CHAPTER VITHE DREAM OF VALENCIA

a.The Castle of the Cidb.The Stones of Wisdomc.The Water Bridged.The Miracle of El Grecoe.The Tomb

Thevalley 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 Countsof 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’ssolar, 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 ofEl Cantar de Mío Cid, probably a Christian menestral, residing in the Moor country of Medinaceli. Theromanceropainted 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 Moslemis 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: itisthe 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 drawson 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.

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 Castilianborricois less frequent; and likewise the crudecarrowhich 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—ofdehesas. 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.Toreroscome to study their victims, for when the bull is not “game” theespadais 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, inzamarraandcalzón, 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 ofencinathat heats thegarbanzojar 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 (asif 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 bookMakor Hayimthe LatinFons Vitæwhich 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.

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, godown: slipping through alleys that swerve, climbing steps that lift him into hiddenplazaswhere 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 theCommuneroswho 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 theupper 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 atpelota. Rome is now a single-tiered, a stolid marching music. It turns at right angles and runs along a road lined with indigent shops. Abodegaopens 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.

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 reversesnorthward 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 theirMudéjartiles 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. Childrenindeed 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 theferry. 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 wasmade 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 immemorialformsof 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,rejasthat 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 alonethe Judería. Athwart the Cathedral, in a little Square, is a building—theAyuntamiento—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—anExpolio—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 MediterraneanVölkerchaos, there must have been echoes ofmany 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 spiritinformsthese 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, thePsalms, 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 balancewith 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....

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 ofsome 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. Butthe 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 theSilla 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....

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, Sevillandulces, 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 thebungalows 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 towingtartinas... 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

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