PART THREE: _Beyond Spain_

XI. THE RIFT IN BARCELONA 255

XII. THE COMEDY OF THE BASQUE 261

XIII. TWO ANDALUSIANS 273

_a._ _The Sleepers_ 275

_b._ _The Awakeners_ 280

_c._ _The Sleepless Spirit_ 287

XIV. THE PORT OF COLUMBUS 293

_PRELUDE_

_THE SKY OF SPAIN_

_The sky of Spain is high. It is above earth very high. It is above Spain very high. It is separate from Spain.... It is a clear white sky. Sunlight is white in it. And the clouds are white.... It is a still sky. The clouds stand still in a great height and fixed as in a crystal.... The light of the sun becomes the light of the sky, becomes the light of the clouds, far from the dark red earth of Spain. Spain is her earth and her sky.... I am within the pasture plains of Extremadura. Behind me lies Badajoz...._

* * * * *

_I have walked at dawn upon an ancient bridge of granite across the summer-shrunken river. The water curls and swerves through gold sand. In little steel-blue pools it lies deep; then it runs off in thinning saffron ribbons. Soldiers sit on black horses who drink the water silkening at their knees. The bridge swings in yellow arches. There is a bastioned gate cut with the conquering arms of Leon and Castile._

_In the east, a low sun. Its horizontal hand touches my face. It is hot, striking across cool dawn. Badajoz is houses gray and gold over shut streets around a Gothic church. The sun is outside the cool city. On the Cathedral porch sit two old women. Their day has begun: it is to sit with open claw and to close on coin and to bless the giver of coin._

_In my pocket is naught but the moldy paper of Portugal and the silver duros of Spain. I shake my head at the two aged women. “No tengo suelto. Lo siento.” I smile. She to my left smiles back. The other frowns and mutters. They are one, save for the difference between a frown and a smile._

_Hairy goats clatter, swinging creamy udders. Burros pass with men and women, stolid, on their haunches. Through the crevice of leaning walls the sun lays a hot finger on my brow. My body is chill._

_The bread in the fonda tastes coarse. It is sour and hurts my mouth. The coffee is tasteless ... a sort of gray heat ... good. Now I have a pocket full of coppers. I cross to the Cathedral porch. The two old women ... one, split by a frown and a smile. To the frown, I give five coppers, to the smile I give one. The smile and the frown do not change. I am in Spain!_

_The shut town is expanding. The sun is still outside; streets twist to avoid it. But the sun works. The city expands. Men and women are a melting on the street. Men and women are motes of life within the melting city...._

* * * * *

_Badajoz is behind. The sun is high, and here the pasture plains. The Guadiana treeless wanders to the south. It is a thirsty river. It is a river homesick for the hills of its youth; moved by a dream of coolness southward, languidly stirred to win this dream in the south. Cities have no sky. Beyond the walls of Pax Augusta which centuries have mellowed from the Roman Camp holding harsh soldiers to this Badajoz ... now the sky of Spain...._

_I have never seen a sky so far from my head: I have never seen a world so sharp in my eye. The sky lifts me to a realm of visions. And as I pass into its moveless search, still I stand fixed within this graphic world.... Sheep bleat in a wave of dust.... The dust is dense. Curling, swirling, puffing, streaking down, the dust is clear as glass. The sheep are solid masses of tempestuous wool; each sheep is a writhe about four feet, about stalks of sinewed bone jerking it on. Here’s a man. A solid body. Hands crustaceous; face crisp skin drawn on a gaping skull: and over the skin porous as soapstone, bristles of separate hair, sweat, huddles of dust. The smoke from the cigarette cuts rising through the air. Over his shoulder, miles and miles away, a ruined village rests on the hump of a hill. Barbary figs stand at the walls of a splintered chapel. Solid Spain! The earth is clotted, corrugation, furrow. In a red gulch a blackish water drips. And there are flowers, purple like shreds of morning._

_Everywhere sky. So far away, and everywhere. Its apartness is a force lifting the broken things of Spain as in a great dance Godward. Dust and sheep-hoof, ash of cigarette, pound of the shepherd’s staff on the earth, swish of his chaps, the dog’s soft pads against stone ... rise all in this various clarity, as in a dance, to the sky._

* * * * *

_I have a vision which has not left me. I shall love this people and this world. For in my vision I have been born as they.... There is a Funnel. Its walls are the round, white sky. It is thewed together by the rays of the sun. And at the Funnel’s mouth is the mouth of God, speaking the words which are the things of earth. Down this Funnel as in birth, we fall. Until we strike upon the land of Spain._

_PART ONE_

_Spain_

_CHAPTER I_

_HINTERLAND IN AFRICA_

_a. Oasis_ _b. Moghreb_ _c. Ishmael and Israel_

_a. Oasis_

In the desert, night is reason; the day is magic and madness. This is a law of the desert, and of the desert dwellers.

The light of the sun turns air into an incantation; it is dangerous to man as the sharpest steel or the fire. And the air possessed makes marvels of the land. The sky is opaque like a baking stone. The sterile hills are in perennial motion. They are not hills docile and quiet for the feet of man. They are enactments of geologic drama. By æons they displace not man alone, but the first life that crawled. Each rim of the hills is an age; they gyre in cosmic emotion.

Under a cloudless sky that is too still, earth veers; and under the hills, sand by some magic teems with forms of flesh. The light on a dune turns it into a thigh. Far off the waste becomes a sea, a snow-field. But this exquisite flesh and snow and sea are aloof. Man is contemporary only with the birth and with the death of worlds. And the hushed counterpoise of life, which is his mortal span, is desert.

But with the night the world becomes a world that he can dwell in. The evening star, sending its ray through opalescent dusk, is a sun he can dwell with. The sky grows soft. The hills are shrouded like his body; they are compounded like his soul of silences; they behold a sky that does not sear and an earth he can walk. The moon strides like a master, subduing the caravans of stars. The moon is male, and human.

The world of the day is a world of violence. It has no water and it has no sweetness. It is the world of this life: best spent in marching, passionate-shrewdly, toward dusk. Night is man’s kingdom, his dear reality: it is a place of gardens under which flow waters: it is a place of measurable fires: a place of shadows and of meditation: a place of dew and of love.

Wonder therefore not at the triumph of Mohammed, master of lands of desolation, who leads his peoples still across a day of flame to the revealing sleep of his dusk paradise.

* * * * *

This magic of the desert day is ironic; at odd places the irony turns smile. Just enough welcoming the smile to tempt man to live on within the toils of the desert. The name of the smile is Oued--whence our word Oasis. The Oued is a spill of water from the breast of a mountain. Hidden springs converge and burst the rusty slope; and there is a tiny river till the sands have drunk it. Where it flows, the desert smiles: smiles date-palms, fig trees, thickets of oleander. So the desert keeps its perennial victims living.

At the bottom of the Oued is the town.

The mountains raise their convolutions in a great struggle, ere they break and die under these southern sands. The heights grow steep. Water falls through rock, pours through curtains of brush that hang upon the gorges. There is verdure: cataracts of stone with silver veins of water, flats of sand where the palms rise seeking the sun above a precipitous gulch, water mills hid in orange-groves, terraced houses with many roofs and every roof a place for looms, for women. The water broadens, is caught into a hundred irrigating ditches. The date-palms thicken and camp like an army; the town huddles with its white walls windowless.

The morning sun comes late to the Oasis, for it must rise above the hills. But dawn dwells already on the desert. It is a subtle radiance of decaying night. Infinitesimal browns and blacks fleck the dim waste: these are the camps of nomads who use the Oasis as a trading center. Their tents are of undyed camel wool, strung low so that they look like camels crouching. The great slow beasts are at anchor by the tent. Dry grass is piled for them; they turn their delicate heads on the arched neck that fronts the body like the prow of a ship. Camel grass burns within. The Arab, swathed in his white burnouse, squats at the mouth of the tent and strikes his brow to the dust, saying his dawn-prayer. Unveiled behind him is his wife over the flame of twisted grass, and cooks and watches her children. On the horizon stand two caravans of twenty camels, bulging with dates. Now the thread of their approach writes upon the desert. It is market day in the Saharan center. There will be many caravans. And the wide scatter of nomads will close in like fragments of iron magnetized; making an irradiant design from the town to the horizons.

The market place is a low square, on the edge of the town away from the Oasis. One side of it is a mosque, a Koran school, a string of Moorish cafés where already merchants huddle with their coffee. The corner breaks into a labyrinth of streets strident with tiny shops. Upon a third side, the desert road cuts into the breast of sand-dunes; far away is the white solitary shell of a Marabout’s tomb.

The crowd is the town and the desert: an Arab world, drawn by hunger from far gold slopes, to make this thick and hardy organism. Most of the men wear burnouses of unbleached wool; their heads are covered by the ample hood and the skirt falls low over the inner jacket, over the naked legs, to the feet which are either bare or shod with sandal soles of grass thonged to the ankle. Time has dyed the virgin wool and use has torn it; the shreds and rents are fantasies in dirt. Within the hoods, sun-baked faces stare. The hands are talonous; the legs are like the tendoned legs of some great bird. And yet the dirtiest garment falls to the dust with grace; and the most squalid head is high.

The merchants sit on straw mats: they bake round acorn cakes on brasiers; they sell dates gold-dry, bronze-rich; they measure thimblefuls of palm oil dripped from reeking goatskins; they cobble sandals; they sell liver of camel and _couss-couss_, a staple dish of wheat, flaked with vegetables or with meat. (Donkeys stand mournful, charged with juniper from the distant Atlas.) They sell dust and fragments of silver, potsherds, amulets against devils, halters, tea; they sell the dry leaf of the favorite henna. The crowd sways, bartering, laughing. The Arabic is vowelless and the burnouse is proud. The Arab is shrewd; his eyes glint, his fingers snap, his voice pelts. He is the survivor of countless children who have died.

Children not yet dead weave through the intricate clamor. The boys wear a burnouse over a naked body; the girls are bound in a thick wool garment that will announce to the men when the breasts bud. They beg, they snatch a date, they nibble. Half of them are blind in an eye. For Islam makes no answer to the Ophthalmia of Egypt: is not Allah good to the blind son, giving him fortune as a beggar, as a ballad singer, as a muedzin to call the prayer from the mosque tower? Blind eyes, ravaged flesh, hard voices--most of the children will die. And their survivors are these hooded men at barter.

Therefore, the men are strong: it is the law that they eat first and what remains may go to the women and the brood. Women are here, too. Ancients with foul rags to bind their bulging udders and their bony legs; ancients almost bald with hands and faces splotched in the henna. They sell wool or weave mats from the coarse camel grass that bunches in the sand dunes like the hair on a mole. Younger women hold the veil so that a single eye peers at the ominous world. They buy wood, slices of liver, oranges from the East. In the weave of laughter, guttural and fleshless, of bray of donkey, of rumble of camels like the ebbed roar of a furnace, twines the call of children ... the call of begging, the life-call. A hand plashes a drum, a strain of song rises and binds this chaos.

He sits between a cobbler and a nomad ebon-black with the drooped tender lip of the Semite. He is the blind singer. He wears a clean tunic of white and his head is swathed in the turbash. His bare legs gleam like metal. His hands are delicate as prayer within the market clamor. He clasps the shallow drum; and his fingers fall like rain.

He sings the deeds of the warriors of Allah. From Mecca they came, and Al-Medinah; they spread from Araby to Egypt and down to Sudan and east to India. They brought the sword of the Prophet to the hand of the world. Like the sun, they went west; like Gabriel they rose into the Spanish north, bridging the sea with minaret and prayer....

Metal he sings: his song is sparse like shreds of grass on a sand hump. Five notes, naked, timbreless, make this intricate weave. They start like arrows, like catapulted stones, like horse-hoofs on the desert. This music is stripped like war; and like war single-willed.

The blind bard’s face is gray beneath the sumptuous swathes of his turbash. His lips twist like cord; his face like an engine discharges the song of Islam--single of key, terrible in singleness.

* * * * *

The sun stands beside the minaret that forms part of the west wall of the town. The eastern mountain is gold and over it lies a pallid crescent moon. There will be moon tonight upon the desert! From the _fondoukhs_, camels are beaten forth. They are prodded to their knees which are then bound so that they cannot rise. And the fragile humps are heaped with the exchange of the mart. Great bags, here, oozed sugar of the date: now there is wheat and wool. Fifteen camels, lashed and hobbled, groan: then sway into the air like an armada moved by the wind of guttural call and staff-blow. Fifteen camels swerve through a narrow gate into the desert.

The town stands behind, low mosqued: the minarets rise from the flat roofs like acrobats. Palms make a misty coronal to the east: thousands of palms, mazed like a camel’s hair: and over all the sterile mountain, a chart of ages, working to the sky. Now, from the minarets comes a voice.

_Alláh acbar.... Echhed en la ila ella Alláh._ _Echhed en Mohammed Rasou Alláh._ _Haï ala Elsalat. Haë ala Elfaláh._ _Alláh Acbar.... La ila ella Alláh._

It is the call of the muedzin. Invariable his word, his key: invariable the five points of the day ... dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and dark ... when from all the minarets of town, in all the towns of the land, in all the lands of Islam, the muedzin calls to prayer. The voice is of iron. Myriad muedzin voices, like strokes of some intricate machine, weave together, and bind Islam holy.

Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God save only Allah. I affirm Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah. Come ye to prayer. Come ye to adore him. Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God, save only Allah.

Belal, first muedzin, crier for Mohammed, spoke these words. They are a redolent poem: ecstasy was in them, and resolve. They have not changed in syllable since Belal received them from his master, a year after the Hegira, the year of our era 623. But they have hardened. They are a terrible horizontal stroke upon a prostrate people. Harder than bells of Christendom they are; harder than the Jewish plaint which Mohammed hated, which Mohammed strove to wipe from the ears of the earth.

The caravan has halted. The camels stand docile, pathetic, shifting their great loads; for it hurts the soft pads of their feet to stand laden, it is easier to walk. The men scatter and squat, each by himself, but each turned from the setting sun toward Mecca. The water of the desert is the sand; and with the sand the men make their ablutions. They place their sandals beside them; all that is unclean in the folds of the burnouse they lay aside. Their mouths mutter fast; their hands perform intricate gestures. To swerve from the immemorial forms, even by a finger twitch, is to be in heresy and to be damned. Their brows touch the sand....

... For man is earth. The brow is his highest and his noblest part. Let his brow therefore, five times with each day, be lowered to earth. This is ISLAM....

The camels fall into the rhythmic swing which will not swerve while the moon swings over the sand and the sand swings under the night, and the silent men round the ocean of the desert.

* * * * *

From the town, as from a smoldering fire, smoke. There are no chimneys; Allah takes care of the smoke. After the bright street, the house is a cavern. The eyes, refocused to the dark, observe a long, high chamber, its walls black with ages of grime, its ceiling stanchioned by wooden posts that shine like ebony. There is no table, there is no chair, there is no bed. Dry grass is piled in corners, and serves for sleeping. Four families live in this lower half of the house. Four women squat in its several quarters; about them nurslings, before them a little brasier to which the children feed chips of wood, shreds of rush. The women cut turnips, bake wheat for the _couss-couss_. There is a stair that is scarce a stair: ages of feet have worn it to an incline. The upper story has more light; there is a hole in the center of the ceiling which leads to the roof. If it rains, the water falls through the heart of the house; but light comes in, smoke rises out. Here, too, there is no furniture. A chicken pecks in the crumbled floor; an old woman weaves at a loom. Her hands know an immemorial process of weaving, like the mouth of her husband praying.

The roof is the domain of the women. The street is for the men and all that the street leads to. But the housetop is the street and the playground of women. On sunny afternoons of the cool season, here is their escape from the drudge and dark of their homes. This house is high among the houses whose flat roofs move away in waving whiteness. A minaret thrusts up ... there is a gap, a square ... then the packed counterpoint of roof and turning wall and wall again to the green dense at last of palms, to the gorge of the Oued, to the sand-stretch southward where the sun lies in a mist as in a sea of opal.

The white roofs are gay with the color of women. Veils are put aside. Babes suck at ruddy breasts. Red shawls and red babouches touch the color of laughter. Women are carefree. Even the onus of prayer that sits on Islam is not for them. Let them but bear children and hold the good will of their men.[1] One woman, the rich blood clear beneath the bronze of her cheek, presses to her bosom a child who will soon die. Children come and often children go. The way of the child, to manhood or the grave, is in the hand of Allah. A girl, candid and great-eyed with a flinty note upon her luscious flesh, like steel on velvet, holds to her lovely breast which motherhood has not distorted from its apple-rondure, a babe whose eyes are already shut with pus. She will have a blind son--perhaps a muedzin, perhaps a poet: certainly a Seer.

* * * * *

When the sun is good, many women follow up the Oued, with their brood, for a day’s washing. The river is gracious within its precipitous banks. The winter sun, sweet like our sun of June, has yet the reverberant Saharan weight. It strikes the top of the hills, it rolls down over the clay-maze; it strikes the level sand, down once more it bounds into the gorge, over drenched bushes, over hanging rock and fills the Oued. Here, knee-deep, with their thin gowns lashed to the thigh and the rondures of their bodies speaking, stand women: and the sun comes to them. Other women lay the washed clothes on rocks and with bare feet dance on them, mangling and rinsing in song. The sun and the vigil of the hills, and the town distant, release the spirit of this flesh. Allah is far away, and the pure violence of Mohammed. Women are pagans again, and the Oued has gods. Children peal. Girls let fall their tunics and their breasts dance with their feet. Old women have eyes hot with memories, as they watch the crisp bodies of their daughters.

But beyond the Oued, beyond its walled mouth where the water disappears in sand, and beyond the date-palms, lies another town. It is more drear than its graveyard. So far, doubtless, in old days the river ran ere it had clotted and shortened its way with silt. The town is almost a ruin. A few children play, but the houses are silent. No windows break the seared patched blocks of clay. The graveyard is higher, and it has a wall. Here one can sit and watch the ruined town and the maze of gardens by the Oued and the palms, and the present town and the desert sea. The muedzin has thrust his call to sunset prayer. The muedzin is gone. The sun is gone. The mountains are sapphires in a cornelian heaven. The Sahara moves in copper from the town: grows argent: its dunes are swathed in mist like women’s bodies in irradiant shawls. The desert fades into a fume of opal under a bronze horizon.

Intricate designs stir in the graveyard chaos. Between the head stones and the foot stones the thin earth is raised so that the body may lightly rise to Heaven. (Jackals and dogs, as well as souls, find the shallow graves to their taste.) And now, to meet this subtle stir of dust, comes music. Common notes, sordid notes, between the sand and the sky. Drone of men in prayer, sudden motley of boys who sit in a black room and shout the Koran, girl laughter, donkey bray, banter--a music secret as this world. It comes with the night, swift, like any revelation. It fuses with the graveyard stones, with the world. The labyrinth of walls, enclosing gardens down to the Oued, is one with it. Fig tree, palm, volute Barbary cactus, winding path to the river, muddy river stretch, litter of refuse, excrement, manure, fuse with the music and the graveyard stones, rhyme in the oneness of Allah.

A late worker jogs past on a burro. A Caïd--Judge--swings with his basket-saddle on a mule. Another worker sticks his rod into the open sore on his burro’s haunch. On one side of the glimmering Oued is the town--a wall with many breaks, cobbles on mud, that lead into alleys and that grow into streets. The walls, within, flank out into a square from which turn several streets. The houses here are open to the night, and on the doorsteps before brasiers red with coal, sit women. Allah is one. They wear gay shawls, striped skirts. They wear massive barbarous bracelets, anklets, necklaces. Their faces, in the gloom, are heavy with designs: brow, cheek, chin painted with henna or with kohl. From eye to temple run delicate starry lines. And the hands are henna-splashed. When man approaches they sing the song of invitation. Behind them crouching on their brasiers, freshening their faces, gleams a room with a samovar and a couch. Now, the classic song of lust from their still lips. The crystal and the song of Islam! One note for all prayer, one note for all begging, one note for lust. Allah is one.

The whole town has caught the day’s fair fever. A man sits with a metal pipe whose saccade cadence flies ... splinters of steel ... into the night. And women dance. They move in strange reply to the music. For it is violent, swift and lean; it is the clang and charge of martial hoofs. But the women are slow, almost imperceptible their feet; almost moveless their thick bodies. The arms wave languid like branches of the willow. The whole town in the dead day’s fever. Dance and laughter and flame blossom in the shadows of the street. A ballad singer sits among the girls: he sings of the chieftain whose head was left upon the field and how the Prophet came and joined it to his body, for the Resurrection. But girls dance in a rising tide of Spring. His hands upon the drum make running of swift steeds, his voice is a javelin: the girls move like their breathing breasts.

Here is a large blank house. The court is high, and all about ring little doors of oak. Below is a hall. Its walls are muffled in rugs, its floor is far under carpets. Before the divans are tables, and the tea is spiced. Men in white squat and play upon pipes, and their black eyes gleam. The music’s shrillness shrieks. Now come women. They are four. Unminding loveliness moves within thick brocades and clashing gems. The faces are exquisitely painted. Verdant and nervelessly, they dance. The body is quiet as a tree, the hands are pliant and susurrous like leaves. The male music works.... A stomach wrench, violent as childbirth, shatters upon the mellifluous woman’s body. Above the music comes a cry from her mouth; it is a piercing call made pulsant with the hand clapped periodically to the open lips. It dies; the elemental bodies stir again within the dress and a sleep. But the male music works. The women pause. The musicians turn about, so that they cannot see. With unfeeling hands, the dancers loose the bonds of their thick robes. They step from the splendor fallen to their feet; they are naked. Only the jewels flash and bite upon their musing flesh. They dance. The muscles of their thighs flow upward toward their breasts; the arms twine sleepy. The male music works. The stomach, sudden, as if in unseen violation, wrenches, cascades, in passional response. The shrilling pipes are visited whole upon the naked women. They shriek: their cry, overtoned, fluted, pulsant, marries flesh and iron: blots out the music, and the music falls.

The town is asleep. Swarming reeking streets of the town are gray and are shells. The walls stand white under the sky, and over the depths of brooding human darkness. The crescent moon, with the dark sphere visible within its horns, sends scimitar rays into the sleep of Islam.

_b._ _Moghreb_

A semi-desert land holds well the squalors and the splendors of its past. This edge of Africa is the western end of the world whence the sun slides down to the sea. The bleak steppes, studded with sage and cactus, rise to sudden mountains; snow fields balance palm groves. It was a harsh place for a great world to grow in. But glories long since dust in Bagdad and Damascus have still their form in the cities of Morocco.

The prehistoric source lives in the prehistoric mountains. The Moor here is Berber. No one knows who is the Berber save that his speech is kin to the speech of Abyssinia and Egypt. His villages are perched on the slopes of the Atlas and in the stony fastness of the Rif, much as the Roman found them--and the Phœnician. Squat rectangular houses with thatch roof form a semicircle on the crest of a divide. Below is a thousand feet of air and a torrent; above are the clouds. The houses are of mud and grapple like goats to the earth. In the low, flat lands between the tiers of mountain, the houses are round. Closer to them than the houses of Europe are the huts of the Congo. They form a full circle within which dwell the cattle at night and sleeps safety.

The archaic world lies whole in the stratified history that is the Moghreb. Ages before Christ the Semite scattered markets on the coast and Carthage grew great. Rome became a mere machine for periodic taxes. Roman order and Vandal havoc left the Berber untouched. He is a hard, dark, leathery man. His head is close-cropped. He is prone to silence. Despite the myth of the Moroccan Sultanate--that feeble creature of the French and Spaniard--he is still unconquered.

Between the coast and the valley of Meknes and Fez he has lived, sullen and declining. The spark in his eye, the curl of his black lip tells that as he has outlived a long parade of empires, he will outlive this French one. In such mood, he dons his woolen tunic broidered red or blue, loads his olives on his donkey’s back and goes down to effete Fez or Marrakech for barter. Yesterday he bartered with the Arab, with the Vandal, with the Roman. Earlier, he knew the men of Carthage, the silver lords of Tartessos. _He_ is a Berber.

Islam alone has won him. But not until Islam had passed him many times, conquering half the Mediterranean world. The first Arabs converted some Berbers and took them along, not loitering in these mountains. Berber horsemen were soldiers and captains in Spain. But the Berber at home did not stir from his stone somnolence. Córdoba and Toledo kindled fires that warmed the monastic cells of Italy and England. Egypt awoke once more. Mecca and Bagdad grew great. Morocco, halfway between the east and the west, was invaded by new waves of Arabs. Hillalians and Idrissides built fine towns in Algeria and Tunis. Morocco was surrounded by splendors. The mountains remained mountains.

Three hundred years the streams of culture flowed through this frustrate land, from Spain to the east and from the east to Europe. Now came a Berber tribe from the southern desert: the Almoravides with their great chieftain Yusuf. Twenty-two hundred years since the Phœnician had builded in the Moghreb, and now the Moghreb in its own name grew great. Fez, Marrakech, Rbat bloomed and their power spread to Tunis and to Spain. Many ages did this stubborn world take to blossom; many ages has it taken to die. The greatness of the Almoravides, of the Almohades, of the Merinides lives still in Morocco.

* * * * *

Fez is the metropolis of a world that is gone: the head of a missing body. A hundred thousand Moors in Fez-el-Bali live in an age synchronous with the Crusades and with the Gothic. The modern world is here like a mirage--or like a curse of Allah.

A river, plenteous in water for Morocco, makes of the hills a single grove for olive, fig and eucalyptus. The town lies solid, within them. Most cities are a crust of houses split into streets and squares. Old Fez is a solid carapace of roofs, its rise and fall like the articulations of a body.

Underneath the roofs are the _soukhs_, intricate like the wrinkles on an old man’s face. These are streets of myriad and tiny shops. In one section there will be only goldsmiths--hundreds of men squatting before their little bellows and their little gems. In another congregate the sellers of fish, the vendors of soap and grease, the ironmongers, the makers of leathern ware. The typical _soukh_ is not more than three paces wide; and each shop is an open box, slightly above the level of the walk, and large enough for a single squatting man. Overhead, is a roof of grapevine or of rush, joining the two sides of the street together and letting in mere crevices of light.

Back and forth in this myriad-textured warren move the Fasi. The rich swathe through on mules; asses laden with produce are led by uncouth Berbers from the mountains or by black slaves from the south of the Sahara. The human pigment is bewildering. The city Arab is pale as a dweller of the northern towns of Europe: the Kabyl is dark-skinned, blue-eyed: the Ethiop is black as the shadows in the tiny shops. Burnouse and turbans are pied. Vendors shout for the passers-by to stop. And from time to time there is a break in the ceaseless lineage of bazaars: the carved, closed shutter of a Koran school shields the incessant coil of adolescent voices, strident, wild, unmeditative--shouting the words of their Prophet. Along the bare walls of the mosques and the medersas, beggars are posted. Their stintless catch-word weaves with the beat of ass-hoof, with the thresh of human feet, with the shop-calls, with the chanting of students.

Each beggar has his phrase. It invokes alms with the patronage and to the glory of a particular saint. It guarantees to the almsgiver a saint’s word in Heaven. He sits in the shadow of the holy buildings. The carven door leads through a passage of mosaic to a court, gorgeous with tile and woodwork laid perhaps with mother-of-pearl. The holy students of the medersa live in cells, mounting in honey-comb mass to the minaret.

From the crowded _soukhs_, streets toweringly high and sinisterly narrow twist in all directions. A band of Moorish minstrels moves from dark door to dark door. The voices of drum and pipe give forth a ghost of music. The voices are shrill like the calls of mountain life. Arab music was lean and violent, a gray fusion of thrusts. This song of the true Moor is almost disembodied. It has accent, but no texture. It stands against the intricate mellow noise of the city, enfolded in the liquid sconce of hills, like a savage summons. A door opens, a copper falls in a drum. The leader of the band gives his toned blessing; the slender men move on, weaving with their song a pall on Islam.

On a hill stands the mosque of Bab-Guissa (one of the 785 mosques built in Fez by the Almohades, exclusive of monasteries and medersas). By this mosque is the north gate through which the Berber from the Rif passes with donkey-charge of olive or of grain. Each donkey-load pays duty to the Sultan; and each appraisal calls for threats from the custom officer--degenerate Moors who are truly slaves of France. The Riffian pays his pence in sullen silence. And his non-resistance maddens the Fasi. Nearby is an olive market, _Fondouk el lhoudi_. The olives ripen in winter. Vast rush troughs and baskets hold the black fruit in the open Square, under the sun and the flies, and the sweating men and donkeys. With the barter come blows. A negro catches a bargainer with his teeth and is flung off with a ripped cheek. The crowd buzzes, deeply unmoved. The open baskets of olives, black-gemmed in the air, give an intenser note....

On the heights above Bab-Guissa are the ruined tombs--the _koubbas_--of the Merinides. Their crumbled arabesques look down on the long valley of Oued Fez. A spirit of those ancient rulers could still find his Fez-el-Bali: know this shut and terracing carapace of stone, blue tile, gold ceramic, fumy beneath the sun. The old walls are there, too, although time and cactus have splintered them. And the mosques rise like a thousand claws toward Allah--the hold of the pious town on the One God.[2]

The sun is sinking on the Almohadian wall that forms a corner with the mosque Bab-Guissa. Soon will come from myriad minarets, the call for evening prayer. The mountain donkeys no longer lurch through the Gate; and the slaves of the imprisoned Sultan are gone. This rocky height studded with moldering tombs, this wall and this tower form a natural amphitheater. It is crowded with Moors. They squat on the ground, swathed in burnouses. Water-boys thread silently. All indeed is silent, facing down to a central point within the wall where sits a man.

His beard is white and his voice is gentle: he is a man with exquisite hands and manners of the Court. And he is speaking so quietly, that the massed crowd must hold silent indeed, if it would hear him. He is the Chronicler of Fez--poet, historian, journalist: one of the great sons of the Moghreb. Each day at nightfall, for an hour, he bespeaks in his own verse the glory of Islam. Each of his tales lasts three months: there are four of them to the year. His unemphatic words give to the men of Fez two realities of Islam: the splendor which was, and the splendor which is eternal. He speaks, not without humor; his immobile body radiates peace. He tells of the gardens underneath which flows water--the Garden whither Islam somnolently moves through this demonic hour of wireless, guns and rail-ways....

* * * * *

The capital of the Sultanate is Rbat. From here, the Almohadian troops set sail for Spain; and after the triumph of Alarcos in 1195, Rbat-el-Fath--“Camp of Victory”--received its name. Fez, in hills, is gold: Rbat is a dazzling white over the sea. The bou Regreg slopes down within its sands, between two gentle promontories. On one of them Rbat, on the other Sla--ancient cities, equally white above the sea, equally proud, equally hostile. You can row from the _soukhs_ of Rbat to the palaces of Sla in a minute. But these are worlds kept separate in an ageless confrontation. Time was when the two cities were independent; blood stained the sands of the Regreg. Each town slants to the sea upon a mighty dune; and this dune is a divided graveyard.

The ocean has opened Rbat. Its bright streets run with the breeze. Its masonry is less delicate and more resolute than that of Fez. In its soukhs is a tang of salt. The Moors themselves are less shut up. Though their burnouses swathe them and the women walk as hidden in their veils, an Atlantic rhythm has crept within these folds; the somnambulance is brighter.

“We have lived fair days In Granada, house of delight. Among its roses and its roses budding We have sped many a silver night. Alas! no more for our enraptured use The dwellings of Andalús..... Hush! do not make me suffer more.”

We are the guests of a _Cherif_.[3] Two slave girls crouched on the carpet sing for us. The house is modern. But in each detail it is a copy of the classic Moorish style whose glory is Al-Hambra. These might be the days when Al-Ahmar, king of Granada, was friend of the Catholic Fernando; and when Christians were entertained in the Andalús even as we in the Moghreb.

It is a long and narrow chamber, run round by a divan yielding with silk cushions. To a man’s height, the wall is mosaic. Above, it is white plaster exquisitely laced in arabesque. The ceiling is carved wood, textured and painted like a maze of flowers, with mother-of-pearl and gold within the toolings. Outside the door we see the court, and hear the song of the fountain. The mansion rises to four stories: upon each floor the balcony goes round and all the windows open in upon it. A girl brings subtly painted goblets; tea fused with mint is poured. Another slave places brasiers of sandalwood. The monotonous wail and rending song has ceased. The singers go in silence, as if they had left with us all that they had. We hear the pulse of the sea: an indeterminate murmur of voice and feet. Two little slaves, with eyes too far to be either friendly or hostile, linger and change our glasses, ere we have half drained them.

“It is because we have disobeyed the Prophet.”

A young man speaks. He is the eldest son and his burnouse is white, undecorated wool. He has laid aside his babouches and his feet are bare. He reclines on the divan, resting his languorous head upon a hand more exquisite than the lacework on the wall. The features are subtly virile. There is fire in them, and cruelty. He is a man fine-drawn--but altogether metal. He is twenty: not yet married. His life is the study of Lore at his _zaouïa_ and the writing of verse.

“In Al-Koran it is written that we should work--we have not worked. It is written that all Islam should live in peace--we have fought each other. It is written that we should shun luxuriance and vice, that we should cultivate our soil and our minds. We neglect them. It is written that we should raise up our women--we keep them down. Therefore our life is disaster. Therefore the French are upon us. We have been the highest of peoples. Islam and Culture were one. In the old days, among a thousand men, there was not one who did not read. Within a thousand homes, there was not one but had delicate rugs, handsomely carved walls. Now, our houses are dark with smoke; our minds are dark with ignorance. Like the pest unto the unclean body, the French have come.”

My host smiled, fearful lest the words of his too serious son should bring discomfort.

“It is an evil hour: and it will pass.”

“Are you acting,” I asked, “to make it pass the quicker?”

“When we are ready, we shall act. Even as a child when it is ready to walk.” The son spoke. And his friend, a philosopher from Tunis, nodded.

“Islam has been cursed with a new childhood. We are not decadent. I know that your historians call us decadent. It is a lie. Measure us by the Law of the Prophet. If it was ever good and great, it is still so today. Perhaps you would find that it was never good. It has been studied by intelligent men--the Jews--and found wanting. We can understand that. But it is not changed: it is not decadent.”

I thought of the world fringing the Power of Rome, before Mohammed: a chaos of repellent parts, giving no light. The Arab kindled this anarchy and made it one. I thought of the reeking _Kasbah_ of Algiers; of the swarming, inert Marrakech and Fez. I thought of the Monastery city in the Sahara and of the holy Marabout whose Word Arabs came weeks on camel-back to hear. I had felt everywhere a Body, flaccidly receding from its accumulate splendors.

“You are a poet,” I said. “Tell me about the forms and the spirit of your verse.”

“We have sixteen forms,” answered the son. “We have but one Spirit.”

“Poetry,” said my host, “is more plentiful than trees, in Islam. It is our water-bearer. It is our forest.”

“And your greatest poet?”

All three spoke as one: “The Prophet.”

The Tunisian explained:

“Amrolkéïs, Antsar, El Bassiri, the poets of El Hariri and El Hamadaín were great. How could there be poetry like that which the Prophet dictated unto his disciples? In those days, Zoheïr was the greatest poet of Mecca. The Prophet had escaped to Al-Medinah. At the annual contest, when all the poets posted their work on the outer wall of El Kaabah, there was none to vie with Zoheïr. And Zoheïr was an idolater, a man of the tribe of the Koreishites--deep haters of the Prophet. But a Sura of the Koran came to the eyes of this man who had been crowned. And he read it, and he tore his victorious poem. And he said: The crown belongs to Mohammed, son of Abd-Allah, son of Abd-El-Motalleb.”

“Who are the great poets, now?”

“How, in a low age, can there be high poets? We follow the great humbly. The best of today--whatever it is--in poetry and in philosophy--is found in Egypt.”

Mine host led us to the roof of his palace.

“It is night,” he explained. “We are not indiscreet.” He referred to the custom of Islam which gives the roof as the inviolate playground of the women.

There was no moon. The stars were a swarm of golden bees within the deep blue meadow of the sky. From a hundred open courts, hid lights of houses were thrown up. Each house was a muffled lantern; Rbat was a cluster of hidden lamps peering into the turbulence of stars. The sea slept. Beyond the city walls, the ancient tower of Hassan mused, a gray ghost.

The man from Tunis spoke:

“It is said, O my friends, that Morocco is the tail of Islam. Let it then be known that Islam is a peacock.”

Outside the inner city, in the direction of Hassan, there was a small, low group of open lights. Here the houses were not dark lanterns; the houses had windows out upon the street. A trill of horizontal fires came against the upright monotone of Islam.

“It is the Mellah,” said mine host, “the Mellah of the Jews.”

We went into another chamber. Slave girls brought fresh glasses, candied fruits, dainties from Arabia Felix. Through the open door, the wide night air was a discord from this polyphony of silks and gems, of cedar and spice and ceramic. And there arose the voices of distant women in song. It was the women of the house, locked from the rooms where men of the profane world might come and drink tea with the masters.

The song drifted palpitant and humble. My thought went out to the Mellah--to the place where windows faced outward, where women showed their faces....

_c._ _Ishmael and Israel_

Forty men, women, children fill the room with a voice. They are Jews, Jews of the Moorish Mellah. The unveiled faces of the women are fertile, less metallic, harder than the faces of their sisters. The eyes are deeper, their consistency more solid. Gaunt determination holds the warmth of these women like an armor. The men are more variant and less harmonious. A burnouse or red fez in place of the black would pass most of them as Arabs. In their eyes the same cunning, the same swift hardness. Yet underneath dwells a distinction: an enduring spiritual source--a quiet water--of which the agitation of their external lives is tributary.

After the song of the Arab minstrels; after the singers of Fez beneath the Merinidean tombs shouting to the twang of a string; after the fakirs of the Socco in Tangiers who bounce and prance their monkey shines to the lilt of an apish cry, to the crash of a scissors; after the mystic monotone of the Darwish whirling his soul into the Absolute; after the service of the Ouled-Naïl who sway like trees deep-rooted and who shriek like Liliths--now, this Jewish music. Ten women step to the center of the room and squat in a circle around a copper cauldron. They sing, and as they sing they beat with open palms upon the upturned cauldron. Their song is in Arabic; it has similitudes with Moorish songs: there are the ceaseless verses, the narrative design with rhythm and note recurring. But the women are ample-breasted, leoninely gay. The beat of palms upon the copper drum rises like a copper wall about the women and the women’s song.

As a mountain torrent carries the rigor of grim heights through a low tropic zone, so this music moves through the Moorish Mellah with its prophetic past. For all its tides of blood and wandering, it is still. The music of Arab races like stripped steeds; that of the Moor jangles like bone, snaps like sinew. Here is a song that dwells wide over fields, tops the cedars of Lebanon, swings with the sun--and yet is but a prayer. Its immobility has voyaged. The prophets are here; and Ruth with her eyes fertile as the wheat; and Judith scabbarded in beauty. And Babylon to which, as Tangiers now, the scum of peoples rose; where magic parded with penury, coins glinted in blood. Spain is here, a perpendicular starkness rising from the low tide of the music--Spain, with her singing seers. And Araby has dropped her gold into a humble song. As in the streets where the street women sing, here is the cry--shrill, lithic: dangling but a moment on the plaint like a barbarous dart upon a mother’s breast.

* * * * *

Like the Jews, the Moslems are the People of a Book. The Bible is the compiled and edited remnant of a literature ranging from epigram to epic, into whose making went a thousand years. The Koran is the work of a generation, and of a man. Whatever divergence from the prophetic mouth is due to the disciples, Omar and Ali,[4] it is sure that before Mohammed there was no Koran and after him his text has changed only through processes of natural error. Before the Koran, the Arabs possessed an anthology of verse, lapidic, utterly objective: poems singing the loves and tribulations of the desert. These did not go, like the ancestral heritage of the Hebrews, into their holy book. After the Koran, this strain, celebrating passion, thirst, hospitality and war, went on. The heightened activity of the Arabs enlarged their letters. But the Koran, unlike what came after as before, is subjective. Pictures of Paradise, explicit laws, ways of the wrath of Allah, pleadings and campaigns, float in the swim of an inchoate exhortation. There is no reason to doubt that the Prophet did dictate the Koran--and revised it little. The book’s substance is an anarchic potpourri of what Mohammed must have thought out for himself, together with what he heard in synagogue and church. There is a canny set of laws: there is an endless repetition of the delights of heaven “where are the gardens under which flow waters” and of the miraculous nature of the virgins there, who are never unclean, being perpetual lovers and perpetual virgins. There is great harping on the unpleasantness of Hell. There are periodic outbursts against the Jews and much gentle reproval of the Christians whom Mohammed wooed with worshipful references to Jesus and to Mary. There is, above all, ceaseless plagiary from the Old Testament tales, whose beauty and significance are usually scrapped in Mohammed’s zest to get to his main point. And the point, as a rule, is that Abraham, Moses and Jesus were all true Moslems, that the Hebrews knew full well the ultimate prophecy of Mohammed, that their Book tells them so, and that only their wickedness keeps them from avowal. Finally, the book holds to a running comment on contemporary events and neighboring peoples; and the effect of this, within the holy Script, must have been vast since here was virtually God himself dictating an editorial page on headline stories.

Such matters lay in a great jumble in Mohammed’s head; for the Prophet was too great and too busy a man to keep a clear literary mind. And in such jumble they poured forth to make the verbose, extraordinarily rhythmed mosaic of the 114 Suras of the Koran. The book is above all an impressionistic portrait of Mohammed; in Mohammed, of the greatest figure and of the greatest era of the Arabs. Even in translation, it reveals the intense afflatus of a man who, from the age of forty till his death at sixty-three, conquered a world, prepared successors to conquer others, ruled savagely and wisely over a race as unruly as it was naturally keen, won the love even of his foes and the submission of almost countless maidens.

Mohammed was a great statesman, a great captain, a great lawmaker, a great poet: he was not the creator of a great religion. Innumerable mystic and religious men have worshiped Allah and performed the ceremonials of the Prophet. But the Mohammedanism of Mohammed, of the Koran, of the _source_ is not essentially a religion at all. A religion is a revealed experience of the relation between a man and his cosmos. If it is not experience, it may be philosophy but it is less than a religion. If it is not revealed, it may be an ecstatic or poetic state, but it is less than a religion. Its conclusion may be suicide for the human spirit, as in some religions of India; its field of consciousness may be narrowly naturalistic or animistic as in the religions of the savage. But no plan for life on earth, however exalted, is of itself a religion; no scheme for reaching heaven. Nor is a system which exploits an already existing sense of God as a means toward a determined human goal a system of religion. This, moreover, is the system of Mohammed. It employs the latent religiosity of the Arab world to a pragmatic end. It exploits the idea of God as modern pragmatism the idea of progress.

Mohammed uplifted a race. Where, in this, is his equal? At his hand an anarchy of tribes filling the desert with internecine blood: and from this anarchy he prepared the force which mastered half Africa, half Asia, Spain--which bound with great houses and great culture Bagdad to Toledo. The religious energy of the Arabs had for ages straggled and fumed in loss; creating but a variety of impotence. The religious energy of the Jews had thrown forth light in the world, and left the Jewish body desolate. Rome? The immense creature, camped about the Latin Sea, accepted Christ in its senility. Its principle of growth had not been Christ; Christ was to help to rot and to transform it. Mohammed studied Rome. He observed this one live element in that immense decay. The religious element. He took it, as the modern pragmatist takes the idea of progress and of science, to express himself and to advance his people.

He lived in a religious age. God for seven hundred years had made a wrangling and a shambles of the marts of the east. God alone, in all Rome, seemed alive. God served to energize Mohammed’s act. In the Koran, Allah is a voice bearing no fresh body of eternity or love, bearing no experience of Nature or of a spirit that transcends it: Allah is at best the charged echo of past holy voices, here applied to spur the Arab on. The quantity that gave Islam weight was the force of its leader and the latent might of his race: God was the _n_ by which the Prophet raised this quantity to the pitch of action.

And Mohammed is the full rich presence in the Koran. Though God speaks, Mohammed has the eye, the answer, the blessing and the curse for all the ambient world. Mohammed tells the Arab about God chiefly that God is telling the Arab about Mohammed. What else he says is not the crux of the matter. Mohammed is Prophet, to obey him is good, to disobey him is hell, the Jews are a bad lot, Allah is ruthless but to the believer kind--such degradations from the old rationales of faith are not dissonant from religion. Mohammed proceeds, after Moses, to instruct the faithful in diet, in justice, in commerce, marriage, war. His plan of success generates its power shrewdly from the normal appetites: man’s dream of heaven, his fear of hell, his love of woman, his thirst for water, his need of forgiveness whenever he has burned his fingers. Here, too, there is no divergence from the usual theocratic Code. But the Koran is distinguished by the relative place of God and of man’s experience of God within the system.

Go back not to the Mishna, and the Prophets; but to the barbarous Torah. Science and method are as demoded here as ethics. Blood and corporal anguish are obsessive symbols. Justice is a matter of plagues and trumpetings. Yet is God present. These old fathers would be abstract save for the dwelling in them of a universal principle, called Jehovah. It is He who moves these semi-savage tales. Hunger for a common experience which, being both true and beautiful, is divine, informs the acts of these men, directs their faltering passage. In the suicidal will of the Buddhist, in the Dionysian dance of the Greek, in the metaphysic of Paul or of Plotinus, dwells ever variant this single purpose: the will to fuse (though it be to fuse with loss) man’s personal act and his experience of the universal. This is religion. It is not in the religious mechanics of Mohammed.

The Prophet invites Heraclius, emperor of Rome, to join or to acknowledge him. He is denied, of course. But Islam is a “carry-all.” It assimilates Mary and Jesus quite as it has garbled the Talmud. It places Mohammed at the top of an agglomeration unified by him from the whirling chaos of the east. Energy, thus drawn from a hundred confusions, thrusts in a hundred directions.

* * * * *

If classic Islam is not essentially a religion, it is an Idea. An Idea in motion. Its motion is horizontal; and its premiss of departure is success. The follower of the Prophet cannot lose. At the worst comes death: death in holy warfare means beatitude and houris. But Mohammed does not lean too heavily on so dim a guerdon. He has genius in the arts of diplomacy and war. He fights innumerable battles, and nearly always he wins. When he does lose, he turns defeat into a strategic triumph. In his first lean years as a Prophet, he has garnered a rare capital for a religious leader: that capital is material success. He loans out his prestige at a usurer’s rates. It is clear, soon enough, that to follow Mohammed means victory in arms, means booty, means fresh women.

Health in Islam became a state of profitable war. From the mobile chaos of the desert was created this intent mobility of advance. Islam was a perpetual raid. Its health meant war: and war meant expedition, conquest, ultimate death. The contrary of war, of health, of Islam--was then the dwelling in the present life, and was Peace.

What contrast to the Jew in these brother Semites! Their mobility of steel to the chemic mobility of Judah! The Idea of Islam has indeed for matrix the unrest, physical and spiritual, of the Roman world. Peoples stirred, because the great People were broken. The interior displacement acted like suction on the peripheries of Rome. Dreams of power, opiate creeds went through the windy world, creating new currents, creating and moving new masses. Araby was drawn, so: and awoke. But this Idea of the Arab could not have lived so well within the womb of the world had it been alien to the Arab soul. In the Arab, as in all desert people, worked the impulse of expansion.

Here Arab and Jew are one. Who has seen the desert understands: this indomitable urge born of the sand-sea, to be moving, to pass horizons, to be moving forever. The desert impulse in the Hebrew was sublimated. Not his body, but his god should pass horizons! When the Jews’ body migrated, Jehovah became static. Only when the body took deep roots--in Palestine, in Spain, in the Talmud at worst (in America perhaps tomorrow)--could the transfigured Jewish God pass the horizons. But the balance held: as the Jews’ spirit spread, their body remained an atom. With the Arabs, it was the body that expanded. Before the Prophet, it had expanded impotently in civil conflict. Mohammed brought this energy to order. But even he knew of no principle of expansion higher than the raid and the empire.

Arabia expanded. Persia, Abyssinia, India, Egypt, the Sahara, Spain became parts of Islam that was Araby in motion. The Jew discovered that to spread in the spirit was to be immobile in the life. Not so the Arab. The Jew learned that only an unmoving and an unmoved God could pass horizons. But in Islam, to expand still meant to move. The law of balance between inner and outer energy was not transcended. The Idea of Islam became all body: all moving, conquering body. Here went the Moslem energy. The energy that dwelt in that hid precinct of creative thought was sapped to a low ebb. In the person of Mohammed, there was energy both for conquest and for the subtler dominance of law and wisdom. He elected that the ideas, the forms, the rituals, the experience, and truth which he created should suffice for all time for his peoples. All their powers might hence be transformed into the stupendous business of outward conquest.

Of course, this was not strictly to be. Many ideas of Islam were born after the Prophet’s death. Even the Koran may have been amended. The Moslem architectures, the Moslem philosophies both mystical and materialistic, much of the Moslem ritual, would have been strange to Mohammed. But independent growths of the spirit could not become organic within Islam. For in the Idea, there was the law that only Body of Islam could expand: its thought and vision were create, forever. In consequence, the few new crystallizations called forth by the new needs of Islamic empire became endowed at once with the old principle of fixity, with the sanctity of intransigent stagnation. The body moved. The forms of the body did not move. Wherefore, as soon as the body ceased to add unto itself by outward conquest, it began to rot.

This is the tragedy of Islam. It is writ large in symbols of the present. Fez and Rbat and Bagdad are fetid relics of gone loveliness. Their life has no virtue of rejuvenation; there was in Islam no autonomy of method for the creating of ideas whereby life is recreated. The Arab literary language is identical with the Koran’s. Dogma declares that the hodge-podge splendor of Mohammed’s script is perfection: who shall dare change perfection? So Arabic literature today is an archaic grimace: a spirit muffled by the masque of thirteen hundred years. And the spoken language, as divergent from the classic as French from Latin, is noisy and yet mute. Moslem architecture has not evolved. The mosque of today is a faithful imitation of some antique model. Prayer has not changed. Science has not changed. The Idea of Islam has forbidden its own growth.

But if this death from inanition is patent in modern Islam, it is implicit in the source. The fruit, only, of the religious impulse lives, for it alone holds the rounding of life’s circle. The religious act--be it art or be it ethics--cannot exhaust itself, because each forward step is an approach to the beginning. The man possessed of religion is possessed of a universal principle; and what he does cannot die. The forms and words of his activity may grow archaic--like the sculpture of Egypt, like the gods of the Rig-Veda. But the activity itself is forever an approach to the Source. The farther the religious man goes afield, the closer he will come to the Primordial Fountain, since all his life is plotted to a circle. And if he lose his life, then will he win it. But with the unreligious will, each act is a severance from source. The unreligious is the incomplete. And its symbol is the unreal straight line which moves away from its beginning.[5]

Even in its classic mosque, Islam betrays its unreligious essence. The mosque is a patchwork of details, a mosaic of finery for the senses. The very character of the mosaic is unreligious. For it represents the analytic, not the One. The minaret has no relation with the aspirant Phallus, or with the sublimated Phallus of the Christian church. The minaret is a down-tending structure upon which the muedzin stands, not to send prayer to Allah, but orders to the people.

The religion of the Koran is a caricature of God drawn in the lying lines of time and space.

_CHAPTER II_

_HINTERLAND IN SPAIN_

The sun is hidden from this dawn. The snow range is a crest to the south and east. Air, pouring over, cold and hard like pearls, is the dawn upon Spain. Tidy huertas are green crystals in the dawn. Villages, orange-marged, make a pied flash in it. Fig and olive march in armies up the slopes of the Sierra, toward snow, toward dawn. When the sun stands at last in the ridge, the day is hot.

This is the south. After Guadix, toward the eastern sea, the human world grows dim. The carretera, at the entrance of a town, slides in a slough of mud. Rain is rare and violent; it becomes a torrent from the impervious mountain. Dark men in black grimed capes walk beside laden donkeys. Women herd goats; the tuberous udders sticking on the mud. Children are rhythms in a maze of rags. The eyes of humans are like the eyes of burros.

The Sierras have disappeared behind the depopulous hills. The verdant valleys of Granada are folded back. Villages here are hard like the parched clay. The carretera is a swathe of dust, glittering in the sun. The land is sere as if a flame dwelt on it. The eyes of humans are velvet dark, like the eyes of a dream.

Murcia, now. Even the sparse irrigated huertas disappear. The barbarous abruptness of the soil turns to desert. Villages are a single eyeless street of houses, abject under the eye of the sun. The world is a turmoil of yellow waste. The villages are splinters of the waste. Only, to break the yellow, walls of cactus--a Maya-like green sculpture matching its lush planes with the harsh planes of the clay. Goats, dusty and crabbed, crop an invisible herb. The Barbary fig is the olive and the grape of this land. Villages grow lower, sparser--merge with the desert. Villages disappear.

Under the sky huge mounds of sterile hill rise now; and on their slopes, red and advancing with the mirrored sun, are serried shadows. Caves. Villages of caves. This is below Phœnicia in time. This is Iberia. A Spanish folk still dwells here.

The hills are steep. There is a row of caves, horizontally curved. Above each cave is a tiny aperture for smoke. Then comes another row. In the foreground, the cactus is cultivated for its fruit. There is a hooded well.

It is not yet noon. But the summer sun has turned the heaven into irradiant steel. Light and heat strike like solids on the solid soil, on the intricate levels of the hills. In their rebound, light and heat become polyphonous, weaving the world into their image.

The sun, rising, faints into its own immensity of heat. And the cave villages grow larger. Between them, the sterile hills leap in a monotone against the day’s pressure. A cave town flings sheer to the ridge of a pyramidal mountain. A hundred threads of smoke thresh the air like filaments of wire. Caves are dark eyes that hide from the steel heaven. The eyes of the dwellers are caves.

Shadow is cold. Here is a town with houses. Where the sun strikes the street, horses, donkeys, moving forms of people gyre and funnel and become a fume in the sun. Signs on shops, blue shutters, yellow parasols of women tremble and swerve as if they were in flame. But shadow is cold.

Outside, there is desert and the sky has melted. All the steel strokes of the sun, beating down, beating up, are melted: heaven has fallen into waves. Villages live in this fierce element. Men and women, donkeys and goats live in this radiant sea.

Over the brow of a _despoblado_, the sun goes. The desert flattens, like a sea after storm. The sterile hills are farther away, and on the even plain there is grass. The desert becomes a moor. Salt wort suggests the ocean. The road circles, catching the sun again. The sun splinters and breaks on the moor. Huge masses of dried dung, the fuel of these people, catch a last ray. There is a hill, dark-mottled. The hill is a city. At the height, there are caves and dwellings cut in clay. At the base, there is dust: and in the dust are streets.

Sordid wineshops, stores, squat in the dust. All is dust save the people who are clay; clay black-baked in the sun.

_CHAPTER III_

_ANDALUSIA_

_a._ _El Andalús_ _b._ _The Eye_ _c._ _The Bowels_ _d._ _A Goddess and Don Juan_ _e._ _The Gypsies Dance_ _f._ _Spain Dances_

_a._ _El Andalús_

In the year of Islam 89 and of Christ 711, an Arab host recruited with proselytes from the pagan Berbers and the Christian Copts, and captained by Târik whose name is a fossil in the rock Gibraltar (_Jebel Târik_) crossed the strait from Africa to Europe. After seven summers, all Spain, even to the Galician mountains, was in the sway of the Prophet. To their new conquest the Arabs gave the name Andalús, which means the land of the west.

Their first pause was in a smiling world. Southern Spain, roughly the part which is Andalusia now, for many ages had drawn the wandering hungers of the nations. Here had been Tartessos, the Tarshish of the thunder of Isaiah, a realm near the present sites of Seville and Cadiz, known as the Land of Silver and whose greatness was synchronous with Crete. Here had been Phœnician Malaca and Gades, cities famous for their gay vice. Here had been Bætican Rome, birthplace of Seneca and of the Stoic mind which in reality was Spanish. Here, from Babylon, came the urgent Jews among the indolent Visigoths. A smiling world. On the breasts of the Sierras, groves of olive and of cork. In the valleys rivers that were veins of wealth. Luxuriant crops, fat kine, orchards and vineyards: shade: and by the alternance of sun and cool a natural culture. Now within this mellowness, the harsh Idea born of the desert dearth.

Historians will give you the facts: how Andalusia did not hold the Arab: how he swarmed the mesas of Castile: how he fanned east to the Ebro and west to the Asturias: how only stubborn knots of Basques withheld him: how he scaled the abrupt wall of Spain and poured down the suaver Pyrenees of France; and how at last, near Poictiers, he was stopped by Charles Martel and driven back forever. The truth is otherwise. Not the Franks, but the smiling south of Spain stopped Islam. When the Arabs faced the French at “Tours,” they were turned back already. The desert, the mountains, the incessant war could not weaken Islam. These were its food and its health. But Andalusia was poison. A luxuriant land worked on the spirit of the Arab, causing in the rear a flinching and dissension. This, several years after the “defeat of Tours,” caused the return from France.

Often is the question asked: what Islam did to Spain? The first response must be another question: what did Spain make of Islam? Spain was there when the Arab came. She was far older than Islam, far more populous. This Celtiberian base which it is simple and safe to call the Spaniard is a strange people. It is warlike,[6] yet submits to conquest: it is indolent yet dwells in a harsh land: it is inarticulate and savage yet transforms its masters. Carthage has come and gone. Rome has faded, after creating in Spain a spirit that is not found in other parts of Rome. The Visigoths make their easy conquest. They are touched by urban Rome already ere they come; they are no longer the rude Germans of the Rhine. Rome has annulled their savagery. Their nature is rural but their will is urban. Their nature is the foray, but their will is Pax Romana. They have no metaphysical hunger, yet they spend their might defending Arianism against the cross-fires of North Africa and Europe. Their history in Spain is their dissolution; their complete absorption in the mute, indefeasible mass of Spain which they are supposed to rule. When Târik defeats Roderick, last Visigothic king, the business is done. But henceforth, German blood suffuses like a golden glow the flesh of Iberia which has already drunk the Celt, the Semite, the Greek, the Latin.

There has been no drama. This process is instinctive. Spain lives like a tree with her roots close and her branches harboring the seasons. She has taken to herself the nourishment of wind and rain, the steadfastness of sun. All Spain takes in is Spain. In her own vague life, an Idea has been born, expressive of her chaos. Now, she takes in an alien Idea to work upon her.

The Arabs found their kingdom. In 755, but a generation after their arrival, Abd-er-Rahman I who sits at Córdoba breaks with the Moslem east. Almost at once, the Islam that came to Spain assumes a separate being, grows into a body independent of Bagdad and Damascus. This separation means a transformation. And the cause of it is Spain.

The nature of Islam, we have seen, is like the nature of the pioneer. Pioneer values--motion, violence, acquisition, conquest--bear the Idea of the desert race, moving toward horizons. The Idea is not the horizon nor the water beyond it: it is the moving forever _toward_ the unmastered goal. Earth, in such psychology, takes on the delusive aspect of a flying road. And mortal life is synonymous with earth. It is a passing stretch. And it is close to death; for it is unreal and it is dark. The true life, the life of the Idea is that forever unattained, is that toward which our mortal days are an incessant moving. True life, then, is beyond that death which this life truly is. And to attain it, this life should be trampled like a road.

The Idea has its adornments: as in pioneering, they will be simplicity of living and of thought; violence, cruelty, intolerance for all that bars the goal; and the equally violent reflex from these--the narcotics of sleep and sensual relaxation.

Islam’s Idea now comes in the land of Spain. And the Moslem hosts who bear it and live to nourish it, settle in the south where settling is easy. And having settled down, they build a culture whose like the world sees seldom and whose causal spirit is essentially opposed to the Idea of Islam. For the Idea of Islam cannot settle down.

Mohammed and his captains knew no such world as this that sends its radiance from Córdoba. Nor would they have found it good. The Prophet would have thundered: “This is blasphemy and failure. This is turning from the commands of Allah. Rather than invent new forms of splendor for your mosques, ye would do well to push on. What? Ye consort with the Jew? Ye are tolerant with the Christian? suffering his monasteries to abide in Islam? Ye turn a peaceful back on the Frank and leave to the Christian Basques the holy labor of driving Charlemagne and Roland from Roncesvalles? And ye study Aristotle? when the Koran holds all wisdom? Ye tolerate schools who explain the creation of the world by natural laws? when I have taught ye of the Hand of Allah.” Mohammed was wise. He knew that the nature of the Arab, the Idea of Islam, the conduct of the people must be one, else the Idea would fall. But if Mohammed was wise, this kingdom of south Spain was luminous. Jews collaborated in government, science, art. Christians brought their mysteries and their music; and those who chose to pray in convents were not molested. An architecture was developed. Poetry and thought flourished like grass of the fields.

What had happened to Islam? The Idea born of the desert had become detached from the life of the desert people, when it lay down in this smiling southland. Life relaxed from the stern rigor of the Faith and took unto itself new forms, consonant with its relaxation: Islam whose health was war desired peace.

Meantime, Spain’s absorption of invading bloods went on. Christian, Arab, Berber, Copt--each with a past mingling--mingled. There lived soon again in southern Spain, one people: but there lived now three Ideas. The Christian was the least self-conscious, the least active; the Jewish was an insidious minority; the Moslem was dominant. These three Ideas were fleshed in human beings; and the human beings were virtually one. There were Moslem lords, whose ancestry counted Visigoths and Jews; there were Christian bishops in whose veins flowed Yemen and Berber blood; there were Jewish poets whose mothers had been reared in a Harem. Under all, there was the immemorial base outnumbering the rest. It had been pagan, Catholic, Arian, Catholic again. Now for a while, it was Moslem. Within a hundred years of the African invasion, Spain was once more inhabited by Spaniards.

Yet a new element had arisen, which was destined to grow tragic. The Idea of Islam touched into new intensity the Ideas of Jew and Christian. Jew, Christian, Arab, settled down and married. But the three Ideas, grown virulent, did not marry. They made war.

* * * * *

Islam, meantime, moves from Andalusia north. And as it conquers Spain, the Catholic Reconquest which for near eight centuries holds Spain in blood is cradled in the tiny mountain kingdoms of Asturias and Aragon. Where the Moslem settles, the land becomes Moslem. Often it changes hands in the long war’s tides. But the people, like a tree, stays with its roots. Fresh Moslems may perhaps come to live in a province soon reconquered by the Christian. They will become Christian, too. It is one people. The struggle is between a Cross and a Crescent. And the hands which bear them are of a single body.

Islam, battling in the desert north, has settled to peace in the south and fallen from the Idea of Islam. But battling in the desert north it takes its Idea along--its temper and its nature. And these, it gives unto the Christian foe! Rigorous desert traits flourish in Christian Aragon and Castile. For here is desert again, and violence as the matrix of the world. So the Christians of the north, facing Islam in battle, live ever closer to the Idea of Islam. War is an embrace fertile like love. Traits of Christian and Moslem pass in osmosis. And there comes the day when warlike Catholics from the north press on the gentled Mussulmans of the south with true Islamic rigor. And the Moslem south must look to Africa for Moslems close enough to the Idea of Islam to be able to withstand these northern Christians. And the war has no cease, being a war not of bloods but of souls.

We are still in the first scenes of the play whose tragedy begins only when the clash of arms is over. Let us dwell awhile in Andalusia, first home of the Moslem and his last in Spain.

_b._ _The Eye_

There are places of earth like eyes. They have more than a proportionate share of the light and the fire. They hold, within a fragile cup of space, measures infinitely deep. Córdoba is an eye within the face of Spain.

But Córdoba is dead? This whirl of houses is a husk of splendor, a strew of ancient ash here and there speaking still in remnant eloquence of arch or Square? Córdoba is not dead. Its life is impalpable like that within an eye. Something has lived on in Córdoba. There was vision here: that quickening of the nerves to the spheres of life which we call vision. Here was an eye that saw; and it still sees despite the catalepsy of the ages. Perhaps no eye that truly sees is ever blind. Perhaps if within this cup of the Sierras there was today no Mosque, no subtle nerve of house and street, Córdoba still would be an eye; and if our sense were sharp enough to meet it, there would rise to us yet the Word of its incarnate knowledge.

* * * * *

The Mosque is open to a _patio_ with orange trees, palms, fountains whose pallid water runs in counterpoint with the fervor of mosaic and tile. Women with their children stand about, filling their huge earth water-jars, setting them down in the shade of a palm to talk. A girl sings quiet and incessant: like the cool water over the stones her notes diverge from the hard hot day. On the medieval _Puerta del Perdón_ the Christian saints and regal arms set up their theme against the Moslem mass of the Mosque. To the sides are colonnaded cloisters. But to the south under the blare of sun in the white sky is the Mosque itself. Nineteen arched gates make way into its open forest.

Hundreds of columns various like trees. They are all low: from their smooth shafts the arches of red and white rise agilely to the ceiling which once was a maze of lace-like wood, inlaid. The movement of the columns becomes horizontal. Pillars of many marbles, of jasper, of porphyry, merge in the sweeping spread. There is no Gothic aspiration. There is a maze of delicate shafts with their heads arched and arabesqued, prancing in cohorts between a dull floor and a dull roof. In the heart of this battalioned whirl, stands the Catholic Capilla Mayor which the Cathedral Chapter placed there in the sixteenth century. It is a formless embryon of gilt and marble. It replaces sixty Arabic columns and its heavy flesh rises far higher than the legion of shafts about it. It is perhaps the greatest monument in Spain of the inæsthesia of Spanish consciousness. But with the worst intentions, it has not broken the spirit of the Mosque. The dance of the pillars moves toward this obtrusion, swirls before it to the right and left, sweeps graciously beyond into the shadows. Svelte and exquisite columns with their double-arched head-dress, with their fleet ankles and shoulders--marshaled like an army--move with the undulance of earth to the _Mihrab_ of Abd-er-Rahman and Al-Hakim. The Mihrab is the cynosure of prayer. Before it sits the Master to direct discourse with Allah. The Mihrabs of Córdoba are gems so bright that they make a ghostly swirl of the columns. Individual vibrancies of gem, of mosaic, of marbles frail as sea-shells, fuse into fixity. The Mihrab is the goal of the columns.

So, within Córdoba, stands and lives today the Idea of Islam. Though the Spaniards call it a Cathedral, it is still the _Mesjid al-Jâmi_, open to the fountains and the _naranjeros_, open to the skies. It is a place whose spirit in racing columns bespeaks the horizontal swarm of Islam to the ends of Spain. Islam speaks; and Córdoba, which is far more than Islam, answers. The Córdoban streets press and swerve to the north of the Mosque. They are a compact of stresses doubly held together: the Guadalquivir turning back upon itself and the rim of mountains in whose heights still live the fertile prayers of hermits, hold the streets.

Córdoban streets are not like those of Fez, of the Kasbah of Algiers, of Lisbon. Fez, within its translucent hills and vales, swarms like the entrails of a body. Algiers mounts sinister from the gleaming sea, its streets a blackened coil within the white sepulcher that strikes the sun. Old Lisbon is explosive, gyrant, tragically repressed in its march upward, losing the sky as it comes closer to it. Córdoba is proud. Its pride is intricate as the Talmud; hard and abstruse as the mystic creed of the Sufi; open as a page of Aristotle. This eye that is Córdoba is neither secret nor flinching. And its pride is not willful. Córdoba is unassertive. Its light speaks for it: Seneca the Stoic, Averroës the Commentator, Moses ben Maimun first rationalist of the Jews, Lucan, and Spain’s greatest lyric poet, Luis de Góngora ... such are the light of Córdoba. It is the home of the most perfect Arab Knight, the quiet Al-Mansor who, ruling Spain, decreed Sunday to be a day of rest in deference to the Christians.

Córdoba lies within tumultuous mountains and a lazy river. It is a poise of mountains and river. It is a kingly city within chaos; it is masculine in a feminine land. The Christian Copts brought their woman worship to Seville; the gypsies found haven in Granada for their Black Sea spells. Córdoba forbids such fascinations. It is quiet as its river, dense as its mountains, open as its mosque. The streets turn just enough to throw shade to the patios. Ox-teams survive, yet splash no mud on the immaculate walls. Here a miracle of life has overtaken the lunge and death of Islam: here grew a kingdom of balance and of peace.

For Córdoba is not the rock of Seneca, not the intellectual play of Averroës and Maimonides, not the deep current underneath of mystical devotion. Córdoba is the balance, and the contemplation, of all its parts.

* * * * *

The summer night is cool as wisdom; it is a poise against day like that of Seneca the Stoic against the fever of life. When the sun falls behind the roofs, the town opens as northern towns with the dawn. Day indeed is often fiery night on Córdoba. The good folk have gone to bed; houses have been swathed to keep this white night out. Now, houses are opened wide. Air from the world is permitted to come in to the shut courts where geese patter and women seat themselves at looms.

The people are dark and silent like the dusk. The sky is pale with a glow of convalescence. The houses, serried in the curving streets, are hot. The evening has a magic, it throbs and swells with tacit fervors. The whole of Córdoba is quick under the glow of night. The stone streets are flesh, willfully rigid, of a spirit possessed with the desire to dance. And in the dance are darker intimations: cries, ravage, conquest. But the slow streams of men and women are the sole expression. Are they puritans, then, these Andalusians? They wear easeful masks for faces. The women are clad in black, and their soft flesh within the shrouds seems not the flesh of lovers but of matrons. Even the girls, sinuous walking lilies, promise a snare of momentary passion: their will of men is not to be initiates of love, but to be mothers. All is easeful--the masks on the faces, the dark women’s weeds. They have been worn so long! They are like the streets whose stones are mellow and whose curves and windings have the fatality of forest paths. If these be puritans, these men and women, with their heritage of war, privation, pioneering--they whose ancestry is Islam, the Cross, the promised Zion--long since has the hard fruit ripened. They are firm and condignly whole within their city whose maze of streets is whole within the mountains....

This evening, Córdoba, released from day, is going to the Bull-Ring. There is no moon; the bowl of the arena holds a winey night in which the stars are bubbles of effervescence. The seat tiers are deep. Men and women clamber noisily from perch to perch. But the thousand voices and footbeats are segregate and aloof within the Ring holding this wine of the night. Upon one side, the seats have been roped off and are empty. Below hang two electric lamps and cast their naked glare upon a stage improvised with unpainted planks. The stage is a little tongue thrust into the arena.

The crowd has come and paid for a good time. But it is self-sufficient--the strong willed, resourceful crowd of Spain. Myriad calls and shreds of laughter, play of hand and foot twine about the Ring: agglutinate: the groups of clamor thicken and grow wider: the entire Ring is joined in the enterprise of shouting, shuffling, clapping. No Spaniards blackening the tiers, but this one sudden Spain! It has many means of making itself live. Boys scurry over the laps of matrons: men sing falling cadences to girls: babies shout. The _aguero_ with an earth-jar large as himself, the vendor of _pastas_ and of Arabic sweetmeats, weave through the mass. But still the Bowl holds its uncanny silence. The night bubbles at its brim.

On the stage step forth two figures: the lamp-glare sharpens and deforms them. A man, stout and short, clad in black broadcloth with a wide purple sash and linen that is green in the electric glare: he carries a guitar. A woman, slender and tall: her black _mantón_ is like a subtle fur over the angular brightness of her shoulders. She wears a large _sombrero ancho_, black as the two black eyes in her white face.

They stand within the night, within the crowd. The man takes a chair: the woman remains isolate beside him. The man’s hands brush the strings of his guitar. The woman’s mouth opens, and her breast rises. Under the laced clamor of the crowd she sings unheard--under the silent night....

A note, hard like silver, high and sharp as an arrow, rises above the clamor and is heard. Far up, it soars, surrounded by the stars. It falls. And as it falls, reaching the crowd, it links itself within the vast confusion. This rough-hewn Spain falls along with the note: is drawn by it down to the naked stage, down to the red mouth of the singing woman. The crowd is transfigured. The woman’s voice fades into rest, within an utter silence.

The hand of the guitarist is not lean: yet his fingers make a murmur like a breeze: clear in the silence is the music’s breathing. The music has conquered: it is the night’s silence, speaking; the night’s quiet, moving. The woman’s body stands rigid, her heels beat a tattoo of subtle restraining: her voice is confident and exultant.

Burden heavy with ages of flesh, bright with ages of dream. Plaint of spirit, rush of blood miraculously woven. A body in dance, rigid as a column; a voice in song, light and swift as a bird. Many Orients are here. In the form, a slender mystic draughtsmanship--Byzantine; a clamor of soul, a submissiveness of body with all its sweetness and its joys merged in the ecstasy of an ideal--Jewish; an intensive thrust, lean, fierce, hunting--Arab. Rising like revelation from the Córdoban Plaza, this Andalusian song of many wills becomes the drama of Spain.

The woman’s body scarcely moves. Even as she circles the stage, her arms slowly rising and falling, her heels in periodic showers of sharp strokes, it is as if she did not move: rather the stage, rather the Ring and the crowd move than this plastic fixity of dance. Torment, passion, vision, ruthlessly compress in a thin body.

The music cadence is vertebral. There is a time counterpoint of two adverse factors: a rising lilt, a falling plaint. And they become the skeletal arabesque which is the backbone of the Spanish music. All the voices of Spain’s world are laced. The Jew’s sensual mysticism, conflict between his homely passions and his cosmic fate, rises in a line more Arabic than Jewish. And the tendency of the music to transcend its scale is Byzantine; it bespeaks the North African shores of Porphyry and Plotinus, of Origen and Augustine. But the stress is more barbarous than platonic. And the _form_ is forever Spain. Its elements do not suffice to make this music great. It is greatly moving, because its moving parts become articulate, not in moments, not progressively, but all at once: in restraint, in defeat--in the triumph of the artist’s will upon them.

The passion does not depart; a woman’s body holds it and we are moved not by the passion but by the unmoved victory over passion. This cadence is a plaint of agony. It does not bend her. This peal is pathos. The high head, the arms crushing the breast, the torrent of heel-notes rivet a triumph over pathos. The mouth sings languorous desire; but the body is hard. Sudden the song flares like a vision from that mouth. But the body circles the stage in a crisp gayety, the eyes smile, the knees dip in courteous bestowal.

At the other end of Córdoba, the night lives among the columns of the Mosque. With arched head and heel of arabesque, they dance their mystery--a forest of willful movement under the will-less stars. This woman is a column too; rigid, and stone-like and adance. But the dance of the Arab columns is horizontal; it is an easeful running with the earth. The dance of this woman which is a dance of Spain, is deep and is high. It is not horizontal. So calm, it touches hell. So still, it reaches God.

_c._ _The Bowels_

The Spanish is the fusion of the warring elements of Spain into dramatic wholes. As the proportions of these elements change, the wholes change: and yet are Spanish. Granada, then, is the least Spanish of the towns of Spain; for, with all the elements there, they have remained disparate. Even physically, Granada does not resolve its discords. It is cast in confusion. Two steep spurs come down from the Sierra Nevada. They are divided by the gorge of the río Darro. Smaller, arid gorges break them, they expire in a plain. And within this broken sea of rock and ridge and wood, Granada sits uneasily. One height is Al-Hambra, palace of kings. From its towers the precipice cuts to the river; and in the west rises Al-Baicín, a populous suburb. North, beside the river straggles a gypsy village. And eastward, on another height, is the cascaded, terraced, tawdry splendor of the Generalife. Physically chaos; culturally, spiritually chaos.

For near five hundred years, Granada was the capital of a Moslem state. After the fall of Córdoba, it was independent. And in 1492, when Boabdil fled from Ferdinand and Isabel, there died the last political body of Spanish Islam. For close three hundred years, Granada was the richest and most populous state of Spain. Castile, Aragon, Catalonia were rustics beside it. But the barbarous states spread; and Granada had energy neither to spread nor to glow. The barbarous states had fused their differences in the terrific lust of religious conquest. Castile and León were closer then to the spirit of Mohammed than the Andalusian Town in which the muedzins called his name and the people spoke his tongue. Toledo, Valencia, Badajoz, Seville, Córdoba fell: Granada came to be the last resort in Spain of the driven Moslems. A veritable city state it was, going north to Baza, west to Málaga, east to Almería. Meantime, Spain had converged into an austere camp. Her forests became deserts, her towns were empty of men, her women suckled warriors, her churches were the centers of recruiting. And Granada shone with ease. In Granada, the wide lands were gardens; husbandry was an art. The cities sang with ceramic and jewels. The mosques were models for the mosques of Africa.

Córdoba had been the seat of Arab Spain. Granada was the heart of the Moor. When the Arabs were too wasted by peace and thought and quarrel to withstand the pressing Christians, they turned to the south whence four hundred years before they too had come, clad only in the harsh will of the Prophet. In the Moroccan mountains and the deserts, dwelt still virgin tribes in whom the Idea of Islam worked with the virulence of birth. This was the need of Spanish Islam. So the Moors came to Spain to do what the Arabs had done and could do no longer. The Moors drove back the Christians. Then they turned and subdued the Arabs. Arab Andalusia was Moorish.

(And here we must digress for definitions.... The greatness of Granada came with the Nazrite dynasty whose founder, Al-Ahmar, captured the town in 1238 from the Moorish Almohades. And Al-Ahmar, born in Córdoba, claimed descent from the pure Yemen Arabs of Kharzrej and Ansár. Which is important, since it displays the dangers of speaking, biometrically, of a _race_. The family that reigned in Moorish Granada was perhaps as Arab as the dynasties of Córdoba and Seville! And of course, the very first Arabs in Spain brought with them Berbers, negroes, Copts. Why then was Córdoba Arab, and Granada Moorish?... We require the names, and for them there are reasons. The first Moslem invasion was _Arab_: for its impulse, its energy, its leadership came straight from the Arabs. And that first Moslem culture which from Córdoba held all Spain north to Toledo, south, west, east to the seas was also _Arab_ for the identical reason. Now come fresh leaders to defend Moslem Spain; and when they have driven back Castile they disperse the Arab masters who bade them in. These hosts come in two waves: the Almoravides--_men of religion_--are Berbers from the Senegal, and the Almohades--_men of the Unity_--are Berbers from the Atlas. It is right to call them Moors since they rose to power in Morocco. And it is right to call their dominance in Spain the Moorish epoch since, after their coming, the culture of all Moslem Spain not only differed from that of Córdoba but was deeply homogeneous within itself despite political chaos.) ...

In the towns of Spain lived still the Spaniard with his absorption of Semite, African, Latin, German. But the difference of the Moor from the Arab was a change in his Idea and in the ways of life begotten by it. The Christian forces were vastly stronger than they had been. Their own Idea had been enhanced by Moslem contact. They were come a long ways from the invertebrate Christianity of the Visigoths. The first Moslem sweep to Biscay and the Pyrenees had planted a germ of resistance which with the ages grew to be this vital Christian body, a body stripped and ruthless as ever had been Islam. So the Moor could not, like the Arab, dismount from his saddle to invite his soul. The Moor did not become tolerant under pleasant skies. He welcomed no Jewish thinkers and statesmen, he housed no Christian convents. Under the benignity of peace he made no introverted, rational culture. When the Moor rested, it meant that he was weary; and then he invited his body. Arab refinement became voluptuousness; Arab ease became prostration. The energy of the Idea of Islam had by the Arab been transformed into a _contrasting_ culture. Under the Moor it became at best a _reposing_ culture. And indeed, the Idea did not change. Christian armies saw to that. But the need of Islam--to expand--could not be fulfilled. The Christian armies saw to that, as well. Here then was a warlike energy that could not spread and yet could not transform. It turned against itself. Moor fought Moor. Granada alone held long to the appearance of a dignified state. And the appearance was false. Moorish Granada helped the Christian San Fernando to march against Moorish Seville, as a century before Moorish troops had helped the Cid win Moorish Valencia. A hundred years ere its fall, dynastic quarrels had split Granada into a chaos of tiny states; the Catholic Kings needed to take it piecemeal in a series of raids on petty princes.

* * * * *

The Idea of Islam is no more within this lovely world. But high and low, strewn through the summits and the troughs of the Sierra, lives the wreckage of the Moorish body. Across a gorge, Al-Baicín and Al-Hambra face each other. Al-Hambra! all that may be said of the skill of the goldsmith may be said of this Palace, with its scores of patios and halls. It brings to mind, not other architectures but the triumphs of the Cellinis of the Renaissance, the delicate perfections in Pompeii and in Egyptian tombs. In minute and marvelous grace, it transcends them all: and yet it is a building!

Within the _patio de los arrayanes_ there is a pool enclosed in myrtle as a sapphire within emerald. Overhead is the soft pale sky. Beyond the _sala de la barca_, arched like a ship, is the Ambassadors’ Hall, its dome an incessancy of carven woods, columns and walls so tooled that they seem lace threaded with gems. Myriad patios on either side are myriad surprises of wood, plaster, stone that flows with arabesques and softens to the creaminess of linens.

Some architectures make one think of man; some make one think of God; some, of the tragic struggle in men’s flesh between the man and the god. Al-Hambra exiles both the earth and heaven. That a palace lacks high poetry, movement of aspirance, is not amiss. But Al-Hambra lacks as well the sense of being made for men to dwell in. It is cold as a jewel and as a jewel hard. Yet unlike other jewels, it adorns no breast and no altar. It is faëry. Yet unlike other visions of surprise, it does not entice the mind. It is no outward form of the old dreams. Nor is it strong, save as some stellar gem, fallen in the mud of our world, has its impregnable strength. It is immaculate of men. It is too far from man, too far from God. It is not strong, yet it is not poetic. Poetry must pay its tribute. If it sing a blade of grass, a kingdom, a divinity--yet it must make its tribute to the world: man in giving music gives himself. Al-Hambra, for all its matchless grace, is incarnate of no warmth, no joy, no agony, no love.... It is a jeweled monster; a sort of dissociate birth of human will. Although its tints are magic, its curves delicate as a woman’s mouth, its forms courteous, and its stuffs transfigurations of the elements into the radiance of silk and the sweetness of wool, yet it is but a fragment. Its rapture parts not from itself. It is Narcissus. It is a _Golem_ of the Moors.

* * * * *

The rock of Al-Hambra falls into the river and on the farther side rises Al-Baicín, antiphony of Al-Hambra.

In the days of the first Nazrites, here was a place of noble mansions. But when the Moslems, exiled from conquered towns, poured into Granada, Al-Baicín became what it is now--a swarming city. This is as near to the Kasbah of Algiers, to the dense Attarine of Fez as you may come in Spain. The town is a lay of alleys maggoting up the breast of the Sierra. The throngs are dark, aburst with energy. Eyes are gentle and give forth no light. Faces are locked as if in obscure struggle of themselves. This folk is neither gay nor sad, savage nor kind. It partakes of the ineffable nature of the houses. What it is, what it has to say--as with the houses--is detached from the hour, is a minglement of nostalgia and obsession. An incommunicable town, knowing no tongue save an archaic one: its houses speak not to us but to their own old shadows.

A patio stable with its mangy mules, a gigantic oven where bread in memorial Moorish shapes is thrust at the end of a pole ... such are the words of the streets. Beneath the language which the people speak, this rhythmic word of the streets.

Al-Baicín has a soul. What Al-Baicín lacks is body! Groveling life within an ancient molder of walls, patios, wine shops black as warts--this life so halted, so disgraced, so blind is life that lacks a body. And there, polished clean of the clamors of the spirit, shines the body on the opposite hill--soulless Al-Hambra.

_d._ _A Goddess and Don Juan_

The air is spiced with murmur, throat call, peal, with stirring of feet, clink of earth-jar; it is a weave through which the horse’s hoof, flick of whip, _ar-r-ra_ and _shuh_ of driver make a swathe. Singing cry of a girl, crying song of a girl cascade to church bells.... Silence.... A little square (Castilians say _patio_, Andalusians say _compás_) holds an alicatado fountain: thin water within a sapphire bowl wavers, splinters, fades like stars at a dawn. All about, the wings of a vast Church. Fortress-like they rise, rise in terrace, in forest of sculpture, in buttresses that sweep out of sight. And straight above, a tower. It is the old prayer tower of a mosque--_al-minar_: the muedzin post which the Christians call Giralda.

In the compas, it is cool; high overhead within the well of the walls, the heat of afternoon is writhing. Heat cannot pierce the eight foot walls of the tower. A pavement, so gradual and wide that a coach could follow it, climbs to the peak. There are windows to tell how you climb. The Cathedral, resonant with statues; the stucco palace of the Bishop beside a compas sleepy and cool like a virgin at dawn; a slant of street with houses dodging sun.... Cathedral roof, a groined and columned symphony with transepts trilling in overtones away; a knot of buttresses that scale a higher wall you could not guess was there; a grove of turrets against the town, green trees; a line of river; town itself keen in the gyrant air ... guitar-like music under the voice of the sun. A scarf of hill, treeless and red. A court within the sapphire day like rubies and emeralds--the _patio de los naranjos_--a frame of creamy walls holding the rows of orange trees. The top of Giralda.

Seville: No, this body is Isbilíya. Town of the Visigoths, the Yemen Arabs and the Copts, alcázar of the Moorish Yusuf who built Giralda, town whence Ferdinand of Castile with the aid of his friend the Moslem of Granada drove countless Moslems in 1248, bringing in other men who said Christ, not Allah--said it in the same Mosque rechristened, in the same town, under the same sun, from the same Giralda.

The repeopling, the christening could not avail against the might of this past. Christ dimmed again; Our Lady grew. Our Lady who was Isis ere she was Mary: consort of Osiris, Horus, Khem, ere she sat with Jesus. And in her hand, through Seville, through Andalusia, a lily that does not grow in Spain but grows indeed on the Nile ... lily or lotus or more simply still _la flor_ in all heraldry, all holy craft of the land. For Islam had passed to Egypt and won the Christian Copts who were in heresy for that they adored a living Trinity and had no Christ on the Cross, a trinity older than the Pyramids with the new Christian names. And now, for an age, their trinity disappeared. But Our Lady became Fatima, daughter of the Prophet and virgin although she bore miraculous sons. And Arab and Copt march on to Spain. And the Christian saint comes south. And the mosque of Seville is again the church of Our Lady. And from Seville to Rome goes the first urgency to make a dogma of the Immaculate Conception....

The town is so very thick with houses, where are the streets? Those sharp cracks weaving through the roofs are streets? The roofs are live, bewildering planes. White flat roofs under dominant chimneys. Roofs that run with their walls. Roofs that are clusters of rush. Roofs that are little gardens for goats and chickens. Roofs that are vineyards. Roofs that are nurseries. Roofs that are streets on which stand huts of turf. In a court, is a palm; its round head sends green star-rays to the sky.

The town is so very wide; solid it rings you. The breaks are breathings for a palm, or a wide wall with crenellated top or a tiled dome like a jewel in the breast of Seville. Thick town ... intricate, turning roofs. Until the sudden stop! Seville does not linger. There is thick town, then huerta. Country gardens are perfumed brasiers. A wandering ribbon of low trees marks the sleepy river creeping down to the copper wall of sunset....

It is cool now. They have drawn to the roof tops the canopies that shield the streets. Now let you go down into Seville.

* * * * *

Varying weathers fall upon Seville. In summer days, she smiles resilient and cool within a fire that shrivels the river. In winter, under a slatey sky with her streets drenched, she is smiling still. Weather and invasions come upon Seville; she masters them all.

She is an Eastern goddess unknown of the Greeks, whose cult is sung with cymbals and in blood. She is no Semite; she is the antistrophe in this, as in all things, of her great brother of the north: Toledo. Within the huddle of her streets, lives clarity; within her sudden and esconded curves, glows coolness. She is immeasurably far from the hot Jew and Arab. Seville is Pagan. But her pagan spirit is uniquely hers. It is not dark and carnal like the Sumerian; not analytic, open-eyed like the Greek; it lacks the Italic will. Nor is it Berber. This spirit has a spirit; the Giralda. To see Giralda from the town is to see both the tower and Seville. Everywhere al-minar follows. It is cool in the sun; in the damp of winter it is gleam. On the river’s margin where vessels coal, it is a yesterday when ships had sails. Its simple face is strength above the prone complexity of life. Variant, it is constant, sovereignly self-contained. It mirrors men’s perceptions, who can see of it at each moment but a flash of time. It stands for Seville whose traits and deeds are facets of a Crystal.

This fixity, this intricate appearance within fixity is the deep trait of Seville. Her genius, her emotions, her religion are in fixity for they are held unwavering to herself. She looks not at Spain nor the world. Not like Venus does this goddess walk and give herself to men. Not like Astarte, thirst for the blood of others. Not like Isis is she concerned with the cycles of sun and planet. Seville loves only herself; and the moon and stars are brilliants for her hair.

* * * * *

The narcism of Seville is fecund. The gorgeous litany of the Semana Santa is but the most famous of her arts. Religion is but the most obvious pretext of her self-worship. Seville abounds in dramas and in altars of her self-delight. Wander through her streets, commune with her churches and cafés, watch her ample daughters dance to the splendor of their own high breasts; read the legends--Don Juan, La Macarena. An hour will come, perhaps at dusk in the park along the river, when she will tell her secret:

“The Guadalquivir is my scarf of saffron; the orange blossoms sing the chant of my flesh; the sky is a mantón of rose and purple on my white shoulders. Church and God, love, blood and death are castanets! I am Real. I am the dancer. I am Isbilíya.”

* * * * *

Sierpes, chief street of the town, is a bit of a way with a crick in its middle: too narrow for horses and mules: the lines of shops and clubs face each other across a slender sidewalk. When the good weather comes the doors open; the clubs and cafés pile chairs pell-mell upon the street. And Seville sits down and looks at herself. Drinks coffee, Manzanilla wine, and looks at herself. Eats mariscos and looks some more at herself. Athwart the Sierpes, other streets are a maze of tiny shops: shops small and delicate like toys, shops secret and uncommercial like the good Majas[7] who keep them, shops with too deep modesty to display their wares and too little will to have much wares to display. Reticent, charming shops like the hearts of simple folk, so full they are of warm darkness. In such a passage, crammed with stores (for these central streets are merely passages), in the very heart of a world of dolls, lottery tickets, pastries, newspapers, umbrellas, fans and pipes, is a Chapel. It is open to the street and it reveals within a long recess its garish bower of candles. The throng crowds by. Dark clad, the women; drab, the men with wide stiff hats and a clank to their high heels. They talk of little things; eyes hold to the unconscious rhythm of the throng. And as they pass, they shift their talk an instant into prayer; or they make the sign of the cross; or they kneel. So Seville prays to herself.

In the Parish church of San Gil, there is the figure of a woman. Is it some crude artisan’s idea of a prosperous Maja? The dress is modern on La Macarena--idol of Our Lady. And La Macarena is the most vaunted, the most puissant goddess in Seville. At Semana Santa, in her garish dress, she parades the town. The Majas of Seville throw themselves before her; and sing; and pray. And as the Doll, who is both Mary and Maja, moves through Seville, the streets are paved with the breasts of the Sevillanas, loving their own image.

The Gardens of Alcázar are a geometric maze of tiny verdant patios. Each stands at its own level, a gradual step lowering with the flow of water. Each is a little bower with tiled floor, an intimate garden holding to its charm in the great sum of gardens. The patios make a mosaic. The design is severe; it is a heritage of the analytic Moslems. But in Seville, the mathematic form is snared into an idyll.

Hundreds of churches in Seville. Many of them are bleak rococo monsters and their interiors gross piles of gilt and scarlet. They are not bad taste in Seville. Murillo is not bad taste in Seville. They are parts of a ceremonial. Seville’s love is great enough to hold and to transform them. So, in the compas of the Convento de Santa Paula, a noble Gothic portal stands with a palm tree; so the rococo dome of Santa Catalina blazes to ceramic; so the Plaza Santa Cruz becomes a faëry quarter, its rows of ancient houses painted like the flowers and the birds that hang from the low casements; so, even the Casa de las Dueñas, home of the bloody Dukes of Alba, winds behind its iron gates into quaint patios and palms and archways.

Each street has its garland of self-praise. A color of façade, a jewel of ceramic, a tiny unsuspected court elbowed between the blank backs of two houses, from which oak doors lead into other courts--communities of painters, artisans, teachers of the dance. And each season has its pretext for self-song. The Semana Santa and the Feria are the most famous rites: in Holy Week, the spirit of Seville meets Seville’s body in orgasmic climax. But other seasons have not less typical embraces. The Velada de San Pedro comes in summer. There are no foreigners and the rich townsfolk are north in the Basque country. Night follows a day’s fever. And now the people open their doors, throw wide their canopies and go into Seville. The servants carry great hampers of _fiambres_: cold sea food, mostly, with jars of Jérez and Manzanilla. They proceed to the popular squares, Alameda de Hiércules, Plaza de León, Plaza Encarnación, near the Mercado where with cool night comes the stir of odors ... greens, fruits, cheeses. They spread themselves, the good folk: they eat and play.

La Plaza de San Juan Bautista de la Palma is not as large as it sounds. A dozen families fill it: it is a pretty stage for the Sevillan drama. Overhead are the crisp stars. The houses, painted cream, blue, pink, fade in unlighted shadow. In the center is a pavilion cut into tiny booths for _churros_, _pasteles_, _bombones_, _patas_, _mariscos_, _bocadillos_, _fiambres_, _vinos_, _cervezas_, _gaseosas_--myriad tidbits _de media noche_. Nearby sit three men and a woman. They play the guitar, the mandolin, the fiddle; and the woman sings. She wears a buff shawl that is caught tight over one shoulder and tighter still under the other armpit. Rondures of breast and stomach press the lashed silk. She is a _gitana_: she comes of an immodest race, but ere she goes among the crowd for coppers she will place a black shawl over the revealing buff one. Each of a dozen groups has its place in the Square. They eat, drink, dance and court within their private precinct. They are as unconcerned as if they were in their own private compas. But their gayety is richer; this open sharing of a public place is the sharing of a rite.

You have seen a young girl in some peasant road step _endimanchée_ from her house to the sun. The velvet bosom of her bodice rises. A jewel at her neck, a ring on a finger, an eye gleam brighter than the jewel make of her a song that runs with the Spring sun and the grass. You know that the peasant girl loves and is loved. Love has wrought this miracle on her flesh. And so, in Seville: the miracle of her streets is the same alchemy. She is adance with the magic of fondness; she is gay in a perpetual Spring of self-delight.

* * * * *

Near the Guadalquivir and not far from the Torre de Oro, a dodecagonal relic of the Moors who built their castle on the waterfront, there is a baroque structure. It is the _Hospital de la Caridad_. In the seventeenth century Don Miguel de Mañara was a caballero in Seville; a knight so dissolute that legend makes him the Burlador, the true Don Juan. This the nuns of the Caridad deny. But the day came when the Lord miraculously spared his life from the assault of a noble seeking to avenge the honor of his sister. Don Miguel avowed the will of God and his sins; and caused to be built this Charity as witness, through perpetual good works, of his atonement.

Above the chapel there is a chaste stone hall; a stair, spreading from above like the train of a regal robe, leads to the carved door of the Consistory. Here hangs the portrait of Don Miguel de Mañara. The face is darkly sensual and brooding. The chin is obtrusive, the eyes have the rigidity of a madman’s. He sits at a table, and behind him in the room there opens a fantastic landscape. It is radiant and nubilous, a landscape of vapors rather than of earth. And on the floor beside the table and at Don Miguel’s feet, squats a boy and looks at him and smiles. Pedro Salinas, the poet, has a theory about this portrait. Don Miguel is mad, says he: the landscape, so amazingly like the “spirit paintings” of our day, is his vision of madness. The boy is the sane boy--the Sancho Panza--laughing at the madman.

Whatever the painter meant, whatever the historical connection of Don Miguel with the legended Don Juan, here at least is his true interpretation. Don Juan is the most conspicuous symbol of Seville. Since Tirso de Molina in the seventeenth century made a play from the old ballad and folklore sources of Don Juan, poets and playwrights of many lands have retold his story.[8] The modern mood has freshened him again with new psychology into a modish legend. But it is futile to approach Don Juan save through the spirit of his town. The Don Juan of Tirso, the first, remains the greatest. For Tirso placed his hero in the proper setting. Tirso was no analyst, but he was a poet ... a great dramatic poet. And his plastic presentation needs no analysis to reach the truth.

Seville--auto-erotic, self-rapt goddess--has a god. Her streets, her churches, her festivals bring you her lord. Don Juan is not the full-grown lover. The true lover dwells within the spirit and body of his woman as within a world holding heaven but earth too and hell: and he enfeoffed to them all for that they all are the true world which he loves. The true lover is constant; he has seen his woman so deep that he has found infinitude within her; and how could he desire to transcend it? What holds him to her is not pleasure: pleasure is but a moment in this eternity of love. Anguish, anger, the black shades of disappointment are also in his woman and he accepts them also. The true lover is rare, rarer than genius. But Don Juan is one who loves in woman his own senses, his own victory, and seeking ever these fleet constants of himself moves ever on from breast to breast. The true lover is rare because the full-grown man is rare. Don Juan is common because infancy is common: the state of seeking only oneself, of taking life as a flowered highway along which appetite and ease run gayly in pursuit of their own image.

Like his mother Seville, Don Juan is restlessly pagan, hunting in countless dramatic scenes a tribute to self-adoration. Each woman is a mirror to himself; love of each woman is a pageant in which he enacts his triumph. When the glance has been enjoyed, what is the mirror for? When the pageant is past, what are its faded garlands? The real is Don Juan! That he may be forever fresh, that his triumph may be forever clear, undulled by custom, there must be new mirrors, new pageants--new women.

Under Don Juan’s lyric words, there is coldness; under his exploits, there is abstraction. His passion is but the spark, ere it has kindled life and made life passion. And his deeds are fantasies, for only he is real and the women whom he meets he never knows, knowing only his desire. Therefore, his deeds like the landscape in the portrait of Mañara are abstract.

All the elements of Don Juan are in Seville. But Seville is greater than her son. His worship of himself in the white bodies of women is true Seville. The constant shift of his deeds, like facets in the crystal of desire, is true Seville. His orgiastic use of blood, of mysticisms, his encounters with statues, necrophiles and ghosts--are Seville of the Semana Santa. His ultimate sinking into the peace of self-absorption is Seville. But the town is ampler, deeper. Don Juan conquers only women. Seville conquers Spain.

This is her ultimate secret. She too--like Córdoba, Toledo, Greco, Cervantes--is a living whole fused from the hostile elements of Spain. But the peculiar chemic proportion of Seville makes all these worlds and wealths the single gesture and the rite of her self-adoration.

She is the pagan goddess, ample limbed, with hair in which brood darkness and the laugh of the sun. She leans over her Giralda. She stirs her head and her arms in a half somnolent, half ecstasied dance, seeking her own image in the water....

_e. The Gypsies Dance_

Below Al-Baicín the bodiless soul and Al-Hambra the soulless body, there is a gypsy town. The sparse waters of the Darro run at the level of the road. And on its other side the land mounts like a wall. Here, under the hill are caves, the dwellings of _gitanos_.

Heavy women, their bare arms clinking with metal and stone ornaments, their breasts slung in crass colors, call out for gain. The eyes are shallow and sly; the mouth that smiles is like the straining of an unsmiling substance; the oily hair throws off the glance of the sun. Men are rigid and yet slender; they lack the easy harshness of the women. Their bodies have melancholy and fatigue; as if an endless joust of appetite and song had worn them.

The cave becomes, inside, an ample room, narrow, cool, long. Walls are white plaster. Floors are fine-beaten clay. Chairs, tables, lamps, make this modern ease fantastic against the crude stone mouth of a cave within a hill. Men take tambours and sing; women dance.

It is a cave of storms. The blasts of many roads, the seas and forests of untempered passions shriek in this music. Tambour, castanet, foot stamp, hand-clap, raise the world in a maelstrom. And the Spanish cadence gleams like a strip of sun upon the barbarous clouds.

The _gitano_ music is impure, and heavy. It has crude curves and broken surfaces. Its timbre is inexact, its form aimless. “Time” is the best of it as if this race had its true ritual in the beat of feet upon the endless highway. Time becomes a hurrying _crescendo_ that splits, turns back, gallops against itself so that it never really moves. The women have an easy grace upon the easy floor. Full bodies swing and swerve in a sensuous complacence. They step to the singing men. And the song of the men swirls like a colored smoke about their hair, about the eyes of the women.

Foot-beat under song ribs it, volumes it, controls its wild delight: holds the _gitanos_ together: is their soul. But this softness and spirit of the music is within; it speaks soothing to the _gitanos_, making their faces good. The outside of the music is coarse and motley. We ... all the world ... know but the wrong side of the weave.

_f. Spain Dances_

Andalusia is the youngest part of Spain. Its land came last from the receding waters; its Christian culture came last from the receding Islam. Its tongue is the youngest of the many forms of Spanish. Galician, Valencian, Catalan, were sister languages of the Castilian: like the dominant form, they sprang from the medieval Latin and for long were rivals. Andalusian stems, not from the mother tongue, but from the Castilian. It is of a later generation. Immigrants from the north gave birth to the fluid, fresh speech which is still heard from Almería to Cádiz. For in the days when writers like Rojas were consecrating Castilian prose, much of Andalusia still spoke Arabic.

There is a reason therefore for the vigor of this land. The cells that make the newborn body are old as the world. Youth inheres in the fresh fusing. In new environment and combination, they are renewed. So Andalusia, ancient of parts, has this organic youth. In this birth, the great factor is Castile. Castile came down with its fanatic will to make Spain one--to make Spain a theodicy in Christ. Castile turned Moor and Jew into the sea: and replenished the fields with farmers from the north. Coming down to make this youngest Spain, Castile caught the rejuvenation.

The body of Andalusia is bright with morning. The ancient capitals reflect this dawn. But the small town is its best image. Villages in Andalusia are gems of white and orange on the green breast of the huerta. Men and women live in a mirage of which their houses are the crystal setting. They seem to know that any day their Saint (or Our Lady) will lift them into heaven. (These villages would fit well into heaven.) They live--and their stone world lives--in an expectant mood. Life becomes a symbol and a pageant. Passion is the breath of a prayer; blood is the paint of a picture. The _pueblo_ entire is platform for the Dance.

* * * * *

Far worlds bespeak us, before the dancer herself. The music plays; and in the distance, the click of castanets. These castanets are gypsy; they came to Spain from regions of the Black Sea. The dancer walks quietly forward, playing an obbligato with her castanets, not to the music (she has not been married to the music), but to the march of her feet, to the swing of her hips. She wears a yellow silk mantón: a mantón de Manilla that went from China to the Philippines and thence to Spain to become the Andalusian shawl. The _bailarina_ bows and listens to the music. In her hair, like the crest of a mythic bird, stands a _peina_ of tortoise shell. Most Andalusian--this arrogant Gothic comb. She hears a cadence--Andalusian too--whose strain is of the Jews and Arabs. Her body is still; the torso faintly turns and the arms wind upward to her head. There is no mistaking this rigorous control. She has answered Semitic song with a gesture of Castile!

Her dance begins as this response, almost this opposition to the music. Sinew of the north confronts the fluid south. Two dominant forms embrace in warfare: a music, limned like prayer, rhythmed like heartbeat, and this fierce coldness on a woman’s body, which is the Word of Castile. The dancer is a column, articulate of spirit: a live plasticity: with the moods of eye and waving hand flung like a largess to our sense.

There is a pause. The two dominants of the dance (the north and the south) fall momently apart and reveal a third. It is the personality of the dancer herself. She is woman: very woman. She is large, almost heavy. Her arms are full rounded; her head is poised; her bare shoulders are a magnificent molding of firm flesh. From the waist, the skirt thrusts almost at right angles. It is a cascade of gold down to the ankles; and as the dancer whirls it flares out wide, revealing the gray stockinged legs which are a minor almost girlish note within the sumptuous dress. Her feet stamp; the skirt flows; the torso, lashed in purple, stands heroically still, its silence an articulation not alone of the tempest within but of the will to subdue it. The arms float languidly to the head. The castanets click their dry commentary. Purring, shrilling, silent, they are a gloss subtle as Talmud page, as Arabesque, upon this whirl of sculpted fire which is the dance of Spain.

The castanet came, probably, with the gypsy from the ruined culture of Byzance. It was known to the Greeks and Romans. In the hands of the _gitana_, it is--as perhaps it was in the Dionysian rites--a heightened bloodbeat to the music: simple, single dimensioned, metronomic. Here it is an instrument subtle as a voice. It is a running, rhyming prose. Like the arabesque--a decoration evolved from the written language--it retains an intellectual power. The line and music of the castanets are apart from the dance. While the arms flow like birds wheeling, while the body becomes a throat of song, here is analysis forever present.

The action in the dance is drama. The bailarina moves in a tiny square. She draws intensity from subtle signals of torso, shoulder, limb, hand: this intensity she transposes to an undulous swing carrying her now far about the platform. She is horizontal and relaxed. She turns her naked shoulders forward; the castanets click almost silently beside her hips that roll in a slow ruminance. She faces about; her caress comes full and forward. The music tears with its down cadence against this mellow mother. Plaint and passion weave a subtle net that draws her forward (the castanets are still). Suddenly, she is held in rigor. The fertile mother of the south is sacrificed to the harsh north. The gorgeous breast, the hips, the arms like songs of love, are tortured in a vise of passionate control. She is the drama of women giving up their sons to the Reconquest, giving the man of their marriage bed to battle with the Moor.... But the mood does not last. Castanets trip lightly. She dances fluidly, widely; her heels strike high; her golden skirt rises and frees her legs. The castanets are become as the chatter of children. From the new relaxation of delight wells more energy, and comes again the tragic transformation. With the emotion, rises the ruthless will locking at last this pleasaunce in its hostile grip. The music is now a battle. Song, body, castanets fuse in the war of passion and will, of nature and of reason breaking on each other. And above this symphony, the dancer’s face is silence.

So do all the motions of this drama converge into a plastic movelessness. The dance itself is not drama; is less kin to the dances of Europe than to the sculpture of Egypt. One thinks of the stones of the Nile in whose unsubtle substance live flame and intricate vision. One thinks of the Maya reliefs of Yucatan whose myriad planes twine to harmonious flatness.

* * * * *

Since the dance is a true classic art, the need of personal genius to express it is reduced. The true genius here is the tradition. Spain dances. Unlike the other dances of modern Europe, the dance of Andalusia is a norm: and the true dancer is a normal woman.

The good bailarina conforms strictly to the type of the good _andaluza_. She is handsomely stout, with broad pelvis, full-developed breast, strong, regular features. She lacks sensual erethism. She is indeed the matron, rather than the prostitute. And the matron is fitted for the classic dance, precisely because of its normality, because it has been purged of the romantic, the brilliant, the superficially sensual--the accidental. A “romantic” Andalusian dance is nonsense.[9]

The classic bailarina is, then, a quiet woman. Her body is splendid without obvious incitements. Her costume is lovely in form and color, but it is too heavy and too complete to be sexually arousing. She conforms to an ideal of plastic motion in which all the romantic elements of the dance--lust, madness, nakedness--are sublimated into social symbols: love, prayer, vision, sacrifice. And all her movements (again unlike the dances of Europe) merge into an almost static mold that has the ultimate finality of sculpture.

The true Andalusian dance is solitary; and except in the special case of the _cuadro flamenco_ it is an æsthetic error for more than a single dancer to occupy the stage. The true Andalusian dancer (with the same exception) is a _woman_. The true Andalusian audience is a _man_. The relation, however, is not sexual, save perhaps in a remote Freudian sense: it is matriarchal. And this too is normal, since psychologically, Spain is matriarchal. The dancer is mother, teacher, priestess. She holds the stage alone, and smiles on the men who sit beyond the music. This smile is a physical caress, reticent, unconsciously restrained like the caress of a mother. It must win her men, else her ultimate word as teacher and as priestess of Spain’s mystery will go for naught. The men, with the brutal candor of the Spaniard (and of the child) will turn from her and make a clamor of talk to drown her out. But the true _andaluza_ wins her men; and gives her message which is the message of all Spain and Spain herself: this quickened fusion of many hostile worlds into a single Beauty.

* * * * *

The cuadro flamenco is a brilliant dilution of the Andalusian dance. _Flamenco_ means Flemish, and is applied strictly to Andalusia. The use harks back to the age of Carlos I and Felipe II when Flanders was part of the Theodicy of Spain and the best will of Castile and the best blood of the south went into the wars with the Low Countries. It became Andalusia’s pride to share in this mad religious struggle.[10]

The _cuadro_ is a “team” of perhaps two men guitarists, four women and one man dancer. The men are clad in trousers that rise like cylinders to a high black band above the waist. They wear white shirts and the coat (which is often absent) is cut in the front like our evening dress, and tailless. The women are soberly gowned. The shawl is brown or black. Only the slippers give a flare of red. The hat is the stiff _sombrero ancho_ of the farmer whose more romantic, more flexible offshoot is our “cowboy Stetson.” The group sit in a half circle. The guitars thrum almost absently. The men and women seem to be examining one another. A woman rises and goes to the center of the group. She dances. The other women and the single man from their chairs with clapping of hand and foot-beat mark a skeletal obbligato.

To the more pigmented music and more volumnear forms of the other Andalusian dances, this dance bears the relation of a steel-engraving to an oil painting. It is a climax of the bare Castilian _motif_: the warrior will of the Reconquest which lived on, after the Moor had disappeared from Spain, in the Inquisition, in the Holy War against the Dutch, in the rapt butcheries of Mexico and Peru--in this flamenco. The dance makes saccade angles against the lush weave of the music. It is too graphic, too linear: it remains in the realm of draughtsmanship and drama.

The dancer does not move from her central square. Feet beat intricate tattoos, the body is poised stiffly, the head turns, arms swerve up and down in a sort of wistful memory of ease, while the fingers click an osseous pointillation that is a shadow of the castanets. The lyrical release of the arms is held to the verge of vanishment. The guitars make a music like dry wind in autumn trees. The maternal verdure of the women, fixed in their chairs, is sacrificed wholly to the stripped will of the dance. One thinks of fields turned into the desert of Castile. The fertile and the pagan are almost gone. And the protagonist of the flamenco is a man.

He comes from his chair only after each woman has danced and has retired. He is short, neither stout nor slender; there is no gallantry about him. His face and his dark body are stamped with seriousness. He has watched the women through their arid figures with eyes like the eyes of a master. He is no lover: he is the priest of a rite. Now, he stands moveless within the weave of the music. Sudden, his feet break in a shattering tattoo from which his body rises in subtle suppressed waves. Even the lyric holiday of the arms is absent from his dance. They are still at his side, or they are held in fixity near the shoulder. The body is vised; the head does not swerve. Feet and legs make a dance, perpendicular and juiceless: bereft of rhetoric and gesture, they bespeak the hoof-beat of armies, the vigils of the desert, the absolute symbol of the Arab Darwish. All of Spain that is not this male message of Castile has been crushed out....

* * * * *

The distinction of flamenco is only of degree. The Andalusian dance is impersonal and abstract. All the movements of the soul and body of an intricate race are essenced here into a ruthless form. The appolonian is channeled; the dionysian is mastered; the dramatic is cleansed of episode; the lyrical is exploited as a mere carrier of life to sculptured unity.

The Andalusian dance is the converse of the art of the Russian ballet in which the pure materials of plastic movement are exteriorized and denatured into the melodramatic. In the Russian dance, the means is the art; the end is the personal, the pathetic. The Russian dance is analytic, episodic, realistic. The Spanish dance is organic and essential. It is the one great classic dance surviving in our modern world.

_CHAPTER IV_

_ARAGON_

_a._ _The Atom_ _b._ _The Way of the Atom_

_a._ _The Atom_

From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the north boundary of Spain is mountain. To the east it is called the Pyrenees: a wall of snowy rock that falls, save for a space above the fertile fields of Catalonia, into the desert of Aragon and Navarre. Westward, the wall is lower and has another name: Cantábrico. It too is wild, but the more moderate moisture covers it with pine and its fall southward is but a step to the high meseta of León and Castile. Within this barrier that like a jagged knife cuts Spain from Europe lived the Christian Remnant before the Arabs. And from two fastnesses of this wall--where the Arabs never gained a foothold--went forth at once the _Reconquista_ which for eight hundred years, thrusting, expanding, retreating, made war upon the Moslem and at last after innumerable shifts of fortune drove him out. The western point of the Reconquest’s birth lies in the perpendicular rocks of the Asturias. This is the cradle of the Kingdom of León, which, thrusting from the Cantábrico, became Castile. To the east, the nucleus of the long “push” south was in the bleakest and highest Pyrenees of Spain: the Ribagorza and Sobrarbe whose hard squat Iberian chieftains were the first kings of Aragon. Not till the last decades of the fifteenth century, at the end of the long battle, did the two Christian forces join and become Spain. During seven hundred years, they had waged war against Mohammed; they had grown great in Spain; they had flung their power northward across the mountains, eastward across the sea to Italy and Greece: but they had lived--Castile and Aragon--separate from each other and for the most part hostile.

Within the Pyrenees--the stratified chaos north of Huesca and Barbastro--the atom of Aragon lives above the splendor it has given forth. Here, if anywhere, is the aboriginal Spaniard--unchanged as his mountains. The Iberians who were pushed north from the desert or south from Acquitaine into the Sobrarbe and the Ribagorza found themselves in a sort of Continental crow’s-nest, high above invasion. The Romans did not tarry here, nor the Visigoths. The Arabs were beaten back, south of Jaca, and had to veer to the east to enter France. For countless ages, these primeval men beside the river Aragon lived uninvaded, until their atomic energy grew to be explosive and they became invaders.

But they are still the atom. They live in the crannies of mountains, in the steep stretches of valleys torn by torrents. The sky above them is shut in by rock. Northward the Pyrenees stand ordered and columned upon France. But in their southward march they become a delirium of broken walls. They symbolize the cacophony of Spain. The little villages perch on a precipitous bench of mountain or are lost within the immense sweep of a moor. They too are stone. The houses are gathered fragments of the heights. Often there is no wooden door. Windows are tiny apertures of space. The houses huddle so close that they appear to be a single rock, whence rise the blind walls of the church--fortress rather than church--like an irregular edge. Another such obtrusion seems the entire village upon the high face of the mountains. If it is low in a valley, still the monotone is there. For the moor is gray and mournful like a stone; and the furze of summer makes it but faintly fluid as if from the blaze of the sun. The rushing river sends splinters of gray fume over the teeth of its rapids. Stone....

From these stone towns come the creatures who have built them. Small weazened men they are, with heads like nuts and eyes like iron. They have no sensuality and no art. Indeed, they too are fragments of the fragmented mountains: atoms of rock who have detached themselves and learned to walk about. They are silent, impenetrable. They have the mineral virtues. They are strong, they are steadfast, they are inexpugnably honest, they are brave. To dislodge them from the inertia of their world is as hard as to lodge an idea in their heads. And as they walk about, their slow and clumsy gait perfects the sense that they are walking stones: that this human venture is a masquerade: that presently they will cast their uncouth manhood and go back into the eternal mountain sleep.

They wear black leathern breeches slashed at the side and ending well above the knee. In the split at the side and below, the drawers bulge white or gray. The calf is enclosed in heavy leggings of white wool, doubly lined with buttons. The feet are wrapped in a cloth and shod in a sole of wood or wool that is thonged with leather, and bound about the ankle. About the waist is a huge sash--_faja_--coming down thick on the buttocks and serving as the pocket. The jacket is short. The aboriginal Aragonese wears no hat: a handkerchief slanted athwart his head absorbs the sweat of his labor and leaves the cropped crown free. When he wears a hat, it is an adaptation either of the _boina_ of the Basque or a lumpish variant of the pie-shaped hat of Castile. His invention has not gone so high as his head.

The effect of the costume is farce. It is elaborate, intricate, unmanly. The bulging drawers, the sash so fat about the buttocks exaggerate the shortness of the body. The man is lean, hard, small. And he drapes himself in clothes that are centrifugal and fussy. The sense of masquerade persists. This man is a stone--an atom of the horizons. With his assumption of a soul, his body has felt cold and he has elaborated this uncongenial mess of wool and leather. His head, however, is still too mineral to need a hat.

His woman is not stone: rather she is the clayish soil that with the stone makes up the slopes and moorlands. She is the earth--dark brown and gray--from which the stone is hardened. She is the earth, the earth-bed of her man. She is silent: when she is young, she has the savage and swift mellowness of the mountain Springtime. Her dress is black. On feast days, the black becomes vermilion, deep blue, green. The thick, rough wool, dyed to one color, falls from below the armpits where it is caught in a tight bodice: falls widely, unheeding the waist, into a flaring skirt. It is a dress that has the dignity of the primeval Springs: its mood is fecund; it is not human enough to be aware of waist, of hips, of breast. Unluxuriant, unvaried, it has the bloom of wholeness. The women of these mountains are the loam on the wastes.

Here is a better model for Adam and Eve, than the pretty Italians, the mystic lovely Byzantines: this rudimentary pair, the man decking his stone simplicity in a clownish gape of drawers and breeches, and the woman, earth-mooded, earth-whole, chording her man and bearing him along.

They have left paradise, and now the world works on them. Christianity has come. They build monasteries--mountain fortresses for God. Strife has come: invasion or threat of invasion. And for these, chieftains, nobles have sprung up who are no longer content to shelter in the little villages of stone. Walled towns make their appearance: such towns as Jaca, pure Iberian name and indeed but a medieval structure for the Iberian blood. Jaca looks up the valley of the Aragon toward France. It sees the primordial hamlets clustered in the moors and on the heights. But Jaca itself crowds sophistications within its turreted walls. The walls themselves are the same gray granite and the streets, narrow and high, are stylizations of the passes northward. But Jaca belongs to history. These houses know of treaties and rebellions. Life has moved into Sobrarbe: now Sobrarbe moves. The mountain citadel is the sign of its moving. It will go south to the valley of the Ebro. It will flow with the Ebro and be part of Spain. It will challenge the world....

The valley of the Ebro--Nile of Spain and historic artery of all her bloods--is still below. The way from Jaca down is short but steep. The wall of the Pyrenees, in a few miles, drops seven thousand feet: but drops, not as northward upon smiling France--drops to desolation. Aragon which began as mountain wall becomes a yellow waste: and save for the narrow corridor of the Ebro, all Aragon is this. It is the bottom of what was once a sea. The rocks of the Pyrenees, of Catalonia, of Valencia and Castile are the rim of the dry bowl through which the Ebro trickles. The soil is still subaqueous: marl, clay, gypsum, alkalis make its sterile surface. Salt lies free on it. Even the heather and grass of the upland moors do not live here.

But the Aragonese lives here: and here is the second stage of his progression. Sere towns lie in the sere waste. The houses are clay. There are wooden doors, but windows of glass are still rare. The peasant chooses the desert bottom for his house. South and north rise the walls of the Sierras, naked as flint: and the winds sweep through his narrow passage, bringing the rigor of the rocks into the air he breathes.

This low tier of the world of Aragon has no clement weather. It has no spring and no autumn. Winter is a rigid siege: summer is fire. When the weather shifts between the seasons, the winds make a runway of the valleys. Frost, flame, storm are the angry cycle. And its dwellers are worthy of their weather. They are not degenerate like the inbred natives of Las Hurdes between Extremadura and León. Nor are they spiced and strained with eastern bloods, like the cave-dwellers of Murcia and Almería. They are simple human stock extraordinarily coarsened. Dull-eyed, crude-lipped, slow-moving, slow-talking: they lack the mineral sheerness of the mountain men. The air that they breathe is not snow-swept. Their flesh has no crystal tarn for neighbor. They live in a roadway of unleashed elements. Dust, clay, salt, drug their air and clog their pores. But there is something else. There is the roadway, and the mobile spirit of the roadway. Movement and action infuse this brutish people.

_b._ _The Way of the Atom_

The men of the mountain and the desert store up great energy within their core: the outer world harries, arouses: the virgin force grows aggressive. East of Aragon are two rich and fluid lands: the Christian Principality of Catalonia, the Moorish Kingdom of Valencia. Frankish Barcelona rivals Marseilles and Venice, in ships. (Ramón Lull, Spain’s most original schoolman, lived here: he wrote in Latin, Catalan and Arabic, books on love and wisdom. Chasdai ben Crescas, Spain’s most original Jewish thinker, lived here: he founded a new Prophetic lineage which three centuries later grew to be Spinoza.) Farther down the coast are the lush huertas of Valencia: a great port facing south as Barcelona east, a seat of Moorish culture.

As Rome once the subtle nations to her east, tough Aragon comes to control these affluent worlds. When in 1149 Ramón Berenguer IV of Barcelona wedded the daughter of Ramiro II of Aragon, the mountainous kingdom did not lose its sway. Catalonia became part of Aragon: and the currents of its open life the veins of the uncouth inland realm. A century later, Jaime I of Aragon with Catalonian help conquered Valencia. Valencia had been in Christian hands before: El Cid had won it rather by treachery than arms. But after the great freebooter’s death, the Moors came back. Now that Aragon sits down within its valleys, Valencia is Christian forever. It loses even its name of tributary kingdom. It becomes simply part of Aragon. Catalan blood has helped win it--for Aragon. Now Catalan, Valencian, and Castilian, led by the Great Captain of Córdoba, win Sicily and Naples--in the name of Aragon again.

Aragon of the desert and the mountains has in its stone-like men an energy which informed the mental mobility of the Catalan, the sensuous fervor of the Valencian: prevailed upon them, dominioned them and made them tools at last to its own activity in Europe, to its ultimate partnership with Castile in Spain. Within itself, Aragon has little else. It lacked the elements for the creating of an indigenous culture. Aragon the core remained prehistoric: its history is its power to accumulate forces about it.

But this elemental virtue through its very neutralness served to fuse the diverse natures upon which Aragon worked. The initial urgency was Aragon: and Aragon was the name of the amalgam which resulted. When at the close of the fifteenth century the nation of Spain was born, its eye toward Europe was Aragon. Isabel of Castile was the spirit and the religious motor of that birth. Ferdinand of Aragon, with his infusion of Frankish-Catalan and Jewish bloods, was the diplomat and politician who turned the mystical Castilian dream into a European fact. Aragon took its place in that polyphony of elemental fusions which was Spain. But with this difference. That fusion, in Castile, Galicia, Portugal, Andalusia, had a preponderance of parts native to these provinces. In Aragon the fusion was of outer elements. Aragon was the port of Spain: it had become a power in Europe. But its own integral rôle in the cultural life of the Aragonese nation was that of a catalyst in a solution.

* * * * *

Although historic Aragon is dead, in the capital city, Zaragoza, the process is revealed. Zaragoza is Spanish: yet its parts speak all of the east, of the south, and of the north. The streets have a dark fluidity which suggests Naples. They are not rigid and bright like the streets of Castile. Their warmth is freeflowing like a blood under the swarthy stones. They brood, they rot: they are not transfixed in contemplation of their unity, nor in rapt service of their own high fate. They are not noble, not inspired streets like the most sordid in Avila or Burgos. Italy’s ageing paganism darklies them: and the Moor’s mobility which lifts Valencia into a dance gives them an elusive charm, a play of light and shadow which Naples lacks.

Upon the dusty shores of the Ebro where the trees bend in a gray burden to the tawny waters, Spain speaks through Zaragoza. Here stand two monsters, the cathedrals. Nuestra Señora del Pilar is a long pile, drear as a Jesuit college, dull as a bull-ring: and from its mournful mass rise suddenly, inappositely, the huge _azulejo_ domes, their hypertrophic rhetoric gleaming of Andalusia and Morocco. Within is a church in the style of Louis XVI of France! The other cathedral is more mellow, but not less hybrid. La Seo is Gothic. There is a Romanesque window: the façade is rich in Moorish bricks and tiles. The columns are Gothic; the walls are exuberant tissues of plateresque. Yet the whole is harmonious, is impressive. It is Aragon. There is here something at once pagan in mind and Christian in mood. The cathedral indeed is like the Latin Sea: a converted heathen whose thought holds to the limits of youth and from the Christian infinite has taken a boundless and vague melancholy. This crossing of sun and shadow is Aragon. Light is here--in eclipse: storm--sun-tinged. The immutable atomism of the Aragonese shivers in contradiction. The sun of Italy breaks into motes, dancing on a grave: the Spanish burden of death becomes the irrational refrain of a gay song.

In La Seo, Aragon works its transformation upon elements chiefly of France and the east. In the _jota_, the basic material is Spanish. What is known as the first jota is a birth of the defense of Zaragoza in 1808 against the forces of Napoleon. It swears to the Virgen del Pilar that the men and women of Zaragoza never will be French. Jota songs and variants of its dance are legion throughout Spain, and its musical elements hark back to Arab days. The formation of the jota is the couplet; the music is an adaptation, in three-quarter time, of Andalusian _cante hondo_. The classic southern song becomes romantic. Its abstract lines, devoted to the elemental passions, become vehicles for commentary verse in which religion, politics, wit and satire are barbarously mingled. The tragic music of Spain is lightened, aerated and then, by the ultimate twist of Aragon, it is once more sicklied with a haunting gloom. But the gloom is pagan, not Christian. It is empiric. Its fluidity is of the east, but its will is a release come from the north.

The dance of the jota is a diluting, a quickening, above all a flattening of the sheer pure figures of the southern dance. The body loses all relationship with sculpture. It is given up to that easy dynamism whose language is the leap, the skip, the pirouette. It has abandoned the dynamism of the soul whose infinite motions conform into an almost motionless figure. The classic dance of Spain, drenched with a facile nervousness from Europe--this is the jota of Aragon.

* * * * *

So the prehistoric atom begets this baroque romanticism of Aragon. There is nobility here. These are the people who fought the establishment of the Inquisition: the heroic defenders of their land against Roman, Visigoth, Arab, Frenchman. But the toughness of Aragon is vulnerable, if not to its invaders, to its own conquests. Valencia and Barcelona become conduits through which a motley of elements pour in. The alliance with Castile brings another bewilderment of forces. The primitive stuff of Aragon has no _organic_ response for these racy cultures. They overwhelm it: they form an amalgam _about_ the rigid core. And the harmony of Aragon is indeed one of flashing dissonances: brilliant, appealing, evanescent. It is a surface fusion, and its charm is flight from an impenetrable center.

Triumphant Aragon disappears in the living peoples it absorbs, in the great neighbor with which it is allied. As cultural beings, its vassals all survive it. Its own primal core survives it....

These men of the Sobrarbe and the desert have been too ruthlessly hardened by their world to receive the juices of spirit. Like a steel mirror, they reflected for an hour the suns of Italy, of Araby and Spain. This is the greatness of Aragon--a swift reflection in which affluent worlds were fused in the reflector and took on the form of the reflector’s contour. But the worlds swung past, life shifted: the light no longer fell on Aragon. Its surface becomes dull once more, and unillumined.

_CHAPTER V_

_CASTILE_

_a._ _The Castle of the Cid_ _b._ _The Stones of Wisdom_ _c._ _The Water Bridge_ _d._ _The Miracle of El Greco_ _e._ _The Tomb_

_a._ _The Castle of the Cid_

The valley of the Ebro is a vein of green, deep within wastes of earth and tiers of mountain. Northward the Solana, sudden as a fort, stands before the snow-clad Pyrenees. Southward the sierras of Aragon and Castile are walls of flint upon a yellow floor. Slender and sinuous, the Ebro leads up to the head of Spain.

This way came the Romans, met by the nut-hard Aragonese and the Basques of Navarre. Here the Visigoths were fought and were absorbed. When the Arabs faced north of Andalusia, they veered to the east: and the Ebro was their path back to Spain’s center. Commerce and nurture went this way: but were the servants of War. Signs of War still mark the valley for its own. Encased in desert and rock, the towns rise above the plethoric vineyards like parts of the stone world. War has brought the desert ranges down and has made cities of them. The Valley, pressing up through Aragon, through Navarre to Castile, is clad in armor of rock towns. So weighted, it could not keep pace with the world. It was great when mountains were barriers and when a river was a highway. It has remained as the past sealed it. North of Zaragoza no great city lies within the valley. It has become an agricultural, above all a viticultural center. Haro, Logroño, are towns of the wine-growers. But even when new houses are put up, they are made of the eternal rock--the warlike rock of the past.

At Miranda the invader leaves the Ebro, and stands at the climax of Castile. The south is a breakage of treeless moor. In the crevices of heights, small towns hide, and church steeples are indistinguishable from the rock. But the earth mellows. Angles are replaced by curves. Wheatfields plaid the rolling slopes of hills. There are dingles, copses. This is the head of Old Castile--the part of the hard land where men lived best, and where they first united against the Moslem to call themselves Castilians. This is Burgos: _La cabeza de Castilla_.

* * * * *

Bristling castles, castle-like sierras exist everywhere in Spain. Why is just this portion called Castile? Look at Burgos, nestling in the bosom of a hill and green with springtime. The río Arlanzón has leaped from the savage Pico de Lara. But when it reaches Burgos, it is gentled: it is an idling pleasant little river. And the folk of Burgos have built along its banks an esplanade, a park of meticulous shrubs and gravel walks, a street of clubs and cafés where music, at nightfall, answers the tripping water and the wheatfields bending in breeze.

The town goes up from a seven-sided Plaza. It is stone, but mellow. Its streets are criss-crossed with surprising squares, irregular in shape and level. Old houses bearing shields seem to stoop as if time-softened in the mounting swirl. The cathedral stands waist-high among roofs. Its grandiloquent splendor is town-bound. Only the loftiest windows catch the free heaven for the nave. The doors of the cathedral open on many levels. Far up in the transept is a golden window topping a stair of carven oak: and this window is a door upon a street. Burgos begins to terrace up less gently. Houses, streets, arched galleries over steps are all one stone: but everywhere the gray walls crack: lilacs bloom in every crevice. Windows are open: flowers wave in them. Black-gowned women make shadows. In the gutters which are clean, play children, warm like their mothers, lyric like the lilacs.... A running bloom in Burgos mounts with the streets until they match the steeples of the churches, until the harsh high churches are engulfed. A green hill dappled with cherry is the height of Burgos. And here is a castle.

It is a famous Castle. It belonged to the first Counts of Castile, ere Castile was a kingdom. It witnessed the marriage of Ruy Díaz de Vivar, _el Cid_, to Ximena: and in its shadow stood the Cid’s _solar_, his “city dwelling.” It dominates the town. But it is ruin. It appears to have no importance. A paltry mass of rock it is, weeds in its cracks, gashes in its sides, and its top agape with earth and shrubs. It stands alone upon the top of the hill and crumbles into dust. Behind it are shanties: asses, dogs, hens possess the theater of its glory. The walls that once enclosed the city go down irrelevant now from the castle ruin: their cubos and bastions droop into a row of modern tenements, one spot of which is a tavern--a noisy mouth--filled with the red coats and red calls of soldiers.

What is this castle in the life of Burgos? A disused memory. It stands above a town whose fluent smile is turned away from it. Surely, it is no symbol?

Nor does the Cid’s spirit, more than that of Burgos, appear to chime with the ruin. The Cid lived in the eleventh century. Shortly after his death, he was immortalized by the poet of _El Cantar de Mío Cid_, probably a Christian menestral, residing in the Moor country of Medinaceli. The _romancero_ painted the Cid afresh. He was a mobile scoundrel. His king, Alfonso of León, distrusted him and ordered him forth from his seigneurial seat Vivar. Ruy Díaz was penniless: but he possessed a trunk whose iron-thonged flanks you can still admire in the chapel of Corpus Christi of the cathedral. He filled this coffer with rock and sand, and sealed it. By his friend, Martín Antolínez, he caused it to be carried to Raquel and Vidas, rich Jews of Burgos. “These are my treasures,” he told the wily Jews. “I am exiled. Guard my wealth for me as security and loan me six hundred marks. The contents of my coffer are worth vastly more; but I am a simple knight and I need cash to pay my people at Vivar, and to lodge my wife with the monks of Cardeña. Six hundred modest marks.”

The Cid crosses into the Moor country of Aragon and begins his raid on the Moslem. Like the Jew, the Moslem is free game--a wilder sort of boar. God sent him into the world for Catholics to prey on. The Cid is out for spoils. It does not occur to him to convert a Moor: he strips him. But he is canny: he never quite strips him bare. He wants him for a friend as he turns his back to go on other raids. At last, the Cid captures Valencia, by guile rather than arms. He is a rich man now! He has sent gifts to mollify Alfonso, and to Ximena and to the monks of Cardeña. (Of course, he does not repay the Jews.) But he imports a bishop to Valencia del Cid, one completely fitted out with all the latest golden implements of worship--quite as a millionaire of Pittsburgh imports a chef from Paris. Listen to mío Cid reflecting on his luck.

All these winnings the Campeador made his. “Thanks be to God who of the world is master! “Before I was poor, today I am rich; “I have money and lands, I have gold and wide possessions, “And for sons-in-law I have the Counts of Carrión, “All battles do I win, it is the will of the Lord. “Muslim and Christian hold me in great fear. “Yonder in Morocco where are the Muslim mosques, “They might open to my attack. Who knows? perhaps they have “The dread that I may come: but I am not so minded. “I’ll not go seek the Moor; here in Valencia I’ll stay. “And let them bring me their wealth: with the help of the Lord “They’ll keep on paying me--or whomever I delegate.”

This is the constant temper of the first hero of Castile whom the changing mood of Spain was to turn at the last into a fanatical crusader. He has conquered another Moorish town:

“Hearken to me, Albar Fánez, and all my valiant knights! “With this castle we have won great spoil; “Many Moors have died; few do I see still living. “As to survivors, both the men and the women, there’s no one who will buy them “If we cut off their heads. Nary a bit would we gain. “Let’s save them for ourselves; now that we are the masters. “We’ll lodge in their houses; we’ll make them wait on us.”[11]

The Cid reminds us vividly how far his Spain was yet from the ultimate, classic Spanish character, four hundred years after the battle had begun between the Moor and Christian. In the Cid are all the elements of that character--in their raw, chemically unfused state. But in the sense that Isabel was Castilian, and that the Castle is Castilian, he is not Castilian and he is not Spanish. His spirit is pagan and is European. No such light-hearted, almost comic bellicosity exists among the Semites to whom warfare was a solemn, religious matter. The Cid is the knight-errant, the medieval sportsman, stripped, however, of the mystic and amorous sentiment which Christianity later put upon the freebooters of the northern forests. The Cid is cheerful and fluid as any pagan: but he has a trait which no true Teuton knight possessed: his extreme concern with money. The Cid fights like a Goth: but he figures like a Phœnician. And, like an Arab, he keeps moving.

From time to time, the Cid is minded that he is fighting for the Lord, that Christ is his captain, and that the Moor (aside passing alliances and friendships) is his spiritual foe. He gets this notion from the Moor himself: and it is well to realize how weakly the Christian has adapted it after four centuries of fighting. Meantime, the Arab who had crossed the Strait in a flame of religious passion, cooled and lost his sectarian, desert ardor. Spain was become a simmering chaos with no clear elements. Christian and Moslem were often in alliance. The Ideas of Cross and Crescent resided unalloyed only in monasteries. The process of osmosis whereby the Christian was to inherit the religious fanaticism long lost by the Moslem did not reach its climax until the Age of Isabel.

The Cid--gay, ambulant, fluid, mercenary pragmatist of arms--lived under the shadow of no Castle. The Castle of Burgos had as yet no spirit for its bristling body. It was not yet Castile. But though the Castle’s body is a ruin over Burgos, and Castile is wrecked among the modern nations, their spirit lives. It created a hard kingdom to tower over Spain, to dominion the world, and stratify at last the Spanish soul.

* * * * *

What is a castle?

It is a shut place that commands by its shutness the open place about it. A castle is builded of the stone of its world: it rises from the stone of its world: it _is_ the stone of its world. A castle is austere toward the world which it defends. It is invariable, forbidding: its strength is that of a perpetual shutting-out of all which lies outside it. Sun beats on the castle wall: inside it is dark. Moon melts on its bastion and bathes its county blue: it is harsh and rigid. Water and wind make song of the green hills: the castle is silent. It is lord of its county because it is apart from it. A castle is hot in a cold land: a castle is cold in a hot land: a castle is high in a low land: a castle is full in a land of dearth: a castle is dry in a land of verdure.

Within the castle walls, anarchy may flame: the walls are law enough. The walls are spirit and sanctity enough, so that within life may be mad and fleshly. A castle draws on the affluence of its world to save its world: it lifts itself into a desert peak, that the low lands may flourish: and then it sucks the land.

Castile becomes a castle. The chaos of running passion and idea hardens: Christian Spain, weary at last of ages of dissension, steals the discarded fervor of the Moor: becomes one passion, permanent and crystal, to withstand all others. Upon the crest of Spain forms this stony essence of her will. The actual struggle dies: the Moslem world droops away toward Africa. But the spirit of the struggle becomes rock.

A castle to defend the soul of Spain; and Spain’s soul at last a castle. The walls raised to minister to an open land grow higher, grow ever more remote from the reason of their being. Become at last a reason unto themselves.

See the castle now, stirred from its mooring in a fertile world! The fertile world itself must turn into a castle! This will of service destroys the served. This vision is so intense that it is blind. The castle is become an unleashed monster, mobile as the Arab or the Cid. It lives--to be a castle. And it devours the spirits and fields of men which raised it up in order to protect them.

The castle, become Spain, moves through Europe: moves across the sea. Its shut erectness is the measure of good. Its sunless cells are the measure of light. Its turrets are the church. Its trampling march over the pliant earth is music. Its dream is to make a castle of the House of God.

_b._ _The Stones of Wisdom_

The Province of Valladolid in Old Castile is fertile. The plain has the aspect of a verdant sea swept by long tides, the hills. In Spring the fields of wheat and barley unfurl their delicate green illimitably to horizons where white clouds stand like enchanted caravels. In the soft grass and the turf, velvety with rains, the flowers sparkle like myriad splinters of sky. And on this vastness, under a solid Dome, towns stand as sudden islands.

Such a town is Medina del Campo--City of the Field: a huddle of clay huts about a bastioned castle where Isabel the Catholic loved to live and where at last she died. The plains are at low ebb against the walls of Medina. They recede with their lush rhythms from this ruined arrogance which once housed Glory. Medina is like a penniless hidalgo. The town’s pride--the Castle--is a molder within the walls. And the town itself is a lay of sordid houses on mud streets, a conglomerate life of stamping peasants and braying mules and women occult like the hidden fires of their kitchens.

West of Medina del Campo lies the Province of Salamanca. It is the southern spur of the kingdom of León which Castile absorbed in the eleventh century, and it is contiguous with Portugal. It is less fertile than Valladolid. That sea-like plain roughens and grows abrupt. The Castilian _borrico_ is less frequent; and likewise the crude _carro_ which it draws with the driver bouncing on its rump. Here is a land of oxen. Slow and inevitable as the day, they swing and steam beneath their wooden yokes, drawing the stone plow through the rocky loam or the cart with axleless wheels on the harsh ruts of a road. The cool young grain-shoot trills less in this land. It is a world of flocks. Sheep fleck the hills; goats cast their jagged shapes like living stones within the stony valleys. It is a world of ranches--of _dehesas_. Bulls, reared for the bull-ring--_toros bravos_--browse in great sweeps of meadow.

The ranch house is of stone. It is large and bleak; if the dehesa breeds good bulls, it is rich. _Toreros_ come to study their victims, for when the bull is not “game” the _espada_ is helpless. There are many bedrooms for guests: the dining room is a long hall in mahogany or oak with crystal candelabras, lofty leather chairs, sideboard glittering with colored glasses, a bull’s-head over the door and portraits of great toreros on the walls. But the house is cold; rustic and crude it is, like the harsh earth of León. The livable room and the living room is the kitchen. The owner, in _zamarra_ and _calzón_, smokes his rank pipe by a vast open fire. (There are few stoves in this land.) A medieval spit, great enough for the whole side of a beef, stands in the blue-black chimney. And through the Castilian winter, when the wind is unbroken from the Cantábrico to the Sierra Morena, the ranch house is a cavern, but the kitchen is warm.

The hidalgo has changed little from his ancestors who fought the Moor at Zamora. With him is his son, who incites the savagery of the bulls as a gardener incites the color of rare flowers; and his son’s wife, a mellow creature, quiet as the low flame of _encina_ that heats the _garbanzo_ jar upon the hearth; and her child, also, taking the breast of a nurse. The other servants sit, too, before the fire in that equality which alone a feudal sense of caste makes possible.

Salamanca is a land of little cities, of tight, insulate worlds with a thousand or five hundred souls. A crude land and a people whose spirit the land encases. A crustaceous people.... A tiny river is nearby, else there could be no town. The houses ray out upon the turf like regimented snails. Windows are spots in a chalky shell. The door, within a triangular cut of the house (as if the reclusion made it less penetrable) is massive oak impounded with iron or with copper. It is divided horizontally, so that the housewife can open the upper half and talk and trade, and yet be locked within her tiny castle.

She is locked ever within herself. Her garb is black. When she goes forth to market in the village square (here bulls are fought on holy-days), there is a black shawl over her black hair and very close to her eyes. The face is beautiful. The skin, color of parchment, ages silken soft. The jaw is round and unassertive. The nose is straight, the mouth is thin and large. Passion, here, and right are not separate claimants to her soul. All this peasant woman’s will and all her duty unison from girlhood to the grave. Service to God and service to her man, the sacraments of communion and of love, the tasks of household and of motherhood ... are one and have one word in her plain mind. They are life itself: like God a unity which miracle divides into three persons. And she is like her hearthfire, this woman of Old Castile: fecund and ensconced. She is the light of her shut home. She has jealous distrust of sun and of the open air. They are her rivals and she bars them out with her tiny windows and her divided door.

Her man moves slow through a strange outward world; for he is wholly embraced by the close of his home and his woman. He wears knee-breeches of hide that are tight as a skin and box his rump into a rigid square. He wears a coat of raw sheepskin with a gap for the head and gaps for the arms. For shoes, he has a bundle of rags cased in sandal-soles and thonged. His hat is either the black skull boina of the Basque or the true sombrero of Castile--pie-shaped, velvety black, with the center pyramiding up to a peak. You see him best when he goes astride his ass. A crude plaid muffler (_tapabocas_) stops his mouth. The woolen manta regally folds from his shoulders to the flanks of his brute. The burro trots sharp and perpendicular. The man is movelessly erect, untinged by the mount’s rhythm. Even a peasant, even on an ass, he seems a caballero. His head is sternly forward; his hands do not stir; he is silent. His world is a coarse world. Winter is a blast and summer is a blast; the short spring covers his field with mud more than with flowers. This his encasement. And within, a balance like a tree’s of sun and earth and weather. He wages an intricate but instinctive warfare within the Hand of God. For God makes the sun a sear or a dim mockery; and God makes foes of the men of the world. Unto the bloody Moor of yesterday there has succeeded the bleeding Noble. Yet he has won of this complexity a peace simple and deep. He lives in a profound seclusion. Love and work are his hearthfire. And from their secret place he can look out, his eyes old in understanding, his eyes bright with the irony of distance.

* * * * *

Within this land of unkempt fields studded with encina, land of wild bulls, of towns shut from the sun and the wind, there glows a jewel that has warmed the world. It is the city of Salamanca. It lies in treeless mountains. Northward Zamora bristles warlike, westward Portugal turns an unfriendly back: and all about, Castile. Sierra de Gata, Peña de Francia, Sierra de Béjar, Sierra de Gredos ... from such wild quarries has come the mellow stone to build a scholar city: the city of the Wisdom and the Love of God within the crude dichotomy of Spain.

Salamanca is its University. Here in the first splendor of the Reconquista, Christian kings foregathered wise men of Israel and Islam and joined to them the aspirant scholars in Christ. The school was founded by a king of León and chartered by a saint, San Fernando of Castile. For two centuries, learning here was universalistic. Here, in spirit, Ibn Gabírol the Jew became Avicebron, and his book _Makor Hayim_ the Latin _Fons Vitæ_ which nourished Saint Thomas of Aquinas. Here the teaching of Averroës the Moslem was absorbed for Rome. The Mussulman Avempace and Tofaíl--Platonists--here went down before the Stagyrite phalanx which included Ibn Ezra, Ben Maimun and Gersonides. Here was prepared food that later fed Albertus Magnus; here were married east and west as a thousand years before in Alexandria. For the body of Catholic Europe was bone of Greek logic, flesh of Jewish faith and eye of Arab science.

Here, ages later, when the medieval unity of Rome drooped and split, when Protestant heresy was annexed by the new State wills of the north, the Church of Rome was saved. From Salamanca came the theocratic polity of the Catholic kings which fused the modern will of the State to the old idea of the Church. From Salamanca spread the religious energy which won all South America and part of North America to Roman Doctrine.[12] For here above all, were nurtured the Spanish mystics who made possible that last great conversion: Cristobal Colón, Pedro de Alcántara, Juan de Avila, Luis de León, Luis de Granada, Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Jesús, Iñigo de Loyola--that various athletic group who by book or preachment, by crusade or compass revived Rome. In Salamanca, at least in spirit, the Medieval Synthesis was reborn: and in spirit has subsisted to our day.

The earlier, more liberal Salamanca which had so immediate a share in the real splendor of that Synthesis is not this town still glowing by the River Tormes. The Salamanca of today is that of Isabel and Ferdinand, of the sixteenth century--of the Jesuits and the fanatical revivers.

Unlike most of the great cities of Castile, it rises gently from the meseta. And heroisms of the mind, rather than of blood, speak in the smolder of its ancient body. The River Tormes is urbane, almost European. It passes waving willows and lush fruit trees; washes the shaded soto where the monks met to platonize with Luis de León upon the Names of Christ. A Roman bridge leads low to the city. Here once stood a granite bull by means of which the wily beggar knocked wisdom into the head of Lazarillo. And the streets climb up through the mud. Walls crumble with the hillside under the town. An ancient church stands on the bank surrounded by the mire; and houses, foul with age, their carved seals moldered, limp like proud beggars up the sharp incline. The Cathedral is a soft gold crest in the sun: at its feet are waves of convents, consistories, churches, schools. The central streets are paved with cobble stones. The houses are low and the glass of their windows is out of place, so new it gleams within the soft senility of walls. Dogs, children, refuse clutter up the streets. Everywhere one feels the elemental base--a hill--on which this young culture of Christian Spain has builded. In the churches, five centuries are confused. The Old Cathedral is Romanesque; with its chaste columns and its nave a petrified forest, it stands beside the scintillance of the plateresque New Cathedral. Nearby is a Dominican convent in which a queer mariner named Columbus found refuge and support in a scheme rejected by most of the Crowns of Europe. The seventeenth century baroque of the Churrigueras flaunts its high monstrosities beneath ornate ceilings. Much of the gold arrogance of this convent is a result of that mad scheme of Columbus. But the man himself is closer to the streets; for here one still encounters at least in spirit the pícaro, the monk half-saint, half-satyr, the immortal Celestina. A Jesuit convent rears its chill harsh walls in the town’s heart: a symbol of the ruthless might of the Company of Jesus, of its enormous logic. And everywhere, the alleys limping up, limping down, between the homes of the Church.

This Salamanca, fixed in the eras of Isabel, Carlos, Felipe II, has aged; has not changed. The dirty streets are the same; the low blind precincts of the poor (Cervantes lived here once) and the dominant recurrent periods of church and tower. Life’s anarchy is here controlled by learning. Every crooked street is righted by a convent; every lurch of alley is stopped by a square. And the whole town is mastered by the Plaza Mayor--a square as correct as a schoolman’s syllogism. Its sides are unvariant four-storied walls; it is colonnaded equally and equally façaded; it is the noble, proper heart of a town which has argued unity in Christ through seven rank chaotic hundred years....

The buildings of the university are the least of it. In the Library you may find manuscripts by Alfonso the Wise, glosses by thirteenth century Jews, Arabic illuminations of Gazali. You may sit in the same chill lecture halls where once great masters taught humanities and where but yesterday Miguel de Unamuno “explained” Greek after the universal measure. But Salamanca is an ancient seer whose word has gone forth to the world, while the body shriveled and the blood grew bleak.

More of the university is the tropical gold work of the Dominican altars; is the stupendous grace of the two Cathedrals; is the immense glower of the Jesuit on the hill. More, the sedulous symmetry of the Plaza within the coil of gutters. More, the glow of the yellow mellow stone within the desert fastness of Castile.

_c._ _The Water Bridge_

The æsthetic sense of Spain is social, instinctive, unconscious. Her master works of art rise like isolate acts from the trammels of her life. Her cities are among them: and none more perfect than the ancient towns bristling upon rocks within the Castilian desert.

Choose your day well for visiting these communal works of Spain. Salamanca needs sun: its warm gold stones speak graciously within an azure sky. The Escorial is best in rain: its chill stones shrink from the blue-gold of the Spanish day, but under the drift of breaking clouds it glows like fossil fire. Segovia sings most clearly in a wind. Great clouds like armies plunge from the Sierras and invest the Castle. The sun makes sudden sallies on the Cathedral. Then gloom once more on the town, like repentance after violence.

Castile, here, is a chaos of mountain and of desert. The Guadarrama is steep over the lofty town. The desert leaps and dips in a cacophony of planes. Elsewhere in Spain, it is Spring. But April in Segovia is stormy. The mountains are still clad in winter. In the pockets of the surrounding valley almond trees and cherry are in bloom, making little perfumed furls of mist against the barren earth. The sky is neither spring nor winter. A great wind rages. Momently, heaven changes. Titanic mounds of cloud are flung like eiderdown from peak to peak: the sun is a swift flash between dark purples. Rain in melted diamonds glances across the valley in the oblique shaft of the sun: is gone: a copse of poplar sings suddenly green and yellow under gray. The volumnear motions of the hills seem to be waves of a seismic sea, swept by the wind and roaring with its might.

* * * * *

Segovia fills the height of a long rock shaped like a ship within this stormy earth. Below one side pours the Eresma, with its melted snows. The valley rises on the other beam, purple and bronze soil, blue sage, rock ... rises to a village that lies flat like a dory on the breast of a wave ... rises again to the sky where the clouds drive wildly. Segovia’s ancient walls are bastioned, pierced with knotty towers and gates, and topped with the typical round cubos which Rome gave to Spain. The walls bind the precipitous rock which holds a park and the Alcázar, the usual pile of tessellated towers that gave Castile its name.

This is one end of the town. The rock goes higher toward the center. Houses are a clutter, unanimous like an army in the moment ere it comes forth to attack. A romanesque church, a feudal tower rise from the stony mob like leaders. And in the town’s heart, stands the Cathedral. Its interior is intricate and cold. But in the façade of the city, it is perfect. It is the climax of Segovia rising to meet it. To the right Alcázar is alone, facing the waste of the meseta; alone above the river and the rock like a lord of the city. But now, the streets mount, an aspiration makes them one: their goal is the Cathedral. Its base is lost in the streets. Rise free and clear only the two thick towers and the crest of the gigantic nave. The Cathedral is a ship breasting the sea of the town: even as the town is a ship, breasting the hills.

Down from the Cathedral in the direction away from Alcázar, once more the city falls. No regular descent. There is no metric rhythm in Segovia, save for the mind that stands outside of it. An Olympian eye sees the vast bowl of the Guadarrama: and on the tide of turf and rock, the city riding like a frigate: and in the town, this regular rise to the Cathedral. But each of these general units is a chaos. The plateau is an intricate context of heights, villages, farms and valley-spots suddenly sweet with orchards. The wave on which Segovia rides is itself broken into rising, falling crests. To make a hundred yards of horizontal progress, the voyager must go up, go down: slipping through alleys that swerve, climbing steps that lift him into hidden _plazas_ where an old church spreads its romanesque cloisters like wings, or a palace with faceted walls stands aloof from a plebeian throng of houses.

So, laboriously the voyager makes his way to the other end of town. There is a Square. The Aqueduct of Rome, immemorial and chaste, rises from the Spanish market. _Plaza del Azoquejo_: it is a name that recalls the soukhs and bazaars of Islam. Within its sordid taverns, fish-shops, stands Rome.

Segovia’s chaos disappears. Segovia becomes a drama rigorously styled. As the town bristles under the wind and the mountains, so has passion run riot in this town. Here lived Juan Bravo, leader of the _Communeros_ who arose through Spain, in tragic presentiment of disaster, to oppose the Austrian Karl who became Carlos the Great. Here lived the stubborn burghers who shut their gates against the young Queen Isabel. Segovia is crude, coarse, anarchic. But Spain’s unconscious art has made it perfect, weaving the elements of its cross-grained will into a living balance.

This is the work of the Roman Water Bridge. Two thousand years ago, the Empire built it to carry from Fuenfría to a reservoir not far from La Granja. The distance was great, so the Aqueduct was long. No aspirance, here, no thinking about symbols. The pragmatic, confident Roman thought not of miracle: the passionate Segovian, building his chaos beneath these Roman arches, looked for miracle elsewhere. And the miracle is born of the unwitting marriage of these wills....

Roman aqueduct and Spanish town offset each other and create, once more, the complex unity of Spain. The Square is a boil of braying burros, muddy motor-buses, lottery vendors, beggars, drinkers. Above it and across it spans the double tier of arches. They are vast granite blocks, pieced without clamp or mortar into a soaring lacework. Hundreds of feet above, swings the upper rim. The town clambers after it on steps, becoming at the top level a hidden maze of low houses. The Bridge, dwarfed here, disappears into the wall of a convent. Its massive granite shelters a patio with a pump, grapevines, geese--and a young girl stringing red clothes on the branch of an encina. Upon the other height from the Plaza del Azoquejo, the Bridge grows gradually less steep as the town rises slowly. Rome’s cool stones run ever closer to the Spanish streets, singing against sordid wineshops, almost touching a schoolhouse dismal as death, skirting a square where boys play at _pelota_. Rome is now a single-tiered, a stolid marching music. It turns at right angles and runs along a road lined with indigent shops. A _bodega_ opens its dark fragrance as it passes: pigskins filled lifesize with wine sprawl like bloated corpses in the shadow of this march of Rome. The town is behind: the sedulous arched mass moves like a resistless army into the ground that rises toward La Granja....

The Aqueduct of Rome is Segovia’s youngest life. Its stones are immense, but its grace makes wings for them. Its tiers and terraces are an ordered song. Horatian is the balance of these pragmatic blocks. The mountains of Castile are old. The barren soil of Castile, stripped of its loam, is old. Segovia is old. It is a spilling of energy, a thing of chaos. Segovia comes to dark and tragic life within this Measure, sure and at ease, of the cool will of Rome.

_d._ _The Miracle of El Greco_

South of the Guadarrama lies New Castile. The world flattens to the vast plain of La Mancha. Towns stand like tiny toys on a table. It is a calm before storm: vineyards and wheatfields stop against the wildest pass of Spain, Despeñaperros of the Sierra Morena. Here Don Quixote like his idol Amadís went into penance and prayer; here the Arabs passed from Andalusia to the high Plateau; here at Las Navas de Toloso they were pushed back and down five centuries later. Within a land of fierce extremities, none is more telling than this sudden chaos rocking to the sky between two mellow plains. In the upper one, La Mancha, the eye is lost between the infinites of earth and heaven: it ceases to feed logic to the mind and the soul starves in a waste of vague realities or, like Don Quixote’s, leaps to the realm of visions.

North of La Mancha, another climax. The Tagus flows lazily west, carrying silt and loam from gradual hills serrated with the olive. The land is wide-browed. Its lack of trees gives it essential peace, as if it were in contemplation of its own fortunate ease among the embattled mountains. Now, swinging westward with the river, the land catches a spiritual fever. Fields grow rockier, hills abrupt. Rondure sharpens to angle; horizons shut. Something like a geological convulsion takes the body of New Castile and turns it into a steep, a tumultuous storm. The land becomes a maelstrom, swirling into a single rock--Toledo. The Tagus maddens too. Bending south, it cuts into a canyon, one of whose walls is Toledo and the other a rocky world to rim it. The river circles; deep in a notch of stone it becomes a purpling torrent. It cuts a precipice, it leaps a rapid, it reverses northward seeking again the long plains that lounge westward to rocky Portugal and to the sea.

Toledo is cold upon its sudden height. Across the gorge that makes it almost an island, olive groves, symmetrical as in the ancient prints, draw verdant stripes in the red face of the hills. The country houses and the chapels mark the swift slopes like little steadfastnesses nailing their chaos. But in this geologic gyre and husbandry, Toledo stands unmoving.

To the north where the plains lead to Toledo and where alone there is no fending water, are walls. So an unbroken rigor belts the high town. Here is the ancient Puerta de Visagra, unchanged since the Arabs put it up twelve centuries ago upon a Roman stronghold dizzily maintained by the Visigoths Athanagild and Leovgild to capital all the land. Gigantic stones not polished by time. Three separate tiers of bastion and of turret. And within the Gate’s shadow like a womb of rock, delicate Arab arches. Behind, the street leads with a promise of gentle curves into the harbored city. Children gambol in these monstrous walls; their calls are flowers suddenly alight in a bleak winter. Women sit before painted doorways and send voices like velvet strands into the silent granite of Toledo. But life cannot prevail against this protecting death. Nearby is a new Visagra (a mere five hundred years). Arms of Carlos V and a statue of San Antonio furbish its forbiddance. Through its round arch, you see two pointed towers with their _Mudéjar_ tiles aflash in the sun. But the tiles are not verdant and skyey like the tiles of Granada and Seville. They are colorless, and they are cold.

Toledo is a coil of streets, like the Tagus stormy and like the rocks precipitous. Men and women live in Toledo. But they are void within the intricate death of convent walls and church, and convent and convent again. Rather than men and women of the sort who come together in the ache of flesh, and of their ease bear fruitage, there seem to live here creatures of prayer and dogma. Children indeed are scarce in these streets that are the bodies of a Creed and a Rite. When there is open, there is waste. When there is color, there is irony.

San Juan de los Reyes ... church, college, convent ... stands on the westward buttress of the Toledan mountain. The rock cuts to the river. The ancient bridge of San Martín loops high above the rapids, thrusting its road away into a waste of dust. The Gate of San Martín stands in a slanting square; and it is naked for the walls are gone. So desert comes into Toledo. Within the city Gate, here is the face of mountain. The streets stand on it, despite their ages, insecure and shallow. Desert is not hostile to them, so they have let it in. Was it not there before them? Let it come back to serve as the refrain of their bleak rigor--of their denials. And the Church which the Catholic Kings projected and then forgot--San Juan of the Kings--shrills with its painted statues in this desert: Gothic, Arabic, and baroque against a hardier silence.

Farther on is the Judería--what is left of this Borough of Jews who ruled Toledo when the Arabs came, and who throve thereafter in Toledo for seven hundred years. The rigid mood goes on. The Castle of the Jews has disappeared: but where it stood, beside the Paseo of a synagogue, falls the escarpment, dark and sheer, into the rushing river. On the farther side, the mountain is a wall. Water foams through the notch. There is a tower standing on a thrust of rock just above the waves. Halfway between the river and the Jewish homes, this ancient prison has survived and fronts with its bars the desolate interstice of stone. Churches and chapels stud the variant heights. And all about, the rise and fall of streets, shut in and clamorously silent, cold in the neutral tint of the Sierra.

You must cross the river. The Puente de Alcántara is a bridge whose subtle dichotomy of arch and gate marks in plastic terms the way from Moslem Musa to Christian Philip. Best strike down from the Cathedral to the ferry. These are the oldest and the poorest streets. And here are children--naked children, and naked patches of rock and turf within the filth of alleys. Dark, over-ripe, mute. These streets on the mountainside are as the hive of some subterraneous bee whose honey is bitter-black. The people are blind. They behold neither the river below that flows to the sea, nor the Cathedral above that touches God. They live compressed within the surging forces of Toledo. They live in a limbo of balance. Their obscurity is poignant, within so aspirant a world. The ferry is a round and ancient bark with a carved prow and two unwieldy oars to pilot it, for better or for worse, athwart the current. And above the precipice of the other side, is the rocky chaos where El Greco sat to paint his city....

Rigor, rigor inflexibly holds. Toledo’s streets are stone veins imbedded. The Alcázar is a higher rock above the rocky huddle of the town: its rectangular loom is a peak of the mountain, polished by the sun. At the summit bristles the Cathedral. Towers, turrets, crested pediments, flying buttresses and chapel roofs are pressed aloft by the Toledan wave, and rise from it like foam. All of the sharp volutions of the streets, even the sheer Alcázar, converge and aspire into this jet of granite. And over the Cathedral is the sky--God’s empty answer to this blast of icy aspiration.

* * * * *

This is one Theme of Toledo: the word of traditional Castile and of its castle towns. The mountain is refuge of friend, menace to foe. The face of the Christian warrior is set. Moor and Jew are driven out. And all the Toledan world becomes a symbol of the mood that drove them. The soul of the Spaniard becomes a castled mountain; masters its chaos by turning it to stone. And what will not ply to immobility, it shuts without the drawbridge.... One theme of Toledo. But a typical Castilian town--no more--is not Toledo. Castile surpasses itself. Spain grows universal.

Color, flame, live too in the shut town. They are everywhere. And in their protean form, they are one. Halfway up from the Puerta Visagra stands Cristo de la Luz in a rough field of rocks. In 1085, the conquering Castilians passed through the Arabs’ gate. Their titular head was Alfonso VI. But Ruy Díaz de Vivar, the Cid, rode first. The streets then were not different from now. Crude stone paved the steep, and the gray houses hid their eyes about the inner verdure of their courts. The Cid came to a little mosque. His horse fell to his knees and the Campeador could not avail to budge him. At last, he dismounted from the rapt steed and strode into the mosque. He beat away the gold-encrusted Mihrab and disclosed a Visigothic chapel. In the altar place, before the Christ, was a brass lamp; and it was burning even as it had burned three and a half centuries before, when Musa walled it up to make his mosque.[13]

The mosque stands first in the unkempt garden. Its entrance is double-arched. Through the three columns topped by a lyric arabesque, lies the round depth of the altar. Upon the walls are paintings of ascetic Christians, lean with the Byzantine projection of their color into the life of their forms. These paintings were recent when the Arab came to Toledo in 711. They are recent today--in the Toledo of El Greco.

Cristo de la Luz is delicate. Its counterpoint of German, Byzantine and Arab themes makes it a song wavering flute-like from the stiff music of the Castilian town. On the other slope, in the Judería that leaned so fatefully over the gorge of the Tagus, are other dissident jewels. Two synagogues have survived. One of them consecrated as a church under the tutelage of Santa María la Blanca, later became the asylum for penitent prostitutes, later a barrack for cavalry and a stable. The other was made over by the Catholic Kings to that most unjewish of cults--the death (Tránsito) of the Virgin Mother. Builded by the Jews, the houses speak across the stormy ages of the Jews, their builders. The sultry masquerades to which they have submitted fade away. This is Toledo indeed. The Toledo of Abraham Ibn Ezra, descendant of Gabírol and forefather of Spinoza; of the munificent and tragic Samuel, treasurer to Spain’s most cruel king; of Ibn Daud, Talmudist, and of his great foe, Jehudah Ha Levi.

At the time of Paul, there were already Jews in Spain. Like the Phœnicians and the Greeks before them, they became protagonists of Spanish urban culture. The Visigoths who inherited the land upon the Roman death, were an agricultural folk. Their will to control this peninsula of cities failed, because they lacked the spirit of the city. At the end, when disaster neared they oppressed the Jews--masters of urbanity--for economic reasons. It was natural, that the oppressed should welcome the Arabs: and that the Moslem captains, aware of the possible ally in a hostile land, should overlook the chief hate of their Prophet by welcoming the Jews. Jews were placed in control of Seville, Málaga, Córdoba, Granada, Toledo. Under the Córdoban Caliphate, they throve and Spain became their land. Jewish Wisdom crossed the sea from Babylon and founded the first Academies of Europe.

During four centuries, the Jew was a master in Spain. But it is doubtful if his number ever equaled half a million. He was a leaven and an enzyme in the land. He was artisan, tradesman. No guild of the cities failed to count him in. He was physician and teacher. He became scientist and philosopher. The majority of Jews lived, of course, in the humble circumstance of a farmer or a weaver. But a few grew great. Jews became diplomats and statesmen for Moslem and for Christian princes. As the modern economy gradually evolved, they became ministers of finance; they waxed wealthy. And with their power they builded in the towns of Spain centers of liberal, luxuriant culture whose like was not then in Europe. They were masters of many tongues, masters of many illuminations. When Arab Córdoba had rotted and the courts of Italy were yet swarming knots of bandits, the Jews of Spain dwelt in a world which embraced Asia, Africa, Europe. Indeed, they were among the eyes of Portugal and Spain, yearning across the seas. They were cartographers; they were promoters of trade. And from Gabírol who was born in Málaga in 1021 to Hasdai ben Crescas who died in Barcelona in 1410--a period of time nearly as great as that which separates the Discovery of America from our day--they traced an incessant thought in Spain.

The modern State sounded once again a Jewish doom. With the birth of its fanatical will came persecution. The Jews’ internationalism was a subtle, psychologic poison. The servants of royal unity became aware of an enemy in their household--of an enemy in their blood. In 1391, Spain--the liberal theater of ideas whose like had not been known since Alexandria (for here argued men who believed, not in abstract gods, but in flaming Prophets and in Incarnations)--lurched to one modern way of progress. Massacre rose from Seville to Toledo. A century later, the Jews were ordered to give up either their faith or their home. They had been in Spain for centuries; their urban genius had helped build Spain’s cities. They had kindled a fire to warm the world and to illumine heaven. They were artisans in the body and in the mind of their land. They were ordered to die. For to leave the home of Spain or the home of Bible and Talmud was no mere uprooting. Probably not much more than a hundred thousand left. The moiety stayed and were lost in the great Catholic amalgam. Their organizations for action and for thought were reft from them. They had no halls or synagogues. They had no language. Worst of all, they had to abandon--those who stayed--the immemorial _forms_ of feeling which were Jewish and in which they were beginning to mold (witness Crescas and Leon Hebreo) a new Enlightenment, a new Naturalistic religion! An end ... not the first, not the last ... came to Jewish Wisdom. And while Europe whose spirit they had nourished rose in Renascence to the bloody dawn of our “liberal” age, the Jews sank down into the very night of mumbled ritual and superstition from which they had upraised their oppressors.

As they pass from the stern city or are lost within its rigorous stones, the Jews give to it a color and a theme without which it would not be Toledo. By their acceptance of death, they have won life unceasing: and here in Toledo which once gave them death, they have bestowed a spirit which has not died.

The house of Samuel Levy stands, gracious and simple, in its garden. (El Greco lived here.) The arched columns of Santa Maria are unhurt. The Tránsito still breathes, darkly, like a rose over-ripe. It is a rectangular building, higher than wide. Its walls are white under the cedar ceiling. Around runs a frieze, margined in Hebrew texts. Above are arches in relief, _rejas_ that suggest the Arab, and a higher line from the Old Testament. But the base wall of the synagogue is its full glory. It is a façade wholly of Hebrew. (Two Castilian seals thrust in to mar it have no more effect than a spot on a sublime illumined page.) The letters of stone make a warm intricate music. The æsthetic inspiration is Arab. But how these Jews have deepened and dimensioned it! The arabesque is a delicate, wavering line; without denseness, without integration. It is like a silhouette, against a desert sky; it is like the trail of life on desert sands. The Hebrew letters are slower, less emphatic, more volumnear. They are far mellower in curves; they are far deeper. They build, in this façade of a Toledan synagogue, a poem that is history. They march on the stone surface of a wall, resolute, self-effacing: symbols of a world whose spirit seems by miracle to survive its body.

Color and aspirant light, throughout Toledo. How has it survived? Not alone the Cristo de la Luz: not alone the Judería. Athwart the Cathedral, in a little Square, is a building--the _Ayuntamiento_--bright, warm, almost fancifully gay with towers. (El Greco builded it.) There are Churches like San Vicente, Santo Tomé, in which a wall grows suddenly glorious in color and sings above the dolorous shadows. (Here, El Greco painted.) Even the Cathedral turns traitor to its stones! The cloisters are a perfumed close. The choir has rows of wood-carved stalls that shout their sensual delight against the heavy columns. And in the Sacristía hangs an altar piece--an _Expolio_--that is a sunny jewel. A genius--from across the sea--has infused this conventional matter with prophetic spirit: space moves, spirit grows manifest in flesh. A red-robed Christ becomes a ritual flame, transfiguring the human shapes about him.

And this, in Catholic Toledo, the stone grim city! Because there came a man to dwell here in whom dwelt the old Prophecies, and who resolved them into shapes which Catholic Toledo could not deny. Color against stone, fire against rigor--this had been the Argument in Toledo, until Isabel and Cisneros put a stop to it, by blotting out the one in favor of the other. A simple resolution. Moor and Jew go forth. Dogma and Conventual remain. The Cardinals of Toledo--Popes of Spain--espouse the iron purpose of Castile. And the long blank walls of the streets with their hidden monks and nuns--these seem the victors of Toledo.

Comes, now, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century a young Cretan painter to make his home in the town. His name is Doménico Theotocópuli. He has studied in Italy with Tintoretto. He is a wanderer. He learns that there is much gold to earn in Spain, and little talent to earn it. A handy place in which to make a fortune. He comes and stays: and although the fortune proves shy, Toledo becomes immortal.

The question of the actual blood which flowed in El Greco’s veins is of no consequence. Child of the Mediterranean _Völkerchaos_, there must have been echoes of many voices in his soul. Maurice Barrès[14] plays with the unestablished notion that he was a Jew. The certainty is the prophetic spirit of his work; the certainty is the vision of the East with which he dowered Spain. He came to Toledo, disciple of a realist in Florence; and he produced an art as opposed to the paganism of his master as it is close to Isaiah.

The spirit of Israel and Byzantium does not die in Spain, because a Catholic has come to make it flesh of the body. The Jew may go into his alien ghettos; the Arab may rot in the Levant. Here is a man to blaze their truth upon the walls of churches--and with a color so wise, that the walls crumble ere his word grows dim.

The work of El Greco was misunderstood by his own age and scouted by the criticism that came after. The wonder is, that it was tolerated--the invasion in it of a world condemned. Manuel Cossío[15] has explained this plausibly by the personal prestige of the man. His contemporaries, failing to grasp his apocalyptic and “inaccurate” art, were moved by the deep power of the man and by his own self-confidence. His work is the crowning plastic of the West. More and more, as the walls of his stiff world molder, El Greco is seen to express not alone Toledo, not Spain alone, but the Christian Synthesis of Europe at its highest luminous pitch.

His æsthetic is one of incarnation. He possesses an idea, dynamic, mystical. He makes his figures immediate forms of that idea. Not symbols, not representations--not even emanations in the separatistic sense of the Brahmins. The spirit _informs_ these heads and torsos, much as the spirit informs the Substance of Spinoza. This is an æsthetic to be found in Egyptian sculpture. The archaic Greeks knew it and the classic Greeks, growing analytical, abandoned it. It has come closest to the West in the word of the Hebrews. Isaiah, Hosea, Job, the Song of Songs, the Psalms, and the Alexandrian Pseudepigraphia rose, all, from a like æsthetic law. Byzantium rewon it wanly in its painting. El Greco’s idiom is close to the Byzantine. In his essence, the fierce passion of its flaming, he is far closer to the Hebrews. This does not mean that Doménico Theotocópuli had Jewish blood. It proves rather that Christianity had Jewish blood, so that the Toledan ambiance of Semitic rhythm and Semitic thought could call forth for Rome a vision very close to the old vision of the Prophets.

El Greco must be regarded as a partaker, crucially, in the Toledan scene. Thus only can the mystical culmination of his work be understood. In Toledo, two antithetic Themes: a will of rigor and a flame of the East. What mystery shall fuse them? In El Greco, two dominant traits: volumnear color, movemented form. The mystery is at hand! Color creates plastic mass; mass, formed through configuration into bodies, creates a flow. But the flow is not of fluid; it is of fire. Fire flows and is steadfast; an essential object and an immutable circumambiance mold its motions to immobility. So now the flowing of El Greco’s forms. Massing colors, thrusting shapes, parabolas of expression round spherically into a balance _with no outlet_. Ecstasy lies within itself. Life aspires--to life. Here is the vision of a Mystery which like flame flows forth from God, is held to God and is a form, in its commotion, of God’s immutable, immobile essence. Here is a Mystery not transcendental, not neo-platonic. But Dante and Spinoza would have hailed it. And Toledo’s stones could be transfigured to express it, without loss of their own nature.

Thus did the essence of El Greco’s art resolve the two themes of his city. Once again, the God of the East upon the body of the West creates a masterpiece....

_e._ _The Tomb_

The ultimate Word of Castile....

A gray rectangle on the bleak Sierras. Behind, upon three sides, the immense mountains. Below, the rock and clay that join Madrid to Avila. Four stories of gray granite. A delicately arched slate mansard roof. Upon each corner a tower and three more tiers of windows tapering through the slender roof to a ball and a cross. Within, sixteen patios, making the design of a Gridiron: symbol of the gridiron upon which San Lorenzo, patron of the Escorial, was roasted. This Gridiron is cold. A mighty central patio, its walls of invariant granite broken by the church façade which rises within the building like a prayer wrung from the rigor of that stony life. Doric columns, gigantic and harsh figures of the Hebrew kings standing upon the pediment. Two towers at the corners, and within, a Dome lifting above the building like a Tomb and making death the dominant of this invulnerable music.

The Escorial stands on a stone platform whose inelastic might is emphasized by the severe cropped hedges. The green of the box, the green of window-sills and shutters chimes faintly against the silence. To the south, under the granite terrace, is a little pond. Its square surface mirrors only granite: that of the monastery walls or of the Guadarrama.

Within also silence. A monastery with its cloisters and chapter halls, a church, a college, a Palace ... in square stone rigor. Walls are thick like fortress walls; rooms are vaults; floors are bare. Below ground is an octagonal chamber of vermilion marble piled to the peaked ceiling with coffins of kings. And beyond, like the streets of some lugubrious town, are the vaults of the Infantas--a procession of marble mansions, body-large. This city of the dead holds the Escorial.

Eastward slopes a little park, and south from the artificial pool there is a lawn. It ends in a granite front flush with the grass. This brief pleasaunce is like a spot of verdure within desolation. Against it rises the Escorial, framed by the scoriant Sierras, based and topped by death--the profoundly stylized and essential form of the bleak Coronal of Castile.

It is the masterwork of Philip II. And Philip is a masterwork of Spain. The Spanish will to forge a unity from the warring elements of its life won no darker victory than his. He was the great grandson of the Most Catholic Kings. He was the true heir of their impossible purpose. His Empire spanned the world. Never has there been its like. Portugal, Holland, Franche-Comté, Austria, the Americas were bulwarks of his House. He strove to make of this delirious chaos a unitary Word to bespeak Christ. He gave his country’s blood and his life. He took at their full value the accoutered lists of his imperial titles. He was the Catholic King; let his land express God. He was Monarch; let him know his children. His personal correspondence immensely regarded every city, every hamlet, every estate in his realms. Each curate of each parish was invited by the King to send detailed reports of the persons of his flock. But the curate might err in perspective. Each report was tested and criticized by another. Philip lived in the scaffolding of a Dream. The Dream was good, for it was to create and rule a unitary world. But the scaffolding was warfare, intrigue, laborious documentation. For peace, he went to war: for light, he plowed the dark. He spent his years and his people: and at the end he felt death.

This was the hour when the Escorial shaped in his dark mind. The pretext was the desire of his father Carlos I, that the kings of Spain possess a worthy tomb; and was the victory over the French on San Lorenzo’s day. But the work that grew was strangely different from the plan, and far profounder.

The will to unity must come to this? Philip had dreamed of a monument of Life: a Spain that was to be the symphony of continents and seas, of a hundred peoples and a hundred tongues fused in the grace of Christ. Now, in the ardor of his maturity and in the glamour of his bloody conquests, Philip knows he has failed. Unity ... the health of Unity ... must be sought elsewhere. Not in the piling up of worlds but in their giving up; not in life but through death.

Many-mooded death. Death of the senses, death of the mind, death of glory, death of the will to live. From his imperial splendor and from the ranges of his kingly sway Philip steps forth an ascetic. He will have his Solution within the ken of his eye--this master upon whose realm the sun does not set. He is the lord of the earth; and lives with one last mastering desire: to build a tomb for his glory.

Philip searches the waste fastness of Castile, until he finds his site: this barren spur of the Sierra below whose rock spreads the desert. Now he calls his slaves--they are the painters and the architects. Juan Bautista de Toledo and his successor Juan de Herrera, builders of the Escorial, are tools in the fever-cold hand of the king. Their plans are studied, revised, rejected. Their ebullient moods are flayed, their dignity is slurred. They are slaves--mere cutters of stone--they are tools.

And so, in a land of bastard architectures, where the Gothic is deformed, where Renaissance and baroque and Oriental forms are puddled and hypertrophied and belied, rises this masterwork. In its brutal chastity, speaks the tragic spirit of him who made it. The Escorial is to unverdant, fanatically ordered Spain what the green tragedies of Racine are to open, sweetly measured France.[16]

* * * * *

Across the valley on a wooded height is a rocky bench known as the Seat of the King. Here Philip comes each day and watches the Escorial grow before him. He fears he might die ere it is done. He drives his slaves the artists; imports whole corps of them from Italy and Flanders. And when he is stricken with the illness which he thought his last, he is carried in a litter from Madrid, eight dolorous days upon the bleak meseta. He seeks the bare cell that is his Palace in the Escorial basement; he lies in the bedroom built beside the Altar so that he may hear Mass from his pillows. And so indeed he died. But still he sits each afternoon upon the _Silla del Rey_, and watches.

Below him, the sun goes down and a cold moon rises. Below him a patch of lawn and a flume float within this world splintered of granite and twilight. A wood of encina stands like an army of cowled saints. They are gnarled, gray-armored in moss, and their leaves are little refulgences of prayer, holding the sunset above the sodden ground. They look up, as Philip looks, toward the Escorial. It is matriced in jagged rock; it is sheer from the sun and the moon light....

_CHAPTER VI_

_THE DREAM OF VALENCIA_

Spain, with face turned east away from the sun, takes her afternoon siesta. She has dined well. Soup of seven meats, codfish, the seven meats, cheese rich as manure, Galician greens, Toledan mazapan, Sevillan _dulces_, wines from Málaga, Jérez and La Mancha, heroic tobacco from the Canary Islands, fill her. She was hungry. For her day had been active. She had served and fused the wills of many peoples: swift Phœnicians, heavy-headed Romans, meteor Greeks, Goths with wild hair and tender eyes, intricate introvert Jews, Arabs with convictions about the materiality of Cosmos, Moors whose blood was fierce like Atlas avalanche, sportsmen like the Cid whose charity was of the sword, whose religion was of the moment, mystics of Castile parsing Christ with Horace, Spaniards at last ... Torquemada, Isabela, Celestina ... makers of the dominance of Castile. So Spain was hungry and heartily ate: was weary and heavily slept. And her dream was a city of the eastern coast.

Its name Valencia. Its streets a Carnival. Its life a Masquerade.

Medieval towers stand over streets that shrill with modern shops. Great Gates of Rome pinion the labyrinths of Orient. Arches of Islam throw into shade white mansions built by American concerns of sewing machines and fountain pens. All masquerade. The people speak a tongue close to the French languedoc: they ride in Citroens and Fords. Put no trust in this, they are not European. These open knots of barter, these entrail alleys, murmurous and fluid, speak of Fez and Tunis. Fraud again: this is not Africa. Islam puts a mockery on Rome. Judah redargues the Castilian dogma. Moorish marts belie the modern measure. Avenues of villas stretch straight from the town in gleams, and end in rice swamps: near the bungalows toss galleys on the tide, with sails like the sails of Carthage. Masquerade.

Here is the market place. _Lonja de seda_, the silk exchange, is Gothic. (The mulberry trees are thick upon the huertas.) But the base from which the Gothic rises is a Moorish palace. And from the noble height hangs Arab ornament. The gargoyles indeed lean down like muedzins--fossil muedzins with a frozen Allah on their lips. Under the holy walls, upon the floor, squat merchants: they masquerade for Greece of the Völkerchaos, for Talmudry of gain. And their commercial heads bathe in the light of a fairer east--the Sun.

Outside are throngs. A church façade, rococo over-blown from the French Renaissance, echoes the shouts of women at their sheds. Oranges in tons, winesacks like human bodies, dates from Elche, potatoes, flowers, donkeys towing _tartinas_ ... all produce of the lush Valencian huerta. The women wear great red aprons and have purple eyes....

Valencia in chaos is a masquerade. Greece, Carthage, Rome, Alexandria, Mecca, Fez annul each other here. Turbulent Valencia does nothing, says nothing. It is a dream of Spain, laden with her ages.

END OF PART ONE

_PART TWO_

_The Tragedy of Spain_

_CHAPTER VII_

_THE WILL OF THE CATHOLIC KINGS_

Young Isabel, sister of the king, sits in her castle tower at Medina, and looks beyond Castile: looks south to the Moorish realm, Granada; looks east and north to the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre; looks west to Portugal. “Let there be Spain,” says Isabel of Castile.

Her own land is riven in chaos. Ferdinand the Saint who won Córdoba and Seville from the Moslem was a strong monarch. But Alfonso the Learnèd was not wise in ruling. There have been two hundred years of banditry, of baronial insolence, of royal wavering. Castile is a quicksand upon which no will can march. Only the penniless submit to taxes. Nobles are outlaws. Rome parcels out appointments in the Church to alien lackeys. Prelates of Spain go their own way with their own crimson armies, or sulk in arrogant safety in their fortress-churches. Tolerance has begotten anarchy. Ideas annul each other in the too free sun. And God, with many faces, turns against Himself.

Isabel, looking from the bastioned windows of her tower out upon Castile is a luminous quiet heart in the storm. King Henry, the Impotent, is fertile of disaster. His favorites juggle with the scepter, scribble upon the royal parchment commands of idleness and of ambition. One of his favorites, Beltrán, has begotten on the Queen a daughter: and Joanna’s growth is the growth of fresh dynastic war. Alfonso, the king’s brother, claims the throne and writes his claim on the sparse wheatfields of Castile, making them desert. Portugal pushes: France plots and watches. Each fortune has its army. Each church is a castle. Each mountain is either an ambush or a throne. “Let there be Spain,” says Isabel of Castile.

She will be queen: but in her own way. And her way, like her will, is her rapt possession by the spirit of her land. Her brother, Alfonso, has died: his faction demand of her that she assume the Crown and drive out the impotent king. Isabel refuses. She bargains with Henry. While he lives, he is to rule. But his pseudo-daughter shall renounce: his adulterous wife shall return to Portugal: Isabel shall be acknowledged heiress of Castile. Henry gives his word, and breaks it. He is neither friend nor foe. He is a symbol of Spain’s brackish chaos. Isabel holds to her castle. She is almost penniless; but she has for confessor a couched eagle, Cisneros, who is to second her mysterious work. Isabel learns that her brother the king plots to imprison her for the sake of Joanna whom the heir of Portugal has married. Isabel summons Ferdinand, heir to Aragon, to come and wed her. She is thinking of Spain; and her articulate will has convinced the old King Juan of Aragon, Ferdinand’s father, that she is going to win--and that the union is good.

Disguised and penniless, Ferdinand crosses the hostile land and reaches the princess in Valladolid. He is seventeen: a lissom, romantic knight, the impact of whose bloods--Latin, Goth and Jew--has kindled a swift fire in his face. He sees this girl, tall and stately and one year his elder: her ruddy hair is a braided glow about her brow, the great blue eyes are a sky for the large rigor of her features. He enters the mansion of her love, to dwell forever within the sway of her will. For her will is Spain. He is brilliant, sharp, ubiquitous: but her will has place for him. Let him move from Italy to Peru: he will yet be within the will of Isabel.

The married boy and girl are fettered by penury in Castile; and like a breath to move them wait the death of Henry. He dies when Isabel is twenty-three. Portugal marches eastward for Joanna. His great army is a shadow in León. Isabel’s faction dwindles. Ferdinand, wise consort, proposes peace with Portugal at the price of Zamora and other bastions of the west. Isabel refuses. She is pregnant. She makes long night journeys on horse, to her recalcitrant towns. She pleads before rough communes and proud _ricos hombres_. She spends her woman’s strength--she and Spain will suffer for it--but she does not entail her still shadowy queen’s power. She makes recruits. She has a good field general in her husband. Portugal loses heart before this hearty mother of unborn Spain. The stubborn towns of Castile rally to her. In 1479 Juan of Aragon dies: Ferdinand becomes king: Castile and Aragon at last are wedded with their monarchs.

“Let there be Spain,” is the rhythm of Isabel’s thought.

“We have not yet won Castile,” she tells her husband on the march to the long, last war for the conquest of Granada.

From ages of invasion and dissent, Spain has become this throbbing swarm of aroused centrifugal impulse. Ideas, races, communities, men: a boiling tumult to be summed and stilled. Spain longs for peace: Spain longs to become Spain. From her multiverse of wills, she has willed a symbol: this person, fair and strong. She has willed Isabel who is the flesh of Spain’s will.

Isabel is one possessed. Her vision, thought and sense move in one cycle. To her, physical love is not this tenderness between herself and her man: it is a joining of Aragon and Castile. To her, physical fecundity is not her woman’s flower: it is the providing by a queen of counters for dynastic matches.

But she is deliberate and wise. She has more than her will and the weapon of her body. She has ideas for weapons. The modern State functioning under an almighty monarch, the medieval Church with its source in Rome and Christ, and for her people Justice: this is the triune tool whereby to weld the anarchies of Spain into her Spain at last.

Strabo already wrote of the separatism of Spain: Rome suffered here as nowhere else to unify her conquest. Spain lacked a nervous system and a base: she had to be subdued bit by bit--and so held. Since the Romans, twelve hundred years have stratified the chaos. Each new strain of blood, each fresh disposal of culture and of faith has become a claimant. The Spaniard bears in his nerves the variance of a past--all anarchy of dissent and self-assertion.

The Catholic Kings sit weekly in open court and dispense justice. The nobles are leveled down: the commoners are lifted. Finance is once more farmed from plenty, not extorted from indigence. Rome is compelled to relinquish to the Kings the right of nomination to high office. In all of this, the monarchs meet Spain’s intricate problem with the conventional measures--those which are unifying France and Britain.

In Spain, this is mere prelude. Spain’s chaos is more organic, and is unique in Europe. Isabel follows the logic of her weapons. What disrupts Spain is not banditry, not the insolence of nobles: but Spain’s free life of inimical ideas. All else is consequence, not cause. To the south is a whole kingdom of the Moors. Everywhere live Mussulmans and Jews. More insidious still, there are the converted Jews--_los conversos_--who under cover of acquiescence spread the poison of their immemorial discord. When France was truly Catholic with Saint Louis for king, her Dominican friars backed by Pope Gregory set up an Inquisitional Tribunal. France showed her mettle against the Albigenses. Isabel has even a closer precedent to hand: Aragon defended herself against the heretics in 1242; and six centuries before, the Visigoths made protective laws against the Jews--the accursed Jews who freed themselves from oppression by letting in the Arabs! They are the same Jews still: few in number, but with the strength of ferment. They turn Christian: they achieve power and wealth: they marry with the nobles: they become princes of the Church. And their anti-national nature, their passion for free thought and independent action rot the weak royal fabric. Isabel applies for a Papal Bull: the Inquisition is set up, not against open Jews and Moors, but against the subtle and treacherous _conversos_.

Granada, decomposed under the affluent Moors, falls to the Catholic Kings. The Inquisition, captained by Torquemada, sends thousands of souls upon their way to Heaven and fills Spain with the anguish of torn bodies. Her roads are safe, her nobles and churchmen buckle under; the last Moorish prince has crossed the Strait to the Moghreb. And yet Spain is not One. Spain must become a Being, rapt and single, serving Christ and conquering for Christ. She who is the symbol of Spain’s will strives to make her land in her own image. Spain, like her, must become chaste and absolute: a Catholic people as she is a Catholic woman.

The Jews are offered a merciful alternative: to be Catholic or to quit the land. Isabel argues that the _conversos_ will lose their secret virulence if they have no nourishment from open Jewish neighbors. In 1492 a goodly fraction of the Jews of Spain “exchanging a House for an ass, a Vineyard for a coat,” leave the cities where they have lived for ages. Ten years later, the Moors of the conquered kingdom of Granada, meet the same fate. Again, a host of intellectuals, artists, tradesfolk is bled away. The peasants do not stir: they become Catholic with the same inert response which had made them Moslem seven centuries before, or Arian under the Visigoths, or pagan under Rome.

Isabel looks at her work--and nods--and is not satisfied.

She says: “We do unto the body of our beloved land as Christ did unto the possessed: we have cast out devils. But this is not enough. True disciple of our Lord, Spain must take up her burden and go forth: must forsake comfort and family and the long-sued peace: must bring His Word to all that dwell on earth. Spain is Christ’s true apostle. France turns away in trickery and ambition. Henri IV, Louis XI--how far they are from Saint Louis! Italy is helpless. Spain is the well-beloved: Spain is Israel, and Rome’s right hand. Let my king, Ferdinand, go with his hardened troops to Sicily and Naples.

“But even this suffices not. The Apostles did not stay among the Jews: they went out to the Gentile. There is more than Europe. Can this strange religious mariner, Cristobal Colón, be right?”

Isabel ponders what she has heard of Columbus. He is the author of a book of _Prophecías_. He has found and plotted in the Old Testament his rationale for a westward route to the Indies. God perhaps wrote down in Isaiah, not alone Christ and the Word of Christ in Europe, but Spain and how Spain shall bring the Word to the East. Columbus a prophet? (He says there is gold in the Indies. Spain needs gold, for her crusade.) He is the friend of holy men in Spain: the Dominicans bespeak him and his cause. He has been rejected by Juan II of Portugal, by Henry VII of England, by Anne of Beaujeu, Regent queen of France.

“Let Colón go westward to the heathen east,” the Catholic Kings ordain. “Let him carry the Christian word to the heathen, and bring back gold to carry the Word farther.”

Isabel’s will is religious. She is a woman incarnate of an idea: passionately eager to make all her realm, all the world flesh of her purpose. This means that her design must be practicable, also. Kingship is acceptance of the immanence of God. Isabel thinks she understands, looking over the turmoiled centuries of Spain: those of the Reconquest from Moor and Arab. She knows that the _mind_ of these shifting wars was of this world and for the spoils of the earth. She knows that the Cid at times fought Christian, and that Saint Ferdinand could not have won Seville without the aid of the Moslems of Granada. God used mundane weapons for His purpose. No archangel did He send to drive Târik and Al-Mansor from Santiago, but mercenary treacherous knights who knew of the Infidel that he had gold, rather than that he spat upon the Cross. And unto this day, the Moor is respected in Castile! He is learnèd, liberal: he has fought well and lived well. Isabel accepts the strange ways of her Lord. She, too, must use mundane weapons. Ferdinand is ambitious: let his lust be a weapon. He is sharp, swift, hard like Toledo steel: no king of France can outwit him, no Italian cardinal withstand him. Isabel cherishes the good tool. A more conscious tool is Columbus. His ships have blundered on a new rich continent. His fortune has foundered: he is in chains--as were the older prophets. But the wealth is Spain’s! His mariners are bullies--worldly tools of the Lord: yet even by them the Indian can be saved. Even by them and their greed, Rome can bring grace to the Indies. Isabel accepts the immanence of God, in the lusts of her servants.

She is a tall, fair woman. In the camp, in the castles that raise her constant journeys across Spain--Córdoba, Valladolid, Medina, Burgos--she lives the frugal life of the campaigner. She has paid for her forced night rides: the heaviest price, perhaps, is the feebleness of her children, none of whom survives to inherit or give an heir to Spain, save the mad second daughter, mother of Carlos the Great. The queen’s splendors are reserved for display that shall bespeak her greatness to the world. When she enters Avila or Seville, it is upon a tide of gold and rubies. But when the doors shut upon her castle and the drawbridge rises, when she is alone with her family or her confessor, the jewels and the cloth of gold are gone: a woman, resolute and stark like the Castilian mountains, looks within herself for God’s next message.

She is the spirit of Spain. Her husband, often unruly, often rebellious, is muscle, skill, craft--he is not the spirit of Spain. Her spiritual father, Ximenez de Cisneros, whom she chose for confessor because he had no respect for a queen, and whom she exalted to be Primate of Toledo because he abhorred all greatness--he is the nude projection of her conscience upon the widening splendor of her realm. Beneath the sumptuous robes of Cisneros is a shirt of hair. Deep in his vast castle is a cell, a bare and bedless floor on which the Primate sleeps after the penitential rope each night has lashed into his flesh the words of Christ. He is a formula of her immaculate will: but he is not the spirit of Spain. His fanatical asceticism is too simple. Spain, like Isabel, is turbulent and complex.

What pouring of flesh and spirit upon Spain, since the Phœnician, the Berber and the Celt first made the Iberian fecund! A subtle chaos. For Spain is a diapason of hostile forces, needing each other to survive: the embattled parts have long since found their balance, and each is in love with itself.

Isabel works like an artist. She has her vision. Her instinct and experience evolve for it a form and for herself a method. She takes her material ruthlessly and transfigures it with a cold passion. But for a deeper reason, Isabel is an artist. This design which is her vision and her will and to which she conforms her world is her world’s will and vision. The creative circle is closed. For he alone is the true artist whose personal will is the will of his land and of God: only in this marriage of wills can there be true creation. Isabel makes Spain over into the image of Spain.

Behold the saintly, the murderous woman! She is the face of irony, and her smile is tragic. With what tender hand she sets up the Inquisition: “Unity in Christ, enforced by the power of the modern State.” With what warm eyes, she bids her marauding mariners godspeed: “America brings recruits for Christ--and gold for the winning and holding of more recruits.” How fondly she gives her insane child, Joanna, in marriage to the heir of Hapsburg; how resolutely furthers her husband’s ambitions in the east. Spain, kingdom of God, surely cannot embrace America and neglect Europe? Infidel Africa, false France must be surrounded and crushed--“Austria, Artois, Netherland, Africa, America,” she counts the organs of her embodied Christ.

And the heart of the Body, Spain herself, with Portugal long since joined by blood alliance: it must be pure and solid like the heart of the Queen. This is the kernel of her work. Isabel looks back upon her life and finds again her measure and her method. She will create a race of Spaniards whose every unit, man and woman, in intimate thought shall strike a single note: so that this note, myriad-repeated, fill the world. Spain, mother and child of chaos, shall become the archetype of unison on earth.

Isabel is ruthless, she is unafraid: she is certain. Such feeble virtues as tolerance, freedom, joy of life--Spain was celebrated for them beyond all Europe--must be given up. Shall Isabel spare her land, when she has not spared herself?

She was young and tender. She has known what it is to lie in a man’s arms. She has been a mother. She has sacrificed love to become a captain. She has lost her children, unborn or born, because of her forced marches in the saddle. She has mortified not alone her lusts and vanities, but her gentleness and sweetness, to become this Weapon of the Lord.

Let Spain do as much. Let there be laws against the wearing of gold braid: against display of luxuriance and ease. Let there be laws against the idleness of doubt, against the vice of willful search of truth. (Rome has the truth!) Let there be laws against any wavering whatsoever from the pure unity of Spain. And what element offends against this white simplicity, let it be cut away--though the land bleed.

Above all let there be no peace. Isabel’s art reaches its ironic climax. Spain’s hunger for unity was the hunger for peace. Disunion and multiplicity had made perpetual war. Now unity was achieved, the Spanish rhythm--which was war--went on. The new ideal nourished the old mode. Spain is the apostle of Christ. Spain has become a state to establish Christ on earth. Let Spain not rest. Christ brings not peace, but a sword.

* * * * *

The vision, a theodicy: the form, the Church of Rome: the dynamic means, a State. In the impossible marriage of these three elements lies the tragedy of Spain.

For seven centuries Christians have fought Moslems. Their motive was conquest of power. But their pretext became the Cross. The opposing Crescent determined this. The Cross grew, because of the faith of the Moor. Very early the Christians found it well in their raids against the Mussulman, to enlist the Presence of the Church. The priest became an auxiliary soldier: he brought the poetry and spirit of a religious slogan to enhance the fleeting motive of the Raid. And now at last the slogan has come true! Saint Ferdinand took Seville because he wanted more land. But Isabel sends ships to the Indies because she wants more Christians. A millennium of brutish restlessness has mothered this religious restlessness of Spain which would embroil the world till all the world be Christian. Ages after the Crusades of France and England, ages after the decadence of the Arab, the troops of Isabel become crusaders.

A modern State with a medieval God. In France and England, the medieval God has already vaporized away. England breaks literally with Rome. France dissolves her bonds into mere gesture. _The modern State must have no God but itself._ It must create its own pragmatic, its ethic, its metaphysic, finally its religion upon the unitary plan of its own health and progress. France knows this: henceforth the State of France will act unhindered by any ideal external to its future. And England knows this. Two mighty States move forward with a unity of program and of control born of the need of the State.

But in Spain, the State is not cause and effect, not ideal and goal, not master and dispenser. In Spain, the State shall be the tool of a Vision hostile to the State’s essential nature.

The State must be materialistic, possessive, selfish. Spain’s ideal is visionary, creative, altruistic. The State must steal and hold. Spain’s ideal spends. The State murders to enhance itself. Spain’s ideal murders to enhance Christ. The State is anti-individual. Spain’s ideal makes and controls by law the yearning of each soul.

Isabel is an artist: she has the logic and the integrity of the artist. But in the form of her work live elements that disrupt and that belie each other. She makes of Spain a modern State: she sends this monster, lustful, treacherous and dull, upon a Christian errand....

_CHAPTER VIII_

_THE WILL OF SAINT AND SINNER_

_a._ _Irony and Honor_ _b._ _The Mystic_ _c._ _The Jesuit_ _d._ _The Jurist_ _e._ _The Rogue_ _f._ _Velazquez_

_a._ _Irony and Honor_

The Catholic Kings have builded ruthlessly: absolutism, the grace of Christ, intolerance, universal justice, arms and prayer were to make Spain one. Now each of these qualities takes form and grows personified in Spain. Each is imbued with Spain’s imperious will to be whole and one: each grows great with this spirit: each wars upon them all. Spain was chaotic and diverse. Her will to be one serries her into antitheses. Her will to union breaks her into extremes. Irony works on Isabel’s fair fabric.

Perhaps the land itself is symbol of the process. Spain is desert--and garden; flat plain--and mountain; great heat--and winter. Spain is Europe--and Africa. In her events, she reveals this first ironic state of fusion--the splitting up into opposites of action. Columbus, mystic captain who charted his voyage in the Prophets, becomes enchained in the lust of avarice. His men, sent to Christianize the Indies, enslave the courteous American and sack his cities. Spain’s past transforms! The Cid, that playful knight, becomes crusader. Saints turn knight-errant. Moderate Stoics (like Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius whose father was a Spaniard) inspire the ascetic fury of the hermits. And the humane Arcipreste de Hita, Castile’s first poet, is turned into an apologist for license.

In her pageant of extremes, Spain’s Middle Class is crowded out. The land has warriors--and beggars; nobles and rascals: saints and scoundrels. Charity is practiced with the sword and the mystic walks with the thief. Santa Teresa answers La Celestina. Don Quixote sallies forth with Sancho Panza.

One spirit moves them all. They have each the same whole pride in Spain, the same faith in her destiny, the same mind that Spain is their inheritance. The Spanish mystic is no aloof and transcendental man: he works for Spain. The Spanish rascal is no shallow rascal: he has the almost metaphysical conviction that Spain must feed him. And every Spaniard, from prostitute to saint, from king to beggar, moves within a sense which reveals this terrible will to _social unity_: the sense of Honor.

* * * * *

The Spanish sense of Honor is the need of Spain to resist the social chaos of her land. The member of an integrated world completes it with self-approval. Self-approval the Spaniard does not need. He was a person, long before he had a nation. The Spaniard knew what was right, what was true. His need was to make others know as he did: for in this social conformity, he would feel himself at last the member of a group. The _pundonor_ was the point of contact whereby he graphed, not his place in Heaven, but his place in the world. The stress was upon others. And this was the trait of a land in which individual unity was achieved; in which rights of personality needed no insistence; but in which social unity was lacking and was longed for.[17]

This need was so intense that it inspired a literature and informed a religion. Æsthetic worlds were built upon this impulse and it infused the writings of mystics as well as the histories of rascals. Spain in her great Age--a pattern of sharp-limned individuals--was symphonized in the key of Honor.

_b._ _The Mystic_

The mystics of Catholic Spain who in act and word gave utterance to the will of Isabel rose from a high tradition in the land. They were indeed the fulfillment ... as was the Queen ... of a religious vision older than Spain herself. When Salamon B. Judah Ibn Gabírol was born in Málaga in 1021, there was not yet Spain. Gabírol looked about him at this land in which three continents and three religions were embroiled. And he said:

“Thy Glory is not diminished because of them that worship aught beside Thee. For the intention of them all is to attain Thee. But they are as the blind: they set their faces toward the way of the King; and they wander out of the way.”

Gabírol the Jew wrote hymns which were included in the Sephardic ritual. But the book which sets forth his vision of God and life reveals no specific creed: it was too universalistic for the Jews who neglected his philosophy and soon lost even the Arabic manuscript of his work. Two centuries later, the _Makor Hayim_ reappears in the Latin version _Fons Vitæ_: Aquinas combats its intuitionalism, Duns Scotus leans on it. The Arabs Ibn Sina and Ibn Roshd were naturalized in Europe as Avicenna and Averroës: now Ibn Gabírol, stripped of his race and sect, becomes Avicebron: one of the sources of platonic faith in modern thought. But it is an error to confound Gabírol with the followers of Plotinus who supplied the principal attack upon those fossils of modern rationalism, Maimonides and Aquinas. There is an element in Gabírol which the true neo-platonist lacks: an element both Semitic and of Spain. It is the element of Will, immanent and purposeful, in his conception of divinity. Life to Gabírol is no mere fated emanation of the Godhead as to the true North African and Hindu mystic: nor is it an unreal envelope about truth, as to the followers of Plato. Life is the form of God in matter: the willful imprint of divinity on earth. This concept gives to the rapt activity of the mystics who embrace it an earthward, a practical direction. If the world is pattern of God’s will, the highest human spirit cannot in the highest vision transcend the earth or grow detached from it: he must work in earth and through earthly deed enact God’s revelation.

Gabírol, first of Spain’s literary mystics, founds this tradition which at the end is to produce in Spain a lineage of mystics who are men of action: a lineage far removed indeed from the commoner progeny of mystics who, as they approach God, leave the terrestrial life. The early Moslem thinkers outdid even their Jewish partners in the great Courts of Córdoba and other Andalusian towns, by this tendency of their doctrines. But their universalism became materialistic. Stressing the monism of nature, they lost sight of God as the _informer_: the Prophet Mohammed shrank to a sort of intellectual agent of the will, what the Spaniards called _intendimiento agente_, a power more physical than of the spirit. There were exceptions. Avempace, the Moslem platonist, for instance, who was born in Guadix a little later than Gabírol. And his disciple, Tofaíl, whose novel _Hai-ben-Jochdam_ is a spiritual _Robinson Crusoe_, an extraordinary proof of the immanence of God. Hai, an infant, is abandoned on a desert island. A doe nurses him. The bare demands of material survival sharpen his reason: and from the purity of intellectual understanding he achieves religious revelation. His body has evoked reason, and reason evokes God. Now, at the end of his days, an aged saint comes to the island. He has reached by simple faith the same religious certitude as Hai by the exercise of mind. The circle is rounded. God is the end of all ways, and is the way of all thoughts. But the rational monism of the Moslems was not protected, like that of the Jews from a sheer materialism which made many thinkers at the Court of Abd-er-Rahman contemporaries at once of Democritus and Haeckel. The immediate plateau from which arose in Spain the Catholic mystic heights was Jewish.

For many ages, the Spanish Catholics[18] contribute little to the medieval Scripture whose prophets were men like Abelard, Albertus and Aquinas. The long line of Spanish Jewish worthies droops: while in the north the subtly variant seed of Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus flowers at last into the twin rebellion of Protestantism and of rationalism. It is with the age of Calvin, of Francis Bacon, of Erasmus, that Catholic Spain finds voice at last: and in a way which is an act. By means of this late flowering in the south, modern Europe is a natural issue from the womb of the medieval Church. Rome is saved until the seed of Rome’s successorship is planted: international law is founded: America is discovered and is peopled.

The tradition of such men as Gabírol and Tofaíl seemed dead, when it spoke suddenly afresh in the work of a Spanish Jew. And of this man’s influence, Menendez y Pelayo says in his classic work on the Ideas of Spain: “All the Catholic mystics, from the Dominican Fray Luis de Granada to the Jesuit Nieremberg accepted the æsthetic of Leon Hebreo integrally, knowingly.”

His true name was Judah Leo Abravanel and with his father, a statesman and a thinker, he left Spain in the exodus of 1492. He was a young man when he settled in Italy, and it is very possible that his _Dialogues of Love_ were originally written in Italian.[19] The oldest text of this epoch-making work is an Italian prose full of Castilian uses.

The originality of the work of Leon Hebreo rests chiefly in the fact that here for the first time ancient and medieval thought achieves a modern form. The stuffs of the _Dialogues_ come up from Plato, Plotinus, Crescas and the Kabbala: but the grace of the Renaissance, the humanism of Venice and of Florence are within them. Here is the doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence which Nietszche strove to incorporate in European thought. Here in germ is Spinoza’s explanation of the union of the individual with God and of the unity of substance. The _Dialogues_ are so universalistic that they do not refute the legend of their author’s conversion to the Christian faith: and they are so poetic that they constitute indeed a lyrical threshold to the Pantheism which Spinoza was to architect for Europe. To Crescas and Leon Hebreo comes Descartes to produce Spinoza: comes the spiritual body of the Spanish will to produce the Spanish mystics. Castilian grows to be the literal and literary word of a nation resolved to win the earth in order to establish God upon it.

Perhaps the most powerful writer among these mystics[20] was the Augustinian monk, Luis de León, whose lecture hall with its narrow wooden benches honeycombed with the knife-marks of his students, one may still see in Salamanca. The prose of Abravanel is luminous, pigmented, mobile. His dialogues remain a string of separate gems, variously valued, inorganic. The prose of Luis de León--far superior to his verse--is integral and substantial as the will of Spain. Abravanel was an uprooted speculator. León was a Spanish Catholic immersed in the business of his age. He is indeed a mystic only by reflection: a classicist at heart. His work is less parabolic, has fewer flashes than the _Dialogues_; it is indeed less open to the sun and stars. But it is far more plastic. Spain herself moves in his sentences and knits them whole. The author is a passionate believer: so is his land, so is his Monarch: so becomes his people. There is no separation between the dreams of the close of Salamanca and the sea-bridging policy of the Castilian State. Luis de León, preaching to his students in a narrow hall within a narrow city, is linked with Italy and with America.

The process of art is the endowment of a particular experience with the full measure of life. The work of art is a fragment of word or substance informed with the wholeness of spiritual vision. The mystics of Spain were fated to make art, or to make deeds. For here theology was heir to centuries of universal vision. The mystic remains a Catholic and a churchman. The Inquisition narrows his forms of speculation. He is a part of Spain. But all Spain’s cosmic will is in him.

This will is in the great work of Luis de León: _Los Nombres de Cristo_. Three Augustinian monks set forth from their convent across the river from Salamanca. One of them has found a shaded grove on the río Tormes: here, shielded from the fever of the sun, they rest and exchange discourse on the names of Christ. The subject is rigidly dogmatic: the treatment of the virtue of names has the Pythagorian and Kabbalistic note which Plato and Aquinas equally would have rejected. Yet in this stifled frame, an artist quickens a magnificent world. The monks with their conventional background, the old town in flame of summer, the river panting through its fringe of trees, the athletic freedom of the mind in search, the passionate reality of God--all Spain is in this antiquated book. Her extremes of waste and verdure, her turmoil of race, her traffic and speculation, her panoply of vision--Jew, Christian, warrior, priest--converge into the substance of prose. The delirious delights of logic scaling the battlements of God, the southern arabesque whereby the abstract thought becomes design make it glamorous and moving.

León’s career was action. He was a teacher, and his words were on the quick of deed. This is why the Inquisition took note of him and subjected him to five years of imprisonment and torture. The Inquisition, for all its folly and corruption, was the coefficient of Spain’s unity. In any organism, thought and act are joined. This was true of medieval Europe: it was true of Spain alone in Europe after the modern dawn.

A younger man than Luis was Juan de Yepes whom Rome later canonized as San Juan de la Cruz. Like Luis de León, like Teresa and Loyola, Juan met with persecution not because he was a mystic and a poet; but a man of action. Haggard, fanatical, almost disembodied, this spirit had body enough to pass like a scourge of flame through the dark cities of Castile, cleansing monastic evil; and like a breath of sweetness, comforting the sick. He, too, is incarnate, in his particular phase, of Spain’s whole will. He is a saint: rapt and ascetic. His voice is the voice of spiritual vision. Yet it, as his life, is marvelously fleshed: a sort of slender fire. The peculiar plasticity of Spain is clear in Juan if one contrast his life with that of Saint Francis of Assisi, or his work with that of Porphyry and Plotinus. Grace here has a hard edge, is the handle of action. This reforming flesh fuses the sweetness of Saint Francis with the acumen of Savonarola. Juan is very close to Christ. For he is ruthless and practical. His charity like Christ’s is sharper than a sword.

John of the Cross shares the _graphic_ quality which Spain through her unitary will breathed into her various parts. He is abstract--plastically; he is Idea--incarnate. In no wise is he transcendent. Chained down to rot in some hostile convent cell, he is still concerned with persons and with convents. A titanic pressure--Spain--seems to have columned all the world into this lean, bright figure.

His song is like him. The simple words hold an immensity like the deep nights of Spain. Love of conquest, of gold, of glory and of power--the turbulence of Spain is not within them. Yet the essence of will and power, making this intricate turmoil, lives in his poems like a resolution of many chords in silence.

Juan’s preceptress and ally in their task of purifying convents was Teresa de Ahumada, known to religion and to letters as Santa Teresa de Jesús. Teresa’s town, Avila, stands for her: stands for the woman of Spain. The unbroken walls, the elliptical towers, the crenellated parapets and gateways, symbolize her virtue. Within, Avila is mellow and is fecund. Her walls shut her safe from the thrusting mountains of Castile. Avila is ordered, within chaos.

Santa Teresa is the mystic, as organizer: she is yet another part of the will of Isabel and Spain. The religious houses of the land are dissolute and weak. Against the hostility which her sex aroused, against the distrust of the Inquisition, Teresa moves through Spain, cleansing and creating hearths for the luminous life. The world, to her, is a household. The Master is Christ and he requires service. Her imaginative powers ... in which the Arab glamour is not wanting ... make so vivid the delights of service that the convents of Spain become as magnets, sapping the humbler households of the land. To Teresa, the soul also is a home; and her book _Las Moradas_ is a picture of its chambers. “As above, so below.” Christ, the bridegroom, enters the household of the soul: and at once, the humble household becomes Heaven. Teresa’s convents are literal heavens upon earth: they are the dwelling of a Lord whose passion fails not. Spain’s will pours a sea of energy into this fragment of her deed. Teresa’s work is homely; and so is the rough plastic language of her books. _Las Moradas, El Libro de su Vida_ articulate the sense of the common Spanish matron who makes of her bridal bed an altar, and of her religion a marriage.

* * * * *

Teresa is no merely powerful reformer: she is a creator. In her hand, the broom and the account-book become mystic weapons: even as in the hands of Torquemada the wrack; and in the hands of Columbus the rudder and the compass.

He was born in Italy; and the question of his descent, Italian or Spanish or Jew, is unsolved and has no bearing. Christopher Columbus in his historic rôle belongs with the Spanish mystics. We have lost his book of _Prophecias_. But we can reconstruct the trend of the argument which, having failed to convince the “practical” Courts of England, Portugal and France, won over the clerics of Spain and at Córdoba moved the Queen to send him westward.

Like the platonic Jews, Columbus idealized his route and made a symbol of his navigating passion. Like Philo, he mapped out his scheme in Scripture. Yet another phase of Spain’s organic will was served by this devout seafarer: and through Spain, yet another need of Europe.

Medieval Christendom is in dissolution. Much energy is released; and needs an outlet, and cannot find it until this mystic mariner, Christian and medieval, finds America. Down to earth pours the energy of Europe: the Vision and Body of a Gothic Christ no longer hold it. Down it clamors, seeking earthly forms--seeking an America, indeed! But Columbus is a Catholic. And Isabel, the Catholic Queen, smiles on his adventure, aiming to spread the Church to India. And what they do--this mystic seafarer, this rapt good monarch--is to give to Europe an escape for its too-long stored Catholic might: to give to it a land in which the blood of the medieval Christ may be sluiced, may be lost forever!

Irony marries with heroic Spain.

_c._ _The Jesuit_

In 1491, there was born to a family of noble Basques in the Guipúzcoan castle of Loyola another mystic instrument of the Spanish will. Iñigo Lopez de Recalde had the crude upbringing of the gentlemen of his race. He learned to write Castilian; he served in the Court of the Catholic Kings; and he became a soldier. He was a good soldier and the eyes of his superiors were on him. At the age of thirty he took part in the defense against the French of Pampeluna, capital of Navarre. A cannon ball shattered his leg. During the long convalescence, grace came to the Basque captain. He renounced worldly arms and took the staff and habit of a religious beggar. He pilgrimaged to Rome and to Jerusalem. At thirty-three, he began to study Latin. His austerity and that of a few comrades whom he had attracted and whom he held for life brought him the usual displeasure of the Holy Office who discouraged any swerving, even in the path of piety, from the common norm. Loyola met distrust in the University of Alcalá: on his arrival at Salamanca, he was jailed on general suspicion of being either too holy or a fraud. Thence, still seeking theology, he went to Paris and to London. Everywhere he was coldly received, and forbidden to speak on religious topics. He was forty: he had abandoned a career of arms: he was not even a priest. But he had friends: they formed a band of seven including another Basque, Francisco Xavier, a Frenchman and a Portuguese. In 1534, they took a private vow of chastity, poverty and devotion. Three years later, Loyola was ordained a priest. Since his conversion at the age of thirty, eighteen years had passed, and they had been for him a constant wrack of suspicion and of impediment to his purpose. He waited eighteen more months ere he judged himself worthy to say Mass. And not until then did he put forth his plan of a Company of Jesus--a cohort of religious soldiers--to defend Christ in the world and to spread Him. Pope Paul III recognized the Order in 1540. Loyola against his will was elected General in 1541.

Like its name, the _Compañía de Jesús_ was military in form and method. One year before Loyola’s conversion at Pampeluna, Martin Luther had burned the Papal bull of excommunication. Europe made this simultaneous gesture of antithesis. The north lurched from the medieval Body: and Spain took its fate unto herself, girded her loins to save and spread the Church. Born to war, converted in an experience of war, surrounded by the strife of faction, Loyola never ceased to be a soldier. He conceived Christianity in martial terms. The Church needed defense and aggrandizement. The nature of the man’s career and the will of his nation shaped the Company of Jesus.

At its head was a General, with power as absolute as that of a commander-in-chief in war. The Church was at war. Monastery and convent were Christ’s infantry. They did not suffice. They were even losing ground. The new Compañía would be the cavalry: an arm best fitted for skirmish and attack.

“Let us think all in the same manner; let us speak all in the same manner,” said Loyola. His Spiritual Exercises were the drill of his cohorts. So the militant ideal of Spain, serving in her armies the will of Isabel, found this new and compact body. The sword had become a mystic instrument. Now a body of spiritual fathers turned themselves into a sword: took on the traits and ethic of the sword. Like Spain’s, the forces of Loyola spread at once to Africa, America and Asia. And at the end, the Society of Jesus, like Spain once more, locked in too perfect oneness: its strength hardened and grew brittle: its heroic faith became a stifling armor.

* * * * *

About a hundred years after the founding of the Society of Jesus, a young Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, wrote a series of Letters which have focused all the distrust and misconception aroused by the aggressive Body, and from whose subtle blows it never has recovered. _Les Lettres d’un Provincial_ is a great literary work. A man of genius, spokesman of his race, exposes the presence in his land of an organism monstrously alien to the spirit and rhythm of France. His intuitions are metaphysically deeper than his logic. Pascal does not know that the Society of Jesus is a formulation of the will of Spain: his points often are departures from false premises as in his invidious handling of the Jesuit doctrine of _probabilism_ or of the famous Jesuit sentence: “The end justifies the means.” Small matter: Pascal wrote a brilliant laughing prose whose beauty has not faded; and more, almost unwittingly he defended France against the invasion of an alien will. Although his arguments were often false, although his irony was unscrupulous, Pascal from his vantage-point was right.

The will of France has been adverse to that of Spain: France has worked from a social sense to the creation of a personal conscience. She has moved from the group-mystical to the personal-rational; from the Gothic church to the modern realistic; from social vision to the individual; from Substance to Essence; from France herself to man. Blaise Pascal is an exemplar of this pattern of his people’s progress. He and the Jansenists reveal the effort of the conservative French to transform the old Catholicism into an individualistic faith that shall be consonant with France’s future. Pascal’s sense of Grace as a determined individual gift of personality places his conflict with the Jesuits on its fairest ground: it is the will of social France for personal autonomy, at odds with this invasion of personalized Spain whose will is to create a social spirit.[21] Pascal, Racine, Descartes are the last great minds of France to believe in the persistence of their nation’s progress _within_ the Church. Calvin, greatest of the Protestant thinkers and a true Frenchman, marks the break. France accepts a destiny outside of Rome which, in this logical people, swiftly leads to a destiny outside the whole structure of Christian revelation. Pascal and Racine within the Church, Calvin in a church of his own, Montaigne the skeptic, begin not by accepting man--but by the desire to create him. The social body exists: the individual soul does not. All French classic literature converges in this effort to establish it ... converges, indeed, upon Romanticism (Diderot, Rousseau, Stendhal). In Germany, the same trend passes from Luther to Goethe, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche. The French problem of creating the personal conscience above the accepted group marries with the will of northern Europe to break up the social synthesis of medieval Rome by the creating of individual souls that shall be _atomic_, _anarchic_, but once more creative. The antistrophe is the tragic will of Spain, and the heroic Jesuit effort, to revive a Body that was doomed.

In the domain of education, the Society of Jesus does not swerve far from Spain. And the will of Spain accepts man as he is found. Isabel creates her empire by use of her countrymen’s frailties and lusts. The Jesuit proceeds in the same spirit. He will work, not from the departure of an ideal concept of what man should be: he will work with man, with this miserable, forkèd, naked son of sin--and build from him the City of his God. Man in his weakness, man in his vice and blindness, will be a note in the cosmic Song: his muddy heart will be strong as marble. There is a magic to enact this. Its name is Faith. There is a philosophy to enact this. It is the traditional sense, in Spanish thought, of God’s immanence and of earth as the immediate pattern of God’s will. The Jesuits are not pantheists: but their tolerance and their practical acceptance of _the fact_ are the unconscious fruits of five centuries of pantheistic feeling. The Jesuits are not Evangelists. But in their attitude toward Faith as a universal magic, they are close to the Apostles. They take the Christian mystery as a present truth. The age of miracle is eternal. God is here and everywhere: the assertion of a magic Word--as in the Kabbala--transfigures immanence to revelation. The doctrine of Grace, as an inborn personal trait to be achieved (if at all) only by spiritual acts, is too hierarchic. It is the doctrine of peoples tending toward individualism. (In the East, it becomes the doctrine of Caste.) Moreover, in accepting man as he is, the Jesuit cannot place the magic virtue in any of his inherent traits. The divine virtue must be at once impersonal and social. Man is frail and corrupt: his will is frail and corrupt. His life is only in God, even as God’s life through Christ is eternally in man. There is no work to be done, beside the assertion that the work _is_ done. If grace depended upon man’s efforts, we should all be damned. If reason or will or any personal trait had been sufficient, why was Christ crucified? No: the commonest human stone is holy, when it becomes a stone of the House of God. Likewise, man’s corruptions, however vile, can be architected by faith into the Church where they are sanctified and transfigured.

The philosophy of the Jesuits explains their methods. Does the builder of a house consult the stones? What can the stone do but put itself into the hands of the builder? The builder must be aggressive, dominant, ruthless. But the Jesuit is more than an architect: he is a soldier. When he sets aside the sword for the word, the cause is strategy. His tactics remain warlike. War is pragmatic. Subtlety, surprise, mobility, deceit are warlike arms.

The world stands at a crisis. The grandiose structure of medieval Rome--the highest spiritual Form ever achieved by Europe--crumbles and sags. Spain strips to save it.

_d._ _The Jurist_

At Salamanca a Dominican monk teaches theology. His name is Fray Francisco de Vitoria. Salamanca, fostered by the Catholic King, becomes the leading university of Spain. Spain becomes Austria, Artois, the Netherlands, Franche-Comté, North and South Italy, Sicily, the Balearic and Canary Islands, Africa from Ceuta to Oran, the Moluccas, the Philippines and the Americas from Florida to Tierra del Fuego. Carlos, son of the mad daughter of the Catholic Kings, becomes head of an empire like the dream of Isabel. He, too, is a creature of her will. The vastness of his realm has blotted out his sense of time and space. His religious fervor blurs his vision of mortal values. He will ride Spain as he might ride a horse in battle. He has inherited Spain as a weapon to be wielded. Spain is his, in order that the world be Christ’s.

The Dominican monk at Salamanca moves within the will of Carlos and of Spain. The blood of Isabel’s empire is justice. Justice nourishes and cleanses. Carlos must be ruthless, but he must not be wrong. He will do what he desires: it must be proven right. The Americas make new challenges of conscience. Vitoria in Salamanca meets the king’s need: and modern International Law is ready for the world.

A full century before the Dutchman Grotius (Huig van Groot), Vitoria lays down a rationale of justice for existing Powers, a structure in diapason between their economic needs and their inherited morale. He works for a modern state whose ideal is a theodicy of medieval Rome. The ideal has become more abstractly ethical, more economic. But Woodrow Wilson and the statesmen of the League of Nations are exact heirs of a Dominican monk.

Vitoria studies the problems of America in his _Relectiones de Indis_: the general problems of war in _De Jure Belli_. Both these works, it is significant to note, form part of his _Relectiones theologicæ et morales_. A true creature of the will of Isabel, he has turned international problems into a problem of conscience. He denies independent form to his subject. The law of nations and of peoples is a moral law: it is outside the activities of lawyers. A question rises between the king of Spain and the Indians of Mexico. The “savages” are not subject to the king by human right. Their dealings with him cannot be determined by human law. Only a divine law, moving Spain as a theodicy, has brought about this juncture between the Indians and the king. Only divine law is competent to rule.

Vitoria expands his thesis. There exists this same divine law--_jus inter gentes_--between all States. The States are interdependent. There is a _societas naturalis_, a natural Society of Nations. The link is God. Free to the Spaniard to assume that God’s agent in the link be the king of Spain. The world is one society: and between peoples of one society peaceful intercourse may not be forbidden. France may not impede a Spaniard from visiting France, even from settling in France, provided he violate no law and cause no damage. If this is true between Frenchman and Spaniard, it is true between American and European. Through the fact of their civil rights in a society of nations the Indian cannot exclude the Spaniard. There exists therefore _jus communicationis_: the right of immigration. There exists also the freedom of the seas. Spain stands justified in her American penetration.

We are at the mere beginning of Vitoria’s subtle structure. _Jus commercii_--the right of commerce--applies not only to the exchange of merchandise between free peoples, but as well to the exchange of ideas. The Spaniard has the right to preach the Gospel to the Indian. The Indian has the right to preach heathenism to the Spaniard. Either may resist conversion (even as either may decline to purchase proffered goods).

Since no State may prevent a stranger from settling on its lands, nor even from becoming a lawful national, here are the Spaniards legally at home in the Americas. But strong Powers must defend by arms the menaced liberties of smaller States. That is a prerogative of a true society of nations. How much more readily therefore shall strong Powers defend the menaced liberties of individuals in every State! All States are “organs of human justice.” Spain shall protect the innocent from “religious sacrifice” and “from cannibalism in America.” If need be, to protect the innocent, a State may subjugate wholly an unjust nation.

The theologian brings to Spain her “cosmic place” in the Americas as Christ’s agent in the society of nations. But this is not enough. That she may be at peace in Zion, she must be alone. So Vitoria evolves in 1500 the modern theory of “spheres of influence.” Pope Alexander was _divinely_ just in submitting to Spain and Portugal, as God’s best tools, the mission of Christianizing the Americas. But the Pope had no _human_ right to partition the property of the red man. Vitoria with all the Dominicans behind him stands against Pope and king: declaring that “the Indian has as much right to possess property as the Catholic peasant.” The Indians, he holds, are potential equals of the Spaniards. They have the right to plebiscite. A majority of their votes alone can justify America’s _annexation_ to the empire of Spain. Beyond the divine and human privileges that are general in a society of nations, “Spain must commit no act in the New World, except by treaty.”

The Dominican legists part company with the deeds of Spain. Already, Isabel had been misled when her adventurous “tools”--the Conquistadores--instead of saving the Indian, enslaved him. Now the followers of Vitoria raise their voices against the behavior of Cortés and Pizarro. Bartolomé de las Casas in his _Brevissima relación de la destrucción de las Indias_ writes pages that are good reading in our own epoch of a “Society of Nations.” But the abstract logic of Vitoria was more useful to the State of Spain than the ethical conclusions of Las Casas. That supreme apologia for villainy and greed--International Law--is born and baptized under Christ.

Thus Vitoria: “War is justified when it is forced on a State in the rightful pursuit of commerce, in the rightful propaganda of ideas--and _if the Spaniards have observed all precautions against taking their interests for principles, and their avarice for duty_.” What empire since has not “taken these precautions?” Christianity had been theoretically pacifistic. Jesus was reported to have declared against all violence and the resisting of evil. Being the Son of God, of course, His words were not to be literally construed. Yet such men as Tertullian, the Manichees, Saint Francis, Wyclif, More, Erasmus, had declared unconditionally against warfare. Chiefly, that prophetic Berber, Augustine, took war to be a usable weapon of the just. Vitoria, his neighbor in race and land, leans on Saint Augustine. The anarchic and endemic sin of war is lifted at last from Europe’s conscience. Spain invents the Moral War.

“War,” says Vitoria, “is justified to right a wrong.” But Vitoria is careful:

“Difference of religion is no just cause for war.

“Aggrandizement of empire is no just cause for war.

“_Principis gloria propria, aut aliud commodum, non est causa belli justa._ The Prince may not wage war to further either his glory or his own interests. And the wrong to be righted by war _must be commensurate with the results of war itself_ (death, confiscation, rapine) ere a just war can be induced to right it.”

The friar seems to be going too far. Hear him:

“The end of war must be, not evil to the foe, but good.

“And victory must be enjoyed in Christian moderation.

“The people shall not suffer through the faults of their princes.

“_Finally, a treaty imposed by force--even after victory--is not valid._”

Modern International Law is after all no growth from these uncomfortable precepts of a monk: it is a lapse and a decadence. The legal dicta of Vitoria are of an old tradition: they are a birth of the old breaking Synthesis of medieval Europe. International Law is the theoretic shred of what was once a spiritual Body.

_e._ _The Rogue_

The Spain of Isabel and Ferdinand, of Carlos and Philip II--wherein is she great? In her idea and Will. These prove the Globe and bind it: these in their own way prove and make her one with God. But Spain, the body of men living in towns and huertas, is indigent and disordered.

At her spiritual climax, under Isabel, Carlos and Philip II, Spain was squalid. By contrast with the state of England, of France, of the German towns and of the cities of Morocco, she was an economic laggard. Her nobles with their retinues cut swathes of gold through the landsides. She was full of heroes and of saints. But the land was arid with neglect. War had razed her forests. Seven centuries of Reconquest, making labor despicable beside the guerdons of battle, had sapped her burghers. What the long wars began, the Inquisition and Expulsions carried on. Jews--a solid class of craftsmen and middlemen--were expelled. The Granadan Moors--ablest of Spain’s cultivators--were making homesick songs about their Andalusian farms, in Fez and Marrakech. There were more vagabonds in Spain than farmers, more soldiers than laborers. There were more hidalgos and caballeros than artisans and merchants. There were seven million Spaniards--and nine thousand convents!

Some men are poor because they are weak and dull: some are poor because they are men of genius. Amsterdam and London grow rich, because such is their will. Avila and Toledo remain dingy, because their will is elsewhere. Spain is virile, brilliantly equipped. But Spain has resolved to be a hero and a saint. Spain has no time to pave streets, who paves the way for Christ beyond the sea. Spain has no time for natural science, for agriculture and for the tricks of trade, who is so expert in theology.[22]

In the extremes of her life, none is wider than this between the Spirit of Spain’s enterprise and the fact of her condition. The crass and earthly elements of Spain are not destroyed nor repressed by her religious will: they are engaged. They must serve in her armies, even though the fight be a crusade. They must man her ships, even though the mariner’s compass be divinely pointed. They are intensified indeed, like all the parts of Spain. And like the other elements of her world, brutality and lust assume in a particular form the wholeness of Spain’s will.

Spain is adventuring. Now the sheer impulse of adventure is embodied. The pícaro is born. He has in him the aboriginal Spaniard: that unruly, lusty, atomic man whom Rome encountered, whom the Cid personified. He is an anarch, brutal as the Iberian of the north, shrewd and subtle as the Phœnician of the south. He is this aboriginal, complex man of Spain shaped by the Spanish will. The pícaro is not lawless: he is an outlaw. He reacts from Spain’s social purpose, from Spain’s social structure, from the mysticism and heroism of this later Spain. Like all reactive bodies, he resembles his opponent. And it is this union in him--the direct issue from the source of Spain and the direct response to Spanish culture--which makes him so true an element in that culture.

The pícaro was long in coming. The Cid promised him in the twelfth century, and the romancero on the eve of the age of Isabel. The genial Juan Ruiz, archpriest of Hita, in 1300 came close to his spirit in the graphic form ... a mingled piety and license ... of his great _Libro de buen amor_. Fernando de Rojas who began _La Celestina_ in 1499 did not create the pícaro only because he created something deeper. Like _Don Quixote_ at the end of the cycle, _La Celestina_ ere its beginning transcends the pícaro and contains him. Now come the Castilian versions of Amadís de Gaul. The spirit of errant adventure waxes so strong that it invades the hagiographa: Spaniards of the age of Carlos read histories of the saints fully as marvelous and picaresque as the profaner tales in the library of Don Quixote. Finally, after these ages of annunciation, the pícaro arrives, full-fleshed. His name is Lazarillo de Tormes: his date is 1554: his author is unknown.

In this pattern of antithesis whose symphony is Spain, the response to Santa Teresa is the procuress of Rojas, the Celestina, that most tender, robustious, scoundrelly, womanly woman. The response to the flame-like San Juan de la Cruz is Lazarillo. San Juan personifies Spain’s purpose, which is divine. Lazarillo embodies Spain’s methods, which are brutal. San Juan is not abstract: he is an embodiment of purpose. Lazarillo is not mere flesh: in his trickeries and thefts, there is an inverted consciousness of Spain which makes his path through Old and New Castile almost as luminous as the path of the saint.

This consciousness is marked by irony: and irony is in the weave of every picaresque design. For the Spanish rascal is no mere reaction from heroic gesture. He is reversion as well. He is moved by the same energy that has uprisen in the forms of asceticism and crusade. His antiphony is but a subtle swerving back from the life he wars on, to Spain’s common base. The pícaro has the resource, the intensity, the method, of conquistador and crusader: he preys on his own land. He has the passionateness of the saint: it is directed toward woman. He is a casuist like the Jesuit: his aim is to filch a purse. He navigates uncharted wastes like Columbus: to fill his belly and to save his skin. This continuous awareness of Spain’s noble world, this subtle swerve transforming it into villainy and lust, make the ironic pattern. The low tricks of the pícaro, weaving through the high fabric of his land, once more limn Spain in her fullness.

Lazarillo is but the first of a long line. The book that tells of him has scarce a hundred pages: yet it seems wide and deathless as the land from Salamanca to Toledo which its hero crosses. Lazarillo is a lad born of poor but unworthy parents. A blind beggar teaches him how to survive as a rascal in a rascally world. The young virtuoso outdoes his master. He becomes the servant of a starving, haughty knight, of a parsimonious churchman, of a shrewd and lecherous canon with whom he makes a treaty which includes the sharing of his wife.

Lazarillo encounters Spain; and the land grows alive at his touch. Disorder, corruption, folly beneath the façade of splendor. But now, an acute principle synthetizes the chaos: the pícaro like a wistful agent of intelligence, envelops Spain and makes Spain one with pity. This pity is of a new order, among the emotions of art. It is neither mystical nor sentimental. It is the child of a modern autonomy: it is the pity of reason.

The author of Lazarillo does not insist. He has created an engine so revealing that he can afford to rest within his quiet prose. He writes a tiny book: plastic portraiture, tender and bitter humor, sweet spirit, dark flesh--all Spain indeed is in it, as is the tree in the seed. Lazarillo is a seed, from which has sprung a forest. In Spain, the picaresque merges quickly with profounder worlds; loses its æsthetic sharpness, and has its share in the birth of a book which is a Scripture: _Don Quixote_. The true form shrinks to formula. The symbol of the rogue, preying on society and so divulging it, is exploited by minds more analytic than creative. In the hands of such masters as Quevedo, the pícaro becomes a concept of pessimism: a chemic force with which to test and to destroy the world. The pícaro voyages to France. But in Le Sage and Marivaux (to name but the greatest), the physical and intellectual movements of the rogue are stressed. France veers backward toward Scapin--toward the scamp of the classic comedy--whose essential difference is great. England borrows more deeply. The pícaro’s animal joyousness, social revelation, bitterness turned sentimental come back to life in Smollett, Fielding, Sterne. But they unite in no one work comparable with _Lazarillo_. Even De Foe wants the luminous poetic atmosphere whereby the crass materials of the tale have their dimension.

No master outside Spain can recreate the pícaro entire. For the Spanish rogue is sterile without the aspirational afflatus of his race, in which he adventures, from which he reacts, and which he embodies in ironic contrast. That is why the greatest heirs of the pícaro of Spain are not his direct sons in eighteenth-century France and England. They are his collateral and remote descendants of a modern world in which once again energy has become aspirant and religious. They are the heroes of Stendhal. Above all, they appear in Russia--that other extreme of Europe which touches Spain in the domain of spirit: they are the hero of _Dead Souls_ of Gogol, the mystic criminals of Dostoievski....

_f. Velázquez_

Antithesis even within the personal will of Isabel and her king. Isabel looks to Africa and the west. Mysterious horizons claim her. Africa is the home of Origen and Augustine--Berber Christians and true Spanish minds. America casts a parabola of search alluring to her mystic appetite. But Isabel is wedded to a man who looks toward Europe. The Aragonese king comes from the most assimilated part of Spain. In him, as in his realm, lives the spirit of Catalan, of European Trader. His hungers strain toward Italy and France. And this dichotomy within the will of the monarchs--Europe and the south, politics in Europe and high adventures across the western sea--is stamped upon the classic will of Spain. The concept of the State which Isabel and Ferdinand adapt is Europe. Louis XI and Machiavelli would have hailed it. The purpose of that State would have been better pleasing to Mohammed or Saint Paul. The spirit is Isabel’s and is accepted by her husband. But the form is Ferdinand’s and here his wife is disciple.

Now, of this division within the will of Spain, that term which is Europe finds a canon. Velázquez, better than the policy of the kings, better than the victories of their captains in Sicily and France, incarnates Spain’s desire to be Europe.

But here, too, irony is at work. Velázquez is the favorite painter at the Court of Philip IV. He lives at the Palace; he is sent on diplomatic missions. His career corresponds almost literally with the reign of his king. And this reign marks the rapid ebb of Spain’s affairs in Europe. Her will toward Europe has flung her power high into the north and clear across the Latin Sea. Now, while Velázquez molds that will into organic form, his king loses Portugal, loses the Netherlands, loses the Roussillon, half the Pyrenees, and faces insurrection in Barcelona, Spain’s European port.

The will of Velázquez’ art is objective form. Bodily substance becomes real. Man’s moods and passions in themselves suffice. They have their value not in some rapt design beyond man’s body or in employing it to mystic ends: the world of appearance _is_ the world. Velázquez’ traits are traits of modern Europe. Mysticism disappears, both in immanent and transcendental form. The beauty of spiritual strain, so eloquent in Ribera, is replaced by the beauty of physical poise. The hot fluidity of El Greco which recalls the Prophets, the creative incompleteness of the Byzantines, becomes a static peace. In El Greco, as in all mystic art, the moving materials reach the immobility of form only through the focus of a world beyond them. But in Velázquez, there are no colors save those of face and fabric; there are no forms save those of the body. Velázquez is a realist in the restricted modern European sense. He is impressionistic and he is mechanistic. The vast autonomy of the subjective vision is renounced in him. He makes his eye a literal _receiver of impressions_: whereas the mystic eye (and the Spanish eye) has ever been a _creator of expression_.

This type of æsthetic will which, from the Renaissance to Courbet, is to reign in Europe wins perhaps its highest triumph in the alien Velázquez. What tribute to the energy of Spain! For this is not Spain, this is but a fragment. The vision yearning to become complete, the mystic marriage, the parabolic search, the lyric plaint, the ceaseless _cante hondo_, the arabesque which transforms words to body--these, too, are Spain: these are the virtues which create El Greco, Calderón, Lope, Ribera, Cervantes. Velázquez will have none of them. Velázquez will be wholly European. Europe, accepting the world of appearance as the entire world, pours all its energy to the creating of the immense material universe which is our shambles of the machine and applied science. Spain does not follow. But Velázquez leads.[23]

Velázquez was a great lover of El Greco. Manuel Cossío tells us that in his private chambers at the Palace, the court painter had works of the great mystic. His love and study of his antithesis helped to confine him within his own domain. In his religious subjects, Velázquez shows the direct influence--chiefly in composition--of El Greco. And in these works, the graphic might of Velázquez fades: they are the least of his pictures. Where Velázquez is great, El Greco is excluded: the younger man seems willfully to avoid what he must have felt should denature his æsthetic. And in this response, Velázquez achieves once more the miracle of Spain: the infusing of a part with an intensity and essence of the Whole. El Greco is Spain of Africa and of the Semites, Spain the High Priest of Rome, the mystic Spain. And Velázquez is Spain of Europe: the land of analytic grace, of luxuriant elaborations, of immense exclusions.

Spain’s craft goes far, when Spain resolves to be “efficient.” Study _Las Hilanderas, Mercurio y Argos_, the portrait of Margarita de Austria. This grace is the ecstasy of cool and obvious metals. It suggests the modern æsthetic of the Machine. Modeling and texture are composed of immediate masses which are self-sufficient. Neither in part nor in whole are they transmuted into the subjective. Or take the portrait of Mariana de Austria, Philip’s second wife. Of the woman there is naught save the weak face and the flat hands. But the black and silver gown is volumnear. Its fringes and its lace hold power that appears almost to be a symbol of this Court--this Court of Spain striving to hold a world within its forces.

The will of Velázquez, at least, does not falter. _Las_ _Meninas_ is forever a shut and earthly room. No glimpse here of the arcana of the soul, of the soul’s subtle modeling of arm and face. Think what El Greco would have done with that group: the royal family, the painter, the dwarf, the dog. How they would have flamed; how heaven and hell would have come in and metabolized these bodies!

* * * * *

In the palace of the king of Spain, there were simpletons and dwarfs. They formed part of the Court and Velázquez painted them. He painted them so well because they were part of himself.

The forces which aspire beyond the body, beyond the domain of sense, died not in Velázquez. His æsthetic will allowed them no immediate word. This explains the cramped discomfort of his religious pictures. Here within him were these instincts, these intuitions, unable to speak, unable to die. And here were the twisted courtiers of the king. A good court painter could portray them; for they were of the palace. And since they were pitiful victims of Nature’s law, the despised and dispossessed, an artist’s soul could use them as a symbol.

In the world there lives a spirit whose name is Christ and his saints. When the world denies, that spirit ceases to be Christ: it becomes a dwarf and a madman. Velázquez has discovered this: he sets down his dark confession after all. Here is a record of the grotesque and the pitiful world, born of his deep denials.

What a page it is! _El Bobo de Coria_: the simplicity of the inane issuing from the breakdown of complex power: sweetness, candor, poetry and grace surviving in the death of idiocy. _El Primo_: a little man beside a gigantic book; pathos, tenderness, pride--the song of frustration. _Don Sebastián de Mora_: a huge body squats, the head empty, the outstretched legs short as a child’s--so eloquent, so helpless. And the _Niño de Vallecas_, most poignant of all, for he bespeaks fecundity without intelligence: he is the lush plasm of life, purposeless, spiritually bereft.

This is the confession of Velázquez, enacting Spain’s will to be Europe. This is a prophecy of Europe, whose life of mechanical perfection has turned the Christ and saints of its soul into such twisted creatures.

_CHAPTER IX_

_THE WILL OF DON QUIXOTE_

_a. The Birth of the Hero_ _b. The Career of the Hero_ _c. The Book of the Hero_

_a. The Birth of the Hero_

Cervantes was born in a Europe more than three centuries beyond the noon of chivalry. Knighthood north of Spain begot great books. The _Chanson de Roland_ in the form which we possess is earlier than 1100. In the last years of the twelfth century Chrétien de Troies--first master in an unbroken line that perhaps closed with Anatole France--put into gracious and fleet form the Arthurian cycle. A bit later, a profounder German, Wolfram von Eschenbach, composed from French materials the transfiguring masterwork of chivalry, the Poem of Parzival. Joinville’s portrait of Saint Louis and of his two Crusades was written about 1290. Thereafter Europe, north of Spain, begins the great decline into the modern era.

The last historic synthesis of western man lies in that Middle Age. It rose from the chaotic impact of the Roman Empire and the Teuton with Alexandria and Judah. Already ere the ancient world had fallen its architects were building. Origen, Tertullian, Jerome, Anthony, Gregory, Charlemagne--such were its foundation-makers. It reaches heights in Abélard, Aquinas, Francis, Dante: in the creators of the Gothic, in the great weavers of polyphonic music, in men of action--Godefroi de Bouillon and Saint Louis. And already, at this hey-day, from the disintegrant north come threats of dissolution in such figures as Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus who, positing the primacy of will over the intellect, declare Theology to be not science but revelation and foretell Luther and Kant--creators of the modern chaos.

European thought, after the Cathedrals, Dante, and the great scholastics, is a story of destruction. Men of as high genius as Albertus Magnus or Saint Thomas proceed by vision and by dialectic to take stone from stone in the dismantlement of Christian Europe. Here and there in the vast liquidation a prophet throws up a scheme for a new Synthesis--such a one was Spinoza: the world cannot accept him, neither can it lose him, from cosmic prescience of a future need.

The towers of this great House in which dwelt the soul of Europe touch the year 1300. Dante has devised his vision; Chartres lives upon the Ile-de-France; Saint Bernard in Clairvaux and Saint Francis in Assisi have filled the world with brothers; chivalry has brought war and love into the sacred symphony of Europe; the German foray is Crusade; lust of the flesh bears the Mystery of Tristan and Isolt, of Abélard and Héloïse. Now, the divine Structure nobly curves back to earth. By 1400, Europe dwells once more in the bowels of discord. By 1500, European man is a congeries of atomic wills: the unity of Christ has scattered into exploration, industry and science.

But in this destructive act, Europe is as creative as when the Fathers builded, out of the Prophets, Plato, Paul, the puissant Organism of medieval Europe. To tear down such a body is as divine an act as to build it. Systole and diastole are equal. Schopenhauer and Kant are brothers before God with Aquinas. The long ages of deliquescence from that peak of Rome rightly seem rich to our enlisted eyes since they are as full of saints and heroes consecrate to our work, as were the anchorites of the Thebaid to theirs.

For this is the mysterious law of history: that the divine is present in death even as in life, in the Nay equally with the Yea. God does not build His revelation upon earth and then turn away His face while man tears down. He is there, too, in the destruction. He was there when the Prophets created the Jew: He was there also when the Pharisees and the Essenic Christ destroyed the Jew. He was there when the saints and Fathers builded Catholic Rome. He was there when Luther, Calvin, Goethe, Blake burned Rome away.

We see Him in the despair of Dostoievski no less than in the joy of Saint Francis. It was while the Jewish world drooped and retched, that the gospels of Jesus flowered. From that nadir was prepared the Dantean zenith. Once more an ebb of the Tide. Spain has become a befuddled chaos. Home from her mad anachronistic dream of establishing on earth what Europe has given up for centuries, she is already rotting. And now, from the bitterness of her awareness rises a new Word. It, too, is entextured of contemporary failure, and is implicit of revelation.

* * * * *

Spain did not conform with the Middle Ages of the north. Roman Iberia received its dominant invasion from the south, whereas in Italy, Gaul and Britain the coefficient of transformation from Rome to Holy Rome was the same Teuton element which held the eastern marches beyond Roman rule. León, Aragon and Castile were medieval in so far as the Visigoth was strong in them. But even here, contact was as great with the Moslem foe of the south as with the brother northward.

Medievalism is an idealism forced upon the world of Appearance. It is a mystical conclusion by the Teuton will, drawn from the logical element of Latin, and the naturalistic element of Semitic, cultures. It is most powerful in the lands where the Teuton is strongest: Germany and England. In France, where the blend was fairest between Frank and Gallo-Roman, it is most balanced and most perfect. In Italy, medievalism is never great. And in a land whose conclusive elements are Semitic or harmonize with the Semitic, it is impossible. Such a land was Spain. The ethnic Iberian base of Spain is more African in nature than European; more aboriginally close to Semite than to German. Arab culture was always naturalistic. Judaism and Mohammedanism are pragmatic systems on different levels, yet both based upon empirical experience and natural law. In medieval Catholicism, the natural laws and the experience of the world are deformed by a mystic idealizing will. In Semitism, the ideal sense is made to converge with natural law: the mystic will is regarded as possessing its true form in the activity of nature.

Semitism in its several shades, or a spirit close to it, impeded Spain from becoming wholly medieval. It was culturally too strong to accept the neo-platonic House of the medieval God. But Semitism is politically weak. Medievalism, repugning the natural body of the world, creates an ideal Organism--a Church--which becomes politically real. Semitism, accepting Nature as God’s organic body, has no impulse to erect political substitutes for the wholeness of existence. Politically, it tends toward fragmentation: even as in art it remains lyrical and forms no such organic structures as the Gothic cathedral or the Dantean epic. This political weakness of the Spanish Semite impeded Spain from becoming wholly Semitic. Spain for centuries was in a state of continuous flux and of osmosis between the medieval north and the Semitic south. When at length there came a final issue the north won. Ferdinand and Isabel turned toward Europe. A revised medievalism, equipped with methods of the Renaissance, became the goal of the Spanish will. And at a time when it was already dead in Europe.

This is the year 1500. The Holy Roman Empire is in full liquidation. Luther and Calvin are rising. Copernicus is at work. America has been discovered. Now Spain pours her ideal energy and her blood into the tragic task of becoming medieval. Godefroi, Saint Louis, Parzival, Saint Francis and Aquinas have been dethroned and denied in the countries of their birth. They become the patterns and movers of Castile.

Lest the hostile--the Semitic elements, which in the noon of medieval Europe held Spain from her part in that great Synthesis, hold Spain back now, Isabel drives the Jew and Moslem from her realms. It is too late. The dissident spirit is at work in Spain. And the heroic effort of this land to revive chivalry, to recreate Christ, to re-establish all the world as Christ’s Rock and Church becomes a divine farce, a sort of comic Mystery--_Don Quixote_.

* * * * *

Perhaps Cervantes’ family was of gentle blood: but it had come to pitiful fortune when Miguel was born to the poor surgeon in Alcalá de Henares. The year was 1547: and the town upon the _llanura_ of Castile was the rival of Salamanca. Naught is more eloquent of the poverty of his people than the fact that Miguel was unable to attend the university round the corner. At twenty-two, however, he was a poet. He went to Italy as the body servant of the Papal Nuncio: later he rose to be a soldier. In 1571, the ships of Philip II defeated the Turk in the waters of Lepanto. A shot crippled the left hand of Cervantes. His officers ordered him below. He refused to leave the deck, and in his blood and pain fought to the close of the engagement. This is a better sign of his unusual nature than his verse. A man of high sensitivity, he exposed himself to physical suffering beyond the duty of a soldier. He was devoted passionately to the Catholic cause. And when in 1575 he took ship from Italy, he had letters to the king from Don Juan of Austria and the Duke of Sessa whom he had served in Naples. He was full of merit: and full of hope he went home for his reward. But the Berber pirates took the vessel and he and his brother, Rodrigo, became slaves in Algiers. Four times in five years Cervantes plotted to escape the stiflement of servitude in the Kasbah of that town which rises within a snow-crowned conch above the hard-blue sea, hiding its reek within the gleam of roofs. Cervantes’ sisters and mother bestirred themselves: scraped coin together, borrowed, and at last, ransomed Rodrigo. In 1580, a mendicant monk came to the aid of the sisters, and Cervantes was freed on the eve of his departure eastward. He went to Madrid. He sought protection, and he failed to find it. He had been a hero and a martyr: but such were cheap in Spain. The land swarmed with veterans of the wars which had spread Spain’s glory to the Pacific Ocean. Cervantes performed odd diplomatic jobs and tried to be a writer. From thirty-four to forty he wrote thirty plays; he had no financial success. But he wed a landed lady, Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano of Esquivias, a town on the fringe of the Manchegan desert which after twenty years was to be transfigured by a hero. At about the time of his marriage, another lady Doña Ana de Rojas bore him a natural daughter, Isabel, whose life was to be fateful in his own. Cervantes’ burdens were great as his means were small. He placed all his hopes on a novel in which he believed that he had lavished all his genius. _La Galatea_ appeared in 1585, and was an unremunerative _succès d’estime_.

Now come twenty years of Gethsemane to Don Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. The silence of oblivion--_el silencio del olvido_ whereof he speaks--was their sweetest portion. We follow him hardly, for he had reason to hold to his obscurity. In 1588 he is a commissary in Seville. In 1592 he is in prison for a bungled sale of wheat. Later he is engaged in provisioning the Armada. He tries to get out of Spain: he seeks a post in Guatemala: but he lacks the influence to win it. Once more he sues the stage. Lope de Vega is the master of taste; and once more Cervantes fails. In 1594 he is a tax-collector in Granada: in disgrace: once more in prison. In 1597 we find him released on faith of his word that he will make good a deficit to the Treasury of the King. There is no trace, however, of his payment. For five years, he seems to have touched depths in Andalusia. An obscure actor, Tomás Gutiérrez (blessèd be his name) supports him. In 1603 he is in jail again, the bank in which he had deposited trusted monies having failed. He appears to have been under lock and key at this time, in both Seville and Argamasilla de Alba. This may have been the circumstance in which, judged by his own words, he began to write _Don Quixote_.

In 1604, Part One of the work is written: has even been bruited about Madrid either in manuscript or in an edition prior to the first extant one which bears the date 1605. Lope de Vega is at his height. He is the Stage of Spain. His name outshines the king’s: his portrait stands beside a saint’s in myriad Spanish homes. Miguel de Cervantes is living in Vallodolid. With him are the two sisters who helped ransom him from slavery, a niece and Isabel; his natural daughter. His wife lives in indifferent ease on her estate in La Mancha. Cervantes is penniless. His labors as tax-farmer have earned him bread in prison and disgrace with the world. He has been forgotten as a writer. And he lives with women who support him. They are good women and he loves them: but they are women, like himself disgraced by fortune. His sisters, Magdalena de Sotomayor and Andrea de Cervantes, have been “kept” women. His niece Constanza is living now with a man to whom she is not married. Cervantes knows this, and eats their bread. His daughter, Isabel, is not of good repute; nor is Cervantes perfectly cleared of implication in her mercenary ways.

He is fifty-seven: he is broken utterly. And his bread is shame. Yet he is still the proud hidalgo who served Don Juan of Austria in Naples, who refused succor and relief at Lepanto: who led gallant sallies in Algiers. He is not Cervantes. He is Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra.

* * * * *

This man looks out upon his world, with eyes of such a life, and decides, after twenty adverse years, again to write a book. He has read only the decadent offspring of chivalry’s literary flower. He does not know the original _chansons de geste_ nor the native water-clear _romans d’aventure_. The best he knows is the fifteenth century Romancero; is Ariosto and the ornate Italians; is the Castilian version of Amadís de Gaula which has come to Spain, over-blown, by Portugal out of Brittany and Wales. These are relatively pure beside their spawn of dull sons performing ridiculous wonders in a world of wooden magic. But the vogue of these knights is past. The books of _caballería_, which tempted the young Santa Teresa to go forth seeking martyrdom and adventure, have already ebbed. On the other hand, _La Celestina_ which appeared along with the first Castilian Amadis has thriven and inspired the pícaro who lives still in Spanish and in European letters.

Vivid in Cervantes’ mind is the organic music--the first great Castilian prose--in which Fernando de Rojas sang the sordid fate of his Celestina. As with Amadis, this book has medieval roots. But unlike Amadis, it has classic form, and independent greatness. Amadis is a fatty degeneration of Roland, Parzival, Lancelot. La Celestina is a transfigurement of the comedy of Terence and Plautus, as well as of the romance of Aucassin and Nicolette, of Tristan and Isolt, of Romeo and Juliet. It is ironic, realistic, ruthlessly tragic as the romance was never. Chivalry expressed a childlike age which projected its own maturity into a Church and a Heaven. The romance at best was an adolescent form. As the Church dimmed and Heaven grew less sure and man began again to build upon himself, it was transfigured into the modern novel. _La Celestina_ is the first towering adult of the childlike race of the fabliaux and romances.

Irony and a profound acceptance of natural justice--such are the transforming elements of _La Celestina_. Love’s medieval idyll is rotted and destroyed by the pragmatic world to which it has appealed for fulfillment. Loveliness is killed by lust. The whole infantile fantasy of the Middle Age is confronted with the fate of its own will: a fate of evil and of sordid passion. And Justice is implicit in the nature of events. This meeting of love and lust, of vice and beauty, this hot-and-cold inmixture of vision and of despair gives to the book of Rojas a dimension that relates it to Dostoievski and to Balzac.

The pícaro novels of Spain’s sixteenth century continue the novel of Rojas and announce _Don Quixote_. Counterpoint of irony and naturalistic justice becomes the theme, variantly construed, of _Lazarillo de Tormes_, of Quevedo’s _El Buscón_, of Delicado’s _Lozana Andaluza_, of the _Guzmán_ of Mateo Alemán.

This in the mind of Cervantes looking out upon his world. And with it, a parallel domain of literary expression: one that is not unrelated to the brutal picaresque and to the extravagant tales of chivalry: the mystic. Cervantes knew the renowned _Diálogos de Amor_ of León Hebreo. And he knew Santa Teresa, Luis de León, Luis de Granada.

This man whom adversity for twenty years has silenced is a bookish man. But he has been a man of action. He has grown old with his own literary failure. But he has absorbed a century of literary success. He is no primitive. Mature in years and in events, he is the heir of a rich, various heritage of expression.

When he was born, Carlos I was king. His youth spanned the age of Felipe II. While he fought and was exiled, the Escorial rose, a last pinnacle of stone, from the Castilian Guadarrama. Now, in Cervantes’ broken age, the grotesque Felipe III leads Spain. Spain has gone on the Crusade Isabel dreamed; and Spain has come to this.

Cervantes looks back over the glorious madness of his land; and he has his earliest vision of the Knight: Quixote wearing a barber’s dish, mounted on a nag. For Spain was not like Europe at the dawn of chivalry. Europe then was dawn, itself. Old wines--the wines of the Prophets, of Plato and Saint Augustine--had raged in the young flesh of Teuton hordes. But Spain at this flush of her ambition was already old. Seven centuries of war with Islam, endless ages of conflict with a desert world have parched the skin and turned brittle the bone of this Quixotic hero, abroad in the world to make the world into the House of Christ.

Cervantes looks at Spain. Outward splendor flings Spain’s canopy from Holland to Africa, from Florida to Santa Fe. Paul and the Apostles who voyaged over the world are dead fifteen hundred years; but Columbus charts his way to the Indies from study of the Scriptures. Roland blew his last horn six centuries since: but Cortés and Pizarro raze empires in Peru. The hermits of the Thebaid are buried under millennial dust; but Córdoba has its anchorites. Saint Anthony and Saint Elisabeth are old in Heaven; but here yesterday were Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa. Bernard of Clairvaux did not crush the Albigensians with more blood than Torquemada the Jews. Saint Louis of France announces Isabel of Spain. Pope Gregory has his brother--across seven hundred years--in Cisneros, Cardinal of Toledo.[24]

Cervantes looks within Spain. It is a squalid land. Men pray while it lies sterile. Old soldiers are vagabonds on the roads. Farms are waste while the lazy lords watch for gold-filled galleons from the Indies. It is a bloodless land. Women give themselves to Christ, and their wombs shrink. Carlos and Felipe pour the blood of Aragon and Castile into the Flemish sea.

Cervantes looks at himself. He, too, has been a hero. His maimed hand recalls the gesture of Lepanto. He has been a poet--in prison; a servant of the State--who starved. He has helped to provision the Armada whose splendor sank under the modern iron of stripped England. And now, he eats the shame-bread of his women.

Looking within himself or out upon his world, Cervantes sees one thing. Spain and he are home, ashen and sober, from a high Crusade. Spain and he are this single body of his bitterness. Such is the conjunction and dark omen of the birth of a hero.

_b. The Career of the Hero_

Don Quixote is but the final name of the ingenious knight of La Mancha. In Chapter One of his book, it is set forth that he was known as Quijada, Quesada or Quejana. Four chapters later a worker in the neighboring fields addresses him as Quijana, and as Quijano he made his will at the end of his last journey. His Christian name was Alonso. Quixote (Quijote in modern Castilian) was the choice of the old man himself. And as Cervantes gives him birth, he is old--old for his fifty years in a frustrate Manchegan village. He is noble but poor. He is an eater of cheap meats. He is a cadaverous, lantern-jawed, brittle-boned, deep-eyed fellow. His house, one room of which is stocked with the chivalric books that have drawn his substance and addled his brains, is cared for by an old Nurse and a niece. There is as well a boy servant who disappears from the tale after the first chapter. Doubtless Cervantes meant to employ him as Don Quixote’s squire: but when the independent knight after his first sally made choice of Sancho Panza, there was naught left for the poor _mozo_. Of course, in the stable stands a splay-hoof nag. After four days of meditation on such names as Bucephalus and Babieca (the stallion of the Cid), Quixote christens his jade Rocinante. _Rocín_ means hack horse: wherefore Don Quixote meant that his mount was _before_ all the other hacks of the world.

This detail, appearing in the first chapter of the Book, might give the canny reader pause. “Why,” he might ask, “if the deluded eyes--as we are told--of Don Quixote saw his hack as a mount equal to the steeds of Amadis or Alexander, as he was soon to be equal in renown, did he christen him with a name so comical and so revealing?” The reader will be aware of a curious shift in this Don Quixote’s “madness”: a note shivering in at once of self-conscious irony.

However, the madman to whom Cervantes introduces us seems on the whole at first to be consistent. A poverty-struck Manchegan, finding his treeless world too empty for his senses, lets them roam in a realm of knight-errants, ogres, fairies, virgins, Magic. Until his senses are strayed. Whereupon, deeming himself a Roland or an Amadis, he buckles on his rusty sword, takes his nag from the stall and sallies forth into a Spain sordidly realistic, sick of heroes, to perform adventures. He cuts a ridiculous figure. And his fate is what a sane man might expect. He is unhorsed, drubbed, pounded. He loses teeth as his molested countrymen lose tempers. The ladies he meets are foul-breathed wenches; the lord of the Castle in which he takes his rest wants his pay, being the keeper of an inn. His battles are with goats, sheep, windmills and Biscayan servants. It is clear that some day his madness will discomfit him entire. At which time he will be forced back to his house where the good Nurse and the niece will staunch his wounds, bathe the dust from his mad eyes and put him to bed. Meantime, there is the tale to tell--with much laughter--of his absurd adventures. Cervantes wishes to laugh at this medieval scarecrow, jousting with the Modern. His fellow Spaniards, sick like himself of gestures and heroics, will roar along--will pay _reales_ for the book--will put money in the purse of a scribbler.

Such a Quixote is the child of Cervantes, and is the subject of the early chapters. And now a fundamental difference sets in, marking off this character from others. Most literary creations remain their maker’s. As he willed, modeled, developed them, so they live--or die. This is true in great books. The evolution of the hero is explicit in the poet’s mind or at least in the action’s threshold. But for the analogue to Don Quixote we must go to biology, rather than to art. The mother forms the baby in her womb. It is organically hers, and so for a brief time it will remain. But she has endowed it with a principle which will make her child recede ever more from being her creation. This inner life, seeking substance in the world of sense and of impression, becomes itself. The mother has created a babe--only to lose it. Similar is the fate of Quixote with Cervantes. From the womb of his will and bitter fancy comes the child. But Don Quixote is no sooner set on earth, than he proceeds by an organic evolution, by a series of accretions, assimilations, responses, to change wholly from the intent of his author--to turn indeed against him. He does not lose organic contact with his source, even as the man is child of his own childhood and of his parents in a way deeper than the parents’ conscious will or than biologic pattern. But above all, the child becomes himself. He has transcended vastly the amorphous thing lodged in his mother’s womb. So Don Quixote is transfigured beyond the sprightly scheme of his maker.

He was conceived and formed, as a broken writer’s bitter turning against his heroic soul and his heroic age; he becomes the Body of sublime acceptance--the symbol of what his misfortunes were to mock. Cervantes’ conscious will has no firm hold on Don Quixote. And this is plain almost from the outset in the fact that the Manchegan knight, despite his author’s assurance, _is not mad_. We had an inkling of this already in the too conscious, too ironic naming of Rocinante. Soon the proofs multiply; for the clown-blows that continue to rain upon Don Quixote in