Young Isabel, sister of the king, sits in her castle tower at Medina, and looks beyond Castile: looks south to the Moorish realm, Granada; looks east and north to the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre; looks west to Portugal. “Let there be Spain,” says Isabel of Castile.
Her own land is riven in chaos. Ferdinand the Saint who won Córdoba and Seville from the Moslem was a strong monarch. But Alfonso the Learnèd was not wise in ruling. There have been two hundred years of banditry, of baronial insolence, of royal wavering. Castile is a quicksand upon which no will can march. Only the penniless submit to taxes. Nobles are outlaws. Rome parcels out appointments in the Church to alien lackeys. Prelates of Spain go their own way with their own crimson armies, or sulk in arrogant safety in their fortress-churches. Tolerance has begotten anarchy. Ideas annul each other in the too free sun. And God, with many faces, turns against Himself.
Isabel, looking from the bastioned windows of her tower out upon Castile is a luminous quiet heart in the storm. King Henry, the Impotent, is fertile of disaster. His favorites juggle with the scepter, scribble upon the royal parchment commands of idleness and of ambition. One of his favorites, Beltrán, has begotten on the Queen a daughter: and Joanna’s growth is the growth of fresh dynastic war. Alfonso, the king’s brother, claims the throne and writes his claim on the sparse wheatfields of Castile, making them desert. Portugal pushes: France plots and watches. Each fortune has its army. Each church is a castle. Each mountain is either an ambush or a throne. “Let there be Spain,” says Isabel of Castile.
She will be queen: but in her own way. And her way,like her will, is her rapt possession by the spirit of her land. Her brother, Alfonso, has died: his faction demand of her that she assume the Crown and drive out the impotent king. Isabel refuses. She bargains with Henry. While he lives, he is to rule. But his pseudo-daughter shall renounce: his adulterous wife shall return to Portugal: Isabel shall be acknowledged heiress of Castile. Henry gives his word, and breaks it. He is neither friend nor foe. He is a symbol of Spain’s brackish chaos. Isabel holds to her castle. She is almost penniless; but she has for confessor a couched eagle, Cisneros, who is to second her mysterious work. Isabel learns that her brother the king plots to imprison her for the sake of Joanna whom the heir of Portugal has married. Isabel summons Ferdinand, heir to Aragon, to come and wed her. She is thinking of Spain; and her articulate will has convinced the old King Juan of Aragon, Ferdinand’s father, that she is going to win—and that the union is good.
Disguised and penniless, Ferdinand crosses the hostile land and reaches the princess in Valladolid. He is seventeen: a lissom, romantic knight, the impact of whose bloods—Latin, Goth and Jew—has kindled a swift fire in his face. He sees this girl, tall and stately and one year his elder: her ruddy hair is a braided glow about her brow, the great blue eyes are a sky for the large rigor of her features. He enters the mansion of her love, to dwell forever within the sway of her will. For her will is Spain. He is brilliant, sharp, ubiquitous: but her will has place for him. Let him move from Italy to Peru: he will yet be within the will of Isabel.
The married boy and girl are fettered by penury in Castile; and like a breath to move them wait the death of Henry. He dies when Isabel is twenty-three. Portugal marches eastward for Joanna. His great army is a shadow in León. Isabel’s faction dwindles. Ferdinand, wise consort, proposes peace with Portugal at the price of Zamora and other bastions of the west. Isabel refuses. She is pregnant. She makes long night journeys on horse, to herrecalcitrant towns. She pleads before rough communes and proudricos hombres. She spends her woman’s strength—she and Spain will suffer for it—but she does not entail her still shadowy queen’s power. She makes recruits. She has a good field general in her husband. Portugal loses heart before this hearty mother of unborn Spain. The stubborn towns of Castile rally to her. In 1479 Juan of Aragon dies: Ferdinand becomes king: Castile and Aragon at last are wedded with their monarchs.
“Let there be Spain,” is the rhythm of Isabel’s thought.
“We have not yet won Castile,” she tells her husband on the march to the long, last war for the conquest of Granada.
From ages of invasion and dissent, Spain has become this throbbing swarm of aroused centrifugal impulse. Ideas, races, communities, men: a boiling tumult to be summed and stilled. Spain longs for peace: Spain longs to become Spain. From her multiverse of wills, she has willed a symbol: this person, fair and strong. She has willed Isabel who is the flesh of Spain’s will.
Isabel is one possessed. Her vision, thought and sense move in one cycle. To her, physical love is not this tenderness between herself and her man: it is a joining of Aragon and Castile. To her, physical fecundity is not her woman’s flower: it is the providing by a queen of counters for dynastic matches.
But she is deliberate and wise. She has more than her will and the weapon of her body. She has ideas for weapons. The modern State functioning under an almighty monarch, the medieval Church with its source in Rome and Christ, and for her people Justice: this is the triune tool whereby to weld the anarchies of Spain into her Spain at last.
Strabo already wrote of the separatism of Spain: Rome suffered here as nowhere else to unify her conquest. Spain lacked a nervous system and a base: she had to be subdued bit by bit—and so held. Since the Romans, twelve hundred years have stratified the chaos. Each newstrain of blood, each fresh disposal of culture and of faith has become a claimant. The Spaniard bears in his nerves the variance of a past—all anarchy of dissent and self-assertion.
The Catholic Kings sit weekly in open court and dispense justice. The nobles are leveled down: the commoners are lifted. Finance is once more farmed from plenty, not extorted from indigence. Rome is compelled to relinquish to the Kings the right of nomination to high office. In all of this, the monarchs meet Spain’s intricate problem with the conventional measures—those which are unifying France and Britain.
In Spain, this is mere prelude. Spain’s chaos is more organic, and is unique in Europe. Isabel follows the logic of her weapons. What disrupts Spain is not banditry, not the insolence of nobles: but Spain’s free life of inimical ideas. All else is consequence, not cause. To the south is a whole kingdom of the Moors. Everywhere live Mussulmans and Jews. More insidious still, there are the converted Jews—los conversos—who under cover of acquiescence spread the poison of their immemorial discord. When France was truly Catholic with Saint Louis for king, her Dominican friars backed by Pope Gregory set up an Inquisitional Tribunal. France showed her mettle against the Albigenses. Isabel has even a closer precedent to hand: Aragon defended herself against the heretics in 1242; and six centuries before, the Visigoths made protective laws against the Jews—the accursed Jews who freed themselves from oppression by letting in the Arabs! They are the same Jews still: few in number, but with the strength of ferment. They turn Christian: they achieve power and wealth: they marry with the nobles: they become princes of the Church. And their anti-national nature, their passion for free thought and independent action rot the weak royal fabric. Isabel applies for a Papal Bull: the Inquisition is set up, not against open Jews and Moors, but against the subtle and treacherousconversos.
Granada, decomposed under the affluent Moors, falls to the Catholic Kings. The Inquisition, captained by Torquemada, sends thousands of souls upon their way to Heaven and fills Spain with the anguish of torn bodies. Her roads are safe, her nobles and churchmen buckle under; the last Moorish prince has crossed the Strait to the Moghreb. And yet Spain is not One. Spain must become a Being, rapt and single, serving Christ and conquering for Christ. She who is the symbol of Spain’s will strives to make her land in her own image. Spain, like her, must become chaste and absolute: a Catholic people as she is a Catholic woman.
The Jews are offered a merciful alternative: to be Catholic or to quit the land. Isabel argues that theconversoswill lose their secret virulence if they have no nourishment from open Jewish neighbors. In 1492 a goodly fraction of the Jews of Spain “exchanging a House for an ass, a Vineyard for a coat,” leave the cities where they have lived for ages. Ten years later, the Moors of the conquered kingdom of Granada, meet the same fate. Again, a host of intellectuals, artists, tradesfolk is bled away. The peasants do not stir: they become Catholic with the same inert response which had made them Moslem seven centuries before, or Arian under the Visigoths, or pagan under Rome.
Isabel looks at her work—and nods—and is not satisfied.
She says: “We do unto the body of our beloved land as Christ did unto the possessed: we have cast out devils. But this is not enough. True disciple of our Lord, Spain must take up her burden and go forth: must forsake comfort and family and the long-sued peace: must bring His Word to all that dwell on earth. Spain is Christ’s true apostle. France turns away in trickery and ambition. Henri IV, Louis XI—how far they are from Saint Louis! Italy is helpless. Spain is the well-beloved: Spain is Israel, and Rome’s right hand. Let my king, Ferdinand, go with his hardened troops to Sicily and Naples.
“But even this suffices not. The Apostles did not stayamong the Jews: they went out to the Gentile. There is more than Europe. Can this strange religious mariner, Cristobal Colón, be right?”
Isabel ponders what she has heard of Columbus. He is the author of a book ofProphecías. He has found and plotted in the Old Testament his rationale for a westward route to the Indies. God perhaps wrote down in Isaiah, not alone Christ and the Word of Christ in Europe, but Spain and how Spain shall bring the Word to the East. Columbus a prophet? (He says there is gold in the Indies. Spain needs gold, for her crusade.) He is the friend of holy men in Spain: the Dominicans bespeak him and his cause. He has been rejected by Juan II of Portugal, by Henry VII of England, by Anne of Beaujeu, Regent queen of France.
“Let Colón go westward to the heathen east,” the Catholic Kings ordain. “Let him carry the Christian word to the heathen, and bring back gold to carry the Word farther.”
Isabel’s will is religious. She is a woman incarnate of an idea: passionately eager to make all her realm, all the world flesh of her purpose. This means that her design must be practicable, also. Kingship is acceptance of the immanence of God. Isabel thinks she understands, looking over the turmoiled centuries of Spain: those of the Reconquest from Moor and Arab. She knows that themindof these shifting wars was of this world and for the spoils of the earth. She knows that the Cid at times fought Christian, and that Saint Ferdinand could not have won Seville without the aid of the Moslems of Granada. God used mundane weapons for His purpose. No archangel did He send to drive Târik and Al-Mansor from Santiago, but mercenary treacherous knights who knew of the Infidel that he had gold, rather than that he spat upon the Cross. And unto this day, the Moor is respected in Castile! He is learnèd, liberal: he has fought well and lived well. Isabel accepts the strange ways of her Lord. She, too, must use mundane weapons. Ferdinand is ambitious: let his lust be a weapon. He is sharp, swift, hard like Toledo steel: no king of France can outwit him, no Italian cardinal withstand him. Isabel cherishes the good tool. A more conscious tool is Columbus. His ships have blundered on a new rich continent. His fortune has foundered: he is in chains—as were the older prophets. But the wealth is Spain’s! His mariners are bullies—worldly tools of the Lord: yet even by them the Indian can be saved. Even by them and their greed, Rome can bring grace to the Indies. Isabel accepts the immanence of God, in the lusts of her servants.
She is a tall, fair woman. In the camp, in the castles that raise her constant journeys across Spain—Córdoba, Valladolid, Medina, Burgos—she lives the frugal life of the campaigner. She has paid for her forced night rides: the heaviest price, perhaps, is the feebleness of her children, none of whom survives to inherit or give an heir to Spain, save the mad second daughter, mother of Carlos the Great. The queen’s splendors are reserved for display that shall bespeak her greatness to the world. When she enters Avila or Seville, it is upon a tide of gold and rubies. But when the doors shut upon her castle and the drawbridge rises, when she is alone with her family or her confessor, the jewels and the cloth of gold are gone: a woman, resolute and stark like the Castilian mountains, looks within herself for God’s next message.
She is the spirit of Spain. Her husband, often unruly, often rebellious, is muscle, skill, craft—he is not the spirit of Spain. Her spiritual father, Ximenez de Cisneros, whom she chose for confessor because he had no respect for a queen, and whom she exalted to be Primate of Toledo because he abhorred all greatness—he is the nude projection of her conscience upon the widening splendor of her realm. Beneath the sumptuous robes of Cisneros is a shirt of hair. Deep in his vast castle is a cell, a bare and bedless floor on which the Primate sleeps after the penitential rope each night has lashed into his flesh the words of Christ. He is a formula of her immaculatewill: but he is not the spirit of Spain. His fanatical asceticism is too simple. Spain, like Isabel, is turbulent and complex.
What pouring of flesh and spirit upon Spain, since the Phœnician, the Berber and the Celt first made the Iberian fecund! A subtle chaos. For Spain is a diapason of hostile forces, needing each other to survive: the embattled parts have long since found their balance, and each is in love with itself.
Isabel works like an artist. She has her vision. Her instinct and experience evolve for it a form and for herself a method. She takes her material ruthlessly and transfigures it with a cold passion. But for a deeper reason, Isabel is an artist. This design which is her vision and her will and to which she conforms her world is her world’s will and vision. The creative circle is closed. For he alone is the true artist whose personal will is the will of his land and of God: only in this marriage of wills can there be true creation. Isabel makes Spain over into the image of Spain.
Behold the saintly, the murderous woman! She is the face of irony, and her smile is tragic. With what tender hand she sets up the Inquisition: “Unity in Christ, enforced by the power of the modern State.” With what warm eyes, she bids her marauding mariners godspeed: “America brings recruits for Christ—and gold for the winning and holding of more recruits.” How fondly she gives her insane child, Joanna, in marriage to the heir of Hapsburg; how resolutely furthers her husband’s ambitions in the east. Spain, kingdom of God, surely cannot embrace America and neglect Europe? Infidel Africa, false France must be surrounded and crushed—“Austria, Artois, Netherland, Africa, America,” she counts the organs of her embodied Christ.
And the heart of the Body, Spain herself, with Portugal long since joined by blood alliance: it must be pure and solid like the heart of the Queen. This is the kernel of her work. Isabel looks back upon her life and findsagain her measure and her method. She will create a race of Spaniards whose every unit, man and woman, in intimate thought shall strike a single note: so that this note, myriad-repeated, fill the world. Spain, mother and child of chaos, shall become the archetype of unison on earth.
Isabel is ruthless, she is unafraid: she is certain. Such feeble virtues as tolerance, freedom, joy of life—Spain was celebrated for them beyond all Europe—must be given up. Shall Isabel spare her land, when she has not spared herself?
She was young and tender. She has known what it is to lie in a man’s arms. She has been a mother. She has sacrificed love to become a captain. She has lost her children, unborn or born, because of her forced marches in the saddle. She has mortified not alone her lusts and vanities, but her gentleness and sweetness, to become this Weapon of the Lord.
Let Spain do as much. Let there be laws against the wearing of gold braid: against display of luxuriance and ease. Let there be laws against the idleness of doubt, against the vice of willful search of truth. (Rome has the truth!) Let there be laws against any wavering whatsoever from the pure unity of Spain. And what element offends against this white simplicity, let it be cut away—though the land bleed.
Above all let there be no peace. Isabel’s art reaches its ironic climax. Spain’s hunger for unity was the hunger for peace. Disunion and multiplicity had made perpetual war. Now unity was achieved, the Spanish rhythm—which was war—went on. The new ideal nourished the old mode. Spain is the apostle of Christ. Spain has become a state to establish Christ on earth. Let Spain not rest. Christ brings not peace, but a sword.
. . . . . .
The vision, a theodicy: the form, the Church of Rome: the dynamic means, a State. In the impossible marriage of these three elements lies the tragedy of Spain.
For seven centuries Christians have fought Moslems.Their motive was conquest of power. But their pretext became the Cross. The opposing Crescent determined this. The Cross grew, because of the faith of the Moor. Very early the Christians found it well in their raids against the Mussulman, to enlist the Presence of the Church. The priest became an auxiliary soldier: he brought the poetry and spirit of a religious slogan to enhance the fleeting motive of the Raid. And now at last the slogan has come true! Saint Ferdinand took Seville because he wanted more land. But Isabel sends ships to the Indies because she wants more Christians. A millennium of brutish restlessness has mothered this religious restlessness of Spain which would embroil the world till all the world be Christian. Ages after the Crusades of France and England, ages after the decadence of the Arab, the troops of Isabel become crusaders.
A modern State with a medieval God. In France and England, the medieval God has already vaporized away. England breaks literally with Rome. France dissolves her bonds into mere gesture.The modern State must have no God but itself.It must create its own pragmatic, its ethic, its metaphysic, finally its religion upon the unitary plan of its own health and progress. France knows this: henceforth the State of France will act unhindered by any ideal external to its future. And England knows this. Two mighty States move forward with a unity of program and of control born of the need of the State.
But in Spain, the State is not cause and effect, not ideal and goal, not master and dispenser. In Spain, the State shall be the tool of a Vision hostile to the State’s essential nature.
The State must be materialistic, possessive, selfish. Spain’s ideal is visionary, creative, altruistic. The State must steal and hold. Spain’s ideal spends. The State murders to enhance itself. Spain’s ideal murders to enhance Christ. The State is anti-individual. Spain’s ideal makes and controls by law the yearning of each soul.
Isabel is an artist: she has the logic and the integrityof the artist. But in the form of her work live elements that disrupt and that belie each other. She makes of Spain a modern State: she sends this monster, lustful, treacherous and dull, upon a Christian errand....
a.Irony and Honorb.The Mysticc.The Jesuitd.The Juriste.The Roguef.Velazquez
a.Irony and Honorb.The Mysticc.The Jesuitd.The Juriste.The Roguef.Velazquez
a.Irony and Honorb.The Mysticc.The Jesuitd.The Juriste.The Roguef.Velazquez
TheCatholic Kings have builded ruthlessly: absolutism, the grace of Christ, intolerance, universal justice, arms and prayer were to make Spain one. Now each of these qualities takes form and grows personified in Spain. Each is imbued with Spain’s imperious will to be whole and one: each grows great with this spirit: each wars upon them all. Spain was chaotic and diverse. Her will to be one serries her into antitheses. Her will to union breaks her into extremes. Irony works on Isabel’s fair fabric.
Perhaps the land itself is symbol of the process. Spain is desert—and garden; flat plain—and mountain; great heat—and winter. Spain is Europe—and Africa. In her events, she reveals this first ironic state of fusion—the splitting up into opposites of action. Columbus, mystic captain who charted his voyage in the Prophets, becomes enchained in the lust of avarice. His men, sent to Christianize the Indies, enslave the courteous American and sack his cities. Spain’s past transforms! The Cid, that playful knight, becomes crusader. Saints turn knight-errant. Moderate Stoics (like Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius whose father was a Spaniard) inspire the ascetic fury of the hermits. And the humane Arcipreste de Hita, Castile’s first poet, is turned into an apologist for license.
In her pageant of extremes, Spain’s Middle Class is crowded out. The land has warriors—and beggars; nobles and rascals: saints and scoundrels. Charity is practiced with the sword and the mystic walks with the thief. Santa Teresa answers La Celestina. Don Quixote sallies forth with Sancho Panza.
One spirit moves them all. They have each the same whole pride in Spain, the same faith in her destiny, thesame mind that Spain is their inheritance. The Spanish mystic is no aloof and transcendental man: he works for Spain. The Spanish rascal is no shallow rascal: he has the almost metaphysical conviction that Spain must feed him. And every Spaniard, from prostitute to saint, from king to beggar, moves within a sense which reveals this terrible will tosocial unity: the sense of Honor.
. . . . . .
The Spanish sense of Honor is the need of Spain to resist the social chaos of her land. The member of an integrated world completes it with self-approval. Self-approval the Spaniard does not need. He was a person, long before he had a nation. The Spaniard knew what was right, what was true. His need was to make others know as he did: for in this social conformity, he would feel himself at last the member of a group. Thepundonorwas the point of contact whereby he graphed, not his place in Heaven, but his place in the world. The stress was upon others. And this was the trait of a land in which individual unity was achieved; in which rights of personality needed no insistence; but in which social unity was lacking and was longed for.[17]
This need was so intense that it inspired a literature and informed a religion. Æsthetic worlds were built upon this impulse and it infused the writings of mystics as well as the histories of rascals. Spain in her great Age—a pattern of sharp-limned individuals—was symphonized in the key of Honor.
The mystics of Catholic Spain who in act and word gave utterance to the will of Isabel rose from a high tradition in the land. They were indeed the fulfillment ... as was the Queen ... of a religious vision older than Spain herself. When Salamon B. Judah Ibn Gabírol was born in Málaga in 1021, there was not yet Spain. Gabírol looked about him at this land in which three continents and three religions were embroiled. And he said:
“Thy Glory is not diminished because of them that worship aught beside Thee. For the intention of them all is to attain Thee. But they are as the blind: they set their faces toward the way of the King; and they wander out of the way.”
“Thy Glory is not diminished because of them that worship aught beside Thee. For the intention of them all is to attain Thee. But they are as the blind: they set their faces toward the way of the King; and they wander out of the way.”
Gabírol the Jew wrote hymns which were included in the Sephardic ritual. But the book which sets forth his vision of God and life reveals no specific creed: it was too universalistic for the Jews who neglected his philosophy and soon lost even the Arabic manuscript of his work. Two centuries later, theMakor Hayimreappears in the Latin versionFons Vitæ: Aquinas combats its intuitionalism, Duns Scotus leans on it. The Arabs Ibn Sina and Ibn Roshd were naturalized in Europe as Avicenna and Averroës: now Ibn Gabírol, stripped of his race and sect, becomes Avicebron: one of the sources of platonic faith in modern thought. But it is an error to confound Gabírol with the followers of Plotinus who supplied the principal attack upon those fossils of modern rationalism, Maimonides and Aquinas. There is an element in Gabírol which the true neo-platonist lacks: an element both Semitic and of Spain. It is the element of Will,immanent and purposeful, in his conception of divinity. Life to Gabírol is no mere fated emanation of the Godhead as to the true North African and Hindu mystic: nor is it an unreal envelope about truth, as to the followers of Plato. Life is the form of God in matter: the willful imprint of divinity on earth. This concept gives to the rapt activity of the mystics who embrace it an earthward, a practical direction. If the world is pattern of God’s will, the highest human spirit cannot in the highest vision transcend the earth or grow detached from it: he must work in earth and through earthly deed enact God’s revelation.
Gabírol, first of Spain’s literary mystics, founds this tradition which at the end is to produce in Spain a lineage of mystics who are men of action: a lineage far removed indeed from the commoner progeny of mystics who, as they approach God, leave the terrestrial life. The early Moslem thinkers outdid even their Jewish partners in the great Courts of Córdoba and other Andalusian towns, by this tendency of their doctrines. But their universalism became materialistic. Stressing the monism of nature, they lost sight of God as theinformer: the Prophet Mohammed shrank to a sort of intellectual agent of the will, what the Spaniards calledintendimiento agente, a power more physical than of the spirit. There were exceptions. Avempace, the Moslem platonist, for instance, who was born in Guadix a little later than Gabírol. And his disciple, Tofaíl, whose novelHai-ben-Jochdamis a spiritualRobinson Crusoe, an extraordinary proof of the immanence of God. Hai, an infant, is abandoned on a desert island. A doe nurses him. The bare demands of material survival sharpen his reason: and from the purity of intellectual understanding he achieves religious revelation. His body has evoked reason, and reason evokes God. Now, at the end of his days, an aged saint comes to the island. He has reached by simple faith the same religious certitude as Hai by the exercise of mind. The circle is rounded. God is the end of all ways, and is the wayof all thoughts. But the rational monism of the Moslems was not protected, like that of the Jews from a sheer materialism which made many thinkers at the Court of Abd-er-Rahman contemporaries at once of Democritus and Haeckel. The immediate plateau from which arose in Spain the Catholic mystic heights was Jewish.
For many ages, the Spanish Catholics[18]contribute little to the medieval Scripture whose prophets were men like Abelard, Albertus and Aquinas. The long line of Spanish Jewish worthies droops: while in the north the subtly variant seed of Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus flowers at last into the twin rebellion of Protestantism and of rationalism. It is with the age of Calvin, of Francis Bacon, of Erasmus, that Catholic Spain finds voice at last: and in a way which is an act. By means of this late flowering in the south, modern Europe is a natural issue from the womb of the medieval Church. Rome is saved until the seed of Rome’s successorship is planted: international law is founded: America is discovered and is peopled.
The tradition of such men as Gabírol and Tofaíl seemed dead, when it spoke suddenly afresh in the work of a Spanish Jew. And of this man’s influence, Menendez y Pelayo says in his classic work on the Ideas of Spain: “All the Catholic mystics, from the Dominican Fray Luis de Granada to the Jesuit Nieremberg accepted the æsthetic of Leon Hebreo integrally, knowingly.”
His true name was Judah Leo Abravanel and with his father, a statesman and a thinker, he left Spain in the exodus of 1492. He was a young man when he settled in Italy, and it is very possible that hisDialogues of Lovewere originally written in Italian.[19]The oldest text of this epoch-making work is an Italian prose full of Castilian uses.
The originality of the work of Leon Hebreo rests chiefly in the fact that here for the first time ancient and medieval thought achieves a modern form. The stuffs of theDialoguescome up from Plato, Plotinus, Crescas and the Kabbala: but the grace of the Renaissance, the humanism of Venice and of Florence are within them. Here is the doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence which Nietszche strove to incorporate in European thought. Here in germ is Spinoza’s explanation of the union of the individual with God and of the unity of substance. TheDialoguesare so universalistic that they do not refute the legend of their author’s conversion to the Christian faith: and they are so poetic that they constitute indeed a lyrical threshold to the Pantheism which Spinoza was to architect for Europe. To Crescas and Leon Hebreo comes Descartes to produce Spinoza: comes the spiritual body of the Spanish will to produce the Spanish mystics. Castilian grows to be the literal and literary word of a nation resolved to win the earth in order to establish God upon it.
Perhaps the most powerful writer among these mystics[20]was the Augustinian monk, Luis de León, whose lecture hall with its narrow wooden benches honeycombed with the knife-marks of his students, one may still see in Salamanca.The prose of Abravanel is luminous, pigmented, mobile. His dialogues remain a string of separate gems, variously valued, inorganic. The prose of Luis de León—far superior to his verse—is integral and substantial as the will of Spain. Abravanel was an uprooted speculator. León was a Spanish Catholic immersed in the business of his age. He is indeed a mystic only by reflection: a classicist at heart. His work is less parabolic, has fewer flashes than theDialogues; it is indeed less open to the sun and stars. But it is far more plastic. Spain herself moves in his sentences and knits them whole. The author is a passionate believer: so is his land, so is his Monarch: so becomes his people. There is no separation between the dreams of the close of Salamanca and the sea-bridging policy of the Castilian State. Luis de León, preaching to his students in a narrow hall within a narrow city, is linked with Italy and with America.
The process of art is the endowment of a particular experience with the full measure of life. The work of art is a fragment of word or substance informed with the wholeness of spiritual vision. The mystics of Spain were fated to make art, or to make deeds. For here theology was heir to centuries of universal vision. The mystic remains a Catholic and a churchman. The Inquisition narrows his forms of speculation. He is a part of Spain. But all Spain’s cosmic will is in him.
This will is in the great work of Luis de León:Los Nombres de Cristo. Three Augustinian monks set forth from their convent across the river from Salamanca. One of them has found a shaded grove on the río Tormes: here, shielded from the fever of the sun, they rest and exchange discourse on the names of Christ. The subject is rigidly dogmatic: the treatment of the virtue of names has the Pythagorian and Kabbalistic note which Plato and Aquinas equally would have rejected. Yet in this stifled frame, an artist quickens a magnificent world. The monks with their conventional background, the old town in flame of summer, the river panting through its fringe of trees,the athletic freedom of the mind in search, the passionate reality of God—all Spain is in this antiquated book. Her extremes of waste and verdure, her turmoil of race, her traffic and speculation, her panoply of vision—Jew, Christian, warrior, priest—converge into the substance of prose. The delirious delights of logic scaling the battlements of God, the southern arabesque whereby the abstract thought becomes design make it glamorous and moving.
León’s career was action. He was a teacher, and his words were on the quick of deed. This is why the Inquisition took note of him and subjected him to five years of imprisonment and torture. The Inquisition, for all its folly and corruption, was the coefficient of Spain’s unity. In any organism, thought and act are joined. This was true of medieval Europe: it was true of Spain alone in Europe after the modern dawn.
A younger man than Luis was Juan de Yepes whom Rome later canonized as San Juan de la Cruz. Like Luis de León, like Teresa and Loyola, Juan met with persecution not because he was a mystic and a poet; but a man of action. Haggard, fanatical, almost disembodied, this spirit had body enough to pass like a scourge of flame through the dark cities of Castile, cleansing monastic evil; and like a breath of sweetness, comforting the sick. He, too, is incarnate, in his particular phase, of Spain’s whole will. He is a saint: rapt and ascetic. His voice is the voice of spiritual vision. Yet it, as his life, is marvelously fleshed: a sort of slender fire. The peculiar plasticity of Spain is clear in Juan if one contrast his life with that of Saint Francis of Assisi, or his work with that of Porphyry and Plotinus. Grace here has a hard edge, is the handle of action. This reforming flesh fuses the sweetness of Saint Francis with the acumen of Savonarola. Juan is very close to Christ. For he is ruthless and practical. His charity like Christ’s is sharper than a sword.
John of the Cross shares thegraphicquality which Spain through her unitary will breathed into her various parts. He is abstract—plastically; he is Idea—incarnate. In nowise is he transcendent. Chained down to rot in some hostile convent cell, he is still concerned with persons and with convents. A titanic pressure—Spain—seems to have columned all the world into this lean, bright figure.
His song is like him. The simple words hold an immensity like the deep nights of Spain. Love of conquest, of gold, of glory and of power—the turbulence of Spain is not within them. Yet the essence of will and power, making this intricate turmoil, lives in his poems like a resolution of many chords in silence.
Juan’s preceptress and ally in their task of purifying convents was Teresa de Ahumada, known to religion and to letters as Santa Teresa de Jesús. Teresa’s town, Avila, stands for her: stands for the woman of Spain. The unbroken walls, the elliptical towers, the crenellated parapets and gateways, symbolize her virtue. Within, Avila is mellow and is fecund. Her walls shut her safe from the thrusting mountains of Castile. Avila is ordered, within chaos.
Santa Teresa is the mystic, as organizer: she is yet another part of the will of Isabel and Spain. The religious houses of the land are dissolute and weak. Against the hostility which her sex aroused, against the distrust of the Inquisition, Teresa moves through Spain, cleansing and creating hearths for the luminous life. The world, to her, is a household. The Master is Christ and he requires service. Her imaginative powers ... in which the Arab glamour is not wanting ... make so vivid the delights of service that the convents of Spain become as magnets, sapping the humbler households of the land. To Teresa, the soul also is a home; and her bookLas Moradasis a picture of its chambers. “As above, so below.” Christ, the bridegroom, enters the household of the soul: and at once, the humble household becomes Heaven. Teresa’s convents are literal heavens upon earth: they are the dwelling of a Lord whose passion fails not. Spain’s will pours a sea of energy into this fragment of her deed. Teresa’s work is homely; and so is the rough plastic language ofher books.Las Moradas, El Libro de su Vidaarticulate the sense of the common Spanish matron who makes of her bridal bed an altar, and of her religion a marriage.
Teresa is no merely powerful reformer: she is a creator. In her hand, the broom and the account-book become mystic weapons: even as in the hands of Torquemada the wrack; and in the hands of Columbus the rudder and the compass.
He was born in Italy; and the question of his descent, Italian or Spanish or Jew, is unsolved and has no bearing. Christopher Columbus in his historic rôle belongs with the Spanish mystics. We have lost his book ofProphecias. But we can reconstruct the trend of the argument which, having failed to convince the “practical” Courts of England, Portugal and France, won over the clerics of Spain and at Córdoba moved the Queen to send him westward.
Like the platonic Jews, Columbus idealized his route and made a symbol of his navigating passion. Like Philo, he mapped out his scheme in Scripture. Yet another phase of Spain’s organic will was served by this devout seafarer: and through Spain, yet another need of Europe.
Medieval Christendom is in dissolution. Much energy is released; and needs an outlet, and cannot find it until this mystic mariner, Christian and medieval, finds America. Down to earth pours the energy of Europe: the Vision and Body of a Gothic Christ no longer hold it. Down it clamors, seeking earthly forms—seeking an America, indeed! But Columbus is a Catholic. And Isabel, the Catholic Queen, smiles on his adventure, aiming to spread the Church to India. And what they do—this mystic seafarer, this rapt good monarch—is to give to Europe an escape for its too-long stored Catholic might: to give to it a land in which the blood of the medieval Christ may be sluiced, may be lost forever!
Irony marries with heroic Spain.
In 1491, there was born to a family of noble Basques in the Guipúzcoan castle of Loyola another mystic instrument of the Spanish will. Iñigo Lopez de Recalde had the crude upbringing of the gentlemen of his race. He learned to write Castilian; he served in the Court of the Catholic Kings; and he became a soldier. He was a good soldier and the eyes of his superiors were on him. At the age of thirty he took part in the defense against the French of Pampeluna, capital of Navarre. A cannon ball shattered his leg. During the long convalescence, grace came to the Basque captain. He renounced worldly arms and took the staff and habit of a religious beggar. He pilgrimaged to Rome and to Jerusalem. At thirty-three, he began to study Latin. His austerity and that of a few comrades whom he had attracted and whom he held for life brought him the usual displeasure of the Holy Office who discouraged any swerving, even in the path of piety, from the common norm. Loyola met distrust in the University of Alcalá: on his arrival at Salamanca, he was jailed on general suspicion of being either too holy or a fraud. Thence, still seeking theology, he went to Paris and to London. Everywhere he was coldly received, and forbidden to speak on religious topics. He was forty: he had abandoned a career of arms: he was not even a priest. But he had friends: they formed a band of seven including another Basque, Francisco Xavier, a Frenchman and a Portuguese. In 1534, they took a private vow of chastity, poverty and devotion. Three years later, Loyola was ordained a priest. Since his conversion at the age of thirty, eighteen years had passed, and they had been for him a constant wrack of suspicion and of impediment to his purpose. He waited eighteen more months ere he judged himself worthy to say Mass. And not until then did he put forth his plan of a Company of Jesus—a cohort of religious soldiers—to defend Christ in the world and to spread Him. Pope Paul III recognized the Order in 1540. Loyola against his will was elected General in 1541.
Like its name, theCompañía de Jesúswas military in form and method. One year before Loyola’s conversion at Pampeluna, Martin Luther had burned the Papal bull of excommunication. Europe made this simultaneous gesture of antithesis. The north lurched from the medieval Body: and Spain took its fate unto herself, girded her loins to save and spread the Church. Born to war, converted in an experience of war, surrounded by the strife of faction, Loyola never ceased to be a soldier. He conceived Christianity in martial terms. The Church needed defense and aggrandizement. The nature of the man’s career and the will of his nation shaped the Company of Jesus.
At its head was a General, with power as absolute as that of a commander-in-chief in war. The Church was at war. Monastery and convent were Christ’s infantry. They did not suffice. They were even losing ground. The new Compañía would be the cavalry: an arm best fitted for skirmish and attack.
“Let us think all in the same manner; let us speak all in the same manner,” said Loyola. His Spiritual Exercises were the drill of his cohorts. So the militant ideal of Spain, serving in her armies the will of Isabel, found this new and compact body. The sword had become a mystic instrument. Now a body of spiritual fathers turned themselves into a sword: took on the traits and ethic of the sword. Like Spain’s, the forces of Loyola spread at once to Africa, America and Asia. And at the end, the Society of Jesus, like Spain once more, locked in too perfect oneness: its strength hardened and grew brittle: its heroic faith became a stifling armor.
. . . . . .
About a hundred years after the founding of the Society of Jesus, a young Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, wrote a series of Letters which have focused all the distrust and misconception aroused by the aggressive Body, and from whose subtle blows it never has recovered.Les Lettres d’un Provincialis a great literary work. A man of genius, spokesman of his race, exposes the presence in his land of an organism monstrously alien to the spirit and rhythm of France. His intuitions are metaphysically deeper than his logic. Pascal does not know that the Society of Jesus is a formulation of the will of Spain: his points often are departures from false premises as in his invidious handling of the Jesuit doctrine ofprobabilismor of the famous Jesuit sentence: “The end justifies the means.” Small matter: Pascal wrote a brilliant laughing prose whose beauty has not faded; and more, almost unwittingly he defended France against the invasion of an alien will. Although his arguments were often false, although his irony was unscrupulous, Pascal from his vantage-point was right.
The will of France has been adverse to that of Spain: France has worked from a social sense to the creation of a personal conscience. She has moved from the group-mystical to the personal-rational; from the Gothic church to the modern realistic; from social vision to the individual; from Substance to Essence; from France herself to man. Blaise Pascal is an exemplar of this pattern of his people’s progress. He and the Jansenists reveal the effort of the conservative French to transform the old Catholicism into an individualistic faith that shall be consonant with France’s future. Pascal’s sense of Grace as a determined individual gift of personality places his conflict with the Jesuits on its fairest ground: it is the will of social France for personal autonomy, at odds with this invasion of personalized Spain whose will is to create a social spirit.[21]Pascal, Racine, Descartes are the last greatminds of France to believe in the persistence of their nation’s progresswithinthe Church. Calvin, greatest of the Protestant thinkers and a true Frenchman, marks the break. France accepts a destiny outside of Rome which, in this logical people, swiftly leads to a destiny outside the whole structure of Christian revelation. Pascal and Racine within the Church, Calvin in a church of his own, Montaigne the skeptic, begin not by accepting man—but by the desire to create him. The social body exists: the individual soul does not. All French classic literature converges in this effort to establish it ... converges, indeed, upon Romanticism (Diderot, Rousseau, Stendhal). In Germany, the same trend passes from Luther to Goethe, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche. The French problem of creating the personal conscience above the accepted group marries with the will of northern Europe to break up the social synthesis of medieval Rome by the creating of individual souls that shall beatomic,anarchic, but once more creative. The antistrophe is the tragic will of Spain, and the heroic Jesuit effort, to revive a Body that was doomed.
In the domain of education, the Society of Jesus does not swerve far from Spain. And the will of Spain accepts man as he is found. Isabel creates her empire by use of her countrymen’s frailties and lusts. The Jesuit proceeds in the same spirit. He will work, not from the departure of an ideal concept of what man should be: he will work with man, with this miserable, forkèd, naked son of sin—and build from him the City of his God. Man in his weakness, man in his vice and blindness, willbe a note in the cosmic Song: his muddy heart will be strong as marble. There is a magic to enact this. Its name is Faith. There is a philosophy to enact this. It is the traditional sense, in Spanish thought, of God’s immanence and of earth as the immediate pattern of God’s will. The Jesuits are not pantheists: but their tolerance and their practical acceptance ofthe factare the unconscious fruits of five centuries of pantheistic feeling. The Jesuits are not Evangelists. But in their attitude toward Faith as a universal magic, they are close to the Apostles. They take the Christian mystery as a present truth. The age of miracle is eternal. God is here and everywhere: the assertion of a magic Word—as in the Kabbala—transfigures immanence to revelation. The doctrine of Grace, as an inborn personal trait to be achieved (if at all) only by spiritual acts, is too hierarchic. It is the doctrine of peoples tending toward individualism. (In the East, it becomes the doctrine of Caste.) Moreover, in accepting man as he is, the Jesuit cannot place the magic virtue in any of his inherent traits. The divine virtue must be at once impersonal and social. Man is frail and corrupt: his will is frail and corrupt. His life is only in God, even as God’s life through Christ is eternally in man. There is no work to be done, beside the assertion that the workisdone. If grace depended upon man’s efforts, we should all be damned. If reason or will or any personal trait had been sufficient, why was Christ crucified? No: the commonest human stone is holy, when it becomes a stone of the House of God. Likewise, man’s corruptions, however vile, can be architected by faith into the Church where they are sanctified and transfigured.
The philosophy of the Jesuits explains their methods. Does the builder of a house consult the stones? What can the stone do but put itself into the hands of the builder? The builder must be aggressive, dominant, ruthless. But the Jesuit is more than an architect: he is a soldier. When he sets aside the sword for the word, the cause is strategy. His tactics remain warlike. Waris pragmatic. Subtlety, surprise, mobility, deceit are warlike arms.
The world stands at a crisis. The grandiose structure of medieval Rome—the highest spiritual Form ever achieved by Europe—crumbles and sags. Spain strips to save it.
At Salamanca a Dominican monk teaches theology. His name is Fray Francisco de Vitoria. Salamanca, fostered by the Catholic King, becomes the leading university of Spain. Spain becomes Austria, Artois, the Netherlands, Franche-Comté, North and South Italy, Sicily, the Balearic and Canary Islands, Africa from Ceuta to Oran, the Moluccas, the Philippines and the Americas from Florida to Tierra del Fuego. Carlos, son of the mad daughter of the Catholic Kings, becomes head of an empire like the dream of Isabel. He, too, is a creature of her will. The vastness of his realm has blotted out his sense of time and space. His religious fervor blurs his vision of mortal values. He will ride Spain as he might ride a horse in battle. He has inherited Spain as a weapon to be wielded. Spain is his, in order that the world be Christ’s.
The Dominican monk at Salamanca moves within the will of Carlos and of Spain. The blood of Isabel’s empire is justice. Justice nourishes and cleanses. Carlos must be ruthless, but he must not be wrong. He will do what he desires: it must be proven right. The Americas make new challenges of conscience. Vitoria in Salamanca meets the king’s need: and modern International Law is ready for the world.
A full century before the Dutchman Grotius (Huig van Groot), Vitoria lays down a rationale of justice for existing Powers, a structure in diapason between their economic needs and their inherited morale. He works for a modern state whose ideal is a theodicy of medieval Rome. The ideal has become more abstractly ethical, more economic. But Woodrow Wilson and the statesmen of the League of Nations are exact heirs of a Dominican monk.
Vitoria studies the problems of America in hisRelectiones de Indis: the general problems of war inDe Jure Belli. Both these works, it is significant to note, form part of hisRelectiones theologicæ et morales. A true creature of the will of Isabel, he has turned international problems into a problem of conscience. He denies independent form to his subject. The law of nations and of peoples is a moral law: it is outside the activities of lawyers. A question rises between the king of Spain and the Indians of Mexico. The “savages” are not subject to the king by human right. Their dealings with him cannot be determined by human law. Only a divine law, moving Spain as a theodicy, has brought about this juncture between the Indians and the king. Only divine law is competent to rule.
Vitoria expands his thesis. There exists this same divine law—jus inter gentes—between all States. The States are interdependent. There is asocietas naturalis, a natural Society of Nations. The link is God. Free to the Spaniard to assume that God’s agent in the link be the king of Spain. The world is one society: and between peoples of one society peaceful intercourse may not be forbidden. France may not impede a Spaniard from visiting France, even from settling in France, provided he violate no law and cause no damage. If this is true between Frenchman and Spaniard, it is true between American and European. Through the fact of their civil rights in a society of nations the Indian cannot exclude the Spaniard. There exists thereforejus communicationis: the right of immigration. There exists also the freedom of the seas. Spain stands justified in her American penetration.
We are at the mere beginning of Vitoria’s subtle structure.Jus commercii—the right of commerce—applies not only to the exchange of merchandise between free peoples, but as well to the exchange of ideas. The Spaniard has the right to preach the Gospel to the Indian. The Indian has the right to preach heathenism to the Spaniard. Eithermay resist conversion (even as either may decline to purchase proffered goods).
Since no State may prevent a stranger from settling on its lands, nor even from becoming a lawful national, here are the Spaniards legally at home in the Americas. But strong Powers must defend by arms the menaced liberties of smaller States. That is a prerogative of a true society of nations. How much more readily therefore shall strong Powers defend the menaced liberties of individuals in every State! All States are “organs of human justice.” Spain shall protect the innocent from “religious sacrifice” and “from cannibalism in America.” If need be, to protect the innocent, a State may subjugate wholly an unjust nation.
The theologian brings to Spain her “cosmic place” in the Americas as Christ’s agent in the society of nations. But this is not enough. That she may be at peace in Zion, she must be alone. So Vitoria evolves in 1500 the modern theory of “spheres of influence.” Pope Alexander wasdivinelyjust in submitting to Spain and Portugal, as God’s best tools, the mission of Christianizing the Americas. But the Pope had nohumanright to partition the property of the red man. Vitoria with all the Dominicans behind him stands against Pope and king: declaring that “the Indian has as much right to possess property as the Catholic peasant.” The Indians, he holds, are potential equals of the Spaniards. They have the right to plebiscite. A majority of their votes alone can justify America’sannexationto the empire of Spain. Beyond the divine and human privileges that are general in a society of nations, “Spain must commit no act in the New World, except by treaty.”
The Dominican legists part company with the deeds of Spain. Already, Isabel had been misled when her adventurous “tools”—the Conquistadores—instead of saving the Indian, enslaved him. Now the followers of Vitoria raise their voices against the behavior of Cortés and Pizarro. Bartolomé de las Casas in hisBrevissima relación de la destrucción de las Indiaswrites pages that are good readingin our own epoch of a “Society of Nations.” But the abstract logic of Vitoria was more useful to the State of Spain than the ethical conclusions of Las Casas. That supreme apologia for villainy and greed—International Law—is born and baptized under Christ.
Thus Vitoria: “War is justified when it is forced on a State in the rightful pursuit of commerce, in the rightful propaganda of ideas—andif the Spaniards have observed all precautions against taking their interests for principles, and their avarice for duty.” What empire since has not “taken these precautions?” Christianity had been theoretically pacifistic. Jesus was reported to have declared against all violence and the resisting of evil. Being the Son of God, of course, His words were not to be literally construed. Yet such men as Tertullian, the Manichees, Saint Francis, Wyclif, More, Erasmus, had declared unconditionally against warfare. Chiefly, that prophetic Berber, Augustine, took war to be a usable weapon of the just. Vitoria, his neighbor in race and land, leans on Saint Augustine. The anarchic and endemic sin of war is lifted at last from Europe’s conscience. Spain invents the Moral War.
“War,” says Vitoria, “is justified to right a wrong.” But Vitoria is careful:
“Difference of religion is no just cause for war.
“Aggrandizement of empire is no just cause for war.
“Principis gloria propria, aut aliud commodum, non est causa belli justa.The Prince may not wage war to further either his glory or his own interests. And the wrong to be righted by warmust be commensurate with the results of war itself(death, confiscation, rapine) ere a just war can be induced to right it.”
The friar seems to be going too far. Hear him:
“The end of war must be, not evil to the foe, but good.
“And victory must be enjoyed in Christian moderation.
“The people shall not suffer through the faults of their princes.
“Finally, a treaty imposed by force—even after victory—is not valid.”
Modern International Law is after all no growth from these uncomfortable precepts of a monk: it is a lapse and a decadence. The legal dicta of Vitoria are of an old tradition: they are a birth of the old breaking Synthesis of medieval Europe. International Law is the theoretic shred of what was once a spiritual Body.
The Spain of Isabel and Ferdinand, of Carlos and Philip II—wherein is she great? In her idea and Will. These prove the Globe and bind it: these in their own way prove and make her one with God. But Spain, the body of men living in towns and huertas, is indigent and disordered.
At her spiritual climax, under Isabel, Carlos and Philip II, Spain was squalid. By contrast with the state of England, of France, of the German towns and of the cities of Morocco, she was an economic laggard. Her nobles with their retinues cut swathes of gold through the landsides. She was full of heroes and of saints. But the land was arid with neglect. War had razed her forests. Seven centuries of Reconquest, making labor despicable beside the guerdons of battle, had sapped her burghers. What the long wars began, the Inquisition and Expulsions carried on. Jews—a solid class of craftsmen and middlemen—were expelled. The Granadan Moors—ablest of Spain’s cultivators—were making homesick songs about their Andalusian farms, in Fez and Marrakech. There were more vagabonds in Spain than farmers, more soldiers than laborers. There were more hidalgos and caballeros than artisans and merchants. There were seven million Spaniards—and nine thousand convents!
Some men are poor because they are weak and dull: some are poor because they are men of genius. Amsterdam and London grow rich, because such is their will. Avila and Toledo remain dingy, because their will is elsewhere. Spain is virile, brilliantly equipped. But Spain has resolved to be a hero and a saint. Spain has no time to pave streets, who paves the way for Christ beyond thesea. Spain has no time for natural science, for agriculture and for the tricks of trade, who is so expert in theology.[22]
In the extremes of her life, none is wider than this between the Spirit of Spain’s enterprise and the fact of her condition. The crass and earthly elements of Spain are not destroyed nor repressed by her religious will: they are engaged. They must serve in her armies, even though the fight be a crusade. They must man her ships, even though the mariner’s compass be divinely pointed. They are intensified indeed, like all the parts of Spain. And like the other elements of her world, brutality and lust assume in a particular form the wholeness of Spain’s will.
Spain is adventuring. Now the sheer impulse of adventure is embodied. The pícaro is born. He has in him the aboriginal Spaniard: that unruly, lusty, atomic man whom Rome encountered, whom the Cid personified. He is an anarch, brutal as the Iberian of the north, shrewd and subtle as the Phœnician of the south. He is this aboriginal, complex man of Spain shaped by the Spanish will. The pícaro is not lawless: he is an outlaw. He reacts from Spain’s social purpose, from Spain’s social structure, from the mysticism and heroism of this later Spain. Like all reactive bodies, he resembles his opponent. And it is this union in him—the direct issue from the source of Spain and the direct response to Spanish culture—which makes him so true an element in that culture.
The pícaro was long in coming. The Cid promised him in the twelfth century, and the romancero on the eve of the age of Isabel. The genial Juan Ruiz, archpriest of Hita, in 1300 came close to his spirit in the graphic form ... a mingled piety and license ... of his greatLibro de buen amor. Fernando de Rojas who beganLa Celestinain 1499 did not create the pícaro only because he created something deeper. LikeDon Quixoteat the end of thecycle,La Celestinaere its beginning transcends the pícaro and contains him. Now come the Castilian versions of Amadís de Gaul. The spirit of errant adventure waxes so strong that it invades the hagiographa: Spaniards of the age of Carlos read histories of the saints fully as marvelous and picaresque as the profaner tales in the library of Don Quixote. Finally, after these ages of annunciation, the pícaro arrives, full-fleshed. His name is Lazarillo de Tormes: his date is 1554: his author is unknown.
In this pattern of antithesis whose symphony is Spain, the response to Santa Teresa is the procuress of Rojas, the Celestina, that most tender, robustious, scoundrelly, womanly woman. The response to the flame-like San Juan de la Cruz is Lazarillo. San Juan personifies Spain’s purpose, which is divine. Lazarillo embodies Spain’s methods, which are brutal. San Juan is not abstract: he is an embodiment of purpose. Lazarillo is not mere flesh: in his trickeries and thefts, there is an inverted consciousness of Spain which makes his path through Old and New Castile almost as luminous as the path of the saint.
This consciousness is marked by irony: and irony is in the weave of every picaresque design. For the Spanish rascal is no mere reaction from heroic gesture. He is reversion as well. He is moved by the same energy that has uprisen in the forms of asceticism and crusade. His antiphony is but a subtle swerving back from the life he wars on, to Spain’s common base. The pícaro has the resource, the intensity, the method, of conquistador and crusader: he preys on his own land. He has the passionateness of the saint: it is directed toward woman. He is a casuist like the Jesuit: his aim is to filch a purse. He navigates uncharted wastes like Columbus: to fill his belly and to save his skin. This continuous awareness of Spain’s noble world, this subtle swerve transforming it into villainy and lust, make the ironic pattern. The low tricks of the pícaro, weaving through the high fabric of his land, once more limn Spain in her fullness.
Lazarillo is but the first of a long line. The book thattells of him has scarce a hundred pages: yet it seems wide and deathless as the land from Salamanca to Toledo which its hero crosses. Lazarillo is a lad born of poor but unworthy parents. A blind beggar teaches him how to survive as a rascal in a rascally world. The young virtuoso outdoes his master. He becomes the servant of a starving, haughty knight, of a parsimonious churchman, of a shrewd and lecherous canon with whom he makes a treaty which includes the sharing of his wife.
Lazarillo encounters Spain; and the land grows alive at his touch. Disorder, corruption, folly beneath the façade of splendor. But now, an acute principle synthetizes the chaos: the pícaro like a wistful agent of intelligence, envelops Spain and makes Spain one with pity. This pity is of a new order, among the emotions of art. It is neither mystical nor sentimental. It is the child of a modern autonomy: it is the pity of reason.
The author of Lazarillo does not insist. He has created an engine so revealing that he can afford to rest within his quiet prose. He writes a tiny book: plastic portraiture, tender and bitter humor, sweet spirit, dark flesh—all Spain indeed is in it, as is the tree in the seed. Lazarillo is a seed, from which has sprung a forest. In Spain, the picaresque merges quickly with profounder worlds; loses its æsthetic sharpness, and has its share in the birth of a book which is a Scripture:Don Quixote. The true form shrinks to formula. The symbol of the rogue, preying on society and so divulging it, is exploited by minds more analytic than creative. In the hands of such masters as Quevedo, the pícaro becomes a concept of pessimism: a chemic force with which to test and to destroy the world. The pícaro voyages to France. But in Le Sage and Marivaux (to name but the greatest), the physical and intellectual movements of the rogue are stressed. France veers backward toward Scapin—toward the scamp of the classic comedy—whose essential difference is great. England borrows more deeply. The pícaro’s animal joyousness, social revelation, bitterness turned sentimentalcome back to life in Smollett, Fielding, Sterne. But they unite in no one work comparable withLazarillo. Even De Foe wants the luminous poetic atmosphere whereby the crass materials of the tale have their dimension.
No master outside Spain can recreate the pícaro entire. For the Spanish rogue is sterile without the aspirational afflatus of his race, in which he adventures, from which he reacts, and which he embodies in ironic contrast. That is why the greatest heirs of the pícaro of Spain are not his direct sons in eighteenth-century France and England. They are his collateral and remote descendants of a modern world in which once again energy has become aspirant and religious. They are the heroes of Stendhal. Above all, they appear in Russia—that other extreme of Europe which touches Spain in the domain of spirit: they are the hero ofDead Soulsof Gogol, the mystic criminals of Dostoievski....
Antithesis even within the personal will of Isabel and her king. Isabel looks to Africa and the west. Mysterious horizons claim her. Africa is the home of Origen and Augustine—Berber Christians and true Spanish minds. America casts a parabola of search alluring to her mystic appetite. But Isabel is wedded to a man who looks toward Europe. The Aragonese king comes from the most assimilated part of Spain. In him, as in his realm, lives the spirit of Catalan, of European Trader. His hungers strain toward Italy and France. And this dichotomy within the will of the monarchs—Europe and the south, politics in Europe and high adventures across the western sea—is stamped upon the classic will of Spain. The concept of the State which Isabel and Ferdinand adapt is Europe. Louis XI and Machiavelli would have hailed it. The purpose of that State would have been better pleasing to Mohammed or Saint Paul. The spirit is Isabel’s and is accepted by her husband. But the form is Ferdinand’s and here his wife is disciple.
Now, of this division within the will of Spain, that term which is Europe finds a canon. Velázquez, better than the policy of the kings, better than the victories of their captains in Sicily and France, incarnates Spain’s desire to be Europe.
But here, too, irony is at work. Velázquez is the favorite painter at the Court of Philip IV. He lives at the Palace; he is sent on diplomatic missions. His career corresponds almost literally with the reign of his king. And this reign marks the rapid ebb of Spain’s affairs in Europe. Her will toward Europe has flung her powerhigh into the north and clear across the Latin Sea. Now, while Velázquez molds that will into organic form, his king loses Portugal, loses the Netherlands, loses the Roussillon, half the Pyrenees, and faces insurrection in Barcelona, Spain’s European port.
The will of Velázquez’ art is objective form. Bodily substance becomes real. Man’s moods and passions in themselves suffice. They have their value not in some rapt design beyond man’s body or in employing it to mystic ends: the world of appearanceisthe world. Velázquez’ traits are traits of modern Europe. Mysticism disappears, both in immanent and transcendental form. The beauty of spiritual strain, so eloquent in Ribera, is replaced by the beauty of physical poise. The hot fluidity of El Greco which recalls the Prophets, the creative incompleteness of the Byzantines, becomes a static peace. In El Greco, as in all mystic art, the moving materials reach the immobility of form only through the focus of a world beyond them. But in Velázquez, there are no colors save those of face and fabric; there are no forms save those of the body. Velázquez is a realist in the restricted modern European sense. He is impressionistic and he is mechanistic. The vast autonomy of the subjective vision is renounced in him. He makes his eye a literalreceiver of impressions: whereas the mystic eye (and the Spanish eye) has ever been acreator of expression.
This type of æsthetic will which, from the Renaissance to Courbet, is to reign in Europe wins perhaps its highest triumph in the alien Velázquez. What tribute to the energy of Spain! For this is not Spain, this is but a fragment. The vision yearning to become complete, the mystic marriage, the parabolic search, the lyric plaint, the ceaselesscante hondo, the arabesque which transforms words to body—these, too, are Spain: these are the virtues which create El Greco, Calderón, Lope, Ribera, Cervantes. Velázquez will have none of them. Velázquez will be wholly European. Europe, accepting the world of appearance as the entire world, pours all its energy to the creating of theimmense material universe which is our shambles of the machine and applied science. Spain does not follow. But Velázquez leads.[23]