assertion of a race of traders. It is
not thunderous. What thunders is the Castilian silence. And the heroic
is the Spanish sleep. And the enduring is the Spanish drama of which the
Catalans, even in their apartness, must be part. Spain has a dawning
will to break from the unity which its will created: her atoms, anarchic
but pregnant, stir to be loosed and to begin again. Despite its denial,
Catalonia shares in this unborn Spain. Once the resistance of the
Catalans helped to rouse Aragon and Castile with greater energy and
clearer mind: helped to create Spain. Now this same resistance of the
Catalans, even if it disrupts, may serve to create Spain again.
_CHAPTER XII_
_THE COMEDY OF THE BASQUE_
In the north where the Cantabrian ranges and the Pyrenees rim the Bay of
Biscay, lives a peculiar people. Even its land is different from
Spain’s. The air is temperate, moist. Mountains are clad in forest.
Fields of high grass bring honeyed redolence. The green plateaux come
down above the sea, like masses of the Alps brought to the Spanish
coast. These lands, so like Europe, so unlike Spain, are studded with
stone towns. Houses are gabled, narrow streets are cobbled: there is a
note of canniness and of seclusion in the towns of the Basque.
When the Romans made a province of Iberia, the Basque lived unconcerned.
When the Moslem swept north, the Basque withdrew into the mountains and
withstood him. When the Visigoth came through the passes of the
Pyrenees, the Basque stood aside and let him go. When Catholic Roland
with the troops of Charlemagne followed the Visigoth, it was the Basque
not the “Saracen,” who beat them at Roncesvalles. When, finally, the
kings of Castile, having cleared Spain of Moor and Jew, turned to subdue
the Basque, he submitted only as a vassal bowing the head to a more
powerful alien. By decree, Fernando VI ennobled all the Basques in the
Province of Vizcaya: already in 1200, the entire population of the
Province of Guipúzcoa had been declared hidalgos.
An indelible, an archaic people! They seem to be a race in an archaic
fashion: a race _by blood_! Spaniards, Chinese, Frenchmen, Jews are a
race _by culture_. But the Basques appear to have had no culture. Their
language was unwritten. They possessed no history, no social records, no
underlying base of ethic, or religion. If they possessed a culture, it
was almost biologic. It persisted in blood, in instinct, rather than in
concept. A certain haleness of self-sufficiency, a certain gusto for
aloofness kept them intact and unique in a land which for three
thousand years boiled with invasion.
In their survival they became neither tragic nor heroic. Naught could be
farther from the Basque than such other peculiar peoples as the Armenian
or Jew. The Basques had no separate Book, no separate God. Very early,
they accepted Christ. He did not make them merge with their Catholic
neighbors, because their instincts were differently attuned. Spain is a
world of Tragedy, of mystic ideals, of devotion to unseen spirits. The
Basque is concrete, light, canny. The Spaniard faces all that he
encounters: this confrontation is the genius of Tragedy. But the Basque
_evades_: and this evasion is the genius of Comedy.
Who the Basques were is not clear: doubtless early dwellers in the
Peninsula--part of the peoples whom the Phœnicians found when they first
skirted Spain. Their music suggests kinship with the Celt; but this may
well be due to the neighborhood of the Celts who named the Spanish
province of Galicia. Their music as well suggests kinship with the
Berbers--the Rifians of Morocco. Their language is inscrutably alone: it
bears no relation with any of the tongues of Babel. But whoever they
were they remain. Their blood in the small towns is little mixed; and
their heads unmixed also. While through the ages, Spain drank a torrent
of Ideas--Greek, Roman, Moslem, Christian, Jew--and bent to the tragic
fusing of Africa, Asia, Europe, America into a single Spain, the Basque
quite simply kept on being himself.
His virtues, like those of his mountains, are conservatism and power of
non-absorption. The Basque language paints this well. It contains no
word for _God_, no word for _spirit_. This is a people rooted to the
earth and which kept to its pastures and farmyards.[27] Not alone had
the Basque mind not reached metaphysics and religion when his tongue
was formed: even common concepts were beyond it. There is a Basque word
for dog, pig, cow, lizard: there is none for _animal_. There is a Basque
word for oak, pine, chestnut: there is none for _tree_. A most
excellently defended, anti-platonic people! Their mountains and their
mountain-courage warded them free of many floods of races. And their
heads kept them clear of metaphysics. Concepts of God, time, substance
are drains upon the business of life. For the interims of business,
there is the singing of songs, there is the gathering in eights to dance
the bland _aurrescu_.
The towns of the Basques express them. The little Guipúzcoan village
lies between the mountains and the sea. The mountains slope into a level
field with cattle and kine growing fat in the lush grasses. The field
rolls to a precipitous edge of rock which falls a thousand feet into the
Bay of Biscay. The beach is a conch with sand as smooth and white as the
heart of a sea-shell. Through the town, a road girding the villages runs
on the seawall. On the one side of the road, the Bay of Biscay--blue as
a bluebell: on the other, the precipice with stone-hewn steps that lead
to an Alpine verdance of pasture and of dingle.
The streets of the town are massive. The houses look as if builded for
siege. But they are not forbidding: they are too sure of themselves.
They are smiling even; though they are dense and strong. Through the
narrow streets moves a mellow race in gesture of traffic and trade. Like
the houses, these men and women face the world in sober colors. But
their eyes are large, and here one reads peace: the lips have the fret
of a smile, and there is laughter tingling the cadence of their talk. At
night they gather in the Plaza, lined with cafés: and while the old ones
drink, the young ones dance. Their dance is a pleasant casual
exercise--not far from the usual way of walk and word. It is a hopping
and bobbing of couples, a weaving of bodily life and bodily sense into
the already existent pattern of their social ease. That is why they
dance in the public Square, while the old ones gossip....
Every Sunday morning, as the sun tips over the town, three men--one with
a drum, two with _dulsínya_ or _chistu_ (a shrill metallic pipe which
bears much resemblance to the pipe of the African Berber)--march through
the silent streets, through every street and alley of the town,
incessantly playing: so that no Vasco, good or bad, shall oversleep the
Mass. This music trills through the morning like the cool sun-filaments
through dawn. It has the dogged filigree of a Scottish bagpipe. It is
more resolved, however, shriller, less fluid: and its notations are
wider. The tune of the _chistu_ interweaves with the plang of drum, and
makes the houses smile and dance a bit ere they are quite awake.
* * * * *
The dance, the smile, the song are never absent. Afternoons, when work
is done in shop or field, the girls will sing till the late hour of
_cena_. Rosa is not pretty. Her face is a little long and has a tilt
which is not of Europe. The nose droops, the mouth is large, the eyes
are resilient and black under the strangely curving brow. But Rosa is
charming. A white kerchief lies on her shoulders, pointed to the throat.
The naked arms are bright against the marron velvet of the bodice; the
breasts are caught by a diagonal sash something like the straps of a
grenadier. Rosa’s hips are wide; her legs, stockinged in gray wool, have
a full firmness--like her breasts--that bespeaks valiance in emotion.
The room is cool and bare: through the high windows comes the mellow
murmur of the folk walking the rigid street, between the sea and the
mountain. The girls are a warm fragrance in the room. They sing. The
songs warm them: they dance. Their heads sway, their throats pulse,
their arms rise and fall.
These songs are older than the tambour and the pipe: the girls sing them
without accompaniment. Many have sad themes. But even as tragedy
invades the brightest _fado_ of Portugal, so here a tripping flexible
gait overbears the pathos. The music bespeaks a clever, winning people.
It has mobility, but it is not plastic. It has the nature of sun
splintered on cloud or running upon water, of the patter of rain on
house-tops, of waves pelting the hull of a sail-boat. It is a music of
light, of surface-patterns of light. On all the earth, there is no music
stranger to that of Spain--to the plastic, sculptural, soul-deep song of
Spain.
It is good music: its mobile patterns are abstracted into grace and
hardness: its swiftness never blurs, its poignance does not become
sentimental. It is not deep music. It remains of the periphery, and its
moods are varieties of reflection, rather than of creation. The Basque
remains _one_. What varies is the circumstance of life; so he wards it
off, he holds it well outside him. Through a hundred ages, Spain has
moved in a processional whose faiths and passions the Spaniard has
absorbed. But the Basque shuts out. So his song--trilling, skipping,
flashing in color and light--is a music of intimations, rather than of
experience.
Was this pagan people first enticed to become Catholic, because of the
occasions offered by a Calendar of Saints for singing and for dancing?
Every church festival is a _fiesta_, a _romería_ for the Basque. The
fiesta of San Iñigo de Loyola is one of the great days of the land, for
Iñigo Lopez de Recalde, founder of the Society of Jesus, was a Basque.
The day of the author of the ruthless Exercises, of the chronicler of
Hell, becomes a day of merriment: foot races, water races, trials of
strength lead up to the climax--the contests in the arts of song and
dance. The Spaniard is no sportsman. His bull fight is an ordeal and an
art. His games are pretexts for gambling. His Carnival is a means of
fierce release for the instincts repressed by morality, caste and honor.
But the Basque is a sportsman. He is incapable of the true carnival
spirit. He turns his feast-days into sport-days.
An altar has been decked out on the façade of a house in the Plaza.
Under a bower of gilt, the priest harangues in _vascuence_.[28] His
theme is the curse of Modernism and Socialism, the hellish lust which
hides in the laborer’s appetite for better wages. (The Basques are the
industrialists of Spain: the ore and factories of Bilbao are not far
off.) On one side of the Square is the summer palace of an Andalusian
Duke. His balconies are hung with great mantones; gorgeous splotches of
gold and green and crimson in the sun. The altar faces an esplanade
which steps down to the sea. But the Basque throng is aloof from the
priest in his garish altar, from the flash of Spain on the walls of the
Duke’s palace, aloof even from the sea. It is a packed, resilient body.
It is waiting to play. Its mood is very like the mood of a sporting
crowd in England. Here is none of the hot dark fervor which Spain brings
even to the bull fight.
The races are over, and the last Mass. The crowds circle the platform
for the dance contest. There is a piper and a drummer. The cadences of
the _chistu_ are thin and cool. The drummer weaves a tattoo that becomes
the matted background for the imponderous figures of the pipe. When the
dancer and piper cease, the drum goes on in an incantation which is
moving precisely because it is so unemphatic, so subhumanly cool, so
pale. It reminds one, indeed, of the nixies of the Celt, the blond green
creatures of the northern marshes. It seems as far from Spain as are the
braes of Scotland. The designs of the dance are brief. Here is grace in
line and point: daintiness; above all spiritual aloofness. In the pauses
of dance and music, ever unceasing the weave of the drum. The elves also
of the Atlas are around the corner: but Spain is miles away.
_Agura_, _contrapas_, _anarxuma_, _zaspi_, _trititzka_, _soka_,
_aguruku_, _taladera_--numberless Basque dance-figures. What
distinguishes them is that they are all social: that they are stylized
from details of the common life. The dance of Andalusia is a plastic
form for the soul. These dances are scenes of bodily acts. Their stuff
is not spirit, nor essence of emotion. It is a synthesis of homely
gestures taken from farm or field. Here is an _apple dance_, an
intricate elaboration of the bestowal of apples. Here is a _chair
dance_, a design of men and women in easy social converse. The _Siete
Saltos_ is a stylization of the walk--of men walking together. The music
is major; the dance is comedic. Indeed, it holds the trait of social
comedy which in France produced Molière. But also, it has a purity of
abstract line which recalls the classic dance of the Pueblo Indians or
of the Pacific Negroes. With, again, a difference of tone and subject:
the dances of the “savage” are elemental, they call rain, they invoke
harvest, they enact sexual passion.
In another part of town there is a match of _pelota_. This game is
originally Basque; its pure form of sport lives still in the Basque
village where boys play on a dirt court against a plaster wall, or
against the wall of the church if the hamlet is very modest. The
Spaniards, however, have taken to pelota. It has become a game for
professionals; and although all the crack players are Basque, the spirit
of the sport has been transformed. It is played in the _frontón_: a
court, three sides of which are high walls of cement. The fourth side
(the long one, to the right of the players who all face one way) is for
the public whose tiers of seats are placed in a sort of open building. A
pair of players make a team, and two teams make a match. To the right
hand of each athlete is strapped a thin short wooden bat called _pala_,
or else, in a variant of the game, a basket, known as _cesta_, or
_remonte_, shaped a little like the curved beak of some bird, scooped
and long and narrow. The principle of pelota is like our handball which
may indeed be a derivation. But the Basque game with its great distance
of service and return, its complexity of movement due to the use of
three walls for the rebounds of the fast ball, achieves an extraordinary
brilliance. Volleys last for minutes: the ball flashes back and forth
from the front wall to the side and rear ones. There is something of
the delicacy of billiards, the grace of tennis: and there is a spill of
sheer physical prowess which tennis does not approach. It is a beautiful
game: the game of a sane, healthily outward people. But in the hands of
the Spaniard, all this becomes minor.
Between the public and the court is a railing which until the game
starts is empty. With the first volley, however, a large group of men in
red _boinas_ line up here, facing the public, with their backs to the
players. They are the _cobradores_, the bookies: the true principals in
what Spain has made of pelota. With the first service, they gather their
first odds and cry their bets. And until the last of the game, the
shifting of odds, the placing of bets continue: the players themselves
serving as a mere pretext for the gambling, like the _petits chevaux_ of
wood at a gaming table.[29]
* * * * *
These are invasions of Spain upon the Basque land. There are whole towns
in Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Alava, where Castile has rooted and worked havoc.
Such a town is San Sebastián, summer capital of the king and of the
intellectuals of Madrid. There are even towns which Castile has
destroyed....
The _carrera_ runs along the breasting cliffs from San Sebastián to
Santander beside a sea blue as the summer sky. It crosses the tip of a
little city resting on land that tongues from the mountain far into the
Bay. The land is high and steep: the streets twine. And in their midst,
coiled all about by alleys, stands a smothered church. It is blackened
by the salt of seven hundred years. It stands low: there is a street at
its door, and there are other streets at rising levels on its four
façades, so that it is plunged and buried in the town. And the windows
are rare, or are blanked by pavements and by the cellars of adjoining
houses. Only the steeple is sheer to the open heaven.
It is an ignoble church, foul like a ship’s bottom after a voyage round
the seven seas. Its nave is foul with shadows; its windows have a yellow
blear like the eyes of the beggar at the gate.
The town is stifled and somber: it is like an apple rotted by this old
church at its core. The Basque here has forgotten how to dance. He has
not turned his saints’ days into merry making. The church has conquered:
the Empiry of Castile.
But more significant than such invasions of the end of old Spain upon
the Basque, are the invasions of the modern Basque into the life of
Spain. While the Spaniard gave himself to crusades and conquest, the
Basque held aloof with his energy untapped. To resist invasion of body
and of spirit took courage. But the effort was as naught beside the
effort of the Spaniard to fuse Moslem, Jew, German, Roman, Celt, into
one Spanish soul. The Spanish soul was achieved: but Spanish spirit
locked in the exertion. This was the moment of the Basque with his
reserve of virgin power. He had no culture but the most primitive; no
world for the expanding of his might save a strip of rocky soil. Spain
offered a profound culture and the sea, and worlds beyond the sea. Now
the Basque passes from his spiritual sleep--passes into Spain, through
the door which Spain herself had battered open....
_CHAPTER XIII_
_TWO ANDALUSIANS_
_a. The Sleepers_
_b. The Awakeners_
_c. The Sleepless Spirit_
_a. The Sleepers_
Spain is not a failure; Spain is not decadent; Spain is complete. By the
too literal achievement of kings and mystics, the vital forces of a
vital land lock as in sleep. This sleep is one of the two moods of art
and letters in contemporary Spain. It has been long upon the land and
the land loves it. Poets have found in it all the delight of cradled
balance, all the delight of dream. They have made of this sleep of Spain
a passionate Nirvana in which the actions of Spain’s waking life return
in pageantry. The ghosts of fire and blood are here: and a pleasant
hopelessness which saves from the scourge of ambition. Spain becomes a
mirrored play of faces and of scenes, for her own self-adoring. First of
all despair. This perennially ironic race has distilled the love of
failure from its too great success. Spain in the nineteenth century knew
an ecstatic impotence which only Russia equaled. It was about 1835 that
Larra wrote: “_Escribir en Madrid es llorar_--to write in Madrid is to
weep.” “Do not attempt to create,” he told his fellows. “Ye are
Spaniards; the task is hopeless. Must ye wield a pen? Then translate
from the French.” Larra’s last logical act was to blow out his brains.
But the spirit of Larra is still upon the tables of the cafés of Madrid.
Sleep here is a wine of Spain’s historic act. Despair is voluptuous.
Incompetence is a cult. And votaries of this narcistic trance are among
Spain’s finest writers.
Chief of them all perhaps is Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán.[30]
Cervantes had a crippled hand; Don Ramón lacks an arm. Rojas who wrote
_La Celestina_ four centuries ago split his novel into dialogue and
acts. Don Ramón does likewise--and interweaves with his Castilian words
and forms that even Rojas would have found archaic. Don Ramón’s books
sell not for current pesetas, but for obsolete _reales_. His typography
is studiously ancient. Upon his works is printed _opera omnia_: and they
are illumined with medieval wood-cuts. His texts reveal a virtuosity in
the use of old Castilian with a mingling of the pure vocables of
Galician, once the poetic tongue of Spain, so imaginative as to be an
art. It is an art of tone and verbal plastic. Don Ramón is an hidalgo of
Galicia, that rocky northwest province which the Arabs scarce pierced:
and he boasts of his Celtic blood. There is a strong and curious kinship
between the dialogue of his books and that of Synge. But the kinship
goes no deeper than an echo. The volumnear body of Valle-Inclán’s prose
serves to mass a death: his drama is one of furious rhetoric. All the
more glorious ghosts of Spain stalk in his books. The Church with its
“charity of the sword,” chivalry mildewed and broken from its long
passage southward, clan warfare, mystic fealty and love are personified
in the were-wolf bombast of his scenes. But though these shapes be
ghosts, they have no charnel odor: the salt of modern irony--the
perennial Spanish irony--is on them. Their puissance is not to be
challenged. The dark firm candor of this prose is so enchanting that one
accepts the nightmarish or sentimental dumb-show: this gesturing
pageantry of Dream which is the Dream of Spain.
A pendant to Don Ramón is José Martínez Ruiz, known as Azorín.[31]
Valle-Inclán is dramatic and dionysian: his mood is perpendicular like
the mountain steeps of his Galicia. Azorín’s elegiac tone is smooth as
the subtle huertas of Valencia where he was born. His books are
haunting, climaxless: they spread the nostalgia which inspires them. In
them lives the small _pueblo_ of high Spain. He loves the village for
the pure success of its equilibrium in sleep. He loves to follow Don
Quixote over the _llanura_ of La Mancha. He loves to doze in the
manure-soaked inns of the Castilian desert. For this world is full of
ghosts. And Azorín casts the wide net of wistfulness to snare them all.
His prose, unlike the mighty, archaic organ of Valle-Inclán, has been
tinged with the perfumed winds of France which mingle oddly enough,
across the Pyrenees, with the rank heat of the posadas of Toledo or with
the ciceronian rhetoric of a peasant from Medina. Azorín’s passive,
apollonian state has left him open to invading foreign accents. Yet his
central impulse is authentic, and his form is Spanish. Here is the
pleasant pain of dream--against the nightmare mood of Don Ramón: a minor
note within Spain’s sleep. After the battalions of Moor and Catholic
have trampled on, here is the plaint in which the fields and towns sink
back upon themselves....
Spain’s most popular poet, Antonio Machado[32] is an Andalusian: but he
sings of Castile. His theme is the robust and brutal world in which the
pícaro careered. Unlike Valle-Inclán, Machado does not recreate this
world of four centuries past with archaic language or atavistic mood.
His means is more subtle. That world lives on, evaporate and refined, in
the subconscious tone of Spain. Machado captures the old splendor by
imaging its reverberations. His prosody is a canon of echoes. The echo
is the shell of the shout. So the rounded and mellow music of Machado
suggests the hollow form of an heroic life. The graphic density of life
in heroic Spain has left this pattern. If the hard bodies of the Spanish
soil were bubbles holding a void as hollow as the Spanish sky, they
would be the poems of Machado. He harks back to Velázquez: the supreme
graphic master reappears in words, diminished, lyrical, plaintive. The
voice of the stark past of Spain comes muffled in this sleep.
The ecstatic revery is rich in changes. Against Machado who sings the
larger currents of the Dream is set the exquisite, scholarly Ramón
Pérez de Ayala.[33] Ayala, who is an Asturian, is his epoch’s most
cultivated novelist and most fanciful poet. This man who in _Política y
Toros_ has written the profoundest apologia of the bull fight and the
subtlest satire on Spain’s political abulia, beneath his disguise of
timeliness is an archaicizer also: one who dwells as deep as his
neighbor Valle-Inclán within Spain’s narcistic adoration. But it is the
schools and cloisters which haunt Ayala: his way to the past is that of
meditation and of learning. Like Azorín, Ayala has not been proof
against French literary currents. The note of Anatole France is a bit
too clear in his novels. But perhaps there is an organic kinship between
the Spaniard and the last master of the French contemplative tradition.
Like Anatole France, Ayala is a musing man: a man of satiric, wistful
fancy rather than of imagination. His style progenitors are those
amazing mystics of sixteenth century Spain who managed to endow ecstasy
with Horatian polish. The sedulous, synthetic texts of Ayala are a
panoply of dream: Spain dreaming of her cathedrals and her schools,
Spain blowing lovely and seductive patterns--two volumes upon the Names
of Christ--from the effluvia of medieval culture. The modern in Ayala is
the ironic salt of intellectual awareness.[34]
* * * * *
There is a moment between sleep and waking, when the mind spans the
abyss between eternity and time. Consciousness turns inward on the realm
of sleep; the materials and meanings of the dream form to the measure of
thought, live an instant the spatial, temporal life ere they dissolve.
In this encounter the worlds of sleep and waking are both broken up.
Their fragments make a counterpoint of exquisite discord; but the
relation between them brings a subtle vision. The minute and the
infinite merge. Essence of dream takes the conforming shape of the
categories of the intellect; and the objective sense for once is applied
to what is real. This mysterious hinterland Ramón Gómez de la Serna has
made his realm. He has mastered it. He has been mastered by it.[35]
Spain stands at this transition, between sleep and waking. Ramón is the
elegist of its dissolving colors, of its shattered and luminous shapes.
Valery Larbaud has compared Ramón with Arthur Rimbaud. The æsthetic
object of Ramón is indeed the atom; but whereas in Rimbaud the atom is
explosive, bursting the cerements of cultured France, the atom in Ramón
merges forever with the intricate flow of waking sense and thought. His
true fellow is not Rimbaud but Marcel Proust. Proust made a portrait of
a society in deliquescence: of its break-up into the essences, atoms,
maggots of dissolution. Ramón also weaves the filmy spell of a
dissolving world, although in him the dissolution is not social but
subjective. Spain stirs in this limbo: her eye peers back into the
fleeting images of dream. Ramón is her eye.
Wherefore the contradictions in his work. Rich in color, it is
evanescent. Affluent in intimations of form, it is formless. His books
are collections of uncollectible items. His true form is chaos. He is
indeed the runner of a rainbow; and should he stop one moment, he would
fall through mist. His one subject is the instant of palpable
inarticulation. But his world is still the dreamed Body of Spain.
However dissolute her state, Spain yet looks inward on her slumber.
Ramón is no prophet; save unconsciously. In him, Spain says to herself:
“I am asleep”--the sign of waking....
_b. The Awakeners_
The entire nineteenth century of Spain was the stormy and dark threshold
of this waking. In 1898, Spain suffered more from the loss of the Isle
of Cuba than she had suffered from the previous loss of the worlds from
Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. So the “generation of 1898” became the
symbol, when it was but the sequel, of Spain’s stir. Spain suffered more
in 1898 because she was nearer waking.
The earliest signs were perhaps political. The extraordinary
Constitution of 1812--more radical than the present one of England--gave
way to absolutism. Quixotism tremored on, in the sleep of Spain.
Carlism, the extreme of reaction, swung back into a republic. But the
republic[36] was a mere parade of presidents. High-minded, eloquent men,
they had no contact with organic Spain. The face twitched; the mind
slept.
More prophetic of spiritual action was the work of a professor and
scholar, Francisco Giner de los Ríos.[37] Don Francisco was the friend
of the makers of the brief republic. But instead of holding office, he
founded a school. (His _Institución libre de Enseñanza_ stands still in
Madrid, environed by convents.) And instead of delivering orations, he
gathered about him the intelligent discontent of Spain. He was a leader
and nourisher of men. And the sons of his spirit have written the
dynamic books of the age. Giner’s weapon for awakening Spain was Europe.
He sent his followers to France, Italy, Germany and England--to bring
home seed and leaven. He saw the problem of his land as a simple one of
retardation. Spain for organic reasons had lagged. Let her catch up.
While his school flourished--a little hearth of Europe at which the
Spanish intellectual might warm his hand--a young diplomat, Angel
Ganivet,[38] published a work that was the antiphony of this Modern
hymn. The _Idearium Español_ looms large in the tale of Spain’s
renascence. Ganivet was a poor historian and a weak logician. His little
book bristles with arguments, æsthetic and ethnic, which no one can
accept. Yet it holds a deep philosophy of Spain’s career. To Ganivet,
Spain is not of Europe: the trend of her growth must be toward Africa as
it has been from Africa. All of the adventure in America and Europe was
a false step. The “Age of Gold” was an age of madness. The effort to
adopt the pragmatic materialist culture of the West was doomed to
failure. Spain is Christian; not Roman; Christian in the way of the
Spanish Stoic, Seneca, of the African patrists, Origen and Augustine, of
the Semitic spirit of Don Quixote. Ganivet scorns the standards and
success of modern Europe. He senses the heroism--the need of heroism--in
the Spanish soul: its peculiar way of sudden climaxes followed by
periods of sleep. The down leveling of Europe is as alien and abhorrent
to him as it was to Nietzsche. He fears the _aurea mediocritas_ of
England as a poison to the Spanish blood. He looks with equanimity on
Spain’s colonial disasters since Spain colonized “not for coal but for
souls”; and on the nadir of Spain’s culture, since from it shall rise
again such sudden giants as were Cervantes, Velázquez, Góngora, Lope. He
pleads for the acceptance, in the spirit of a religious sacrifice, of
Spain’s difference from the brilliant capabilities of France and
England. His book, appearing in 1896, urged the relinquishment of the
last Colonies. Two years later, Cuba and the Philippines were gone. But
though his book was a Jeremiah’s prophecy, Ganivet lacked the strength
to face the apathy of his people. In that same year, he died by his own
hand.
Not, however, before he had met the opposing, clamorous word of the man
who, gradually, was to veer to his own vision. Miguel de Unamuno[39] had
corresponded with Ganivet while they were young in Madrid. The result of
their exchange was _El Porvenir de España_, a volume in which they
estimate the opposing doctrines: that Spain must be awakened by letting
in “ultra-pyrenean currents,” and that Spain has been ruined precisely
by these currents. To Ganivet, the history of Spain reveals no “Spanish
period.” Let there be one! he cries. Unamuno counters that eclecticism
is the unity of Spain. “Spain is still to be discovered,” he thunders,
“and will be discovered only by European Spaniards.” In the volume which
defines this attitude of his youth, _En Torno al Casticizmo_, he
diagnoses the abulia of Spain. The Inquisition was bad because it shut
out the four winds of Europe: Spain was forced to feed upon herself.
Spain’s historical tradition was bad, because it was anti-European. He
declares for the _corrientes ultrapirenáicas_. Ganivet was dead. Even
had he lived, this mystic afield in history must have lacked the power
to answer Unamuno. Unamuno is the strongest moralist of our day. Wells
and Shaw have thin voices beside his well-aimed uproar. There was no
one, then, in Spain to answer Unamuno. Unamuno answered himself.
His answer is not analytic. This radical mystic scorns the fuss of
argument. The Inquisition, shutting out the “four winds” from Spain was
indeed “bad.” Its purpose--unity--was good. Its confusing homogeneity
with unity and its means of action were not Spanish at all: were of
Rome, of France, of Europe. Spain had been the most tolerant land of all
the West: even Islam grew tolerant in Spain: Rome alone, making the
Visigoth into crusader and winning Isabel to its own waning theoditic
dream, made Spain intolerant. The historical tradition which won in
Spain was also European: it was a mixture of the state policy of France
and the church policy of Rome. (France was never guilty of such
nonsense: France the State was consistently anti-Roman.) Finally,
whence came these “ultra-pyrenean currents” that were to flush Spain
once more with fecund air? They were ideas that reached Western Europe
by the very ethnic worlds of which Spain is the organic integer. Ideas
from the Greek and Alexandrian, from the Jew and Egyptian and Arab: many
entered Europe directly by the door of Spain; none came to Spain by way
of western Europe. They came by the sea and the south--in that long
germinal embrace whereby Phœnician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Jew,
Copt, Arab, Moor were poured into Spain’s womb. What Western Europe did
was to transform and finally to betray these living thoughts. The
Visigoth minority represented Spain’s medievalism: and its action was a
retarded and arbitrary form of what in Germanic Europe produced the
noble synthesis of Catholic culture. In Spain, the naturalistic Semites
were too dominant for a culture based on transcendental values.
Medievalism in Spain became a maniacal gesture. Modernism? It is the
breakdown of the medieval culture: its intellectualism, its
systematization is a vast Machine proficient at destroying, and creating
nothing. Is this what Spain must come to, to be saved? Unamuno
reconsiders; and by 1905 he has his answer--which is indeed a
conversion.
Unamuno is an expression of dynamic egoism. This atom has got loose from
the locked coil of Spain; and what a surge it has! Yet all his doctrine
comes rather simply down to the assertion of an immense personal will
emerging from the stratified social trammels of his land. The intrinsic
substance of Unamuno’s thought will strike the Western mind as meager;
but the drama of its formulation is a new act in Spain, the flesh of its
assertion is a fresh embodiment of the Spanish spirit.
This announcement of a personal will recalls at once earlier apocalypses
of the north: Blake, Whitman, Dostoievski, Nietzsche. Unamuno’s
assertion is important, because it is made up of the conflicting
substances of Spain. The voice of this man declaring that he will never
die, and that he will never live according to the herd-patterns of
modern Europe, becomes palpable and true, because it is so deeply
Spanish. Perhaps the æsthetic value of the utterances of Whitman,
Dostoievski, Nietzsche, Blake is similarly grounded in racial substance.
The case is evident in Unamuno. Freeing himself from the still equipoise
of Spain he frees himself from nothing that is Spanish.
In Unamuno, the same Spanish spirit heretofore held in tragic unison--in
the actless unison of its will--swings once more into motion. Instead of
equating each other, the elements of the Spanish soul line up _behind_
the soul of Unamuno and serve to project him, parabola-wise, into his
personal heaven. Here is Spain’s neo-medieval sense of the futility of
life; here is Christ; here is Spain’s narcistic love of the extremes
within her, whence arose the pícaro and the saint. Here above all is
Spain, enemy of pragmatism and of rational progress, worshiper of the
Absolute--Spain that will be heaven or hell, and never merely earth; and
yet will not loose her hold on earth, in all her visions of heaven.
Unamuno transfigures the despised and comic person of Don Quixote. This
symbol of his land’s wrong-headed action becomes for Unamuno the god of
a new Order, the prophet of a new national revelation. Don Miguel de
Unamuno of the Basques identifies his cause of pure and personal effort
with the crusade of the old hidalgo of La Mancha. Like that knight, he
will construct his world platonically from the ideals of his inheritance
and go forth _really_ that it may prevail. As Quixote fought common
sense, Unamuno fights “business.” The old windmills are now factories,
the old inns are industrial cities, the old King’s police are the
votaries of Demos. Where all that is glorious has become so sterile, all
that is serious so low, let Don Quixote be savior. The final jest of the
bitter, broken Cervantes becomes our Man of Sorrows. Does not the
mockery of modern Europe call for a ridiculous Messiah? The sterile and
impotent meseta of Castile--that butt of Europe--shall be the mount of
the new Zion, for the new Sermon.
So with inimitable verve and wit, Unamuno identifies his will with the
old body of Spain: and hobbles forth, like Quixote, to enact justice. He
wants it for himself. But since Spain is in him, since Spain is his
Rocinante, Spain must go along. Spain must wake, if only for his sake.
Unamuno’s philosophy is a tissue of compensations: which by no means
proves it to be false. He feels inferior in Europe as a Spaniard? he
will assert his immortal soul against all Germany and England. He feels
his peopled cultural impotence before the sure voice of France? he will
turn this anguish into the travail of birth. The method is persuasive.
Our modern world is so very shoddy, that any honest light can show it
up. The prose fabric of our civilization is so thin, that any song can
tear it. And Unamuno is essentially a poet, even though his best vehicle
is the short personal essay which, indeed, his pen has made a powerful
æsthetic organ.
The atomic individualism of Unamuno is strictly modern: it springs from
Rousseau and the German romantics. It is the inevitable impulse to
“return to a beginning” which has overwhelmed the modern soul since the
breakdown of the Medieval House. But if this atomic will is modern, the
values it propels in Unamuno remain medieval.
* * * * *
The intrinsic value of such work either as thought or as æsthetic form
is very slight. Interest in Unamuno hinges on interest in Spain. The
power of this soul, one feels, approaches that of Whitman or
Dostoievski. But the substance in which it has clothed itself is less
negotiable. Like Don Quixote, Unamuno fails to realize that the modern
world can be defeated only with modern weapons. Our multiverse, our
chaos of sterile facts, is the result of an abuse of analytic methods.
The true savior will have to understand and accept this analytic world,
ere he can transform it. Unamuno, believing that he preaches to the
world a new Salvation, is merely rousing Spain from her old ordered
sleep.[40]
_c. The Sleepless Spirit_
In this new stir of Spain, it is not wonderful that the land which
created Córdoba, Cádiz, Seville, which perfected the Dance and the cante
hondo, which gave birth to Gabírol, to Góngora, should lead in the fresh
emergence of Spain’s perennial spirit. For Andalús achieved the Spanish
Balance without the Castilian rigor; obeyed like every part of Spain the
will of Castile to make Spain’s chaos into One and yet contrived to keep
that Oneness green. A painter and a poet of modern Andalusia voice so
clearly the spirit of the land, that they speak again for the world.
They are Pablo Picasso and Juan Ramón Jiménez.[41]
Picasso is a man of Málaga who came to Paris, and by the strategy of
time and place conquered the plastic world. To the French, he appeared
the Heaven-sent inheritor of Cézanne. Cézanne, naturalistic mystic and
lover of El Greco, made of each stroke of his brush a preachment of the
sanctity of form. Pure form, in his work, had its ritual of sacrament in
its intrinsic stuffs. The Body and the Blood of life were to Cézanne the
volumes and the movements palpable to the eye. El Greco, in a devout
Catholic Age, was able to retain the legendary forms of Christianity as
at least subsidiary means to express his vision. Cézanne was driven back
on what seemed to him “primary” matter: the hills and the haystacks and
the human body. His work implicitly rejects the concepts of European
culture by its refusal of them all, as aids to revelation. Not religion,
not ethics, not “beauty” shall be syllables for Cézanne, as for his
predecessors, in the spelling of his Word. In this sense, Cézanne
aspires to the primitivism which accepts the essences of previous
culture and rejects its forms. Ideationally, he created and bequeathed a
void: but an expectant and a fertile one. The successor of Cézanne was
bound to be a man with concepts to fill in his abstract wording.
Concepts come to Europe from the east. It appears that Western Europe
can create no concepts of the Real, although she creates the greatest
Forms for concepts.[42] Like Cézanne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Dostoievski, Blake, Whitman, Wagner were in this sense inviters of the
east; the line of nineteenth century masters was long, who in their
rejection of the conceptual forms of their inheritance, filled the world
once more with a clamorous hunger for fresh Ideas to make incarnate. It
is this hunger that explains, in art, the vogue of El Greco, of African
sculpture, of Picasso.
The Idea in Picasso is the _arabesque_. The Moslem needed to harmonize
his love of beauty and his fear of idols. He required a plastic form
which would not, like the forms of physical nature, recall the old
idolatries of the desert. The letters of his holy Arabic language served
him, even as the Hebrew letters served, in the Kabbala, to make a Temple
for the medieval Jews. These letters of the Arab held Allah and all the
world of Islam, and yet were freed of natural associations. In Picasso,
there is a similar impulse. His need also, as an artist, is to make
designs; but his fear was an idolatry of another sort. The associations
attached to physical forms--religion, sentiment, moral value--were
already so unconvincing in the nineteenth century that Cézanne refused
them, as Moses the Golden Calf. Now, even the sensory organisms formed
by the eye must be rejected. To the hand of a Raphael, a woman’s body is
amenable to art through its motherhood, its sanctity, its sexual appeal.
These are cogent means for his æsthetic work. To Cézanne a woman’s body
is still a woman’s body. Picasso rejects even the associative concept of
_woman_: her body becomes a configuration of planes, densities, colors.
This formal use of transfigured substances is old in Spain. Spain’s
wildest excess of sculpture and ornament in the _plateresque_ holds an
element of transformed abstraction that recalls Egypt. The Spanish dance
resolves dramatic gesture into a formal end. And now, Picasso makes an
_arabesque_ of the letters and signs of nature.
Paris has worked perhaps too much upon Picasso. It has made him a
“court” painter. This is intrinsically no ill thing: Ronsard and Racine
were poets of the Court. The essential dynamism of Picasso has been
urbanized; his intellectual stuffs have been turned at times into
theory, into impulse. From creation, he has been deflected into analysis
which is the antithesis of creation.[43] All this, because Paris is a
Court of painters, with the tendency to cultivate the statement which
clarifies at the expense of the creation; to address only itself; to
polish surfaces rather than plumb new depths. Or, perhaps, the trouble
is that this Court of Paris is not Picasso’s. It has needed him, more
than he Paris. Too often has Picasso fragmented his invention into sharp
annunciations of the theory others builded from his work. Yet for all
that, he has brought light to the west: it came with him from Málaga:
it rises from Andalusian depths older than Spain and yet forever
Spanish.
* * * * *
Juan Ramón Jiménez[44] has come far indeed since the early poems and the
sweet idyll, _Platero y Yo_, which appeared in 1907. That book was
written in a prose crisp as young leaves. Yet it was the conveyancer of
old emotions. The poet’s spirit was already old; only his senses urged
him to the gait of youth. Such delicacy promised rather to crack than to
reveal in later years what is perhaps the profoundest poetic
intelligence today in Europe.
Jiménez has lost the audience which his earlier work won him. He is very
little read. He has sloughed off cleverness and minor sentiment. His
work has become stark and stripped. He has gone from exquisite grace to
a virtuosic clumsiness and uncouthness, which brings astoundingly close
the face of truth, and turns it into a strange, impersonal thing. He has
become a recluse. Yet his seclusion has not divorced him from contact on
his own terms with his generation. No poet serves youth more sedulously
than he. He is the master and the friend of the young poets of
Castilian, not alone in Spain but in the greater Spain across the sea.
He is in touch with Paris, with Germany and Austria. And he has read the
work of Whitman, of Emily Dickinson, of Frost, of Robinson and
Sandburg....
Jiménez, indeed, is a mystic of the naturalistic order of Walt Whitman.
He traces the constant divine in life; he ignores the transcendental. He
finds God in the sea, in the subtle sense-play of love, in the
landscapes of Spain; or in the gyring thoughts of his own meditation.
Yet no poet’s accent could more radically differ from that of the Bible,
of Spinoza or of Whitman. Not the least magic of Jiménez’ work is its
perpetual counterpoint of meaning and substance. The meaning is cosmic,
the stuff is light and casual. Often a seeming haphazard of expression
fringes the ineffable; a drop of water miraculously turns into a
universe. No tinge of cosmic rhetoric mars the body of his words. The
universe is implicit. The ultimate gift of Jiménez is a song of life,
liquid and gemmed, within whose moment silence is an inner flame. This
flame is simple and constant. The variation in the poems is the
outturning into surfaces of mood and color. The flame is One. Life’s
mystery is its becoming form, its creating for itself out of a single
depth numberless facets, out of whiteness many tints, out of silence,
song. This is the process of life: and this is the process of Jiménez’
writing. When he speaks of _La Obra_ he means his record of these
inscrutable _becomings_, of which he is a rapt and consecrated witness.
If his poems are many, so are the shapes of life: if they are fleet,
fragmentary, snatches of a Form whose symmetry lies in dimensions beyond
the fragments, so is our visible world a phantasm of shreds, thrusts,
flashes. And to see it whole, the eye must be beyond as well as within
it.
Jiménez’ work is a sort of _comédie mystique_. Singly, the poems have
variety of notes. Yet there is a cryptic quality in them, and a subtle
allusiveness to something not explicit, which must repugn the shallow
sense, even as it entrances the mind hungry for great vistas. His poems
have prosodic value. Yet their chiefest value is that they _create
æsthetically_ a sense of incompleteness. Æsthetically, they are whole
because they contain this _lack_--this positive surge toward an
apocalyptic sense which lives in them only by the imprint of its
absence. Each of his poems is at once a sensory form, and a spiritual
inchoation. Like the atom, it is complete, yet holds in the whirlwind of
electrons an infinitude and a contingency with infinitude: it is
appearance forever tending to disappear into the Real. One might say
that a poem of Jiménez is like an instant in a human life: full-limned,
full-equipped with thought, emotion, will; and yet this fullness is but
the passing function of an implicit unity which transcends and subscends
it.
No Castilian poet since Luis de Góngora has equaled Jiménez in craft and
virtuosic power. Jiménez makes of the language an instrument subtle and
intricately ranged, whose farthest flexes yet lie within the natural
genius of Castilian. This is his superiority as a craftsman over his
master, Góngora. Góngora worked as if in minerals. His arabesques were
cut and carved, like the original arabesques, in stone. In Jiménez, the
arabesque is of organic substance: it is traced in flesh, blood, breath.
This makes his work less assured, less sheer than the verse of Góngora
which, after three centuries of misprizal, comes at last, with the work
of his friend El Greco, into its kingdom of appreciation. At first
glance, one doubts that the poetry of Jiménez can live as long: so fine
are its lineaments, so exquisite its reliefs from the organic atmosphere
on which it stands. Flowers of spirit, will they fade like flowers? The
answer is, that such flowers do not fade. To examine this frail prosody,
is to find it made of certainties. Jiménez has lifted from life his
overtones into a form that is life’s natural emergence into
consciousness from the eternal infraconscious flow. His arabesques are
therefore as organic as their base. Jiménez belongs to the race of
Góngora and San Juan de la Cruz--a race of poets who are immortal, and
hermetic.
* * * * *
Again Spain is speaking for the world. This painter and this lyrist, in
the true sense, are _poets_. Their word is a creation, immediate as life
and as eternal: and this conjunction of time and of eternity is birth.
_CHAPTER XIV_
_THE PORT OF COLUMBUS_
_The Scene is a bare height over a little town, white huddled with
shard roofs. Coppery, the río Tinto widens and swirls through sands
into the Gulf of Cádiz. Upon the height, stand two old men,
bare-headed. They are clad in the gentility of their days. But the
cloth is thread, the brocade is dim, the velvet shines and yellow
is the lace. The one is tall. He holds behind his back, martially,
an arm with a crippled hand. He is erect. His features are hard and
large: only his mouth, too delicate and his eyes, tender and dark
as a womb, belie the warrior. The second man is short. Beaked is
his nose, and the eyes have a watery gleam. His hair is silken
white above the swarthy skin. The tall man speaks_:
CERVANTES--Why did you ask that I should meet you here?
COLUMBUS--This is Palos de la Frontera. [_There is a pause in which with
a hard hand he wipes his watery eyes._] From here the first time we
sailed. Here, seven months later, we returned. Bringing back----
CERVANTES--A world.
COLUMBUS--Nay. Bringing back a Grave.
CERVANTES--[_Regarding the town and not_ COLUMBUS’ _words_.]--Here, now,
is nothing.
COLUMBUS--Look beyond the fat sands of the Gulf. Look beyond the sea.
[_They stand in silence toward the west. The low sun swims above the
brooding water, vaults the hard roofs, and lights the shabbiness of the
watchers._]
COLUMBUS--[_Nervously._] Well? Are you looking? Tell me what you see.
CERVANTES--I see America.
COLUMBUS--[_Rubbing his hands in ironic satisfaction._] They robbed it
of my name, because they thought I did not know what I had found. They
robbed me of my kingdom, because they thought I aspired to be a king.
Because my eyes kept watch, they are dim.
CERVANTES--I shall tell you, friend, what I see.
COLUMBUS--Be careful of your eyes!
CERVANTES--A City of White Towers! The men who live in it are little
motes. Yet they uphold these Towers! And in their hand, they wield a
golden weapon making them the world’s master.
COLUMBUS--Look sharp.
CERVANTES--They are not masters of themselves. They are full of
chaos----
COLUMBUS--Spain?
CERVANTES--Within this serried, glittering Order--Chaos! Chaos of races,
traditions, dreams. They are uneasy. They build the Towers higher. The
Towers are high, in order to enclose them safely from their chaos.
Towers of stone, machines of subtle iron--to shut out bloods, dreams,
words, making this Confusion which they hate.
COLUMBUS--[_Smiling shrewdly._] Are you looking at America, or Spain?
CERVANTES--They have lost sight of the True God. Yet they are full of
God-hunger, of God-search. To their own works they turn--and worship God
in these.
COLUMBUS--Look beyond: beyond the Towers.
CERVANTES--[_Heeding only what he sees._] They ban new pioneers! Lusting
for Unity they crush what is not One. They shut out thoughts which might
rise loftier than the highest Towers.
COLUMBUS--[_Chuckling._] Leap from your Spain, I tell you. Beyond the
Towers----?
CERVANTES--Continents!
COLUMBUS--Now you hold me!
CERVANTES--What childish peoples, there! Beyond the Towers one can see
them clearer, although they are the same as those beneath the Towers.
Savages, who can not even speak, who can not even think--who spin about
in quaint machines.
COLUMBUS--Where do you see them?
CERVANTES--Everywhere. Upon two Continents I see them, like an Itch on
the rugose World. Yet within them, there is a world of Desire. I can
hear their clamor; though they use words English, Spanish, Portuguese, I
cannot read their reason. They are dumb as children.
COLUMBUS--They have their Inquisition, I suppose? They drive out the
Infidel? They go to their Cathedrals, and would bind all men in Christ?
CERVANTES--Their names for these are different. And unlike Spain, I see
that they have not succeeded.
COLUMBUS--[_Quickened._] There is my hope! If I could go and tell them:
therein is _their_ hope! They shall not, like Spain, succeed.
CERVANTES--[_Not turning._] Your voice rings glad?
COLUMBUS--Why should I not be glad? The New World is in them, underneath
the Towers. When they have learned that they can not succeed: that all
the Towers and all the machines and all the gold on earth can not crush
down this unborn need in them for a true New World--then it will arise.
CERVANTES--[_turns and looks at_ COLUMBUS.] You speak in Parables.
COLUMBUS--I am a practical man.
CERVANTES--I am sick of parables and stories.
COLUMBUS--Good. You want history? The Book of Moses--is that history
enough for your hard sense? Well, do you recall how the Lord led the
children of Israel out of Egypt? They too crossed a Sea. But did they
come into their promised land, their new world flowing with milk and
honey, when they had crossed the sea?
CERVANTES--Yes. After forty years.
COLUMBUS--You are a shallow reader. Not one came into the Promised
Land--not even Moses! They went into the wilderness, and they died.
From Marah to the wilderness of Sin, from Horeb to the wilderness of
Moab--they roamed, and rotted, and were dead forever! Not Aaron the
Priest, not Miriam the mother, not Moses the Prophet came to the
Promised Land. For it is written that the Seed shall die, ere Life may
be reborn.
CERVANTES--[_Incredulous._] If that is Death yonder across the sea, it
is a death most stable and most splendid.
COLUMBUS--Death is the most sumptuous song. This golden-towered America
is but the Grave of Europe.
CERVANTES--I do not understand.
COLUMBUS--What do you find there?
CERVANTES--Mighty stones----
COLUMBUS--Are not stones of Europe?
CERVANTES--Gold----
COLUMBUS--Is not gold a lust of the old world?
CERVANTES--Marvelous machines----
COLUMBUS--Did you, then, not know England, that you should think them
new?
CERVANTES--Never with us were gold and stone and iron of so high a
glory.
COLUMBUS--Does not Europe merit a high Sepulcher?
CERVANTES--Still you speak in parables, my friend.
COLUMBUS--[_Testily._] What would you have me say? Teach me the words
for the New World, if you have them! Since its gold and its stones and
its machines are unknown to the Old, what words can the old tongues give
us?
[CERVANTES _looks in silence to the west, while the weak eyes of_
COLUMBUS _watch him. Suddenly_, CERVANTES _clutches at the short man’s
arm_.]
CERVANTES--Look! Can’t you see?... No!... God, the Towers are falling!
COLUMBUS--Glory to Jehovah!
CERVANTES--They veer, they twist. They have sunk in this mire of men.
COLUMBUS--The Seed shall rot.
CERVANTES--They are a turmoil of blind maggots. Their world is become
as were their souls--a quicksand. The gleaming Towers are gone!
COLUMBUS--Now shall be the birth of the World which I discovered.
CERVANTES--[_Sternly gazes west in a deep silence. Then he turns to his
friend._] Gone is the city. Continents of chaos. What shall rise?
COLUMBUS--The Dream of the Old World, at last--a New World!
CERVANTES--Spain?
COLUMBUS--Nay. Spain’s Grave is over there, with Europe’s.
CERVANTES--I shall believe your dim eyes. Tell me, mariner, what your
dim eyes see.
COLUMBUS--[_With a laugh._] Then keep your sharp eyes westward.
CERVANTES--[_He turns again, complying, to the west._] It is easy to
look away from Spain, when one has loved Spain.
COLUMBUS--You shall not be alone, in loving Spain.
CERVANTES--Prophetic Spain.
COLUMBUS--Spain which, creating life, has never lived.
CERVANTES--Her fields are shrunken and her eyes are hot.
COLUMBUS--God has begotten on her, and He has passed her by.
CERVANTES--She is a mother.
COLUMBUS--A mother of beginnings.
CERVANTES--Always the Seed in her--never the life itself?
COLUMBUS--It was ever so. When Rome lived, Spain did not live in Rome:
she bore her Stoics and her Saints for Holy Rome. When Holy Rome was
hale, Spain was not holy. She bore, with her Jews and Arabs, the death
of Christ. When Holy Rome was dead and Modern Europe flourished, Spain
was not modern and Spain was not Europe. She bore America.
CERVANTES--Europe has used my mother! Even you, landless mariner, have
used her.
COLUMBUS--God has used her.
CERVANTES--Why then are her fields hungry?
COLUMBUS--All worlds have come in, unto her: of all worlds, she has
begotten worlds. And she has lain untouched.
CERVANTES--My tragic mother.
COLUMBUS--[_Suddenly remembering and exalted._] But the White Towers
have toppled. Ready, Spain! You must stir again. You must give again.
Europe has rotted at last into the Grave they called America. Your work
is not quite done. You, most broken mother of all Europe, you have
preserved a Seed.
... [CERVANTES _has turned from the west, and facing inland, kneels_.
COLUMBUS _does not heed him_.]
COLUMBUS--Your spirit, Spain. They above all will need it, in the north:
they whose speech is English and who have led in the building of the
Towers which are the Grave of Europe. For it is written that these shall
also lead in the birth of the true New World--the true America which I
discovered. Let them see you, Spain; let them take from you, O mother.
For their spirit is weak and childish. They are cowards, not masters,
before life. But you, Spain, dared to be what you believed: you knew the
wisdom of what small men call “madness.” You dared to make of life
itself the Body of your Vision, the Word of your Prayer. You did not
flinch, proud Spain, from being laughed at--from being wrong--from being
right! Give to the New World now your spirit, that it may surpass you.
[_There is a silence, Columbus still facing west, while his comrade
kneels toward Spain._]
CERVANTES--[_Still kneeling and praying._] I understand, my mother, why
we have always loved Our Lady. What this man says is true. Unpossessed,
you have borne a Word. And the Word, even as Christ unto His mother, has
turned and has denied you.
COLUMBUS--[_Lifting_ CERVANTES _up_.] Look again. You are sure? The
White Towers--?
CERVANTES--[_Rises and looks again westward, standing beside_ COLUMBUS.]
The City of Towers is gone.
_As they gaze in silence_, CERVANTES _seeing_, COLUMBUS
_understanding, the sun goes down in the sea. And
over their shoulders to the east, the sky is
suddenly aflame with sunrise._
FINIS
1921-1925
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The so prevalent notion that in Mohammedanism women have no souls
and cannot gain heaven is false.
[2] To the west, sprawls another Fez which the old ruler would not
know. This is Fez-el-Djidid--Fez the New--a Fez of the sixteenth
century. It is a squat, chalk town filled with Bedouin types--Syrians,
Arabs, Negroes, Spaniards, Jews: a conglomerate of squalid shops
and _louche_ cafés. It is like Tangiers, the invaded and corrupted
Moorland. Farther west, there is a third Fez--still stranger. Here are
a railroad station, a wireless tower, and a _garnison_ for “Frankish”
troops. Since 1911--this visitation of the wrath of Allah.
[3] One of a family tracing descent from Mohammed.
[4] Mohammed is generally supposed not to have been able to read; and
his Chapters, brought to him haphazard by the angel Gabriel, were
dictated to his disciples. These chapters (Suras) were not compiled
until after the Prophet’s death.
[5] As mathematics becomes non-Euclidean, it tends toward the
religious. In place of the pagan straight-line, we have the
geodesic-line which meets its source and completes a body for
gravitational and inertial forces.
[6] “The Iberians are the most warlike of all the barbarians.”
Thucydides.
[7] The native women of Seville.
[8] Italian imitations of Tirso were innumerable. Doubtless through
them Molière took his turn. Mozart, Byron, Zorrilla followed. Among the
moderns who have rewritten him is Rostand. Tirso’s real name is Gabriel
Téllez (1571?-1648).
[9] The desire to conform with foreign notions has produced a Spanish
export in which the true genius of the Spanish dance is lost. To see
Seville or Córdoba, you must go to Andalusia. To see the Andalusian
dance, you must do likewise.
[10] Of the many explanations for this strange use of _flamenco_,
that of Federico de Onís strikes me as plausible. He believes that
_flamenco_ was first applied to the dress of Flemish courtiers of
Carlos I. Nobles of Spain imitated these styles; the people of
Andalusia finally adopted them, and so at last _flamenco_ was applied
to the song and dance accompanying a style.
[11] To the reader who fears the difficulty of the old Spanish, I
recommend a modern Castilian version of this perennial poem in which
none of the flavor is lost: it is by Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican poet,
and is published in the _Collección Universal of Madrid_.
[12] It must not be forgotten that the Jesuits of France who
contributed so greatly to the creation of the Catholic strongholds of
Canada were the instruments of a spirit and of a method born in Spain.
[13] Must I assure the reader that this is pure legend? The historical
Cid was probably raiding “on his own” in Valencia when his king, who
had exiled him, entered Toledo.
[14] El Gréco: ou Le Secret de Tolède.
[15] Author of the authoritative life of El Greco, and one of the
world’s few truly great art critics.
[16] Like many other major works of art, the Escorial has its
imperfections. The murals on the vaults of the Church are absurd;
the murals in the cloisters of the Patio de Los Evangelistas are
monstrous; and the pretty interiors of many of the Palace chambers
are impertinent. But the blame for these defects does not lie with
Philip II: they are the deed of successors. There is another flaw in
the Escorial more significant, and miraculously appropriate. It is the
presence of the _San Marcial_ of El Greco in the Salas Capitulares.
Philip ordered this painting; and when it was delivered he disliked
it and refused it admission. The story goes that El Greco insisted on
being paid. Philip paid him and thrust the work into the cellar. It
is customary, on this point, to make sport of the bad taste of the
King. El Greco is the greatest of Spanish painters; the _San Marcial_
is perhaps his greatest picture. But Philip was right. This luminous
and parabolic life did not belong in the frozen rigor of El Escorial.
Today it serves with its gyrant aspirant forms to offset the brooding
stillness in which it lives: a flame in an impenetrable night.
[17] The relatively great importance of honor to women in all lands is
perhaps to be explained by analogue. The inherent social sense in women
(beyond the family sense) is weaker than in men: hence their need of
social approval is the more intense.
[18] There was of course Ramón Lull, the great scholastic poet and
mystic of Majorca.
[19] A. S. Oko, the Hebrew scholar, is certain that the original was
in Italian. José Ortega y Gasset, Professor of metaphysics in the
University of Madrid, assured me of his personal conviction that an
original Castilian MS. was lost.
[20] A mighty lineage of masters who made of the Castilian an immortal
language. Among them are the Dominican Luis de Granada; the Franciscans
Juan de los Angeles, Diego de Estella, San Pedro de Alcántara; the
Carmelites San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa, Jerónimo Gracián, Miguel
de la Fuente; the Augustinians Malon de Chaide, Alonzo de Orozco; and
the Jesuits Nieremberg (Juan Eusebio) and Alonzo Rodríguez.... At the
same time a literary æsthetic was developed (Ausias March, Fernando
de Herrera de Sevilla) whose creative liberality rings refreshingly
modern, beside the poetics of Boileau. Writes Herrera: “So long as a
language lives and is spoken, it cannot be said to have run its course:
for its constant tendency is to surpass itself and to leave behind what
was formerly esteemed. We must constantly essay new forms....” This was
the spirit which made possible El Greco and Góngora and Cervantes. It
was one outcome of the monasteries and of the religious universities of
the Age of Isabel. It proves how strong, in a way, the Renaissance was
in Spain until the reactionary time of Philip II.
[21] The Jansenist belief in predestination and the Jesuit doctrine
of free will appear to contradict this. The paradox is only of the
surface. Acceptance of predestination and of pre-determined grace rests
on acceptance of the inviolable autonomy of the individual soul and
minimizes all objective--i. e., social--effect on it. The Jesuit free
will actually puts the stress on possible change in the individual soul
through social forces, thus minimizing the soul’s autonomy. That this
interpretation is correct is borne out by the developments of Jesuit
practice on the one hand and of French-Calvinist-Protestant cultures on
the other.
[22] “When we lose our dominions, it will be said: You came here to
evangelize and to commit outrage. It will not be said: You came here to
mine coal.” Angel Ganivet.
[23] It must be added that this realistic art, and this realistic
Europe, are doomed today. Cézanne, a disciple of El Greco, marks the
turn of the tide, in the domain of painting.
[24] I hope it will be clear that in these parallels I am suggesting
not identity but analogy. Elements of the Renaissance and of the modern
world definitely distinguish these Spaniards from the true medievals.
The beauty and the irony of the Spanish scene lies precisely in this.
[25] The elements which go to the making of a great _corrida_ in
Madrid, Seville, Barcelona, Zaragoza, San Sebastián, are intricate
and varied. If any of them fails, the consummation fails. The rearing
of perfect bulls is a science in Spain. Only a few preëminent
ranches--_ganaderías de toros bravos_--are equipped to supply them.
They are either in the province of Salamanca or in Andalusia. The
_toreros_ study the bulls in the field, coöperating in their upbring.
Experts breed and train them, and prepare them for their supreme moment
in the sun of the arena. And before the conflict, they are examined by
veterinary surgeons. If they are one jot less than perfect, they may
not enter the ring of a true _corrida_. They are then consigned to the
_corridas de novilleros_: the innumerable encounters of the apprentice
fighters--who must go through several seasons and win the applause of
the most exacting critics ere they are admitted to the rank of _espada_.
Yet despite this care, imperfect bulls (bulls who refuse to fight,
who fight erratically, who flinch at crucial moments) do enter the
best _corrida_ and blot out the artistry of the most expert _matador_.
Indeed, the skill of the _torero_ lies in great measure in his ability
to control the bull. The genuine artist must possess hypnotic power.
He must compel him in the instant of confrontation to forget the
multitude, the flashing _capas_, the _banderillas_ that bite his flesh:
to concentrate upon his own frail grace all the bull’s hate and all the
bull’s vigor. He must compel a brute to be the partner of an exquisite
dancer.
He must control his own body as perfectly as any artist on a stage.
Utter purity of form, of pace, of measure must be preserved within this
threat of death. There is no virtuosity like this in all the world.
Beyond is the crowd, not at all loth to seeing him undone: before him,
_his colleague_, is a maddened bull whose horns are more terrible than
swords. He must control the crowd; he must model the lunges of the
brute into the design of an essential dance. And all this he must do in
coolness.
The _torero_ who can achieve this, not one time in a career but with
reasonable frequency, and before the most savagely critical--and the
most savage--audience in the world, comes not often in a decade’s
passing. Most _toreros_ are at the mercy of the bull. If he behaves
they acquit themselves with credit. If he baulks, they must trust to
luck--to the saving _capas_ of the _banderilleros_--even to their
heels. Hisses are more frequent in the _plaza_ than cheers.
All artists must labor against the inclement will of their materials.
The temper of the bull, the action of the _cuadro de_ _banderilleros_,
the mood of the crowd present the common problem of technique. What
distinguishes the art of the _torero_ is the immediacy of death. If the
dancer slips, he fails and that is all: if the acrobat misses, he lands
in a net: if the actor forgets his line, he hears the prompter. If the
_torero_ makes a false step, he is dead.
And the _corrida_ will go on without him! for he is never alone. But
he is alone with his skill and with his nerve. The slightest trace of
haste or sign of fear will spoil the pure line of his style. If for an
instant he breaks from the perfection of his pose to save his life, he
loses his art. And if in that moment he elects rather to hold to his
art, he may not live to reap its glory.
In recent years, two _toreros_ of genius have arisen in Spain. One,
Joselito, died on the horns of the bull: and the _corrida_ went on
despite the mourning of the nation. Joselito shared with Belmonte
the summit of his art. He was an Apollonian classicist. Chance and
inspiration were reduced to a minimum. He had control over the brute:
but it appeared to be less of hypnosis than of reason. He operated on
the bull with so cool an accuracy that the infuriated beast was soothed
into an obedient opposition to the _torero_. Joselito was exact,
unostentatious. But when he had coupled with his enemy, his art became
ornate. He moved facilely, he gave delicate steps. When he was killed
in Valencia, Spain lost the most exquisite if not the profoundest of
her tragic dancers.
Nature has aided Belmonte with its abstruse law of compensation for
inferiorities. In this abnormally frail body live courage, rhythmic
articulation, dionysian gesture. When Belmonte steps out to meet his
bull the mind falls into heroic channels. For the head is brooding. And
when, as once when I saw him, there is a white bandage across the brow
with a touch of blood upon it, the effect is magic.
Belmonte at his worst is an ugly boy vaguely at odds with an unwieldy
task. At his best, he is the propounder of rapture. He does not
abstract the individuality of the bull like Joselito, and then perform
his cold objective art. He measures the foe. He accepts him as he is.
He plunges into the bull’s fury. And thence, he rises to his high
victory. There is always a moment in Belmonte’s act when he is lost.
The crowd gasps. Gone altogether beneath the fury of the brute, he
emerges. His body sways in the prepossessive grace of one who has come
through death. His art is perhaps greater than that of Joselito because
its content is greater. Joselito excluded from his victory the reality
of defeat. Psychologically, he crushed his foe first, and then worked
on him at ease. Belmonte begins by submitting to the bull’s might. And
then, from this submission of the man, from this faltering of the god,
he creates a form sculpturally superb.
[26] In the winter of 1924 the Dictator of Spain, Primo de Rivera, on
his own initiative conferred the municipal suffrage upon women. They
did not agitate for it; and it seems clear that if they exercise this
new privilege it will be in the same spirit of compliance with which
they accede to all the demands of men.
[27] This statement is not literally correct. The Basques became
eminent navigators in the sixteenth century; their American settlements
ranged from Canada to the Argentine. Yet, intellectually and
spiritually, they remained, as a people, rooted.
[28] The Basque language.
[29] The bookies serve as middlemen between the individual bettors.
Each bookie has a little rubber ball with a hole. In this hole, he
places a slip of paper declaring the odds of the moment, and by tossing
the ball to the man who has laid odds and to the man who has taken him
on, the bet is established. The true pelota fan does not wager once: he
wagers a dozen times as the game progresses: he concocts an intricate
system of varying odds: his mind is on the betting and his balance:
he is aware of the game only as the machine that automatically shifts
the chances. Indeed, to go to a pelota match and observe the game, and
refrain from betting, is so anomalous as to attract attention. The
sport is still there: the Basque players enact it: but the Spanish
public does not participate.
[30] Born 1870.
[31] Born 1874.
[32] Born 1875.
[33] Born 1881.
[34] Another remarkable expression of this state is the Valencian
Gabriel Miró (born 1879). Miró makes gorgeous word-tapestries of
legendary life, such as the Mystery of Christ. In his prose are lurid
and elementary colors that suggest some medieval canvas protected
for ages from the sun, together with pale modern water-tints of
psychological introspection.
[35] Ramón, as he calls himself, was born in 1891. His works
already fill sixty volumes. And yet his true artistic unit is the
paragraph--when it is not the sentence or the phrase.
[36] 1873-1874.
[37] 1839-1915.
[38] 1865-1898.
[39] Born, 1864.
[40] To go beyond Unamuno--into the present constructive period of
Spain’s waking, into the transition from her “old ordered sleep” to
the new ordered consciousness now dawning, would be to turn this
chapter into a discussion of writers and young literary movements: and
this would be to digress from the formal province of my book. Since
Unamuno answered Ganivet, there have arisen leaders in æsthetic and
social criticism, in the novel, in the drama, in the field of creative
erudition, whose aggregate work makes the contemporary literature of
Spain perhaps the most pregnant of the West. I regret that this is not
the place to analyze these younger men. The modern writers whom I have
mentioned at all I have chosen arbitrarily for the distinct formal
purpose of my portrait of Spain. It must be understood that whereas
I consider them important, I have been silent about others equally
important. Throughout, I have felt called on, no more to discuss all of
Spain’s great men, than to describe all her cities.
[41] A third name might be added: that of Manuel de Falla, Spain’s
leading composer and a pure Andalusian, also. Falla in tonal structures
hard, fluid, irreducible, conveys into æsthetic form elements of life
that are very close to those which we shall consider in Picasso and
Jiménez. He may be said to recreate the _body_ of Andalusian folk-song,
as Picasso recreates physical shapes and Jiménez physical sensations,
into a new arabesque.
[42] I--at least--know of no Forms, in the east, so great as (to choose
haphazard) the Medieval Church of Rome, the Gothic Cathedral, Dante’s
Poem, the music of Palestrina and of Bach, the Ethic of Spinoza. Yet
the concepts in these Forms are invariably of the east.
[43] Æsthetic creation is an act from the unitary self upon the
objective world. It is the contrary of analysis which breaks up that
world--_unreally_. But analysis may precede creation, if the elements
broken up by it are reabsorbed and fused into a new subjective unity.
[44] Born in 1881.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Mckor Hayim=> Makor Hayim {pg 113}
Mekor Hayim=> Makor Hayim {pg 159}
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