. . . . . .
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....
Thecarreraruns 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 landthat 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....
a. The Sleepersb. The Awakenersc. The Sleepless Spirit
a. The Sleepersb. The Awakenersc. The Sleepless Spirit
a. The Sleepersb. The Awakenersc. The Sleepless Spirit
Spainis 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 wroteLa Celestinafour centuries ago split his novel into dialogue and acts. DonRamón 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 obsoletereales. His typography is studiously ancient. Upon his works is printedopera 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 smallpuebloof high Spain. He loves the village for the pure success of its equilibrium in sleep. He loves to follow Don Quixoteover thellanuraof 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 inPolítica y Toroshas 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 acounterpoint 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....
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. (HisInstitución libre de Enseñanzastands 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. TheIdearium Españollooms 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 theaurea mediocritasof 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 wasEl 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 thecorrientes 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 theState 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 upbehindthe 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 forthreallythat 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 preachesto the world a new Salvation, is merely rousing Spain from her old ordered sleep.[40]
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 thearabesque. 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 ofwoman: 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 theplateresqueholds an element of transformed abstraction that recalls Egypt. The Spanish dance resolves dramatic gesture into a formal end. And now, Picasso makes anarabesqueof 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 ofLa Obrahe means his record of these inscrutablebecomings, 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 ofcomédie 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 theycreate æstheticallya sense of incompleteness. Æsthetically, they are whole because they contain thislack—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, arepoets. Their word is a creation, immediate as life and as eternal: and this conjunction of time and of eternity is birth.
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:
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 notCOLUMBUS’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 thesame 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 istheirhope! 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 atCOLUMBUS.] 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 intothe 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?
[CERVANTESlooks in silence to the west, while the weak eyes ofCOLUMBUSwatch him. Suddenly,CERVANTESclutches 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.
... [CERVANTEShas turned from the west, and facing inland, kneels.COLUMBUSdoes 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—[LiftingCERVANTESup.] Look again. You are sure? The White Towers—?
CERVANTES—[Rises and looks again westward, standing besideCOLUMBUS.] The City of Towers is gone.
As they gaze in silence,CERVANTESseeing,COLUMBUSunderstanding, the sun goes down in the sea. Andover their shoulders to the east, the sky issuddenly aflame with sunrise.
FINIS
1921-1925