The legend of Christ was deeper: deeper the blundering way of Quixote. For he sought the grace of union not by absorbing the world into himself, but by transmuting himself into an impersonal symbol of the world.
He failed; but his book lives; for with the failure is the triumphant impulse that led up to it. The effect of the crusade was death; the cause was life.
The magics of Don Quixote are as absurd as our own. But his impulse was as true as the Prophets’. The Old and the New Testaments also are a tale of sins and follies. But these are visible, because the light of God shines on them. In the effect that passes, all the prophets and all the Christs have failed. None of them has failed, in the cause that remains. The cause of Don Quixote’s life strikes us as truer than the realities which brought about his death. This is the pitiful best that we can say for him—or for any of the prophets.
One and all, they encounteredreasonswhich put theirtruthto flight. And the world was able to live whole within their truth only in ages which willfully made reason servile. In the violence of his divorce from the world which he aspired to unite, in the ridiculousness of his discord from it, Don Quixote stands the last prophet of our historic Order. He bespeaks our need: a dynamicunderstanding which shall enlist ideal and reason, thought and act, knowledge and experience; which shall preserve the personal within the mystical will; which shall unite the world of fact in which we suffer all together, with the world of dream in which we are alone....
a. The Bull Fightb. Man and Womanc. Madrid
a. The Bull Fightb. Man and Womanc. Madrid
a. The Bull Fightb. Man and Womanc. Madrid
Thebull fight is older than Spain; the art of the bull fight has little more than a hundred years of history. Perhaps Crete, which gave El Greco to Toledo, gave the bull worship to Tartessos. Perhaps the Romans turned the bull rite into spectacle. The Visigoths assuredly had bull fights: and the medieval lords of Spain jousted with bulls as Amadis with dragons. Thetoreowas held in the public squares of towns, alternating possibly withautos de fe. In the one sport, the actors were nobles and the victims were bulls. In the other, officiated captains of the Church and the victims were Jews. In both, the religious norm was more or less lost sight of, as the spectacular appeal grew greater. But no æsthetic norm had been evolved to take its place. The bull fight was a daredevil game to which the young bloods of the Court—in their lack of Moors to fight—became addicted after the Reconquest. It was a dangerous sport, and it cost the kings of Spain many good horses and not a few good soldiers. Still, it throve until in 1700 a puritan, Philip V, ascended to the throne. He disliked the bull fight. It lost caste among the nobles. But its usage was too deeply, too immemorially engrained. The gentlemantoreadorwent out: the professionaltoreroandbanderillerocame in.
Francisco Goya has recorded in genial sketches and engravings the nature of this bull fight. It was still chiefly a game of prowess. If an art, it was more allied to the art of the clown and acrobat than to the dance or the drama. The professional torero was a gymnast. He had to risk his skin in elaborate ways: and skill was primarily confined to his grace in going off unhurt. He fought thebull, hobbled on a table, or lashed to a chair, or riding a forerunner in a coach, or saddled to another bull.
Only after the War of Independence against the French and after the lapse caused by Napoleon, whose generals disapproved of so barbarous an art, did Spain’s popular tragedy arise: the modern, profoundcorrida. Its birthday was the same as that of the jota of Aragon which sprang directly from the incitement against the French. Like the jota, the bull fight was new only as an integration of old elements. And like the ancient bull-rite of Tartessos it reached its climax in Andalusia: more particularly in the Province of Seville.
. . . . . .
Theplaza de torosis of course the Roman circus. Rome created no more powerful form for an æsthetic action than this rounded, human mass concentered on sand and blood. With its arena, the bull fight wins a vantage over such western spectacles as cricket, baseball, the theater. In all of these, the audience is a partial unit: it is not above the action, but beside it. The arena of the bull fight is a pith of passion, wholly fleshed by the passionate human wills around it.
Theplazais too sure of its essential virtue to expend energy in architectural display. Here it scores another point over the modern theater whose plush and murals and tapestries and candelabras so often overbear the paleness of the play. The plaza has tiers of backless seats terracing up to balcony and boxes. The seats are of stone: the upper reaches are a series of plain arcades. The plaza is grim and silent. It is stripped for action. It is prepared to receive intensity. The human mass that fills it takes from the sand of the arena, glowing in the sun, a color of rapt anticipation. These thousands of men and women, since the moment when they have bought their tickets, have lived in a sweet excitement. Hours before the bugle, they are on their way. They examine the great brutes whose deaths they are to witness. They march up and down the sand which will soon rise with blood.
Bright shawls are flung on the palcos. Women’s voices paint the murmur of the men. A bugle sounds, and there is silence. The crimson and goldmantonesstand like fixed fires in this firmament of attention. The multitudinous eyes are rods holding in diapason the sky and the arena. Two horsemen (alguaciles) prance forward through the gates. Black velvet capes fold above their doublets. From their black hats wave red and yellow plumes.
They salute the royal or presidential box; circle the ring in opposite directions and return to the gate. The music flares. They proceed once more on their proud stallions, and behind them file the actors in the drama. The toreros are first: four of them: they wear gold-laid jackets, gold-fronted breeches backed in blue, rose-colored stockings. The banderilleros in silver drape their piedcapasacross their arms. Thepicadoresfollow. They are heavy brutish men, with chamois leggings and trousers drawn like gloves over their wooden armor. They are astride pitiful nags, each of which is Rocinante. The shoes are encased in stirrups of steel; the spurs are savage against the pitiful flanks. Behind the picadores are the red-bloused grooms, costumed like villains. It is their task to clean up entrails and gore. And the procession closes with two trios of mules, festooned and belled, who draw the drag to which the bodies of slaughtered bulls and horses will be attached.
The cavalcade crosses and salutes. Toreros, banderilleros, picadores on nervous nags, scatter along the barriers. Again, the bugle sounds. Doors open on the interior passage which two high barriers hold as a protective cordon between the audience and the arena. A bull leaps into the glare.
His massive body is a form for the emotion of rage and for the act of plunging. The forelegs are slight beneath the heft of his shoulders whence he tapers down, so that the shoulders and head are like a swinging turret. The brute is all infuriated flesh pivoting the exquisite ferocity of horns. They are slender and curved, needle-sharp,lance-long. The bull is aware of the strange ten-thousand-headed creature that shouts at him and drives its will upon him. He understands that the mob is his foe. He bellows, circles, plunges at last to reach it. The barrier jerks him up, splintering with his onslaught. He is bewildered and stopped, pawing the sand, while the mob prepares to send its single emissaries to engage him.
The first act of the drama is formless and ends in farce. Toreros and banderilleros toy with the bull. They fling capes, side-step, dawdle with him. But gradually they withdraw the brute’s first fury from the indeterminate mob ringing him round to the accessible lives in the arena. The bull sees a horse. It capers before him in a blind presentiment of death. Its ears are tied, its eye is bandaged. Upon it a picador levels an enormous pike, steel-pointed. The bull charges and a horn sinks in the belly. Horse and rider rise and are flung in a clatter of bone, in a drench of flesh, against the barrier. The bull draws out his ensanguined horn and charges a banderillero whose cape is there protecting the picador. The crowd roars. The horse is whipped to its feet by grooms. The picador is hoisted back. The old nag’s entrails hang in a coiled horror within a foot of the ground.
The horse is the comedian of the drama. The bull tosses him. He lies on his back and his four anguished legs beat like drumsticks on the barrier. Or, losing his saddle, he plunges mad and blind around the ring, kicking his own intestines, until death takes him. Or the bull mangles him at once, and he disappears in a swirl of flesh. This is farce; and also this is the sense of the immanence of danger. The bull is drunken with his victory. The crowd, beholding the fate of a horse, laughs with a tinge of terror. For what has happened there, may happen to a man.
Enough horses have been slaughtered: their poor flesh shredded into the gleaming unconquerable sands. A bugle summons the second act of the drama.
This is the scene of the banderilleros. They are thecritics, the epigrammatists, thegraciosos, the chorus of the accelerant play. They bespeak the bull. They test him. They show off his subtle points—and their own. If he has faults—clumsiness, cowardice, lethargy—they correct him. They call forth his finest rage; and as he plunges on them they leave gay ribboned darts within his flesh. If he is slow to anger, they will employ darts that explode beneath the skin of their victim. They enrage him. But all the while, they sober him as well, making him realize that the holiday of the horses is no more: a harder enemy is on the field.
Often the bull is put into a meditative mood. He stands, panting in the center of the arena. Blood drips from his mouth. His horns are carmine and the lacedbanderillasdance on the scruff of his shoulder, biting, nagging. He wants to understand what his life has become. The fields of Andalusia—the good grass, the warm care—have been wiped out in this blare of terror. That background of pleasaunce merely serves to sharp the tense present—this delirium of men and sun. A banderillero dances up. The bull faces him, asking a question. But the man will not tell. His smile is false; that swing of his cape is treachery. There is nothing to do but plunge—whatever it means. The cape of red and blue folds over the eyes of the bull and vanishes like a cloud: a dart bites his flesh. The crowd roars. The good life behind and the peace beyond are mist: life is this glare and this roar and this goad of steel.
The second act is over: the bull is chastened. He has been cleansed for the tragedy, after his brief triumph. Once again the bugle: the torero to whose lot this bull has fallen, selects his slender sword and his redcapa. He steps forward for the ultimate tragic scene.
Toreros are of many kinds. This one is called Belmonte and he is one of two greatespadasof recent years in Spain. He is a small man, smaller than the average and more swarthy. His body moves rhythmic and slight into the hard glitter of the sand.
The elemental glare of Spanish sunlight makes that body, striding so quiet toward the bull, frail and helpless. Could this man run away, as do so many? could he, if need be, vault the high barrier to safety just as the bull splintered the wood beneath him? The head is heavy. The nose is large and sharp; the mouth is wide; the lower jaw thrust out. But the brow is sensitive and smooth. Close by, this is the face of a neurotic. The arena’s flame bakes it into a brooding gloom above the body so ironically decked in gold and silk.
Belmonte in this instant has already awakened in the crowd the troubling emotion of pity mixed with fear. He salutes the bull and spreads his red mantle (the capa) across the fragile sword. He steps in close; and while the arena hardens into silence, he lifts the mantle toward the eyes of the brute.
Within an instant, breathless save for the breath of the bull, something goes forth from Belmonte to the beast and marries them. The bull is the enemy, and they are joined more close, more terribly than love. He plunges. Belmonte, motionless, swings the mantle to his side and the bull, as if attached to it, grazes the frail body. The mantle lifts. The bull lifts and turns, as if ligated by the mantle to Belmonte’s will. The cloth thrusts to the other side. The bull along. Back and forth they go, in rigorous dance. The torero’s body does not break from its repose. He is as cool as sculpture; he is as fluid as music. The bloody beast is attuned by a will, hard and subtle as Belmonte’s sword. His clumsy movements are molded into grace: his rage is refined into these exquisite feints. He, too, like the torero, leaves the plane of nature, and becomes a symbol.
As the torero stepped out to the sand, his rôle was god-like. His minions had played with the great innocent victim: fed him victory and blood: taunted him: taught him. Now he, to enact the ultimate rite oflife ... the ultimate gift of the gods ... the only gift which they give unstintingly ... death.
But this dance has transfigured the torero. Meeting the brute upon the plane of danger, he becomes a man. Those hypnotized horns graze human flesh: where they touch they rend. That gold-lined body is a sheath, holding the blood of a man. The bull could plunge through it ... plunging so near, so rhythmically near ... as if it were indeed the mist and dream of mortal life.
And now another change in the beauty of their locked encounter. The man becomes the woman. This dance of human will and brutish power is the dance of death no longer. It is the dance of life. It is a searching symbol of the sexual act. The bull is male; the exquisite torero, stirring and unstirred, with hidden ecstasy controlling the plunges of the bull, is female.
The crowd acts its part. The little man is but a gleam of fire, the bull but a tongue of dionysian act within this dark flame of ten thousand souls. From them come dream and desire and memory of sense: concentrate upon this spot of drama: merge with it and marry it to themselves. At every pass of the bull from side to side of Belmonte, the crowd is released in a terrific roar. So silent the dance of the two coupled dancers: so vast the response of the crowd. Now, Belmonte kneels and his mantle rhythmically wipes the furious bloody head, making the plunge of horns diagonal athwart the torero’s breast.Verónicais the name of this classic gesture. And the allusion is to the handkerchief of the Saint, which smoothed the sweat from the forehead of the Christ. The ancient orgy of Dionysius and Priapus is tinged with Christian pity. The commingled symbolisms of many Spains meet in the dance: become abstracted and restrained. The whole is the silent balance of the wills of Spain.
The bugle signals for the final action. Belmonte has risen; has exchanged the capa for the smallmuletawith which he covers his steel. Now he withdraws the muleta from the slender sword. It is a flexible two-edged steel, dipped at the end. He stands still before the brute whosesweat rolls red from the heaving rugose flanks. He stands with heels clicked together, holding the brute with his eye, and raises the blade deliberately forward. The steel points not at the head, but slightly above it. In that mountain of flesh beyond the deadly horns there is an unmarked spot which the sword must find. It is the tiny crutch formed by the bones of the shoulder. Within its aperture the blade can strike, unimpeded, to the heart. Anywhere else, the blade will not bring death but a mere ugly plunging rage.
Belmonte has chosen to stand and make the bull plunge on him. He is frail and erect. His shoulders are flexed; his head is slightly forward. Grace becomes subtly rigor. The bull obeys. He leaps. The blade sinks to the gemmed hilt. A wave of blood gushes to the sand, as the dead bull sinks.
. . . . . .
This is the archetype of the Spanish bull fight. It describes a masterpiece. And in an art so profound and dangerous, the masterwork is rare, even as in other æsthetic fields. But if great toreros are rare, one actor in the play is constant and is always masterful. The crowds of Spain, against the agitation of intellectuals and of Church, hold to their dear drama. In thecorrida, all the desires which history has bred and then denied an issue, find an issue. Conflict is the stratified peace of the Spanish soul. For too many ages has the Spaniard lived on war to be able to do without it. In war, the lusts of the world and the lust for God became one. Christ and Priapus were joined in its full ecstasy. And in this dumb show of a man and a bull, they are conjoined again.
Gross comedy of blood; sex, dionysian and sadistic; the ancient rites of the brute and of the Christ meet here in the final image of stability. Spain’s warring elements reach their locked fusion—Spain’s ultimate form. For although everything is in the bull ring, and although anything mayhappen,nothing happens. Circus, blood, dance, death equate to nullity.[25]Like life in Spain, this spectacle is self-sufficient, issueless....
Queen Isabel may rest in peace. She is having her will although she would not recognize its way. Her conscious will was to make Spain one: it has become the unconscious will of every Spaniard. Her concept of the State of Spain has become a universal state of mind. Here was Spain, this sea of elements tossing and titanic. Here was the Spaniard, pressed by the amorphous world in which he lived to establish unity within himself: to become a person, in defense from the chaos that was Spain. In his will to create Spain, he could not change the theater of his action. He must create Spainwithin himself. The first stage of his endeavor was that of the intense crystallizations which made Spain’ssiglos de oro. These saints and sinners are not fragments: they are entire forms of Spanish energy. And the elements which they personify exist in every Spanish soul. If, therefore, Spain was to be unified within each Spaniard, La Celestina must be equated with Saint Teresa, Quixote and Amadis with Lazarillo and the Cid.... Although the energic sum of all these forces might in each individual soul add up to zero!
To the intensely individual Spaniard, Spain became more and more subjective: until at last the boundary to the outer world was lost. Politics, war and church became subjective. The Spaniard saw the world only in terms of himself. This is why he strove to make the State the mentor of conscience: this is why he strove to make the domains of the State a sort of spiritual body. To inculcate faith by Inquisition; to establish truth by the sword; to drive dissenters in spirit from the soil—these were the mad and logical acts of a man who beheld the world in his own image. Willing to create a Spain, each Spaniardremained the anarchic personal creature whose separatism Strabo had noted and Rome endured.
The tragedy of Spain—her reaching of success! First her energy broke up into dominant forms of will: then she equated these forms into the equilibrium she desired. And no energy was left! All of her opponent tensions merge to rest in every Spanish soul. The titanic efforts toward conquest, toward art, toward God which have made Spain great balance each other at the end. The energy is not gone, not weakened: it is equated. And the result is sleep.
The energy of a people is the sum of its personal propulsions. The dynamic race is that in which the individualas an individualis incomplete. Consider the United States. The immigrant in losing his old land loses the completion which he achieved in his own share of its life. As an American he espouses America’s incompletion. He injects his restlessness into America; and conversely America’s lack of final form becomes his lack and his need. The result is a social body moving toward completion, and energetic in so far as it is barred from completion save in the act of moving. In Russia, the incompleteness of the individual soul is a paradoxical result of its consonance with the land. Russia is vast, uncharted, indefinite. The Russian spirit, identified with the soil, becomes imbued with a symbolic sense of vastitude and longing. Spirit is therefore national in Russia: and spiritual energy floods the land, precisely because the land is an incomplete experience in each Russian mind.
There are indeed permanent forms of spiritual incompleteness, and one of these exists in every energetic people. The Frenchman’s soul is part of a social soul. The Frenchman is organically incomplete, in so far as his mind and sense know themselves integral components of the nation. From this knowledge comes the automatic flow of individual energy into social channels: this is balanced by the impersonal character of the French nation which receives the energy it requires and discharges back into the individuallife a transformed power: the protection and unity of the enveloping organism. This perpetual interplay between the Frenchman and his group is an equilibrium in incompleteness: it makes permanent the impermanent achievement of individual and nation, the need of each for the other, the flow of energy between them. The Jew possesses another form of permanized incompleteness. The Jewish soul yearns for Zion and for God. The Jew’s intelligence successfully places both Zion and God beyond his reach. His incompleteness is hence perpetual: and the Jewish energy has not ebbed.
But the Spaniard elected a form of achievement and a form of truth which he could reach: and as he reached it, he stopped moving. Truth became the Church of Rome: he attained that truth and rejected every other. His ideal of unity was homogeneity: the simple fusion in every Spaniard of thought and faith, according to a fixed ideal. To this end he impoverished the elements of his psychic world into sharp antitheses: these he balanced against each other: the result was indeed simplicity, homogeneity, a neutralization of energy summing to zero.
The Spaniard is not decadent: neither is he weak. There is as great force in him as in the days when his still unfused power conquered half Europe, discovered America and poured the vision of Cervantes, Rojas, Calderón and Velázquez upon the world. But now, all this energy islockedin its own willed equation. Its original dualisms are not dead; they are controlled and neutralized. The equilibrium is complete: and what energy is left from it the Spaniard must expend in holding the equation. There is no energy unemployed: and it is precisely the excess energy of man, the energy that is unable to find its goal within the organism, which creates intellect and which creates creation.
Had he been less heroic in his will, or more objective in his way to it, the Spaniard would not be this cripple: this giant shattered by his success, this giant imprisoned in the reality of his ideal.
The most willful of men, he appears will-less. For his power of will goes to dominate himself—and to hold his dominion. So that no power is left wherewith to dominate the world. The unity of Spain exists, subjectively and multiplied by millions. In consequence the Spaniard is not adhesive: he is too complete: the motive toward adhesiveness is the sense of incompletion. The most secret impulse of the Frenchman or the Jew has its social dimension. No Jew can people Zion in solitude. No French mystic or philosopher is an anchorite. Pascal and Descartes are Catholic: Paul Cézanne strives to create a new museum art. The rebel in France is a rebel against monarchs. But the Spaniard is an empire and a god unto himself. The perfected Spanish person makes permanent the social Spanish chaos.
The most intellectual of men, he appears unintelligent. He lives so wholly within his Idea, that no energy is left for further ideation. Creative intelligence is the birth of conflict between the personal will and life: it is born of the pause between impulse and response and of the excess energy which remains after the instinctive action. In the Spaniard, this excess energy is small: he is too self-sufficient to know richly the pauses between will and deed; and in the relativity of values which springs from a chaotic or incompleted conscience he is poor. Having achieved his Idea, he is weak in intellect: having created his imagined world, he is weak in imagination.
Therefore he understands vaguely the causes of his incompetence, and struggles weakly against them. His contemporary literature is strong in plaint: it is wanting in self-knowledge and constructiveness. It is weak, also, in creative imagination: even as it is strong in fantasy. The Spanish mind has become like the mind of a child. The child’s intellect is not inferior to the man’s: it is merely too preoccupied within itself to have achieved the power of association and of objective experience which comes with maturity and which begets analysis and imagination. The child is credulous, because its belief is subjective fantasyand finds no opponent in the real world. Also, the child is cruel because it cannot imagine pain in others, it is anti-social because it has not associated its life with the life around it. The Spaniard is still the victim of the infantile beliefs of medieval Europe. He accepts the literal Heaven and Hell, having no imagination strong enough to make them real, and in consequence to reject them. He is cruel. And his separatism, his want of the adhesive impulse make him a ready victim to tyranny in government. Unable to organize a social body, he accepts the simple body of the King or the alien body of the Church of Rome.
He has the virtues of his state. His personal development brings him a personal integrity, a true personal pride unknown in Europe. He has natural dignity. Whatever his rank, he is acaballero: a true microcosm of the Spanish nation. There is no artifice in him. He is clean, self-controlled and independent. In his veins lives the impulse of heroism; in his mind is the knowledge and the acceptance of heroism’s price. Cowardice, compromise, hypocrisy are traits more common in more social races. And cant requires no word incastellano. Even the Spanish thief is sincere: the tradition of the pícaro has not died. And the power of endurance, of sacrifice, of devotion is developed in the average Spaniard beyond the dream of the romantic north.
The once furious and unleashed elements of the Spanish soul have been woven into this counterpoint of rest: they make a quiet music. It is natural that the Spaniard’s love of music and gift for music should be supreme. This art of vigorous abstracted balance, so subjective, so ruthlessly legal, is the symbol of the Spanish nature. And as with his classiccanto hondo, the effect in counterpoise and control is almost that of silence. By the same token he is a great dancer: his dance is a synthesis of movements equated to rest. And he loves the drama: where the torrential forces of mankind are fused into a unitary form.
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The world nurses two myths concerning Spain. The first, that she is decadent, Spain believes herself, and thereby proves, if other proof were lacking, her failure in self-knowledge. The other myth is that Spain is romantic.
The first myth rests upon ignorance of psychological mechanics. The second is a confusion of words. The philology of the termromanceis clear. In the formative eras of modern Europe, the Latin dialects which were to become French, Italian, Castilian, Portuguese, Galician, Provençal, etc., were lumped as theromanceto distinguish them from the pure tongue of Latin. They were popular vernaculars and despite the early instance of such men as Dante and Petrarca, or the Arcipreste de Hita, they were not deemed worthy vehicles of exalted thought. The writer whose ideas were holy or philosophic was supposed to clothe them in Latin. Only if he treated of such vulgar subjects as earthly love, might he employ the vulgar language. By association,romancewas transferred from the tongue to the subject for which it was disposed: a story of profane love or profane adventure becameromance; and becoming so, remained trivial and vulgar. The essential attitude of the Spaniard toward the subjects of romance was, however, the very contrary of what we mean by romantic.
Now came the hour of confusion. The knights of Portugal and Spain fought for God, for Mohammed, for the King: for anything but what we callromanticreasons. The Iberian north is Celt and is contiguous with the Celtic cultures of Britain and of France. The Iberian knight went northward out of Spain; and when he returned he had become what today we call a “nordic.” He was sentimental, tender, monogamous, and chaste. He was the very converse of the old Spanish knight, Arab or pagan-Christian whose canny materialism speaks so clear in thePoema del Cid. He was, indeed, Tristan, Arthur, Lancelot, or Amadís of Gaul. The books that were written about him were published in romance: so that the qualities of passionate devotion which in Spain has been confined to the religious—to subjects too high for romance—became romantic.
The romance, therefore, is of the south: the romantic is of the north; and they negate each other. It is the German metaphysicians who invented the romanticism of Calderón; it is Byron and the French æsthetes who created romantic Spain. But the best efforts of Schlegel, Goethe, Mérimée, Gautier, Byron have failed to make the Spanish man or woman in the least romantic.
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She is serene and she is incurious. Her Anglo-Saxon sister would call her inactive, even as theParisiennewould find her dull. Since sexual adventurousness is normally the result of intellectual curiosity—sensual stimulation by ideas—she is chaste and dispassionate. But if her lack of amorousness is due to her lack of thinking, her serenity and her external inactivity are due to her tremendous power. Women are most clamorous for “rights” in lands where culturally they have counted least. Witness England or the United States where for all her liberties woman is spiritually sterile. In contrast witness France whose women are the subtle partners of all deep events; or matriarchal Spain in which suffragists are as rare as they would be superfluous.[26]
The Spanish woman is a pragmatist in love. Love to her is the means of raising children in the grace of Christ. No less sensual, no less amorous woman exists in Europe. As a girl she is lovely: a crisp expectancy makes her flesh sweet and rounds her darkling eyes. She looks to marriage as the highest and most powerful career. Once she is mated, the natural coquetry of Spring falls from her like a season: she is instantly sedate, full-fleshed,maternal. She has no instinct for the game of love. Sexual virtuosity in woman is a slow process nurtured at the expense of the maternal passion. This diversion is rare in Spain. The French or American woman’s sexual science is an undeciphered, an irrelevant perversion to the woman of Spain who wears upon her head an invisible crown of matriarchal power.
For she is powerful: this discreet female in a land of furiously dreaming males! Events have sobered her and made her worldly-wise. Her man is the theater of opponent passions, ideals, hungers equating into nothing. She is the compensatory act. She is steady, unemotional, unmystical, canny. She distrusts excess—even of maternal service. Her man has made magic of such words as State, God, Honor. Hers the task to materialize these words which in his mouth bespeak inaction. The family, the garden, the morrow; these become her Word.
The woman of Spain leans on the Church of Rome. No small part this of her dominance in a land incapable of social institutions. Spain with her separatist nature, her inadhesiveness, could never have created Rome: but Rome has gone far toward giving Spain that minimum of organic body which the millions of individual “Spains”—her men—required. The Spanish woman by her massed support makes the Church Spanish.
If the Church belongs to the woman, ruling Spain through her, she has remained outside the exhaustive activities of her husband. The Spanish woman has been untouched by metaphysics: her heroine, Santa Teresa de Jesús, is an ennobledhouse-cleaner, a glorified matron of Christ. The Spaniard’s wife has not, like him, been split into intricate traits of will and of expression: nor in the sequel need she spend herself to win back unity from an inner chaos. She is naturally whole: she is the foe of even the fairest anarchies of the spirit. There is in her an heroic amplitude that recalls the poised women of the Hebrews. She is the savior of Spain, for she is the Responder to Spain’s excesses of action and inaction.
The land has become a matriarchy—by default. The Spaniard has been too busy establishing theodicy on earth to rule Spain well: at last too involved in the equating of his embattled impulse to rule Spain at all. Imperceptibly, unofficially, woman has taken hold. She allows man many liberties—trivial liberties of the sort she would call romantic, if she knew the word. He may “govern,” vote, own; he may fight; he may drink, gamble, whore. He may act indeed the perfect child thinking himself the center of the world because of his exultant vices (of which politics and journalism are the most absurd). Meantime, she with her compass Christ, and her wheel, the priest, steers the slow ship of Spain. In her disposal are the education of her children, intellectual and moral, the molding of those customs which go deeper than statute. In her hands is the family, and the family is Spain. She is the true controller of finance. It is a common thing in Spain for the man to own the money of his wife, and for the wife to distribute the money of her husband. In the peasant classes, she is arbiter of culture and thought: in the middle classes she is economic judge: in the noble classes the lineage descends through her in equality with her husband.
The nature of Spain calls imperatively for the dominance of woman. Woman’s mind is individualistic, and Spain is a congeries of consonant parts rather than an organism. Woman builds her familial molecule from the Spanish atoms: she erects a great simplicity in which her man can dwell.
In Spain there are two kinds of women: the mother and the prostitute. And both are mothers. The land is sensuous in its air, its flowers. The Spaniard is not sensuous at all. In the nineteenth century, a group of romantic Spanish poets endeavored to sing of Spain as had the Germans and the English. No more frustrate coldness exists in all the literature of failure. “Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehen” could never have been written by a Spaniard about Spain. For the Spaniard is as abstract inhis bodily lusts as he is concrete in his ideals. Of his wife, he seeks the haven of morale: of his prostitute, he seeks the peace of respite. The Spanish prostitute with her Cross lying within her breasts is the least mercenary, the most womanly of her class. She is mellow and maternal. She bears with her a great sense of sin: and the man who touches her lips touches pity. From man she receives two treasures, bread and shame: she is eager to give, in return, her humility and comfort. She has no delights of subtle sense to barter: but he who comes to her, weary and broken, will find her arms mysteriously soothing, as if her acceptance of sin were a Christian solace, as if her acceptance of shame were heartening to his pride.
And the Spanish wife knows of the prostitute and suffers her. She brings for the husband an escape from the chaste rigors of family and church into the anarchy of unorganized affection and of Christian pity. She makes the work of the wife less arduous.
. . . . . .
Human happiness is the full deep flow of human energy. It has many ways, nor is it rare. The madman is happy since all of his thought and sense falls into the pattern of his will. The lover is happy. Children are happy, eating or at play. Soldiers are happy in battle. And everyone is happy in dream.
There are happy nations: nations at war, nations in the madness of any enterprise, whether it be of growth or dissolution. But Spain is not happy. Her energy does not flow. It stands locked in a diapason of pause.
Nor is Spain unhappy. Unhappiness is the thwarted need of energy to flow. Spain’s energy is not thwarted. It does not flow: it does not need to flow. It is absorbed in its own perpetual balance.
Spain is a dark soul. Sun is a flame in her land, and her land is a storm of color. But the soul of Spain is neither sun nor storm. It is neither gayety nor grief. It is a dark contentment, midway held between ecstasy and sleep.
Outside the tremor and traffic of spiritual movement, Spain moves like a somnambulant. Her body moves: but within her shut eyes there is a vision truer than her stirring: a vision stirless and composed.
Her mood is dark and stagnant. Yet it is pleasant, for it is not pain. Her soul is caressed passively by this rhythmic swing between the extremes of action: as if the long ages of Spain’s agitation had bred this sensuous delight in their denial.
Within her heroic memory, within her heroic land, Spain wanders unobtrusively and scatheless. She does not forget nor remember. Upon the surface of her life, intellect pricks, passion stirs, action clamors. But her depths are limpid in a dark and dreamless slumber....
In the eighteenth century one Spaniard out of three is an ecclesiastic, a noble or a servant. (This takes no toll of rogues and beggars.) The special rights of Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia are annulled. Those of the Basques are a dead letter, although they linger on the books until the Carlist wars. Spain has become a receding unity, under a single monarch. Her American possessions wait only the full tide of growth in order to set loose. Castile’s will has leveled Spain. Her huertas give wine and fruit just in the amount to balance the desert dearth about them. Her high towns are fossils of recalcitrance, or backfires smoldering against each other. Although the diapason of will has its home in every Spanish soul, no one city is its symbol. Toledo, Avila, Seville, Barcelona, Jaca, Murcia, Mérida, Oviedo ... they bespeak their pasts, their individual dynamisms, whose sum is zero. To be the symbol of this sum—Spain’s tragic consummation—there must be a modern city.
Madrid stands for the ultimate achievement—and for none of its factors. It is the capital of Spain—and of no old Spanish region. It is a pleasing town. Its populous quarters bespeak the eighteenth century. The cabs blotched under gas-lamps, the shuttered stores, the sumptuous theaters, the cobbled streets and alleys holding a bar, a flower-stand, a beggar, recall old prints of Paris. The reminiscent age of Balzac and of Daumier has taken refuge here. In Paris, the twentieth century has jostled out the last; it seems to keep better terms with the Paris of Louis XIV, of Henri IV, even of François Villon than it does with the Paris of Voltaire. But in Madrid, the eighteenth century has mellowed to the next; they strike together a plaintivereminiscence against the modern city: the Madrid of broad Avenidas, of the Gran Via, of dapper taxicabs and monumental banks. This Madrid is pleasant also: it might be almost any provincial capital of central Europe.
Madrid is noisy. In the modern streets, the chauffeurs toot as if they had just discovered horns and were intent, like children, to break the new toy ere bedtime. In the older, more populous streets there is a texture of ancient voices. Shut your eyes and the windowed walls of Europe fade away: the breath of the desert and the steeps of the mountain north, the watery chatter of the Catalan, the grunt of the Aragonese, the gracious Andalusian palaver merge into a music of the air and make Madrid a maze of memory.
Yet for all the noise and all the business, there is upon the town a subtle and a gentle quiet. This assertiveness is only for itself: it is a heightened murmur of assent to Spain’s rich past. Beneath the bruit, Madrid is silent, like Spain’s history. Beneath its animal turbulence it broods. And for all its mingled moods, its final one is a dream.
On Sundays, therastro—the great city fair—boils down hill, a human torrent through a canyon of tattered houses to the dryManzanares. On feast days in spring or summer, the town roars at the bull-ring. And when the last death is written in the sands, it swarms in lorries, motors, tally-hos, back to the Plaza de la Cíbeles; it spreads in numberless café tables on the broad sidewalks of the Alcalá. The Puerta del Sol—theater of revolutions—is a somber well whose sides are gray soiled houses and whose crowds are a thick condiment. Trolleys, lottery vendors, beggars, loafers, make a bright shuttle through the sluggish maze. At the Carnival of Spring, the gutters of the barrios de Toledo and de Manzanares pour their lives into the Castellana. Rogues, prostitutes, shopgirls, mothers with babes at the breast flow back and forth under the statue of Columbus and the austere walls of the Biblioteca Nacional: queer costumes grimace through confetti clouds;a murmur of sexual release agglutinates the swarms; a glow as of rich earth breaking to grass rises beneath the sere March sky.... And yet, there is a silence, there is a stillness on Madrid. The songs of the turbulent streets are songs of silence. This parade of pleasures and of passions, of crimes and revolutions, is somnambular.
Populous Madrid falls from the Plaza Mayor fan-wise to the arid curve of river upon whose treeless banks are stuck the shanties of the breadless. And above the river and the shanties is the Palace of the King, a cold and granite jewel set upon misery. If you would see it well, go down to where the starvingmadrileñosstack their huts and air their tattered shirts—ironic flags under the flag of Spain.
Through populous Madrid—a massive flesh—runs the artery of the calle de Toledo. The cobbled streets are moist with sweat of lives. The high walls rise, blind in a mood of siesta under the blazing sun. Winter presses like icy steel upon the open wound of Madrid’s poverty. But even in winter, the fever is there. It is damp in summer, in winter it is frozen. These streets have a cellar mood. Their stones seem porous with a fungus warmth or with a fungus odor. They are straight and steep—not gyring Moorish streets; they funnel the dark song of life, or let it escape like fume into the dry air of the meseta. Some of them are short: the leisurely streets of the old inns—posadas—of the stagecoach, of the itinerant milker with his flock of goats. Through a huge oak door, one passes into a patio. A fig tree, old as a satyr, thrusts its branches through the ancient iron balcony. Below is another patio with a pump, a rose-bush, a pile of manure, a flock of hens and a woman kneeling before a basin. Her hair and her gown are black, her lips are scarlet. Vice and compassion rise from the old close like perfumes; for this aged posada was once a convent, and bright fleshed maidens told their rosaries where now this woman looks into her mirror.
All the people are emanations of the past. Girls in the street are lovely and rank, roses over-blown. Women walklike wafts of a hot night through the day. Men are lean, high-tensioned, and isolate as lusts. But though they tide the streets, though their deeds are a storm, this agitance and lushness of Madrid fades to mirage ...
It has become a very modern city. Its boulevards are superb; it is full of smart shops and theaters; it has restaurants as expensive as the best of Paris. Its traffic is dense and efficiently controlled; its wealthy sections have the empty glitter of similar districts of Paris or New York. Madrid cannot overcome the spirit of its being, which is a spirit of stillness. Other towns in Spain grew from the needs of conquest, of commerce, of defense. God—or profit—gave them energy. But Madrid is of no such beginning: Madrid is of theend. It is a consummation. It stands for the Spain that has annulled its motions.
Its greatness is but the stubborn Castilian will to remain and to hold all Spain in perfect equilibrium of forces. Madrid is the town of politicians, of social servants, of soldiers. It is aconservativetown. It wants things as they are. From here goes forth the will to repress Barcelona, to exploit the Basques, to muzzle Unamuno, to tax Andalusia, to play at empire in Morocco. A town of government—a parasite town, it is the converse of such towns as London or Paris. For in these, greatness came first, and made them govern.
There is this subtle melancholy in Madrid, this silence under all its voices—of a life come to dark pause. And yet this same dark element is fecund. Like a culture-bed, it nurtures even with its rot.
Beside the parasite, here is the thinker; beside the exploiter, here is the creator. Along the Gran Via, the calle de Alcalà or near the Puerta del Sol are thetertulias. They are cafés in which the men of the town congregate each night. You will find each of them in his appointed place, from close of work until nine, when the householder returns to dinner. The café is dark and the smoke fumes are thick. The muscular integument of the Castilian language is darker and thicker. It fills the air with a heavy yet swifttexture. It is fluent, agile, potent. The plastic rigor of the Spanish world is in this tongue of Spain. The men sip coffee or vermouth. They are small drinkers. One can live in Spain a year and see no drunkard. They are too busy in talk, to think of alcohol. They are talkers, neither brilliant nor dull. Their speech has weight, acuity, vigor. It is too solid to be bright: it is like the pigment of a Velázquez.
Most of these men in the tertulias are of the intricate army of bureaucratic Spain. Postman or Minister, clerk, alguacil or General—all attend their tertulia with a ritual devotion. They think that they are “running Spain”—directing a State more or less modern and which, since the choice of Ferdinand and Carlos, has willed to be European. But like all Spaniards, they are unselfconscious and are actors in a drama deeply beyond them. They are the tools of the Spanish will to remain in equilibrium—to remain in sleep. All their conservative energy goes to this end, whose symbol is Madrid.
But beside them, at other tables, in the tertulias of other cafés, are other men who form the antiphony of their neighbors. These are the intellectuals. They too are largely unselfconscious. They believe, perhaps, that they are artists creating in word or color things of intrinsic beauty, like their Parisian models. So they also put their heads close together over smoky tables and drink coffee and talk “shop.” But in truth, they are the inevitable response—the stir against and within the sleep of Spain. They are the germs of dissolution. The bureaucrats hold Spain together—in sleep. The intellectuals plot and dream to burst Spain asunder—in a new waking.
END OF PART TWO
The cathedrals of Spain are splendors heaped by the hand of chaos. Well they sing the discord of a world too full of life to find perfection save in the dream of death. Most of them rise from stones that formed a mosque; the mosque ofttimes was a converted citadel of Visigoth or Roman. And here Spain brought her will to unity. Where could these rank lusts of a hundred factions, these voices of continents and peoples meet, save in death? The simple romanesque is buried under the aspiring jungle of baroque, plateresque, Gothic,churriguera. Window,reja,retablo, altar flourish like fevers and sum up to silence.
If this is Spain, Barcelona is of another land. The cathedral of the great town of the Catalans is luminous and graceful. Although it could be lost in the vastitudes of the cathedrals of Seville or Salamanca its voice is clear and carries farther: it bespeaks the living.
Yet here, too, the church is dark. The brown-black stones are lifted by the day of the deep windows into a rosy flush. The Choir is so low that the line fromcimboriotocapilla mayoris free. Toward the Altar, the Choir is open. Its sides are exquisite spires that rise in tremulous shadow. The windows are small. They hold light in their stained glass like eyes. The church is a reticent life gazing within itself. And what it sees is an inset of twenty columns making a sort of inner body, a dark and mystic body in the gaze of the glowing outward walls.
The loveliest monument of the Catalans, their church bespeaks them. It is a thing of beauty: but unlike the beauty that resides in Spain, it is not tragic. Beauty is consummation: in Castile the goal is immobility or death. Here the perfected mood is wakefulness. The grace is gentle and assured: it is not tortured, neither is it prophetic. Close is the ease of the fields of France, ofFrance’s churches. Close is the balance of Attica....
Islam had short shrift in the Catalan Province which rests upon the Pyrenees and faces east across the sea toward Italy and Greece. When the Moslem came, the Catalan retreated into France. And in less than a hundred years (in 797) the great town of Gerona (you can still see its walls and its fortress-church) fell to the Frankish Christians. In 801, the vassals of Charlemagne drove out the Crescent forever. Barcelona became Frankish: Catalonia was apportioned to Frankish nobles. This strain of alien blood is a symbol of the wavering dissonance that has endured in Catalonia forever. For the yearning of Spain was to be Spain: and the will of the Catalans was to be part of Europe.
The Teuton element in Spain is Visigothic. With the Franks there came across the dwindling spurs of the Pyrenees the Gallo-Romans of Provincia, a different intensity of the Idea of Rome from that of the Ibero-Romans. Catalonia straddled the mountains, mingling in spirit and in affairs with France. Almost at once after the Reconquest, it took the lead in the Mediterranean trade of the Provincian littoral. Feudalism flourished here, as it never did in Spain—a true French feudalism, heritage of Charlemagne who indeed had held Spain clear to the Ebro. The domains of the great Counts of Barcelona were as wide north of the Pyrenees as south. And already, sharing this participance of France, in the eleventh century there are Italians (Pisans) fighting under the pennants of Barcelona against the Valencian Moor. Even today, the spirit and the tongue of the Catalans bestrides the Eastern Pyrenees from Lérida to the French Roussillon, from Tarragona to the French Port Vendres.
The Catalan of Spain is an outsider within the gates. Ere Spain stratified her chaos into locked unity, Catalonia was free to be exploited by the hardier will of Aragon. But as Aragon was set within the grip of Isabel of Castile, Catalonia became an irrepressible motion—needing to be repressed. Its flow of energy in an immobileState meant anarchy: its lyrism was discord within Spain whose counterpoint of themes summed into silence. Spain achieved her union. Madrid on the roof of Castile became the symbol of union: Barcelona, at the half open gate which led to Italy and France, to Greece and Africa, became the symbol of disruption.
Castile tried to woo this province, as it wooed Valencia, Galicia, Extremadura, Andalusia. But the Catalan blood could not respond to the immobile ecstasy of Castile: nor could the winds and the songs which blew in at the door of Barcelona be shut out. The Catalan remained light, moving, gay. When the unity of Spain was strong, the Catalan was a tonic discord. Now that Spain’s unity is flaccid, the Catalan is a menace.
But if Barcelona is not Spain, neither is it France. The Catalan is a unique organic compound of the Mediterranean, of the Mountain and of Spain. His cathedral is set in a town that beats with a rich fervor. TheRamblas—wide, gay avenues—descend to the sea and the town faces with them from the wooded hills. It is an old ripe city: a labyrinth of streets that are fresh with the salt, dark with the feudal yoke, yet glamorously flowing as if in cognizance of the genius of this people to outlast all yokes. This is no strong race, as the Aragonese or even the Basques are strong. It is a subtle and a gracious people. Its secret of survival is manifest in the women: delicate daughters of Eve, perhaps the fairest of all Europe, hued like April orchards, and with eyes like twilight. They have the permanence not of the eternal, but of the evanescent which returns. The flower that was Greece has been cast here upon a coast of Spain and has grown afresh. This life does not resist: it returns. France mastered the Catalans: and they returned. Aragon used them ruthlessly in war: they returned. Castile stifles and racks them: they are returning. For they are like the Spring, the evanescent Spring—which returns....
Their rising song begins to be heard over the shut land.It is not heroic song: it is after all the assertion of a race of traders. It is not thunderous. What thunders is the Castilian silence. And the heroic is the Spanish sleep. And the enduring is the Spanish drama of which the Catalans, even in their apartness, must be part. Spain has a dawning will to break from the unity which its will created: her atoms, anarchic but pregnant, stir to be loosed and to begin again. Despite its denial, Catalonia shares in this unborn Spain. Once the resistance of the Catalans helped to rouse Aragon and Castile with greater energy and clearer mind: helped to create Spain. Now this same resistance of the Catalans, even if it disrupts, may serve to create Spain again.
In the north where the Cantabrian ranges and the Pyrenees rim the Bay of Biscay, lives a peculiar people. Even its land is different from Spain’s. The air is temperate, moist. Mountains are clad in forest. Fields of high grass bring honeyed redolence. The green plateaux come down above the sea, like masses of the Alps brought to the Spanish coast. These lands, so like Europe, so unlike Spain, are studded with stone towns. Houses are gabled, narrow streets are cobbled: there is a note of canniness and of seclusion in the towns of the Basque.
When the Romans made a province of Iberia, the Basque lived unconcerned. When the Moslem swept north, the Basque withdrew into the mountains and withstood him. When the Visigoth came through the passes of the Pyrenees, the Basque stood aside and let him go. When Catholic Roland with the troops of Charlemagne followed the Visigoth, it was the Basque not the “Saracen,” who beat them at Roncesvalles. When, finally, the kings of Castile, having cleared Spain of Moor and Jew, turned to subdue the Basque, he submitted only as a vassal bowing the head to a more powerful alien. By decree, Fernando VI ennobled all the Basques in the Province of Vizcaya: already in 1200, the entire population of the Province of Guipúzcoa had been declared hidalgos.
An indelible, an archaic people! They seem to be a race in an archaic fashion: a raceby blood! Spaniards, Chinese, Frenchmen, Jews are a raceby culture. But the Basques appear to have had no culture. Their language was unwritten. They possessed no history, no social records, no underlying base of ethic, or religion. If they possessed a culture, it was almost biologic. It persisted in blood, in instinct, rather than in concept. A certain haleness of self-sufficiency, a certain gusto for aloofness keptthem intact and unique in a land which for three thousand years boiled with invasion.
In their survival they became neither tragic nor heroic. Naught could be farther from the Basque than such other peculiar peoples as the Armenian or Jew. The Basques had no separate Book, no separate God. Very early, they accepted Christ. He did not make them merge with their Catholic neighbors, because their instincts were differently attuned. Spain is a world of Tragedy, of mystic ideals, of devotion to unseen spirits. The Basque is concrete, light, canny. The Spaniard faces all that he encounters: this confrontation is the genius of Tragedy. But the Basqueevades: and this evasion is the genius of Comedy.
Who the Basques were is not clear: doubtless early dwellers in the Peninsula—part of the peoples whom the Phœnicians found when they first skirted Spain. Their music suggests kinship with the Celt; but this may well be due to the neighborhood of the Celts who named the Spanish province of Galicia. Their music as well suggests kinship with the Berbers—the Rifians of Morocco. Their language is inscrutably alone: it bears no relation with any of the tongues of Babel. But whoever they were they remain. Their blood in the small towns is little mixed; and their heads unmixed also. While through the ages, Spain drank a torrent of Ideas—Greek, Roman, Moslem, Christian, Jew—and bent to the tragic fusing of Africa, Asia, Europe, America into a single Spain, the Basque quite simply kept on being himself.
His virtues, like those of his mountains, are conservatism and power of non-absorption. The Basque language paints this well. It contains no word forGod, no word forspirit. This is a people rooted to the earth and which kept to its pastures and farmyards.[27]Not alone had theBasque mind not reached metaphysics and religion when his tongue was formed: even common concepts were beyond it. There is a Basque word for dog, pig, cow, lizard: there is none foranimal. There is a Basque word for oak, pine, chestnut: there is none fortree. A most excellently defended, anti-platonic people! Their mountains and their mountain-courage warded them free of many floods of races. And their heads kept them clear of metaphysics. Concepts of God, time, substance are drains upon the business of life. For the interims of business, there is the singing of songs, there is the gathering in eights to dance the blandaurrescu.
The towns of the Basques express them. The little Guipúzcoan village lies between the mountains and the sea. The mountains slope into a level field with cattle and kine growing fat in the lush grasses. The field rolls to a precipitous edge of rock which falls a thousand feet into the Bay of Biscay. The beach is a conch with sand as smooth and white as the heart of a sea-shell. Through the town, a road girding the villages runs on the seawall. On the one side of the road, the Bay of Biscay—blue as a bluebell: on the other, the precipice with stone-hewn steps that lead to an Alpine verdance of pasture and of dingle.
The streets of the town are massive. The houses look as if builded for siege. But they are not forbidding: they are too sure of themselves. They are smiling even; though they are dense and strong. Through the narrow streets moves a mellow race in gesture of traffic and trade. Like the houses, these men and women face the world in sober colors. But their eyes are large, and here one reads peace: the lips have the fret of a smile, and there is laughter tingling the cadence of their talk. At night they gather in the Plaza, lined with cafés: and while the old ones drink, the young ones dance. Their dance is a pleasant casual exercise—not far from the usual way of walk and word. It is a hopping and bobbing of couples, a weaving of bodily life and bodily sense intothe already existent pattern of their social ease. That is why they dance in the public Square, while the old ones gossip....
Every Sunday morning, as the sun tips over the town, three men—one with a drum, two withdulsínyaorchistu(a shrill metallic pipe which bears much resemblance to the pipe of the African Berber)—march through the silent streets, through every street and alley of the town, incessantly playing: so that no Vasco, good or bad, shall oversleep the Mass. This music trills through the morning like the cool sun-filaments through dawn. It has the dogged filigree of a Scottish bagpipe. It is more resolved, however, shriller, less fluid: and its notations are wider. The tune of thechistuinterweaves with the plang of drum, and makes the houses smile and dance a bit ere they are quite awake.
. . . . . .
The dance, the smile, the song are never absent. Afternoons, when work is done in shop or field, the girls will sing till the late hour ofcena. Rosa is not pretty. Her face is a little long and has a tilt which is not of Europe. The nose droops, the mouth is large, the eyes are resilient and black under the strangely curving brow. But Rosa is charming. A white kerchief lies on her shoulders, pointed to the throat. The naked arms are bright against the marron velvet of the bodice; the breasts are caught by a diagonal sash something like the straps of a grenadier. Rosa’s hips are wide; her legs, stockinged in gray wool, have a full firmness—like her breasts—that bespeaks valiance in emotion.
The room is cool and bare: through the high windows comes the mellow murmur of the folk walking the rigid street, between the sea and the mountain. The girls are a warm fragrance in the room. They sing. The songs warm them: they dance. Their heads sway, their throats pulse, their arms rise and fall.
These songs are older than the tambour and the pipe: the girls sing them without accompaniment. Many havesad themes. But even as tragedy invades the brightestfadoof Portugal, so here a tripping flexible gait overbears the pathos. The music bespeaks a clever, winning people. It has mobility, but it is not plastic. It has the nature of sun splintered on cloud or running upon water, of the patter of rain on house-tops, of waves pelting the hull of a sail-boat. It is a music of light, of surface-patterns of light. On all the earth, there is no music stranger to that of Spain—to the plastic, sculptural, soul-deep song of Spain.
It is good music: its mobile patterns are abstracted into grace and hardness: its swiftness never blurs, its poignance does not become sentimental. It is not deep music. It remains of the periphery, and its moods are varieties of reflection, rather than of creation. The Basque remainsone. What varies is the circumstance of life; so he wards it off, he holds it well outside him. Through a hundred ages, Spain has moved in a processional whose faiths and passions the Spaniard has absorbed. But the Basque shuts out. So his song—trilling, skipping, flashing in color and light—is a music of intimations, rather than of experience.
Was this pagan people first enticed to become Catholic, because of the occasions offered by a Calendar of Saints for singing and for dancing? Every church festival is afiesta, aromeríafor the Basque. The fiesta of San Iñigo de Loyola is one of the great days of the land, for Iñigo Lopez de Recalde, founder of the Society of Jesus, was a Basque. The day of the author of the ruthless Exercises, of the chronicler of Hell, becomes a day of merriment: foot races, water races, trials of strength lead up to the climax—the contests in the arts of song and dance. The Spaniard is no sportsman. His bull fight is an ordeal and an art. His games are pretexts for gambling. His Carnival is a means of fierce release for the instincts repressed by morality, caste and honor. But the Basque is a sportsman. He is incapable of the true carnival spirit. He turns his feast-days into sport-days.
An altar has been decked out on the façade of a housein the Plaza. Under a bower of gilt, the priest harangues invascuence.[28]His theme is the curse of Modernism and Socialism, the hellish lust which hides in the laborer’s appetite for better wages. (The Basques are the industrialists of Spain: the ore and factories of Bilbao are not far off.) On one side of the Square is the summer palace of an Andalusian Duke. His balconies are hung with great mantones; gorgeous splotches of gold and green and crimson in the sun. The altar faces an esplanade which steps down to the sea. But the Basque throng is aloof from the priest in his garish altar, from the flash of Spain on the walls of the Duke’s palace, aloof even from the sea. It is a packed, resilient body. It is waiting to play. Its mood is very like the mood of a sporting crowd in England. Here is none of the hot dark fervor which Spain brings even to the bull fight.
The races are over, and the last Mass. The crowds circle the platform for the dance contest. There is a piper and a drummer. The cadences of thechistuare thin and cool. The drummer weaves a tattoo that becomes the matted background for the imponderous figures of the pipe. When the dancer and piper cease, the drum goes on in an incantation which is moving precisely because it is so unemphatic, so subhumanly cool, so pale. It reminds one, indeed, of the nixies of the Celt, the blond green creatures of the northern marshes. It seems as far from Spain as are the braes of Scotland. The designs of the dance are brief. Here is grace in line and point: daintiness; above all spiritual aloofness. In the pauses of dance and music, ever unceasing the weave of the drum. The elves also of the Atlas are around the corner: but Spain is miles away.
Agura,contrapas,anarxuma,zaspi,trititzka,soka,aguruku,taladera—numberless Basque dance-figures. What distinguishes them is that they are all social: that they are stylized from details of the common life. The dance of Andalusia is a plastic form for the soul. These dancesare scenes of bodily acts. Their stuff is not spirit, nor essence of emotion. It is a synthesis of homely gestures taken from farm or field. Here is anapple dance, an intricate elaboration of the bestowal of apples. Here is achair dance, a design of men and women in easy social converse. TheSiete Saltosis a stylization of the walk—of men walking together. The music is major; the dance is comedic. Indeed, it holds the trait of social comedy which in France produced Molière. But also, it has a purity of abstract line which recalls the classic dance of the Pueblo Indians or of the Pacific Negroes. With, again, a difference of tone and subject: the dances of the “savage” are elemental, they call rain, they invoke harvest, they enact sexual passion.
In another part of town there is a match ofpelota. This game is originally Basque; its pure form of sport lives still in the Basque village where boys play on a dirt court against a plaster wall, or against the wall of the church if the hamlet is very modest. The Spaniards, however, have taken to pelota. It has become a game for professionals; and although all the crack players are Basque, the spirit of the sport has been transformed. It is played in thefrontón: a court, three sides of which are high walls of cement. The fourth side (the long one, to the right of the players who all face one way) is for the public whose tiers of seats are placed in a sort of open building. A pair of players make a team, and two teams make a match. To the right hand of each athlete is strapped a thin short wooden bat calledpala, or else, in a variant of the game, a basket, known ascesta, orremonte, shaped a little like the curved beak of some bird, scooped and long and narrow. The principle of pelota is like our handball which may indeed be a derivation. But the Basque game with its great distance of service and return, its complexity of movement due to the use of three walls for the rebounds of the fast ball, achieves an extraordinary brilliance. Volleys last for minutes: the ball flashes back and forth from the front wall to the sideand rear ones. There is something of the delicacy of billiards, the grace of tennis: and there is a spill of sheer physical prowess which tennis does not approach. It is a beautiful game: the game of a sane, healthily outward people. But in the hands of the Spaniard, all this becomes minor.
Between the public and the court is a railing which until the game starts is empty. With the first volley, however, a large group of men in redboinasline up here, facing the public, with their backs to the players. They are thecobradores, the bookies: the true principals in what Spain has made of pelota. With the first service, they gather their first odds and cry their bets. And until the last of the game, the shifting of odds, the placing of bets continue: the players themselves serving as a mere pretext for the gambling, like thepetits chevauxof wood at a gaming table.[29]