Part Two has a less rollicking mood. Cervantes has been affected by Don

Quixote. But there is worse: Don Quixote, enacting Justice, brings trouble to others--and to the best of them. There is the boy whom he frees from a flogging master, and who is flogged the worse, in payment for the humiliation the master has suffered from Don Quixote. There is the freeing of the convicts--a menace to every household in the land. There is the freeing of the lion, to the probable disgrace of the poor keeper. Don Quixote wrecks funerals: he maims an innocent Penitent for life. He unhinges Sancho’s peace: brings the anarchy of ambition into the breast of this sweet clod of the earth. He visits destruction upon the unfortunate inns which he takes for castles. He robs a barber of his copper dish. He drubs innocent servants. He smashes the sole fortune of Maese Pedro--his set of puppets. He commits sacrilege even: plunging full-tilt upon a pilgrimage of disciplinants, breaking legs and wresting from the outraged hand of a priest an image of the Virgin.

Though he offends many and amuses more, he convinces no one. That a prophet should inspire jeers and hatred is natural: but that he should have not one disciple? and that at the end of his mission, he should recant, and call his mission folly? How can such win the love of the world?

The strong whom he encounters laugh at him. The weak flee from him. The Nurse and his niece do not laugh: they weep and tear their hair for his unseemly conduct. In the bachelor Carrasco he inspires a nagging irritation. This man is common sense incarnate: he is ill-at-ease before the irreducible vision of the artist. He goes out of his way to down him: dons the armor of folly in order to bring home the fool. This must not be construed as altruism. Carrasco pays tribute to Don Quixote, in despite of himself. It is his own peace he is after. He is aware, albeit far too rational ever to admit it to himself, that this utter idealist stalking La Mancha robs his small reality of ease. Common sense--the sense of approximation and of compromise--is fragile and is nervous. It must sequester the poet-prophet in his home town.

Perhaps the ugliest episode in the book treats of the knight’s entertainment in the castle of the Duke and Duchess. They are the worldly-wise, the worldly-cultured, even as Carrasco is the pragmatist. They take Don Quixote in; and make him a show for their own genteel delectation. They are the perpetual patron of the artist. They feed him, flatter him, serve him: everything but believe him. Their minds hold him safe from their hearts. And nowhere does the knight of the Sorrowful Figure appear so pathetic, so ridiculous, so disarmed, as under this ducal roof where he is lionized and where whole pageantries are enacted to pander to his need of enacting Justice.

Quixote survives the sophistical salon of the Duchess and of her lecherous ladies. But while he is among them, he is shrunken. He goes forth at last, aware of the subtle poison of their praise, to seek the adventure of Justice--to be laid low by the bachelor Carrasco.

But there is his squire? are there not moments at least in which the squire is a true disciple? Sancho Panza seems to have come latterly to Cervantes. Indeed, this loamy son of the Manchegan desert is less immediate altogether to the world illumined by Don Quixote. That treeless, sapless plain whose horizons are beyond eye, whose winters are blasts of ice, whose summers are fire, whose indeterminate panorama of details--dust, men, towns, roads--is chaos, is the true mother of Don Quixote. La Mancha is a defeated desert: neither waste nor garden, it imposes the way of gardens upon the mood of the desert. Don Quixote transfigures its inns and sordid villages, its hard-fist peasants and its heavy girls into a ruthless psychic unity; much as the son of the true desert drew its vast horizons and its breastlike slopes into the body of God. But how in this world was Sancho Panza born? For not Falstaff of verdant England is more robustly gay, not Panurge of luxuriant France more subtly sensual.

Sancho is wholly the creation of Cervantes. Don Quixote, born of his author, outgrew him. Sancho, too, grows organically. Contact with his master determines this. But none the less he lies ever full within Cervantes’ will: he is the sheer miraculous birth of gayety from the frustrate desert of Cervantes’ life.

To Sancho, the “phenomenal” world, the world of facts is everything. Since he conceives no other, and since his master continuously lives within another of his own conceiving, Sancho is held busy translating into factual terms the entire adventure which he rides with Don Quixote.

A vertiginous effort it is, and it ends by making Sancho more nearly mad than his knight. He believes factually in his Island. He believes himself its governor, though he has crossed no water to attain it. The maid who is to wed Don Quixote after he has gone to Africa to slay her foe is factually to him the Princess Micomacoma. This enchantment must be a fact, like the one which befell Dulcinea, turning her into the wench Aldonza. Sancho vacillates forever between the credulity and the skepticism of the literal mind: ignorance is so clearly the matrix of his sanity that the delusions of his master become wise by contrast. There are no dimensions to his thinking. Don Quixote is mad--or he is a true knight-errant: the adventure is wild,--or there will be a veritable island.

His dominant impulse, either way, is greed. Greed makes him doubt: greed makes him trust his master. Yet underneath, there works subtly upon Sancho a sweeter influence: his indefeasible respect for Don Quixote. Howsoever he argue, howsoever clear he see, howsoever he sicken from constant thumpings and sparse earnings, howsoever wry are the pleasures of his Island, Sancho cannot altogether free himself from the dominion of an idealizing will which he can never understand. In a directer way (since he is no intellectual) than that of Sansón Carrasco, he is held and haunted by Don Quixote. When he is absent from his master he is lost. When, in a scene more touching than the pathos of two quarreling lovers, Don Quixote gives him leave to depart homeward, promising him reward for his past service, Sancho bursts into tears and vows that he cannot forsake him.

He loves his master. Not greed alone, or if so, the greed of devotion to an ungrasped grandeur, holds him astride his dappled ass to follow Don Quixote to the sea. And yet, he despises him; and he betrays him. He judges him, and he exploits him. He makes sure of his reward in Don Quixote’s will, and he gives up the comfort of his wife to follow him through ridiculous dangers. He is this sensual, lusty, greedy oaf of the soil. And yet in the love that masters him he is Cervantes, himself: Cervantes who created Don Quixote to laugh and to mock--and who remained to worship.

For this is the crux of the matter. Cervantes needed Sancho to keep Don Quixote in the perspective for laughter. “Common-sense” rides along with the “madman,” and constantly shows him up. But here is Sancho, shown up himself! Here is Cervantes, shown up! For Cervantes accepts Don Quixote. And that is why we accept him. Cervantes builds up these countless reasons for rejecting him: the havoc wrought by his acts, the shoddy stuff of his dream, the addled way of his brain. It avails naught. Cervantes ends with love. And we--the more humbly in that we have mocked and roared--avow our veneration.

Of such stuff is made the holiness of Don Quixote: mildewed notions, slapstick downfalls. We laugh at his unfitness to impose his dream upon a stubborn world: we see well enough that Rocinante is a nag and the knight himself, helmeted with a dish, a mangy addled fellow. And we accept, in order that he may live this nonsense, the disruption of inns, the discomfiture of pilgrims, the routing of funerals, the breaking of bones!

Cervantes strives hard to snuff out the aspiring hunger of his soul. For this, Don Quixote is bemuddied and deformed. But Don Quixote lives: and his chief enemy--Cervantes--gives him his blood and his passion, in order that he may triumph.

_c. The Book of the Hero_

_Don Quixote_ is written in a prose majestical, dense, warm, lucid, still. It is the fulfillment of the Castilian music which Rojas’ _La Celestina_ promised a century before. The tempo is slow. More correctly, the organic movement of the prose is slow; and the facet movements are swift and nervous. The Cervantine prose is a portrait of the soul of Spain whose cadences of desire and will resolve into an immobile whole.

The accentual music of this prose had already become the innate quality of Castilian. Cervantes heightened his inheritance. The natural genius of the language was already, in the mystics and novelists before him, one that made for a muscular, slow yet sharply surfaced prose. In _Don Quixote_, the music has as its base an almost cosmic beat, within which as in a firmament, the swifter, brighter, more fleeting qualities stand forth. Cervantes makes good use of the agglutinated verb and pronoun, of the syncopations within the general prose rhythm. Above all, he makes use of the loamy expressions of the people, transfiguring them, however, into a tonal design not remotely naturalistic and more akin to the prose of the religious writers than of the pícaro novelists who also helped themselves to the vernacular of the soil.

In the great novel of Rojas there is a like marriage of pungent and ironical stuffs in an exalted orchestration. The difference is one of quality and quantity. Cervantes’ instruments are more varied; his themes and the materials that build them are more numerous, even if no one is richer than the central form of _La Celestina_. Indeed, the earlier work is the intenser; its colors are more hot. There is in Cervantes a strain of the north which the Jew Rojas lacked; and which made his æsthetic action longer and slower. The art of the Semite is more lyrical, less architectonic. _La Celestina_ is a bomb-like organ; a piston-strong machine driving hard and singly. It is the tale, moreover, of a city where life is vertical and packed. Its form is true to its theme. But _Don Quixote_ is the story of a journey--of three journeys rather--over the plains and mountains of La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia. Its basal movement is panoramic, horizontal. Its loftier dimensions are attained by the associative power of its hero who, riding the roads of Spain, touches incessantly the spiritual realms of a people, of an age, of a soul. The formal values of _La Celestina_ are more manifest. Very consciously, an intellectual, nervously coördinated man bound together the counterpoint of his design, so that each element partakes _immediately_ of the whole. This is not the case in _Don Quixote_. The materials of the book--persons of the road, interpolated stories, situations--stand end to end, flat for the most part and quite episodic. The knight enters them organically. He transfigures them as a new element in a chemical solution. He enacts a continuous catalysis upon the parts of Spain which he encounters. The result of this is two-fold. There is created for the entire book a _surface of action_ and a _line of action_. These hold the attention of the reader: these, indeed, caused the book’s popularity when it first appeared. The surface of action in the large is the Spain to which the Spanish people through the picaresque novel had been accustomed for over fifty years. The line of action is the pilgrimage of Quixote and Sancho.

But each of these two actions is complex. In consequence, their organic synthesis is often subtle and hidden. This synthesis gives to the work its unity: and one can enjoy _Don Quixote_ without awareness of it. Indeed, the synthesis may take place in the reader’s mind, long after he has absorbed its elements and put the book aside.

Consciousness of the organic greatness of _La Celestina_ must come at once; since that greatness is the result of a design preconceived and implicit in the book’s several scenes. Consciousness of the greatness of _Don Quixote_ came late even to its author and not to Spain until a whole century had passed. For its parts have an immediate life of their own; only after they have become lost and merged in one another does the book’s unity, as a synthesis of all these parts, dawn on the reader.

The knight himself is not so much an organ in this ultimate synthesis as a dimension. The synthesis is not articulate in him alone, any more than in the episodes. But it is articulate in the book’s language. And the rare individual who understood the æsthetic nature of prose might tell from the first page that _Don Quixote_ was a stupendously formal work of art.

This prose is a _becoming_ prose. It is heavy and pregnant. It is the antithesis of the immediate prose of Santa Teresa or of the lapidic absoluteness of the verse of Luis de Góngora. It is attuned at every moment to the whole of the book. It lacks swiftness and often sharpness. It is frequently clumsy in the projecting of little scenes. The book abounds in episodes that Quevedo would have fleshed more brightly or the author of Lazarillo pointed to more effect.

Cervantes is forever after deeper game. If, for instance, he describes the cozy dinner at which Quixote and Sancho shared the meat and acorns of six goatherds, the prose is not fundamentally focused upon the _genre_: but upon the tragic implications of Don Quixote’s presence and upon the irony of the attitude of the goatherds.

But Cervantes never _states_ these deeper implications. His prose _creates_ them. And creates them, by the immanent and abstract nature of its music. This immanence runs throughout the work, and thereby Cervantes is permanently saved the unæsthetic makeshift of statement. His direct attention goes unhindered to the presentment of the action. The action’s significance, one might say its _soul_, is implicit as is the significance of life implicit and _unasserted_ in material substance and in specific action.

But as in all great art, this deep effect is won at sacrifice of a lesser. Analogously, El Greco maintains the larger anatomy of his vision throughout the details of his paintings, although he loses thereby the grace and accuracy of the anatomy of his subjects.

There are still cavilers at El Greco’s drawing; and there have always been depreciators of Cervantes’ prose. Lope de Vega whose prosody was an immediate lyric flow of two dimensions, was perhaps sincere in his denigration of Cervantes. And even today Miguel de Unamuno, for all his adoration of Don Quixote, decries the language of Cervantes, for a similar reason: Unamuno’s lyric mood can not span the parabolas in which the figure of Don Quixote is limned.

These parabolas are the _lines_ of the prose: and they are not, like simpler curves, to be plotted in the segment of any specific action in the book. But they are to be _felt_ in every page. That is why the first chapter of _Don Quixote_ announces the inscrutable tragi-comedy, although Cervantes when he wrote it had no knowledge of his undertaking. The music of his prose is the mother of his book. It is the beginning of the book’s significance, and it is the conclusion. Nor can it be translated.

* * * * *

A work of art in whose making significant forces have not played is inconceivable. The veriest trash, the most incompetent effort must in some wise have issued from a man’s life, from a people’s will, from an epoch’s spirit. What lies between such work and work significant in itself is not difference of material, but form. The poor work is one in which the elements of life are inchoate and, failing to achieve a unity of form, cannot be said to achieve life itself. The real work of art is that in which these elements achieve a body: is that of which these elements _are_ the body. But the bodies of men and age whence its elements of life have sprung will rot away. Other men and other ages will succeed; and these in their will to know essential union with all men and all ages preserve the true work of art. For in it only, do those moldered lives of other men and ages touch them. The real work of art, builded of the substances of time, therefore alone does not exist in time. And a consideration of the work of art, whose basis is not equally beyond time--is not metaphysical or religious--is inadequate to art’s function in the world of time.

Before all else, _Don Quixote_ is in form the life of Cervantes.

Toward the end of his last adventure, on the way to Barcelona, Don Quixote with Sancho attempts to hold the road against a herd of bulls. But they are overturned, trampled, bemudded. They find a limpid spring garlanded with trees and wash the blood and mire from their sore bodies. Sancho brings food from the saddlebags. But his master is too disconsolate to eat. Sancho waits patiently: seeing no end to Don Quixote’s sorrow nor to his own hunger, he falls to.

“Eat, friend Sancho,” says Don Quixote. “Sustain the life which means more to you than to me, and leave me to die in the embrace of my thoughts and in the power of my disgraces. I, Sancho, was born to live dying; you, to die eating. And that you may see how I speak truth in this, behold me printed in history, celebrated in arms, commended in all my acts, respected in principles, desired by damsels; from end to end, whilst I awaited the palms, triumphs and crowns merited by my valorous deeds, you have seen me as this morning laid low, outraged and ground down, under the hoofs of obscene and filthy brutes....”

The roars and blows that greet the Sorrowful Knight might, in the jargon of our day, be termed Cervantes’ masochistic satisfaction. Cervantes ridicules himself for the dreaming fool he has been. But the strain is too deep. This figure that he sets going to make mock of is after all his soul. He grows away from his embittered pose. He can still laugh at his creature; still gather him at the end back into the logic of his story. But in Part Two, he is seen defending him against the laughter of others. He is seen regarding his knight, for all his folly, as purer than the sensible world: and at the last, more real.

But the times were out of joint. Spain and Don Quixote were pitted against Reasons: the logic of their ideal against the reasons of a world breaking from the unity of God which once had been the Roman Church, into a multiverse of fragmentary facts which is our modern crisis.

Frustrate brilliance, seeking to be healed, is the one unity of the modern story. Since Columbus voyaged, we have voyaged and bruised ourselves in spiritual chaos: seeking the salvation of wholeness and seeking it in vain.

From our search has come the national concept of the State, for instance: a degenerate medievalism, this--a wistful effort to achieve the wholeness of Rome without the holiness that informed it. Has come the Marxian Internation--an inverted idealism which put up the economic process in place of the Hegelian Spirit. Has come the faith in science as Revelation. Has come with Rousseau, the seeking of salvation through the return to the unity of man’s primordial needs: with Nietzsche, the same seeking in the but seeming opposite direction of the superman. And finally, Darwin inspired us to hope that God might be inserted as the principle of flux in biologic process. All these prophecies and dogmatic actions strove alike to enlist mankind once more in a full unity of life and impulse. All who believed in them, to the extent of their devotion, have been Quixotes.

Don Quixote gave himself to make the world One, through the application of measures that strike us as shoddy and unreal. His were the old “magics” of chivalry--of a Europe peopled by Germanic children and schooled by adolescents from Athens, Alexandria and Rome. The magics no longer _worked_: had indeed not worked to build a universal House, since Dante. But we, laughing betimes at Quixote, patronizing Dante, have for five hundred years been struggling to construct our house with materials equally inadequate. The primacy of reason or of subjective intuition, the autonomy of science or of economic purpose, the ideal of the State or social interstate, the dream of communism or the return to nature--one and all are magics as impotent and as unreal as those of the old knight who rode La Mancha on a bony nag, with a barber’s dish on his brow, and in his head a neo-platonic vision.

* * * * *

Don Quixote and Faust are the great antistrophes to the Commedia of Dante. The body of Dante’s poem had the same elements as the body of Dante’s world. They were the Judæo-Christian revelation, Aristotelian logic, Euclidean Nature, the Ptolemaic cosmos. They cracked, and with them Catholic Europe passed. Only in Dante and in certain other art forms, like the Gothic churches, has that body lived.

Don Quixote and Faust are bodies of Europe’s dissolution--forms of our modern formlessness and of our need to be whole. They are perhaps the most vital æsthetic organs of the activity into which modern man was thrown by the deliquescence of his medieval world. As a poem, the Spanish work is the greater. Faust is the child of personal lyrism and speculative will. His sources, like the Knight’s, are medieval. He seeks knowledge and through knowledge personal redemption. He knows that he cannot be redeemed, save by a cosmic understanding; and his sense of understanding is in this, the mystic’s: that it implies possession of what is understood, and a dynamic act. But Faust remains the atom, the unfertile seed of human will. His way to unify the world is to dominate and absorb it within the complex of personal volition. This is heroic, but it is savage. It ignores the fundamental wisdom of the Jews and Hindus which taught that the health of the personal will lies through the threshold of its death. Faust seeks knowledge through its extended acquisition. Mefisto is the symbol of his faith in the reality of extension. If he can garner the right catchwords, he can swallow the world; and the world will become one within him. This bluntly is the means toward a new synthesis adapted by all the centuries of Europe that intervene between the Renaissance and us: and it is Kabbalistic! The personal will, in its endeavor to achieve fusion with the world, has concocted formulæ that were to act directly on the world, and by magic to control it. These formulæ of course became external organisms: they became a machine, an empire or empiric law. Instead of lending themselves to a solution, they spawned a multitude of problems. They could not fecundate the personal will, from which they issued. For it is the Law that from personal will, alone when it is rendered fertile by its own disaster (like a rotted seed) can cosmic will and a cosmic synthesis arise.

The legend of Christ was deeper: deeper the blundering way of Quixote. For he sought the grace of union not by absorbing the world into himself, but by transmuting himself into an impersonal symbol of the world.

He failed; but his book lives; for with the failure is the triumphant impulse that led up to it. The effect of the crusade was death; the cause was life.

The magics of Don Quixote are as absurd as our own. But his impulse was as true as the Prophets’. The Old and the New Testaments also are a tale of sins and follies. But these are visible, because the light of God shines on them. In the effect that passes, all the prophets and all the Christs have failed. None of them has failed, in the cause that remains. The cause of Don Quixote’s life strikes us as truer than the realities which brought about his death. This is the pitiful best that we can say for him--or for any of the prophets.

One and all, they encountered _reasons_ which put their _truth_ to flight. And the world was able to live whole within their truth only in ages which willfully made reason servile. In the violence of his divorce from the world which he aspired to unite, in the ridiculousness of his discord from it, Don Quixote stands the last prophet of our historic Order. He bespeaks our need: a dynamic understanding which shall enlist ideal and reason, thought and act, knowledge and experience; which shall preserve the personal within the mystical will; which shall unite the world of fact in which we suffer all together, with the world of dream in which we are alone....

_CHAPTER X_

_THE WILL OF GOD_

_a. The Bull Fight_ _b. Man and Woman_ _c. Madrid_

_a. The Bull Fight_

The bull fight is older than Spain; the art of the bull fight has little more than a hundred years of history. Perhaps Crete, which gave El Greco to Toledo, gave the bull worship to Tartessos. Perhaps the Romans turned the bull rite into spectacle. The Visigoths assuredly had bull fights: and the medieval lords of Spain jousted with bulls as Amadis with dragons. The _toreo_ was held in the public squares of towns, alternating possibly with _autos de fe_. In the one sport, the actors were nobles and the victims were bulls. In the other, officiated captains of the Church and the victims were Jews. In both, the religious norm was more or less lost sight of, as the spectacular appeal grew greater. But no æsthetic norm had been evolved to take its place. The bull fight was a daredevil game to which the young bloods of the Court--in their lack of Moors to fight--became addicted after the Reconquest. It was a dangerous sport, and it cost the kings of Spain many good horses and not a few good soldiers. Still, it throve until in 1700 a puritan, Philip V, ascended to the throne. He disliked the bull fight. It lost caste among the nobles. But its usage was too deeply, too immemorially engrained. The gentleman _toreador_ went out: the professional _torero_ and _banderillero_ came in.

Francisco Goya has recorded in genial sketches and engravings the nature of this bull fight. It was still chiefly a game of prowess. If an art, it was more allied to the art of the clown and acrobat than to the dance or the drama. The professional torero was a gymnast. He had to risk his skin in elaborate ways: and skill was primarily confined to his grace in going off unhurt. He fought the bull, hobbled on a table, or lashed to a chair, or riding a forerunner in a coach, or saddled to another bull.

Only after the War of Independence against the French and after the lapse caused by Napoleon, whose generals disapproved of so barbarous an art, did Spain’s popular tragedy arise: the modern, profound _corrida_. Its birthday was the same as that of the jota of Aragon which sprang directly from the incitement against the French. Like the jota, the bull fight was new only as an integration of old elements. And like the ancient bull-rite of Tartessos it reached its climax in Andalusia: more particularly in the Province of Seville.

* * * * *

The _plaza de toros_ is of course the Roman circus. Rome created no more powerful form for an æsthetic action than this rounded, human mass concentered on sand and blood. With its arena, the bull fight wins a vantage over such western spectacles as cricket, baseball, the theater. In all of these, the audience is a partial unit: it is not above the action, but beside it. The arena of the bull fight is a pith of passion, wholly fleshed by the passionate human wills around it.

The _plaza_ is too sure of its essential virtue to expend energy in architectural display. Here it scores another point over the modern theater whose plush and murals and tapestries and candelabras so often overbear the paleness of the play. The plaza has tiers of backless seats terracing up to balcony and boxes. The seats are of stone: the upper reaches are a series of plain arcades. The plaza is grim and silent. It is stripped for action. It is prepared to receive intensity. The human mass that fills it takes from the sand of the arena, glowing in the sun, a color of rapt anticipation. These thousands of men and women, since the moment when they have bought their tickets, have lived in a sweet excitement. Hours before the bugle, they are on their way. They examine the great brutes whose deaths they are to witness. They march up and down the sand which will soon rise with blood.

Bright shawls are flung on the palcos. Women’s voices paint the murmur of the men. A bugle sounds, and there is silence. The crimson and gold _mantones_ stand like fixed fires in this firmament of attention. The multitudinous eyes are rods holding in diapason the sky and the arena. Two horsemen (_alguaciles_) prance forward through the gates. Black velvet capes fold above their doublets. From their black hats wave red and yellow plumes.

They salute the royal or presidential box; circle the ring in opposite directions and return to the gate. The music flares. They proceed once more on their proud stallions, and behind them file the actors in the drama. The toreros are first: four of them: they wear gold-laid jackets, gold-fronted breeches backed in blue, rose-colored stockings. The banderilleros in silver drape their pied _capas_ across their arms. The _picadores_ follow. They are heavy brutish men, with chamois leggings and trousers drawn like gloves over their wooden armor. They are astride pitiful nags, each of which is Rocinante. The shoes are encased in stirrups of steel; the spurs are savage against the pitiful flanks. Behind the picadores are the red-bloused grooms, costumed like villains. It is their task to clean up entrails and gore. And the procession closes with two trios of mules, festooned and belled, who draw the drag to which the bodies of slaughtered bulls and horses will be attached.

The cavalcade crosses and salutes. Toreros, banderilleros, picadores on nervous nags, scatter along the barriers. Again, the bugle sounds. Doors open on the interior passage which two high barriers hold as a protective cordon between the audience and the arena. A bull leaps into the glare.

His massive body is a form for the emotion of rage and for the act of plunging. The forelegs are slight beneath the heft of his shoulders whence he tapers down, so that the shoulders and head are like a swinging turret. The brute is all infuriated flesh pivoting the exquisite ferocity of horns. They are slender and curved, needle-sharp, lance-long. The bull is aware of the strange ten-thousand-headed creature that shouts at him and drives its will upon him. He understands that the mob is his foe. He bellows, circles, plunges at last to reach it. The barrier jerks him up, splintering with his onslaught. He is bewildered and stopped, pawing the sand, while the mob prepares to send its single emissaries to engage him.

The first act of the drama is formless and ends in farce. Toreros and banderilleros toy with the bull. They fling capes, side-step, dawdle with him. But gradually they withdraw the brute’s first fury from the indeterminate mob ringing him round to the accessible lives in the arena. The bull sees a horse. It capers before him in a blind presentiment of death. Its ears are tied, its eye is bandaged. Upon it a picador levels an enormous pike, steel-pointed. The bull charges and a horn sinks in the belly. Horse and rider rise and are flung in a clatter of bone, in a drench of flesh, against the barrier. The bull draws out his ensanguined horn and charges a banderillero whose cape is there protecting the picador. The crowd roars. The horse is whipped to its feet by grooms. The picador is hoisted back. The old nag’s entrails hang in a coiled horror within a foot of the ground.

The horse is the comedian of the drama. The bull tosses him. He lies on his back and his four anguished legs beat like drumsticks on the barrier. Or, losing his saddle, he plunges mad and blind around the ring, kicking his own intestines, until death takes him. Or the bull mangles him at once, and he disappears in a swirl of flesh. This is farce; and also this is the sense of the immanence of danger. The bull is drunken with his victory. The crowd, beholding the fate of a horse, laughs with a tinge of terror. For what has happened there, may happen to a man.

Enough horses have been slaughtered: their poor flesh shredded into the gleaming unconquerable sands. A bugle summons the second act of the drama.

This is the scene of the banderilleros. They are the critics, the epigrammatists, the _graciosos_, the chorus of the accelerant play. They bespeak the bull. They test him. They show off his subtle points--and their own. If he has faults--clumsiness, cowardice, lethargy--they correct him. They call forth his finest rage; and as he plunges on them they leave gay ribboned darts within his flesh. If he is slow to anger, they will employ darts that explode beneath the skin of their victim. They enrage him. But all the while, they sober him as well, making him realize that the holiday of the horses is no more: a harder enemy is on the field.

Often the bull is put into a meditative mood. He stands, panting in the center of the arena. Blood drips from his mouth. His horns are carmine and the laced _banderillas_ dance on the scruff of his shoulder, biting, nagging. He wants to understand what his life has become. The fields of Andalusia--the good grass, the warm care--have been wiped out in this blare of terror. That background of pleasaunce merely serves to sharp the tense present--this delirium of men and sun. A banderillero dances up. The bull faces him, asking a question. But the man will not tell. His smile is false; that swing of his cape is treachery. There is nothing to do but plunge--whatever it means. The cape of red and blue folds over the eyes of the bull and vanishes like a cloud: a dart bites his flesh. The crowd roars. The good life behind and the peace beyond are mist: life is this glare and this roar and this goad of steel.

The second act is over: the bull is chastened. He has been cleansed for the tragedy, after his brief triumph. Once again the bugle: the torero to whose lot this bull has fallen, selects his slender sword and his red _capa_. He steps forward for the ultimate tragic scene.

Toreros are of many kinds. This one is called Belmonte and he is one of two great _espadas_ of recent years in Spain. He is a small man, smaller than the average and more swarthy. His body moves rhythmic and slight into the hard glitter of the sand.

The elemental glare of Spanish sunlight makes that body, striding so quiet toward the bull, frail and helpless. Could this man run away, as do so many? could he, if need be, vault the high barrier to safety just as the bull splintered the wood beneath him? The head is heavy. The nose is large and sharp; the mouth is wide; the lower jaw thrust out. But the brow is sensitive and smooth. Close by, this is the face of a neurotic. The arena’s flame bakes it into a brooding gloom above the body so ironically decked in gold and silk.

Belmonte in this instant has already awakened in the crowd the troubling emotion of pity mixed with fear. He salutes the bull and spreads his red mantle (the capa) across the fragile sword. He steps in close; and while the arena hardens into silence, he lifts the mantle toward the eyes of the brute.

Within an instant, breathless save for the breath of the bull, something goes forth from Belmonte to the beast and marries them. The bull is the enemy, and they are joined more close, more terribly than love. He plunges. Belmonte, motionless, swings the mantle to his side and the bull, as if attached to it, grazes the frail body. The mantle lifts. The bull lifts and turns, as if ligated by the mantle to Belmonte’s will. The cloth thrusts to the other side. The bull along. Back and forth they go, in rigorous dance. The torero’s body does not break from its repose. He is as cool as sculpture; he is as fluid as music. The bloody beast is attuned by a will, hard and subtle as Belmonte’s sword. His clumsy movements are molded into grace: his rage is refined into these exquisite feints. He, too, like the torero, leaves the plane of nature, and becomes a symbol.

As the torero stepped out to the sand, his rôle was god-like. His minions had played with the great innocent victim: fed him victory and blood: taunted him: taught him. Now he, to enact the ultimate rite of life ... the ultimate gift of the gods ... the only gift which they give unstintingly ... death.

But this dance has transfigured the torero. Meeting the brute upon the plane of danger, he becomes a man. Those hypnotized horns graze human flesh: where they touch they rend. That gold-lined body is a sheath, holding the blood of a man. The bull could plunge through it ... plunging so near, so rhythmically near ... as if it were indeed the mist and dream of mortal life.

And now another change in the beauty of their locked encounter. The man becomes the woman. This dance of human will and brutish power is the dance of death no longer. It is the dance of life. It is a searching symbol of the sexual act. The bull is male; the exquisite torero, stirring and unstirred, with hidden ecstasy controlling the plunges of the bull, is female.

The crowd acts its part. The little man is but a gleam of fire, the bull but a tongue of dionysian act within this dark flame of ten thousand souls. From them come dream and desire and memory of sense: concentrate upon this spot of drama: merge with it and marry it to themselves. At every pass of the bull from side to side of Belmonte, the crowd is released in a terrific roar. So silent the dance of the two coupled dancers: so vast the response of the crowd. Now, Belmonte kneels and his mantle rhythmically wipes the furious bloody head, making the plunge of horns diagonal athwart the torero’s breast. _Verónica_ is the name of this classic gesture. And the allusion is to the handkerchief of the Saint, which smoothed the sweat from the forehead of the Christ. The ancient orgy of Dionysius and Priapus is tinged with Christian pity. The commingled symbolisms of many Spains meet in the dance: become abstracted and restrained. The whole is the silent balance of the wills of Spain.

The bugle signals for the final action. Belmonte has risen; has exchanged the capa for the small _muleta_ with which he covers his steel. Now he withdraws the muleta from the slender sword. It is a flexible two-edged steel, dipped at the end. He stands still before the brute whose sweat rolls red from the heaving rugose flanks. He stands with heels clicked together, holding the brute with his eye, and raises the blade deliberately forward. The steel points not at the head, but slightly above it. In that mountain of flesh beyond the deadly horns there is an unmarked spot which the sword must find. It is the tiny crutch formed by the bones of the shoulder. Within its aperture the blade can strike, unimpeded, to the heart. Anywhere else, the blade will not bring death but a mere ugly plunging rage.

Belmonte has chosen to stand and make the bull plunge on him. He is frail and erect. His shoulders are flexed; his head is slightly forward. Grace becomes subtly rigor. The bull obeys. He leaps. The blade sinks to the gemmed hilt. A wave of blood gushes to the sand, as the dead bull sinks.

* * * * *

This is the archetype of the Spanish bull fight. It describes a masterpiece. And in an art so profound and dangerous, the masterwork is rare, even as in other æsthetic fields. But if great toreros are rare, one actor in the play is constant and is always masterful. The crowds of Spain, against the agitation of intellectuals and of Church, hold to their dear drama. In the _corrida_, all the desires which history has bred and then denied an issue, find an issue. Conflict is the stratified peace of the Spanish soul. For too many ages has the Spaniard lived on war to be able to do without it. In war, the lusts of the world and the lust for God became one. Christ and Priapus were joined in its full ecstasy. And in this dumb show of a man and a bull, they are conjoined again.

Gross comedy of blood; sex, dionysian and sadistic; the ancient rites of the brute and of the Christ meet here in the final image of stability. Spain’s warring elements reach their locked fusion--Spain’s ultimate form. For although everything is in the bull ring, and although anything may happen, _nothing happens_. Circus, blood, dance, death equate to nullity.[25] Like life in Spain, this spectacle is self-sufficient, issueless....

_b. Man and Woman_

Queen Isabel may rest in peace. She is having her will although she would not recognize its way. Her conscious will was to make Spain one: it has become the unconscious will of every Spaniard. Her concept of the State of Spain has become a universal state of mind. Here was Spain, this sea of elements tossing and titanic. Here was the Spaniard, pressed by the amorphous world in which he lived to establish unity within himself: to become a person, in defense from the chaos that was Spain. In his will to create Spain, he could not change the theater of his action. He must create Spain _within himself_. The first stage of his endeavor was that of the intense crystallizations which made Spain’s _siglos de oro_. These saints and sinners are not fragments: they are entire forms of Spanish energy. And the elements which they personify exist in every Spanish soul. If, therefore, Spain was to be unified within each Spaniard, La Celestina must be equated with Saint Teresa, Quixote and Amadis with Lazarillo and the Cid.... Although the energic sum of all these forces might in each individual soul add up to zero!

To the intensely individual Spaniard, Spain became more and more subjective: until at last the boundary to the outer world was lost. Politics, war and church became subjective. The Spaniard saw the world only in terms of himself. This is why he strove to make the State the mentor of conscience: this is why he strove to make the domains of the State a sort of spiritual body. To inculcate faith by Inquisition; to establish truth by the sword; to drive dissenters in spirit from the soil--these were the mad and logical acts of a man who beheld the world in his own image. Willing to create a Spain, each Spaniard remained the anarchic personal creature whose separatism Strabo had noted and Rome endured.

The tragedy of Spain--her reaching of success! First her energy broke up into dominant forms of will: then she equated these forms into the equilibrium she desired. And no energy was left! All of her opponent tensions merge to rest in every Spanish soul. The titanic efforts toward conquest, toward art, toward God which have made Spain great balance each other at the end. The energy is not gone, not weakened: it is equated. And the result is sleep.

The energy of a people is the sum of its personal propulsions. The dynamic race is that in which the individual _as an individual_ is incomplete. Consider the United States. The immigrant in losing his old land loses the completion which he achieved in his own share of its life. As an American he espouses America’s incompletion. He injects his restlessness into America; and conversely America’s lack of final form becomes his lack and his need. The result is a social body moving toward completion, and energetic in so far as it is barred from completion save in the act of moving. In Russia, the incompleteness of the individual soul is a paradoxical result of its consonance with the land. Russia is vast, uncharted, indefinite. The Russian spirit, identified with the soil, becomes imbued with a symbolic sense of vastitude and longing. Spirit is therefore national in Russia: and spiritual energy floods the land, precisely because the land is an incomplete experience in each Russian mind.

There are indeed permanent forms of spiritual incompleteness, and one of these exists in every energetic people. The Frenchman’s soul is part of a social soul. The Frenchman is organically incomplete, in so far as his mind and sense know themselves integral components of the nation. From this knowledge comes the automatic flow of individual energy into social channels: this is balanced by the impersonal character of the French nation which receives the energy it requires and discharges back into the individual life a transformed power: the protection and unity of the enveloping organism. This perpetual interplay between the Frenchman and his group is an equilibrium in incompleteness: it makes permanent the impermanent achievement of individual and nation, the need of each for the other, the flow of energy between them. The Jew possesses another form of permanized incompleteness. The Jewish soul yearns for Zion and for God. The Jew’s intelligence successfully places both Zion and God beyond his reach. His incompleteness is hence perpetual: and the Jewish energy has not ebbed.

But the Spaniard elected a form of achievement and a form of truth which he could reach: and as he reached it, he stopped moving. Truth became the Church of Rome: he attained that truth and rejected every other. His ideal of unity was homogeneity: the simple fusion in every Spaniard of thought and faith, according to a fixed ideal. To this end he impoverished the elements of his psychic world into sharp antitheses: these he balanced against each other: the result was indeed simplicity, homogeneity, a neutralization of energy summing to zero.

The Spaniard is not decadent: neither is he weak. There is as great force in him as in the days when his still unfused power conquered half Europe, discovered America and poured the vision of Cervantes, Rojas, Calderón and Velázquez upon the world. But now, all this energy is _locked_ in its own willed equation. Its original dualisms are not dead; they are controlled and neutralized. The equilibrium is complete: and what energy is left from it the Spaniard must expend in holding the equation. There is no energy unemployed: and it is precisely the excess energy of man, the energy that is unable to find its goal within the organism, which creates intellect and which creates creation.

Had he been less heroic in his will, or more objective in his way to it, the Spaniard would not be this cripple: this giant shattered by his success, this giant imprisoned in the reality of his ideal.

The most willful of men, he appears will-less. For his power of will goes to dominate himself--and to hold his dominion. So that no power is left wherewith to dominate the world. The unity of Spain exists, subjectively and multiplied by millions. In consequence the Spaniard is not adhesive: he is too complete: the motive toward adhesiveness is the sense of incompletion. The most secret impulse of the Frenchman or the Jew has its social dimension. No Jew can people Zion in solitude. No French mystic or philosopher is an anchorite. Pascal and Descartes are Catholic: Paul Cézanne strives to create a new museum art. The rebel in France is a rebel against monarchs. But the Spaniard is an empire and a god unto himself. The perfected Spanish person makes permanent the social Spanish chaos.

The most intellectual of men, he appears unintelligent. He lives so wholly within his Idea, that no energy is left for further ideation. Creative intelligence is the birth of conflict between the personal will and life: it is born of the pause between impulse and response and of the excess energy which remains after the instinctive action. In the Spaniard, this excess energy is small: he is too self-sufficient to know richly the pauses between will and deed; and in the relativity of values which springs from a chaotic or incompleted conscience he is poor. Having achieved his Idea, he is weak in intellect: having created his imagined world, he is weak in imagination.

Therefore he understands vaguely the causes of his incompetence, and struggles weakly against them. His contemporary literature is strong in plaint: it is wanting in self-knowledge and constructiveness. It is weak, also, in creative imagination: even as it is strong in fantasy. The Spanish mind has become like the mind of a child. The child’s intellect is not inferior to the man’s: it is merely too preoccupied within itself to have achieved the power of association and of objective experience which comes with maturity and which begets analysis and imagination. The child is credulous, because its belief is subjective fantasy and finds no opponent in the real world. Also, the child is cruel because it cannot imagine pain in others, it is anti-social because it has not associated its life with the life around it. The Spaniard is still the victim of the infantile beliefs of medieval Europe. He accepts the literal Heaven and Hell, having no imagination strong enough to make them real, and in consequence to reject them. He is cruel. And his separatism, his want of the adhesive impulse make him a ready victim to tyranny in government. Unable to organize a social body, he accepts the simple body of the King or the alien body of the Church of Rome.

He has the virtues of his state. His personal development brings him a personal integrity, a true personal pride unknown in Europe. He has natural dignity. Whatever his rank, he is a _caballero_: a true microcosm of the Spanish nation. There is no artifice in him. He is clean, self-controlled and independent. In his veins lives the impulse of heroism; in his mind is the knowledge and the acceptance of heroism’s price. Cowardice, compromise, hypocrisy are traits more common in more social races. And cant requires no word in _castellano_. Even the Spanish thief is sincere: the tradition of the pícaro has not died. And the power of endurance, of sacrifice, of devotion is developed in the average Spaniard beyond the dream of the romantic north.

The once furious and unleashed elements of the Spanish soul have been woven into this counterpoint of rest: they make a quiet music. It is natural that the Spaniard’s love of music and gift for music should be supreme. This art of vigorous abstracted balance, so subjective, so ruthlessly legal, is the symbol of the Spanish nature. And as with his classic _canto hondo_, the effect in counterpoise and control is almost that of silence. By the same token he is a great dancer: his dance is a synthesis of movements equated to rest. And he loves the drama: where the torrential forces of mankind are fused into a unitary form.

* * * * *

The world nurses two myths concerning Spain. The first, that she is decadent, Spain believes herself, and thereby proves, if other proof were lacking, her failure in self-knowledge. The other myth is that Spain is romantic.

The first myth rests upon ignorance of psychological mechanics. The second is a confusion of words. The philology of the term _romance_ is clear. In the formative eras of modern Europe, the Latin dialects which were to become French, Italian, Castilian, Portuguese, Galician, Provençal, etc., were lumped as the _romance_ to distinguish them from the pure tongue of Latin. They were popular vernaculars and despite the early instance of such men as Dante and Petrarca, or the Arcipreste de Hita, they were not deemed worthy vehicles of exalted thought. The writer whose ideas were holy or philosophic was supposed to clothe them in Latin. Only if he treated of such vulgar subjects as earthly love, might he employ the vulgar language. By association, _romance_ was transferred from the tongue to the subject for which it was disposed: a story of profane love or profane adventure became _romance_; and becoming so, remained trivial and vulgar. The essential attitude of the Spaniard toward the subjects of romance was, however, the very contrary of what we mean by romantic.

Now came the hour of confusion. The knights of Portugal and Spain fought for God, for Mohammed, for the King: for anything but what we call _romantic_ reasons. The Iberian north is Celt and is contiguous with the Celtic cultures of Britain and of France. The Iberian knight went northward out of Spain; and when he returned he had become what today we call a “nordic.” He was sentimental, tender, monogamous, and chaste. He was the very converse of the old Spanish knight, Arab or pagan-Christian whose canny materialism speaks so clear in the _Poema del Cid_. He was, indeed, Tristan, Arthur, Lancelot, or Amadís of Gaul. The books that were written about him were published in romance: so that the qualities of passionate devotion which in Spain has been confined to the religious--to subjects too high for romance--became romantic.

The romance, therefore, is of the south: the romantic is of the north; and they negate each other. It is the German metaphysicians who invented the romanticism of Calderón; it is Byron and the French æsthetes who created romantic Spain. But the best efforts of Schlegel, Goethe, Mérimée, Gautier, Byron have failed to make the Spanish man or woman in the least romantic.

* * * * *

She is serene and she is incurious. Her Anglo-Saxon sister would call her inactive, even as the _Parisienne_ would find her dull. Since sexual adventurousness is normally the result of intellectual curiosity--sensual stimulation by ideas--she is chaste and dispassionate. But if her lack of amorousness is due to her lack of thinking, her serenity and her external inactivity are due to her tremendous power. Women are most clamorous for “rights” in lands where culturally they have counted least. Witness England or the United States where for all her liberties woman is spiritually sterile. In contrast witness France whose women are the subtle partners of all deep events; or matriarchal Spain in which suffragists are as rare as they would be superfluous.[26]

The Spanish woman is a pragmatist in love. Love to her is the means of raising children in the grace of Christ. No less sensual, no less amorous woman exists in Europe. As a girl she is lovely: a crisp expectancy makes her flesh sweet and rounds her darkling eyes. She looks to marriage as the highest and most powerful career. Once she is mated, the natural coquetry of Spring falls from her like a season: she is instantly sedate, full-fleshed, maternal. She has no instinct for the game of love. Sexual virtuosity in woman is a slow process nurtured at the expense of the maternal passion. This diversion is rare in Spain. The French or American woman’s sexual science is an undeciphered, an irrelevant perversion to the woman of Spain who wears upon her head an invisible crown of matriarchal power.

For she is powerful: this discreet female in a land of furiously dreaming males! Events have sobered her and made her worldly-wise. Her man is the theater of opponent passions, ideals, hungers equating into nothing. She is the compensatory act. She is steady, unemotional, unmystical, canny. She distrusts excess--even of maternal service. Her man has made magic of such words as State, God, Honor. Hers the task to materialize these words which in his mouth bespeak inaction. The family, the garden, the morrow; these become her Word.

The woman of Spain leans on the Church of Rome. No small part this of her dominance in a land incapable of social institutions. Spain with her separatist nature, her inadhesiveness, could never have created Rome: but Rome has gone far toward giving Spain that minimum of organic body which the millions of individual “Spains”--her men--required. The Spanish woman by her massed support makes the Church Spanish.

If the Church belongs to the woman, ruling Spain through her, she has remained outside the exhaustive activities of her husband. The Spanish woman has been untouched by metaphysics: her heroine, Santa Teresa de Jesús, is an ennobled _house-cleaner_, a glorified matron of Christ. The Spaniard’s wife has not, like him, been split into intricate traits of will and of expression: nor in the sequel need she spend herself to win back unity from an inner chaos. She is naturally whole: she is the foe of even the fairest anarchies of the spirit. There is in her an heroic amplitude that recalls the poised women of the Hebrews. She is the savior of Spain, for she is the Responder to Spain’s excesses of action and inaction.

The land has become a matriarchy--by default. The Spaniard has been too busy establishing theodicy on earth to rule Spain well: at last too involved in the equating of his embattled impulse to rule Spain at all. Imperceptibly, unofficially, woman has taken hold. She allows man many liberties--trivial liberties of the sort she would call romantic, if she knew the word. He may “govern,” vote, own; he may fight; he may drink, gamble, whore. He may act indeed the perfect child thinking himself the center of the world because of his exultant vices (of which politics and journalism are the most absurd). Meantime, she with her compass Christ, and her wheel, the priest, steers the slow ship of Spain. In her disposal are the education of her children, intellectual and moral, the molding of those customs which go deeper than statute. In her hands is the family, and the family is Spain. She is the true controller of finance. It is a common thing in Spain for the man to own the money of his wife, and for the wife to distribute the money of her husband. In the peasant classes, she is arbiter of culture and thought: in the middle classes she is economic judge: in the noble classes the lineage descends through her in equality with her husband.

The nature of Spain calls imperatively for the dominance of woman. Woman’s mind is individualistic, and Spain is a congeries of consonant parts rather than an organism. Woman builds her familial molecule from the Spanish atoms: she erects a great simplicity in which her man can dwell.

In Spain there are two kinds of women: the mother and the prostitute. And both are mothers. The land is sensuous in its air, its flowers. The Spaniard is not sensuous at all. In the nineteenth century, a group of romantic Spanish poets endeavored to sing of Spain as had the Germans and the English. No more frustrate coldness exists in all the literature of failure. “_Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehen_” could never have been written by a Spaniard about Spain. For the Spaniard is as abstract in his bodily lusts as he is concrete in his ideals. Of his wife, he seeks the haven of morale: of his prostitute, he seeks the peace of respite. The Spanish prostitute with her Cross lying within her breasts is the least mercenary, the most womanly of her class. She is mellow and maternal. She bears with her a great sense of sin: and the man who touches her lips touches pity. From man she receives two treasures, bread and shame: she is eager to give, in return, her humility and comfort. She has no delights of subtle sense to barter: but he who comes to her, weary and broken, will find her arms mysteriously soothing, as if her acceptance of sin were a Christian solace, as if her acceptance of shame were heartening to his pride.

And the Spanish wife knows of the prostitute and suffers her. She brings for the husband an escape from the chaste rigors of family and church into the anarchy of unorganized affection and of Christian pity. She makes the work of the wife less arduous.

* * * * *

Human happiness is the full deep flow of human energy. It has many ways, nor is it rare. The madman is happy since all of his thought and sense falls into the pattern of his will. The lover is happy. Children are happy, eating or at play. Soldiers are happy in battle. And everyone is happy in dream.

There are happy nations: nations at war, nations in the madness of any enterprise, whether it be of growth or dissolution. But Spain is not happy. Her energy does not flow. It stands locked in a diapason of pause.

Nor is Spain unhappy. Unhappiness is the thwarted need of energy to flow. Spain’s energy is not thwarted. It does not flow: it does not need to flow. It is absorbed in its own perpetual balance.

Spain is a dark soul. Sun is a flame in her land, and her land is a storm of color. But the soul of Spain is neither sun nor storm. It is neither gayety nor grief. It is a dark contentment, midway held between ecstasy and sleep.

Outside the tremor and traffic of spiritual movement, Spain moves like a somnambulant. Her body moves: but within her shut eyes there is a vision truer than her stirring: a vision stirless and composed.

Her mood is dark and stagnant. Yet it is pleasant, for it is not pain. Her soul is caressed passively by this rhythmic swing between the extremes of action: as if the long ages of Spain’s agitation had bred this sensuous delight in their denial.

Within her heroic memory, within her heroic land, Spain wanders unobtrusively and scatheless. She does not forget nor remember. Upon the surface of her life, intellect pricks, passion stirs, action clamors. But her depths are limpid in a dark and dreamless slumber....

_c. Madrid_

In the eighteenth century one Spaniard out of three is an ecclesiastic, a noble or a servant. (This takes no toll of rogues and beggars.) The special rights of Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia are annulled. Those of the Basques are a dead letter, although they linger on the books until the Carlist wars. Spain has become a receding unity, under a single monarch. Her American possessions wait only the full tide of growth in order to set loose. Castile’s will has leveled Spain. Her huertas give wine and fruit just in the amount to balance the desert dearth about them. Her high towns are fossils of recalcitrance, or backfires smoldering against each other. Although the diapason of will has its home in every Spanish soul, no one city is its symbol. Toledo, Avila, Seville, Barcelona, Jaca, Murcia, Mérida, Oviedo ... they bespeak their pasts, their individual dynamisms, whose sum is zero. To be the symbol of this sum--Spain’s tragic consummation--there must be a modern city.

Madrid stands for the ultimate achievement--and for none of its factors. It is the capital of Spain--and of no old Spanish region. It is a pleasing town. Its populous quarters bespeak the eighteenth century. The cabs blotched under gas-lamps, the shuttered stores, the sumptuous theaters, the cobbled streets and alleys holding a bar, a flower-stand, a beggar, recall old prints of Paris. The reminiscent age of Balzac and of Daumier has taken refuge here. In Paris, the twentieth century has jostled out the last; it seems to keep better terms with the Paris of Louis XIV, of Henri IV, even of François Villon than it does with the Paris of Voltaire. But in Madrid, the eighteenth century has mellowed to the next; they strike together a plaintive reminiscence against the modern city: the Madrid of broad Avenidas, of the Gran Via, of dapper taxicabs and monumental banks. This Madrid is pleasant also: it might be almost any provincial capital of central Europe.

Madrid is noisy. In the modern streets, the chauffeurs toot as if they had just discovered horns and were intent, like children, to break the new toy ere bedtime. In the older, more populous streets there is a texture of ancient voices. Shut your eyes and the windowed walls of Europe fade away: the breath of the desert and the steeps of the mountain north, the watery chatter of the Catalan, the grunt of the Aragonese, the gracious Andalusian palaver merge into a music of the air and make Madrid a maze of memory.

Yet for all the noise and all the business, there is upon the town a subtle and a gentle quiet. This assertiveness is only for itself: it is a heightened murmur of assent to Spain’s rich past. Beneath the bruit, Madrid is silent, like Spain’s history. Beneath its animal turbulence it broods. And for all its mingled moods, its final one is a dream.

On Sundays, the _rastro_--the great city fair--boils down hill, a human torrent through a canyon of tattered houses to the dry _Manzanares_. On feast days in spring or summer, the town roars at the bull-ring. And when the last death is written in the sands, it swarms in lorries, motors, tally-hos, back to the Plaza de la Cíbeles; it spreads in numberless café tables on the broad sidewalks of the Alcalá. The Puerta del Sol--theater of revolutions--is a somber well whose sides are gray soiled houses and whose crowds are a thick condiment. Trolleys, lottery vendors, beggars, loafers, make a bright shuttle through the sluggish maze. At the Carnival of Spring, the gutters of the barrios de Toledo and de Manzanares pour their lives into the Castellana. Rogues, prostitutes, shopgirls, mothers with babes at the breast flow back and forth under the statue of Columbus and the austere walls of the Biblioteca Nacional: queer costumes grimace through confetti clouds; a murmur of sexual release agglutinates the swarms; a glow as of rich earth breaking to grass rises beneath the sere March sky.... And yet, there is a silence, there is a stillness on Madrid. The songs of the turbulent streets are songs of silence. This parade of pleasures and of passions, of crimes and revolutions, is somnambular.

Populous Madrid falls from the Plaza Mayor fan-wise to the arid curve of river upon whose treeless banks are stuck the shanties of the breadless. And above the river and the shanties is the Palace of the King, a cold and granite jewel set upon misery. If you would see it well, go down to where the starving _madrileños_ stack their huts and air their tattered shirts--ironic flags under the flag of Spain.

Through populous Madrid--a massive flesh--runs the artery of the calle de Toledo. The cobbled streets are moist with sweat of lives. The high walls rise, blind in a mood of siesta under the blazing sun. Winter presses like icy steel upon the open wound of Madrid’s poverty. But even in winter, the fever is there. It is damp in summer, in winter it is frozen. These streets have a cellar mood. Their stones seem porous with a fungus warmth or with a fungus odor. They are straight and steep--not gyring Moorish streets; they funnel the dark song of life, or let it escape like fume into the dry air of the meseta. Some of them are short: the leisurely streets of the old inns--posadas--of the stagecoach, of the itinerant milker with his flock of goats. Through a huge oak door, one passes into a patio. A fig tree, old as a satyr, thrusts its branches through the ancient iron balcony. Below is another patio with a pump, a rose-bush, a pile of manure, a flock of hens and a woman kneeling before a basin. Her hair and her gown are black, her lips are scarlet. Vice and compassion rise from the old close like perfumes; for this aged posada was once a convent, and bright fleshed maidens told their rosaries where now this woman looks into her mirror.

All the people are emanations of the past. Girls in the street are lovely and rank, roses over-blown. Women walk like wafts of a hot night through the day. Men are lean, high-tensioned, and isolate as lusts. But though they tide the streets, though their deeds are a storm, this agitance and lushness of Madrid fades to mirage ...

It has become a very modern city. Its boulevards are superb; it is full of smart shops and theaters; it has restaurants as expensive as the best of Paris. Its traffic is dense and efficiently controlled; its wealthy sections have the empty glitter of similar districts of Paris or New York. Madrid cannot overcome the spirit of its being, which is a spirit of stillness. Other towns in Spain grew from the needs of conquest, of commerce, of defense. God--or profit--gave them energy. But Madrid is of no such beginning: Madrid is of the _end_. It is a consummation. It stands for the Spain that has annulled its motions.

Its greatness is but the stubborn Castilian will to remain and to hold all Spain in perfect equilibrium of forces. Madrid is the town of politicians, of social servants, of soldiers. It is a _conservative_ town. It wants things as they are. From here goes forth the will to repress Barcelona, to exploit the Basques, to muzzle Unamuno, to tax Andalusia, to play at empire in Morocco. A town of government--a parasite town, it is the converse of such towns as London or Paris. For in these, greatness came first, and made them govern.

There is this subtle melancholy in Madrid, this silence under all its voices--of a life come to dark pause. And yet this same dark element is fecund. Like a culture-bed, it nurtures even with its rot.

Beside the parasite, here is the thinker; beside the exploiter, here is the creator. Along the Gran Via, the calle de Alcalà or near the Puerta del Sol are the _tertulias_. They are cafés in which the men of the town congregate each night. You will find each of them in his appointed place, from close of work until nine, when the householder returns to dinner. The café is dark and the smoke fumes are thick. The muscular integument of the Castilian language is darker and thicker. It fills the air with a heavy yet swift texture. It is fluent, agile, potent. The plastic rigor of the Spanish world is in this tongue of Spain. The men sip coffee or vermouth. They are small drinkers. One can live in Spain a year and see no drunkard. They are too busy in talk, to think of alcohol. They are talkers, neither brilliant nor dull. Their speech has weight, acuity, vigor. It is too solid to be bright: it is like the pigment of a Velázquez.

Most of these men in the tertulias are of the intricate army of bureaucratic Spain. Postman or Minister, clerk, alguacil or General--all attend their tertulia with a ritual devotion. They think that they are “running Spain”--directing a State more or less modern and which, since the choice of Ferdinand and Carlos, has willed to be European. But like all Spaniards, they are unselfconscious and are actors in a drama deeply beyond them. They are the tools of the Spanish will to remain in equilibrium--to remain in sleep. All their conservative energy goes to this end, whose symbol is Madrid.

But beside them, at other tables, in the tertulias of other cafés, are other men who form the antiphony of their neighbors. These are the intellectuals. They too are largely unselfconscious. They believe, perhaps, that they are artists creating in word or color things of intrinsic beauty, like their Parisian models. So they also put their heads close together over smoky tables and drink coffee and talk “shop.” But in truth, they are the inevitable response--the stir against and within the sleep of Spain. They are the germs of dissolution. The bureaucrats hold Spain together--in sleep. The intellectuals plot and dream to burst Spain asunder--in a new waking.

END OF PART TWO

_PART THREE_

_Beyond Spain_

_CHAPTER XI_

_THE RIFT IN BARCELONA_

The cathedrals of Spain are splendors heaped by the hand of chaos. Well they sing the discord of a world too full of life to find perfection save in the dream of death. Most of them rise from stones that formed a mosque; the mosque ofttimes was a converted citadel of Visigoth or Roman. And here Spain brought her will to unity. Where could these rank lusts of a hundred factions, these voices of continents and peoples meet, save in death? The simple romanesque is buried under the aspiring jungle of baroque, plateresque, Gothic, _churriguera_. Window, _reja_, _retablo_, altar flourish like fevers and sum up to silence.

If this is Spain, Barcelona is of another land. The cathedral of the great town of the Catalans is luminous and graceful. Although it could be lost in the vastitudes of the cathedrals of Seville or Salamanca its voice is clear and carries farther: it bespeaks the living.

Yet here, too, the church is dark. The brown-black stones are lifted by the day of the deep windows into a rosy flush. The Choir is so low that the line from _cimborio_ to _capilla mayor_ is free. Toward the Altar, the Choir is open. Its sides are exquisite spires that rise in tremulous shadow. The windows are small. They hold light in their stained glass like eyes. The church is a reticent life gazing within itself. And what it sees is an inset of twenty columns making a sort of inner body, a dark and mystic body in the gaze of the glowing outward walls.

The loveliest monument of the Catalans, their church bespeaks them. It is a thing of beauty: but unlike the beauty that resides in Spain, it is not tragic. Beauty is consummation: in Castile the goal is immobility or death. Here the perfected mood is wakefulness. The grace is gentle and assured: it is not tortured, neither is it prophetic. Close is the ease of the fields of France, of France’s churches. Close is the balance of Attica....

Islam had short shrift in the Catalan Province which rests upon the Pyrenees and faces east across the sea toward Italy and Greece. When the Moslem came, the Catalan retreated into France. And in less than a hundred years (in 797) the great town of Gerona (you can still see its walls and its fortress-church) fell to the Frankish Christians. In 801, the vassals of Charlemagne drove out the Crescent forever. Barcelona became Frankish: Catalonia was apportioned to Frankish nobles. This strain of alien blood is a symbol of the wavering dissonance that has endured in Catalonia forever. For the yearning of Spain was to be Spain: and the will of the Catalans was to be part of Europe.

The Teuton element in Spain is Visigothic. With the Franks there came across the dwindling spurs of the Pyrenees the Gallo-Romans of Provincia, a different intensity of the Idea of Rome from that of the Ibero-Romans. Catalonia straddled the mountains, mingling in spirit and in affairs with France. Almost at once after the Reconquest, it took the lead in the Mediterranean trade of the Provincian littoral. Feudalism flourished here, as it never did in Spain--a true French feudalism, heritage of Charlemagne who indeed had held Spain clear to the Ebro. The domains of the great Counts of Barcelona were as wide north of the Pyrenees as south. And already, sharing this participance of France, in the eleventh century there are Italians (Pisans) fighting under the pennants of Barcelona against the Valencian Moor. Even today, the spirit and the tongue of the Catalans bestrides the Eastern Pyrenees from Lérida to the French Roussillon, from Tarragona to the French Port Vendres.

The Catalan of Spain is an outsider within the gates. Ere Spain stratified her chaos into locked unity, Catalonia was free to be exploited by the hardier will of Aragon. But as Aragon was set within the grip of Isabel of Castile, Catalonia became an irrepressible motion--needing to be repressed. Its flow of energy in an immobile State meant anarchy: its lyrism was discord within Spain whose counterpoint of themes summed into silence. Spain achieved her union. Madrid on the roof of Castile became the symbol of union: Barcelona, at the half open gate which led to Italy and France, to Greece and Africa, became the symbol of disruption.

Castile tried to woo this province, as it wooed Valencia, Galicia, Extremadura, Andalusia. But the Catalan blood could not respond to the immobile ecstasy of Castile: nor could the winds and the songs which blew in at the door of Barcelona be shut out. The Catalan remained light, moving, gay. When the unity of Spain was strong, the Catalan was a tonic discord. Now that Spain’s unity is flaccid, the Catalan is a menace.

But if Barcelona is not Spain, neither is it France. The Catalan is a unique organic compound of the Mediterranean, of the Mountain and of Spain. His cathedral is set in a town that beats with a rich fervor. The _Ramblas_--wide, gay avenues--descend to the sea and the town faces with them from the wooded hills. It is an old ripe city: a labyrinth of streets that are fresh with the salt, dark with the feudal yoke, yet glamorously flowing as if in cognizance of the genius of this people to outlast all yokes. This is no strong race, as the Aragonese or even the Basques are strong. It is a subtle and a gracious people. Its secret of survival is manifest in the women: delicate daughters of Eve, perhaps the fairest of all Europe, hued like April orchards, and with eyes like twilight. They have the permanence not of the eternal, but of the evanescent which returns. The flower that was Greece has been cast here upon a coast of Spain and has grown afresh. This life does not resist: it returns. France mastered the Catalans: and they returned. Aragon used them ruthlessly in war: they returned. Castile stifles and racks them: they are returning. For they are like the Spring, the evanescent Spring--which returns....

Their rising song begins to be heard over the shut land. It is not heroic song: it is after all the assertion of a race of traders. It is not thunderous. What thunders is the Castilian silence. And the heroic is the Spanish sleep. And the enduring is the Spanish drama of which the Catalans, even in their apartness, must be part. Spain has a dawning will to break from the unity which its will created: her atoms, anarchic but pregnant, stir to be loosed and to begin again. Despite its denial, Catalonia shares in this unborn Spain. Once the resistance of the Catalans helped to rouse Aragon and Castile with greater energy and clearer mind: helped to create Spain. Now this same resistance of the Catalans, even if it disrupts, may serve to create Spain again.

_CHAPTER XII_

_THE COMEDY OF THE BASQUE_

In the north where the Cantabrian ranges and the Pyrenees rim the Bay of Biscay, lives a peculiar people. Even its land is different from Spain’s. The air is temperate, moist. Mountains are clad in forest. Fields of high grass bring honeyed redolence. The green plateaux come down above the sea, like masses of the Alps brought to the Spanish coast. These lands, so like Europe, so unlike Spain, are studded with stone towns. Houses are gabled, narrow streets are cobbled: there is a note of canniness and of seclusion in the towns of the Basque.

When the Romans made a province of Iberia, the Basque lived unconcerned. When the Moslem swept north, the Basque withdrew into the mountains and withstood him. When the Visigoth came through the passes of the Pyrenees, the Basque stood aside and let him go. When Catholic Roland with the troops of Charlemagne followed the Visigoth, it was the Basque not the “Saracen,” who beat them at Roncesvalles. When, finally, the kings of Castile, having cleared Spain of Moor and Jew, turned to subdue the Basque, he submitted only as a vassal bowing the head to a more powerful alien. By decree, Fernando VI ennobled all the Basques in the Province of Vizcaya: already in 1200, the entire population of the Province of Guipúzcoa had been declared hidalgos.

An indelible, an archaic people! They seem to be a race in an archaic fashion: a race _by blood_! Spaniards, Chinese, Frenchmen, Jews are a race _by culture_. But the Basques appear to have had no culture. Their language was unwritten. They possessed no history, no social records, no underlying base of ethic, or religion. If they possessed a culture, it was almost biologic. It persisted in blood, in instinct, rather than in concept. A certain haleness of self-sufficiency, a certain gusto for aloofness kept them intact and unique in a land which for three thousand years boiled with invasion.

In their survival they became neither tragic nor heroic. Naught could be farther from the Basque than such other peculiar peoples as the Armenian or Jew. The Basques had no separate Book, no separate God. Very early, they accepted Christ. He did not make them merge with their Catholic neighbors, because their instincts were differently attuned. Spain is a world of Tragedy, of mystic ideals, of devotion to unseen spirits. The Basque is concrete, light, canny. The Spaniard faces all that he encounters: this confrontation is the genius of Tragedy. But the Basque _evades_: and this evasion is the genius of Comedy.

Who the Basques were is not clear: doubtless early dwellers in the Peninsula--part of the peoples whom the Phœnicians found when they first skirted Spain. Their music suggests kinship with the Celt; but this may well be due to the neighborhood of the Celts who named the Spanish province of Galicia. Their music as well suggests kinship with the Berbers--the Rifians of Morocco. Their language is inscrutably alone: it bears no relation with any of the tongues of Babel. But whoever they were they remain. Their blood in the small towns is little mixed; and their heads unmixed also. While through the ages, Spain drank a torrent of Ideas--Greek, Roman, Moslem, Christian, Jew--and bent to the tragic fusing of Africa, Asia, Europe, America into a single Spain, the Basque quite simply kept on being himself.

His virtues, like those of his mountains, are conservatism and power of non-absorption. The Basque language paints this well. It contains no word for _God_, no word for _spirit_. This is a people rooted to the earth and which kept to its pastures and farmyards.[27] Not alone had the Basque mind not reached metaphysics and religion when his tongue was formed: even common concepts were beyond it. There is a Basque word for dog, pig, cow, lizard: there is none for _animal_. There is a Basque word for oak, pine, chestnut: there is none for _tree_. A most excellently defended, anti-platonic people! Their mountains and their mountain-courage warded them free of many floods of races. And their heads kept them clear of metaphysics. Concepts of God, time, substance are drains upon the business of life. For the interims of business, there is the singing of songs, there is the gathering in eights to dance the bland _aurrescu_.

The towns of the Basques express them. The little Guipúzcoan village lies between the mountains and the sea. The mountains slope into a level field with cattle and kine growing fat in the lush grasses. The field rolls to a precipitous edge of rock which falls a thousand feet into the Bay of Biscay. The beach is a conch with sand as smooth and white as the heart of a sea-shell. Through the town, a road girding the villages runs on the seawall. On the one side of the road, the Bay of Biscay--blue as a bluebell: on the other, the precipice with stone-hewn steps that lead to an Alpine verdance of pasture and of dingle.

The streets of the town are massive. The houses look as if builded for siege. But they are not forbidding: they are too sure of themselves. They are smiling even; though they are dense and strong. Through the narrow streets moves a mellow race in gesture of traffic and trade. Like the houses, these men and women face the world in sober colors. But their eyes are large, and here one reads peace: the lips have the fret of a smile, and there is laughter tingling the cadence of their talk. At night they gather in the Plaza, lined with cafés: and while the old ones drink, the young ones dance. Their dance is a pleasant casual exercise--not far from the usual way of walk and word. It is a hopping and bobbing of couples, a weaving of bodily life and bodily sense into the already existent pattern of their social ease. That is why they dance in the public Square, while the old ones gossip....

Every Sunday morning, as the sun tips over the town, three men--one with a drum, two with _dulsínya_ or _chistu_ (a shrill metallic pipe which bears much resemblance to the pipe of the African Berber)--march through the silent streets, through every street and alley of the town, incessantly playing: so that no Vasco, good or bad, shall oversleep the Mass. This music trills through the morning like the cool sun-filaments through dawn. It has the dogged filigree of a Scottish bagpipe. It is more resolved, however, shriller, less fluid: and its notations are wider. The tune of the _chistu_ interweaves with the plang of drum, and makes the houses smile and dance a bit ere they are quite awake.

* * * * *

The dance, the smile, the song are never absent. Afternoons, when work is done in shop or field, the girls will sing till the late hour of _cena_. Rosa is not pretty. Her face is a little long and has a tilt which is not of Europe. The nose droops, the mouth is large, the eyes are resilient and black under the strangely curving brow. But Rosa is charming. A white kerchief lies on her shoulders, pointed to the throat. The naked arms are bright against the marron velvet of the bodice; the breasts are caught by a diagonal sash something like the straps of a grenadier. Rosa’s hips are wide; her legs, stockinged in gray wool, have a full firmness--like her breasts--that bespeaks valiance in emotion.

The room is cool and bare: through the high windows comes the mellow murmur of the folk walking the rigid street, between the sea and the mountain. The girls are a warm fragrance in the room. They sing. The songs warm them: they dance. Their heads sway, their throats pulse, their arms rise and fall.

These songs are older than the tambour and the pipe: the girls sing them without accompaniment. Many have sad themes. But even as tragedy invades the brightest _fado_ of Portugal, so here a tripping flexible gait overbears the pathos. The music bespeaks a clever, winning people. It has mobility, but it is not plastic. It has the nature of sun splintered on cloud or running upon water, of the patter of rain on house-tops, of waves pelting the hull of a sail-boat. It is a music of light, of surface-patterns of light. On all the earth, there is no music stranger to that of Spain--to the plastic, sculptural, soul-deep song of Spain.

It is good music: its mobile patterns are abstracted into grace and hardness: its swiftness never blurs, its poignance does not become sentimental. It is not deep music. It remains of the periphery, and its moods are varieties of reflection, rather than of creation. The Basque remains _one_. What varies is the circumstance of life; so he wards it off, he holds it well outside him. Through a hundred ages, Spain has moved in a processional whose faiths and passions the Spaniard has absorbed. But the Basque shuts out. So his song--trilling, skipping, flashing in color and light--is a music of intimations, rather than of experience.

Was this pagan people first enticed to become Catholic, because of the occasions offered by a Calendar of Saints for singing and for dancing? Every church festival is a _fiesta_, a _romería_ for the Basque. The fiesta of San Iñigo de Loyola is one of the great days of the land, for Iñigo Lopez de Recalde, founder of the Society of Jesus, was a Basque. The day of the author of the ruthless Exercises, of the chronicler of Hell, becomes a day of merriment: foot races, water races, trials of strength lead up to the climax--the contests in the arts of song and dance. The Spaniard is no sportsman. His bull fight is an ordeal and an art. His games are pretexts for gambling. His Carnival is a means of fierce release for the instincts repressed by morality, caste and honor. But the Basque is a sportsman. He is incapable of the true carnival spirit. He turns his feast-days into sport-days.

An altar has been decked out on the façade of a house in the Plaza. Under a bower of gilt, the priest harangues in _vascuence_.[28] His theme is the curse of Modernism and Socialism, the hellish lust which hides in the laborer’s appetite for better wages. (The Basques are the industrialists of Spain: the ore and factories of Bilbao are not far off.) On one side of the Square is the summer palace of an Andalusian Duke. His balconies are hung with great mantones; gorgeous splotches of gold and green and crimson in the sun. The altar faces an esplanade which steps down to the sea. But the Basque throng is aloof from the priest in his garish altar, from the flash of Spain on the walls of the Duke’s palace, aloof even from the sea. It is a packed, resilient body. It is waiting to play. Its mood is very like the mood of a sporting crowd in England. Here is none of the hot dark fervor which Spain brings even to the bull fight.

The races are over, and the last Mass. The crowds circle the platform for the dance contest. There is a piper and a drummer. The cadences of the _chistu_ are thin and cool. The drummer weaves a tattoo that becomes the matted background for the imponderous figures of the pipe. When the dancer and piper cease, the drum goes on in an incantation which is moving precisely because it is so unemphatic, so subhumanly cool, so pale. It reminds one, indeed, of the nixies of the Celt, the blond green creatures of the northern marshes. It seems as far from Spain as are the braes of Scotland. The designs of the dance are brief. Here is grace in line and point: daintiness; above all spiritual aloofness. In the pauses of dance and music, ever unceasing the weave of the drum. The elves also of the Atlas are around the corner: but Spain is miles away.

_Agura_, _contrapas_, _anarxuma_, _zaspi_, _trititzka_, _soka_, _aguruku_, _taladera_--numberless Basque dance-figures. What distinguishes them is that they are all social: that they are stylized from details of the common life. The dance of Andalusia is a plastic form for the soul. These dances are scenes of bodily acts. Their stuff is not spirit, nor essence of emotion. It is a synthesis of homely gestures taken from farm or field. Here is an _apple dance_, an intricate elaboration of the bestowal of apples. Here is a _chair dance_, a design of men and women in easy social converse. The _Siete Saltos_ is a stylization of the walk--of men walking together. The music is major; the dance is comedic. Indeed, it holds the trait of social comedy which in France produced Molière. But also, it has a purity of abstract line which recalls the classic dance of the Pueblo Indians or of the Pacific Negroes. With, again, a difference of tone and subject: the dances of the “savage” are elemental, they call rain, they invoke harvest, they enact sexual passion.

In another part of town there is a match of _pelota_. This game is originally Basque; its pure form of sport lives still in the Basque village where boys play on a dirt court against a plaster wall, or against the wall of the church if the hamlet is very modest. The Spaniards, however, have taken to pelota. It has become a game for professionals; and although all the crack players are Basque, the spirit of the sport has been transformed. It is played in the _frontón_: a court, three sides of which are high walls of cement. The fourth side (the long one, to the right of the players who all face one way) is for the public whose tiers of seats are placed in a sort of open building. A pair of players make a team, and two teams make a match. To the right hand of each athlete is strapped a thin short wooden bat called _pala_, or else, in a variant of the game, a basket, known as _cesta_, or _remonte_, shaped a little like the curved beak of some bird, scooped and long and narrow. The principle of pelota is like our handball which may indeed be a derivation. But the Basque game with its great distance of service and return, its complexity of movement due to the use of three walls for the rebounds of the fast ball, achieves an extraordinary brilliance. Volleys last for minutes: the ball flashes back and forth from the front wall to the side and rear ones. There is something of the delicacy of billiards, the grace of tennis: and there is a spill of sheer physical prowess which tennis does not approach. It is a beautiful game: the game of a sane, healthily outward people. But in the hands of the Spaniard, all this becomes minor.

Between the public and the court is a railing which until the game starts is empty. With the first volley, however, a large group of men in red _boinas_ line up here, facing the public, with their backs to the players. They are the _cobradores_, the bookies: the true principals in what Spain has made of pelota. With the first service, they gather their first odds and cry their bets. And until the last of the game, the shifting of odds, the placing of bets continue: the players themselves serving as a mere pretext for the gambling, like the _petits chevaux_ of wood at a gaming table.[29]

* * * * *

These are invasions of Spain upon the Basque land. There are whole towns in Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Alava, where Castile has rooted and worked havoc. Such a town is San Sebastián, summer capital of the king and of the intellectuals of Madrid. There are even towns which Castile has destroyed....

The _carrera_ runs along the breasting cliffs from San Sebastián to Santander beside a sea blue as the summer sky. It crosses the tip of a little city resting on land that tongues from the mountain far into the Bay. The land is high and steep: the streets twine. And in their midst, coiled all about by alleys, stands a smothered church. It is blackened by the salt of seven hundred years. It stands low: there is a street at its door, and there are other streets at rising levels on its four façades, so that it is plunged and buried in the town. And the windows are rare, or are blanked by pavements and by the cellars of adjoining houses. Only the steeple is sheer to the open heaven.

It is an ignoble church, foul like a ship’s bottom after a voyage round the seven seas. Its nave is foul with shadows; its windows have a yellow blear like the eyes of the beggar at the gate.

The town is stifled and somber: it is like an apple rotted by this old church at its core. The Basque here has forgotten how to dance. He has not turned his saints’ days into merry making. The church has conquered: the Empiry of Castile.

But more significant than such invasions of the end of old Spain upon the Basque, are the invasions of the modern Basque into the life of Spain. While the Spaniard gave himself to crusades and conquest, the Basque held aloof with his energy untapped. To resist invasion of body and of spirit took courage. But the effort was as naught beside the effort of the Spaniard to fuse Moslem, Jew, German, Roman, Celt, into one Spanish soul. The Spanish soul was achieved: but Spanish spirit locked in the exertion. This was the moment of the Basque with his reserve of virgin power. He had no culture but the most primitive; no world for the expanding of his might save a strip of rocky soil. Spain offered a profound culture and the sea, and worlds beyond the sea. Now the Basque passes from his spiritual sleep--passes into Spain, through the door which Spain herself had battered open....

_CHAPTER XIII_

_TWO ANDALUSIANS_

_a. The Sleepers_ _b. The Awakeners_ _c. The Sleepless Spirit_

_a. The Sleepers_

Spain is not a failure; Spain is not decadent; Spain is complete. By the too literal achievement of kings and mystics, the vital forces of a vital land lock as in sleep. This sleep is one of the two moods of art and letters in contemporary Spain. It has been long upon the land and the land loves it. Poets have found in it all the delight of cradled balance, all the delight of dream. They have made of this sleep of Spain a passionate Nirvana in which the actions of Spain’s waking life return in pageantry. The ghosts of fire and blood are here: and a pleasant hopelessness which saves from the scourge of ambition. Spain becomes a mirrored play of faces and of scenes, for her own self-adoring. First of all despair. This perennially ironic race has distilled the love of failure from its too great success. Spain in the nineteenth century knew an ecstatic impotence which only Russia equaled. It was about 1835 that Larra wrote: “_Escribir en Madrid es llorar_--to write in Madrid is to weep.” “Do not attempt to create,” he told his fellows. “Ye are Spaniards; the task is hopeless. Must ye wield a pen? Then translate from the French.” Larra’s last logical act was to blow out his brains. But the spirit of Larra is still upon the tables of the cafés of Madrid. Sleep here is a wine of Spain’s historic act. Despair is voluptuous. Incompetence is a cult. And votaries of this narcistic trance are among Spain’s finest writers.

Chief of them all perhaps is Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán.[30] Cervantes had a crippled hand; Don Ramón lacks an arm. Rojas who wrote _La Celestina_ four centuries ago split his novel into dialogue and acts. Don Ramón does likewise--and interweaves with his Castilian words and forms that even Rojas would have found archaic. Don Ramón’s books sell not for current pesetas, but for obsolete _reales_. His typography is studiously ancient. Upon his works is printed _opera omnia_: and they are illumined with medieval wood-cuts. His texts reveal a virtuosity in the use of old Castilian with a mingling of the pure vocables of Galician, once the poetic tongue of Spain, so imaginative as to be an art. It is an art of tone and verbal plastic. Don Ramón is an hidalgo of Galicia, that rocky northwest province which the Arabs scarce pierced: and he boasts of his Celtic blood. There is a strong and curious kinship between the dialogue of his books and that of Synge. But the kinship goes no deeper than an echo. The volumnear body of Valle-Inclán’s prose serves to mass a death: his drama is one of furious rhetoric. All the more glorious ghosts of Spain stalk in his books. The Church with its “charity of the sword,” chivalry mildewed and broken from its long passage southward, clan warfare, mystic fealty and love are personified in the were-wolf bombast of his scenes. But though these shapes be ghosts, they have no charnel odor: the salt of modern irony--the perennial Spanish irony--is on them. Their puissance is not to be challenged. The dark firm candor of this prose is so enchanting that one accepts the nightmarish or sentimental dumb-show: this gesturing pageantry of Dream which is the Dream of Spain.

A pendant to Don Ramón is José Martínez Ruiz, known as Azorín.[31] Valle-Inclán is dramatic and dionysian: his mood is perpendicular like the mountain steeps of his Galicia. Azorín’s elegiac tone is smooth as the subtle huertas of Valencia where he was born. His books are haunting, climaxless: they spread the nostalgia which inspires them. In them lives the small _pueblo_ of high Spain. He loves the village for the pure success of its equilibrium in sleep. He loves to follow Don Quixote over the _llanura_ of La Mancha. He loves to doze in the manure-soaked inns of the Castilian desert. For this world is full of ghosts. And Azorín casts the wide net of wistfulness to snare them all. His prose, unlike the mighty, archaic organ of Valle-Inclán, has been tinged with the perfumed winds of France which mingle oddly enough, across the Pyrenees, with the rank heat of the posadas of Toledo or with the ciceronian rhetoric of a peasant from Medina. Azorín’s passive, apollonian state has left him open to invading foreign accents. Yet his central impulse is authentic, and his form is Spanish. Here is the pleasant pain of dream--against the nightmare mood of Don Ramón: a minor note within Spain’s sleep. After the battalions of Moor and Catholic have trampled on, here is the plaint in which the fields and towns sink back upon themselves....

Spain’s most popular poet, Antonio Machado[32] is an Andalusian: but he sings of Castile. His theme is the robust and brutal world in which the pícaro careered. Unlike Valle-Inclán, Machado does not recreate this world of four centuries past with archaic language or atavistic mood. His means is more subtle. That world lives on, evaporate and refined, in the subconscious tone of Spain. Machado captures the old splendor by imaging its reverberations. His prosody is a canon of echoes. The echo is the shell of the shout. So the rounded and mellow music of Machado suggests the hollow form of an heroic life. The graphic density of life in heroic Spain has left this pattern. If the hard bodies of the Spanish soil were bubbles holding a void as hollow as the Spanish sky, they would be the poems of Machado. He harks back to Velázquez: the supreme graphic master reappears in words, diminished, lyrical, plaintive. The voice of the stark past of Spain comes muffled in this sleep.

The ecstatic revery is rich in changes. Against Machado who sings the larger currents of the Dream is set the exquisite, scholarly Ramón Pérez de Ayala.[33] Ayala, who is an Asturian, is his epoch’s most cultivated novelist and most fanciful poet. This man who in _Política y Toros_ has written the profoundest apologia of the bull fight and the subtlest satire on Spain’s political abulia, beneath his disguise of timeliness is an archaicizer also: one who dwells as deep as his neighbor Valle-Inclán within Spain’s narcistic adoration. But it is the schools and cloisters which haunt Ayala: his way to the past is that of meditation and of learning. Like Azorín, Ayala has not been proof against French literary currents. The note of Anatole France is a bit too clear in his novels. But perhaps there is an organic kinship between the Spaniard and the last master of the French contemplative tradition. Like Anatole France, Ayala is a musing man: a man of satiric, wistful fancy rather than of imagination. His style progenitors are those amazing mystics of sixteenth century Spain who managed to endow ecstasy with Horatian polish. The sedulous, synthetic texts of Ayala are a panoply of dream: Spain dreaming of her cathedrals and her schools, Spain blowing lovely and seductive patterns--two volumes upon the Names of Christ--from the effluvia of medieval culture. The modern in Ayala is the ironic salt of intellectual awareness.[34]

* * * * *

There is a moment between sleep and waking, when the mind spans the abyss between eternity and time. Consciousness turns inward on the realm of sleep; the materials and meanings of the dream form to the measure of thought, live an instant the spatial, temporal life ere they dissolve. In this encounter the worlds of sleep and waking are both broken up. Their fragments make a counterpoint of exquisite discord; but the relation between them brings a subtle vision. The minute and the infinite merge. Essence of dream takes the conforming shape of the categories of the intellect; and the objective sense for once is applied to what is real. This mysterious hinterland Ramón Gómez de la Serna has made his realm. He has mastered it. He has been mastered by it.[35]

Spain stands at this transition, between sleep and waking. Ramón is the elegist of its dissolving colors, of its shattered and luminous shapes. Valery Larbaud has compared Ramón with Arthur Rimbaud. The æsthetic object of Ramón is indeed the atom; but whereas in Rimbaud the atom is explosive, bursting the cerements of cultured France, the atom in Ramón merges forever with the intricate flow of waking sense and thought. His true fellow is not Rimbaud but Marcel Proust. Proust made a portrait of a society in deliquescence: of its break-up into the essences, atoms, maggots of dissolution. Ramón also weaves the filmy spell of a dissolving world, although in him the dissolution is not social but subjective. Spain stirs in this limbo: her eye peers back into the fleeting images of dream. Ramón is her eye.

Wherefore the contradictions in his work. Rich in color, it is evanescent. Affluent in intimations of form, it is formless. His books are collections of uncollectible items. His true form is chaos. He is indeed the runner of a rainbow; and should he stop one moment, he would fall through mist. His one subject is the instant of palpable inarticulation. But his world is still the dreamed Body of Spain. However dissolute her state, Spain yet looks inward on her slumber. Ramón is no prophet; save unconsciously. In him, Spain says to herself: “I am asleep”--the sign of waking....

_b. The Awakeners_

The entire nineteenth century of Spain was the stormy and dark threshold of this waking. In 1898, Spain suffered more from the loss of the Isle of Cuba than she had suffered from the previous loss of the worlds from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. So the “generation of 1898” became the symbol, when it was but the sequel, of Spain’s stir. Spain suffered more in 1898 because she was nearer waking.

The earliest signs were perhaps political. The extraordinary Constitution of 1812--more radical than the present one of England--gave way to absolutism. Quixotism tremored on, in the sleep of Spain. Carlism, the extreme of reaction, swung back into a republic. But the republic[36] was a mere parade of presidents. High-minded, eloquent men, they had no contact with organic Spain. The face twitched; the mind slept.

More prophetic of spiritual action was the work of a professor and scholar, Francisco Giner de los Ríos.[37] Don Francisco was the friend of the makers of the brief republic. But instead of holding office, he founded a school. (His _Institución libre de Enseñanza_ stands still in Madrid, environed by convents.) And instead of delivering orations, he gathered about him the intelligent discontent of Spain. He was a leader and nourisher of men. And the sons of his spirit have written the dynamic books of the age. Giner’s weapon for awakening Spain was Europe. He sent his followers to France, Italy, Germany and England--to bring home seed and leaven. He saw the problem of his land as a simple one of retardation. Spain for organic reasons had lagged. Let her catch up.

While his school flourished--a little hearth of Europe at which the Spanish intellectual might warm his hand--a young diplomat, Angel Ganivet,[38] published a work that was the antiphony of this Modern hymn. The _Idearium Español_ looms large in the tale of Spain’s renascence. Ganivet was a poor historian and a weak logician. His little book bristles with arguments, æsthetic and ethnic, which no one can accept. Yet it holds a deep philosophy of Spain’s career. To Ganivet, Spain is not of Europe: the trend of her growth must be toward Africa as it has been from Africa. All of the adventure in America and Europe was a false step. The “Age of Gold” was an age of madness. The effort to adopt the pragmatic materialist culture of the West was doomed to failure. Spain is Christian; not Roman; Christian in the way of the Spanish Stoic, Seneca, of the African patrists, Origen and Augustine, of the Semitic spirit of Don Quixote. Ganivet scorns the standards and success of modern Europe. He senses the heroism--the need of heroism--in the Spanish soul: its peculiar way of sudden climaxes followed by periods of sleep. The down leveling of Europe is as alien and abhorrent to him as it was to Nietzsche. He fears the _aurea mediocritas_ of England as a poison to the Spanish blood. He looks with equanimity on Spain’s colonial disasters since Spain colonized “not for coal but for souls”; and on the nadir of Spain’s culture, since from it shall rise again such sudden giants as were Cervantes, Velázquez, Góngora, Lope. He pleads for the acceptance, in the spirit of a religious sacrifice, of Spain’s difference from the brilliant capabilities of France and England. His book, appearing in 1896, urged the relinquishment of the last Colonies. Two years later, Cuba and the Philippines were gone. But though his book was a Jeremiah’s prophecy, Ganivet lacked the strength to face the apathy of his people. In that same year, he died by his own hand.

Not, however, before he had met the opposing, clamorous word of the man who, gradually, was to veer to his own vision. Miguel de Unamuno[39] had corresponded with Ganivet while they were young in Madrid. The result of their exchange was _El Porvenir de España_, a volume in which they estimate the opposing doctrines: that Spain must be awakened by letting in “ultra-pyrenean currents,” and that Spain has been ruined precisely by these currents. To Ganivet, the history of Spain reveals no “Spanish period.” Let there be one! he cries. Unamuno counters that eclecticism is the unity of Spain. “Spain is still to be discovered,” he thunders, “and will be discovered only by European Spaniards.” In the volume which defines this attitude of his youth, _En Torno al Casticizmo_, he diagnoses the abulia of Spain. The Inquisition was bad because it shut out the four winds of Europe: Spain was forced to feed upon herself. Spain’s historical tradition was bad, because it was anti-European. He declares for the _corrientes ultrapirenáicas_. Ganivet was dead. Even had he lived, this mystic afield in history must have lacked the power to answer Unamuno. Unamuno is the strongest moralist of our day. Wells and Shaw have thin voices beside his well-aimed uproar. There was no one, then, in Spain to answer Unamuno. Unamuno answered himself.

His answer is not analytic. This radical mystic scorns the fuss of argument. The Inquisition, shutting out the “four winds” from Spain was indeed “bad.” Its purpose--unity--was good. Its confusing homogeneity with unity and its means of action were not Spanish at all: were of Rome, of France, of Europe. Spain had been the most tolerant land of all the West: even Islam grew tolerant in Spain: Rome alone, making the Visigoth into crusader and winning Isabel to its own waning theoditic dream, made Spain intolerant. The historical tradition which won in Spain was also European: it was a mixture of the state policy of France and the church policy of Rome. (France was never guilty of such nonsense: France the State was consistently anti-Roman.) Finally, whence came these “ultra-pyrenean currents” that were to flush Spain once more with fecund air? They were ideas that reached Western Europe by the very ethnic worlds of which Spain is the organic integer. Ideas from the Greek and Alexandrian, from the Jew and Egyptian and Arab: many entered Europe directly by the door of Spain; none came to Spain by way of western Europe. They came by the sea and the south--in that long germinal embrace whereby Phœnician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Jew, Copt, Arab, Moor were poured into Spain’s womb. What Western Europe did was to transform and finally to betray these living thoughts. The Visigoth minority represented Spain’s medievalism: and its action was a retarded and arbitrary form of what in Germanic Europe produced the noble synthesis of Catholic culture. In Spain, the naturalistic Semites were too dominant for a culture based on transcendental values. Medievalism in Spain became a maniacal gesture. Modernism? It is the breakdown of the medieval culture: its intellectualism, its systematization is a vast Machine proficient at destroying, and creating nothing. Is this what Spain must come to, to be saved? Unamuno reconsiders; and by 1905 he has his answer--which is indeed a conversion.

Unamuno is an expression of dynamic egoism. This atom has got loose from the locked coil of Spain; and what a surge it has! Yet all his doctrine comes rather simply down to the assertion of an immense personal will emerging from the stratified social trammels of his land. The intrinsic substance of Unamuno’s thought will strike the Western mind as meager; but the drama of its formulation is a new act in Spain, the flesh of its assertion is a fresh embodiment of the Spanish spirit.

This announcement of a personal will recalls at once earlier apocalypses of the north: Blake, Whitman, Dostoievski, Nietzsche. Unamuno’s assertion is important, because it is made up of the conflicting substances of Spain. The voice of this man declaring that he will never die, and that he will never live according to the herd-patterns of modern Europe, becomes palpable and true, because it is so deeply Spanish. Perhaps the æsthetic value of the utterances of Whitman, Dostoievski, Nietzsche, Blake is similarly grounded in racial substance. The case is evident in Unamuno. Freeing himself from the still equipoise of Spain he frees himself from nothing that is Spanish.

In Unamuno, the same Spanish spirit heretofore held in tragic unison--in the actless unison of its will--swings once more into motion. Instead of equating each other, the elements of the Spanish soul line up _behind_ the soul of Unamuno and serve to project him, parabola-wise, into his personal heaven. Here is Spain’s neo-medieval sense of the futility of life; here is Christ; here is Spain’s narcistic love of the extremes within her, whence arose the pícaro and the saint. Here above all is Spain, enemy of pragmatism and of rational progress, worshiper of the Absolute--Spain that will be heaven or hell, and never merely earth; and yet will not loose her hold on earth, in all her visions of heaven.

Unamuno transfigures the despised and comic person of Don Quixote. This symbol of his land’s wrong-headed action becomes for Unamuno the god of a new Order, the prophet of a new national revelation. Don Miguel de Unamuno of the Basques identifies his cause of pure and personal effort with the crusade of the old hidalgo of La Mancha. Like that knight, he will construct his world platonically from the ideals of his inheritance and go forth _really_ that it may prevail. As Quixote fought common sense, Unamuno fights “business.” The old windmills are now factories, the old inns are industrial cities, the old King’s police are the votaries of Demos. Where all that is glorious has become so sterile, all that is serious so low, let Don Quixote be savior. The final jest of the bitter, broken Cervantes becomes our Man of Sorrows. Does not the mockery of modern Europe call for a ridiculous Messiah? The sterile and impotent meseta of Castile--that butt of Europe--shall be the mount of the new Zion, for the new Sermon.

So with inimitable verve and wit, Unamuno identifies his will with the old body of Spain: and hobbles forth, like Quixote, to enact justice. He wants it for himself. But since Spain is in him, since Spain is his Rocinante, Spain must go along. Spain must wake, if only for his sake.

Unamuno’s philosophy is a tissue of compensations: which by no means proves it to be false. He feels inferior in Europe as a Spaniard? he will assert his immortal soul against all Germany and England. He feels his peopled cultural impotence before the sure voice of France? he will turn this anguish into the travail of birth. The method is persuasive. Our modern world is so very shoddy, that any honest light can show it up. The prose fabric of our civilization is so thin, that any song can tear it. And Unamuno is essentially a poet, even though his best vehicle is the short personal essay which, indeed, his pen has made a powerful æsthetic organ.

The atomic individualism of Unamuno is strictly modern: it springs from Rousseau and the German romantics. It is the inevitable impulse to “return to a beginning” which has overwhelmed the modern soul since the breakdown of the Medieval House. But if this atomic will is modern, the values it propels in Unamuno remain medieval.

* * * * *

The intrinsic value of such work either as thought or as æsthetic form is very slight. Interest in Unamuno hinges on interest in Spain. The power of this soul, one feels, approaches that of Whitman or Dostoievski. But the substance in which it has clothed itself is less negotiable. Like Don Quixote, Unamuno fails to realize that the modern world can be defeated only with modern weapons. Our multiverse, our chaos of sterile facts, is the result of an abuse of analytic methods. The true savior will have to understand and accept this analytic world, ere he can transform it. Unamuno, believing that he preaches to the world a new Salvation, is merely rousing Spain from her old ordered sleep.[40]

_c. The Sleepless Spirit_

In this new stir of Spain, it is not wonderful that the land which created Córdoba, Cádiz, Seville, which perfected the Dance and the cante hondo, which gave birth to Gabírol, to Góngora, should lead in the fresh emergence of Spain’s perennial spirit. For Andalús achieved the Spanish Balance without the Castilian rigor; obeyed like every part of Spain the will of Castile to make Spain’s chaos into One and yet contrived to keep that Oneness green. A painter and a poet of modern Andalusia voice so clearly the spirit of the land, that they speak again for the world. They are Pablo Picasso and Juan Ramón Jiménez.[41]

Picasso is a man of Málaga who came to Paris, and by the strategy of time and place conquered the plastic world. To the French, he appeared the Heaven-sent inheritor of Cézanne. Cézanne, naturalistic mystic and lover of El Greco, made of each stroke of his brush a preachment of the sanctity of form. Pure form, in his work, had its ritual of sacrament in its intrinsic stuffs. The Body and the Blood of life were to Cézanne the volumes and the movements palpable to the eye. El Greco, in a devout Catholic Age, was able to retain the legendary forms of Christianity as at least subsidiary means to express his vision. Cézanne was driven back on what seemed to him “primary” matter: the hills and the haystacks and the human body. His work implicitly rejects the concepts of European culture by its refusal of them all, as aids to revelation. Not religion, not ethics, not “beauty” shall be syllables for Cézanne, as for his predecessors, in the spelling of his Word. In this sense, Cézanne aspires to the primitivism which accepts the essences of previous culture and rejects its forms. Ideationally, he created and bequeathed a void: but an expectant and a fertile one. The successor of Cézanne was bound to be a man with concepts to fill in his abstract wording.

Concepts come to Europe from the east. It appears that Western Europe can create no concepts of the Real, although she creates the greatest Forms for concepts.[42] Like Cézanne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dostoievski, Blake, Whitman, Wagner were in this sense inviters of the east; the line of nineteenth century masters was long, who in their rejection of the conceptual forms of their inheritance, filled the world once more with a clamorous hunger for fresh Ideas to make incarnate. It is this hunger that explains, in art, the vogue of El Greco, of African sculpture, of Picasso.

The Idea in Picasso is the _arabesque_. The Moslem needed to harmonize his love of beauty and his fear of idols. He required a plastic form which would not, like the forms of physical nature, recall the old idolatries of the desert. The letters of his holy Arabic language served him, even as the Hebrew letters served, in the Kabbala, to make a Temple for the medieval Jews. These letters of the Arab held Allah and all the world of Islam, and yet were freed of natural associations. In Picasso, there is a similar impulse. His need also, as an artist, is to make designs; but his fear was an idolatry of another sort. The associations attached to physical forms--religion, sentiment, moral value--were already so unconvincing in the nineteenth century that Cézanne refused them, as Moses the Golden Calf. Now, even the sensory organisms formed by the eye must be rejected. To the hand of a Raphael, a woman’s body is amenable to art through its motherhood, its sanctity, its sexual appeal. These are cogent means for his æsthetic work. To Cézanne a woman’s body is still a woman’s body. Picasso rejects even the associative concept of _woman_: her body becomes a configuration of planes, densities, colors.

This formal use of transfigured substances is old in Spain. Spain’s wildest excess of sculpture and ornament in the _plateresque_ holds an element of transformed abstraction that recalls Egypt. The Spanish dance resolves dramatic gesture into a formal end. And now, Picasso makes an _arabesque_ of the letters and signs of nature.

Paris has worked perhaps too much upon Picasso. It has made him a “court” painter. This is intrinsically no ill thing: Ronsard and Racine were poets of the Court. The essential dynamism of Picasso has been urbanized; his intellectual stuffs have been turned at times into theory, into impulse. From creation, he has been deflected into analysis which is the antithesis of creation.[43] All this, because Paris is a Court of painters, with the tendency to cultivate the statement which clarifies at the expense of the creation; to address only itself; to polish surfaces rather than plumb new depths. Or, perhaps, the trouble is that this Court of Paris is not Picasso’s. It has needed him, more than he Paris. Too often has Picasso fragmented his invention into sharp annunciations of the theory others builded from his work. Yet for all that, he has brought light to the west: it came with him from Málaga: it rises from Andalusian depths older than Spain and yet forever Spanish.

* * * * *

Juan Ramón Jiménez[44] has come far indeed since the early poems and the sweet idyll, _Platero y Yo_, which appeared in 1907. That book was written in a prose crisp as young leaves. Yet it was the conveyancer of old emotions. The poet’s spirit was already old; only his senses urged him to the gait of youth. Such delicacy promised rather to crack than to reveal in later years what is perhaps the profoundest poetic intelligence today in Europe.

Jiménez has lost the audience which his earlier work won him. He is very little read. He has sloughed off cleverness and minor sentiment. His work has become stark and stripped. He has gone from exquisite grace to a virtuosic clumsiness and uncouthness, which brings astoundingly close the face of truth, and turns it into a strange, impersonal thing. He has become a recluse. Yet his seclusion has not divorced him from contact on his own terms with his generation. No poet serves youth more sedulously than he. He is the master and the friend of the young poets of Castilian, not alone in Spain but in the greater Spain across the sea. He is in touch with Paris, with Germany and Austria. And he has read the work of Whitman, of Emily Dickinson, of Frost, of Robinson and Sandburg....

Jiménez, indeed, is a mystic of the naturalistic order of Walt Whitman. He traces the constant divine in life; he ignores the transcendental. He finds God in the sea, in the subtle sense-play of love, in the landscapes of Spain; or in the gyring thoughts of his own meditation. Yet no poet’s accent could more radically differ from that of the Bible, of Spinoza or of Whitman. Not the least magic of Jiménez’ work is its perpetual counterpoint of meaning and substance. The meaning is cosmic, the stuff is light and casual. Often a seeming haphazard of expression fringes the ineffable; a drop of water miraculously turns into a universe. No tinge of cosmic rhetoric mars the body of his words. The universe is implicit. The ultimate gift of Jiménez is a song of life, liquid and gemmed, within whose moment silence is an inner flame. This flame is simple and constant. The variation in the poems is the outturning into surfaces of mood and color. The flame is One. Life’s mystery is its becoming form, its creating for itself out of a single depth numberless facets, out of whiteness many tints, out of silence, song. This is the process of life: and this is the process of Jiménez’ writing. When he speaks of _La Obra_ he means his record of these inscrutable _becomings_, of which he is a rapt and consecrated witness. If his poems are many, so are the shapes of life: if they are fleet, fragmentary, snatches of a Form whose symmetry lies in dimensions beyond the fragments, so is our visible world a phantasm of shreds, thrusts, flashes. And to see it whole, the eye must be beyond as well as within it.

Jiménez’ work is a sort of _comédie mystique_. Singly, the poems have variety of notes. Yet there is a cryptic quality in them, and a subtle allusiveness to something not explicit, which must repugn the shallow sense, even as it entrances the mind hungry for great vistas. His poems have prosodic value. Yet their chiefest value is that they _create æsthetically_ a sense of incompleteness. Æsthetically, they are whole because they contain this _lack_--this positive surge toward an apocalyptic sense which lives in them only by the imprint of its absence. Each of his poems is at once a sensory form, and a spiritual inchoation. Like the atom, it is complete, yet holds in the whirlwind of electrons an infinitude and a contingency with infinitude: it is appearance forever tending to disappear into the Real. One might say that a poem of Jiménez is like an instant in a human life: full-limned, full-equipped with thought, emotion, will; and yet this fullness is but the passing function of an implicit unity which transcends and subscends it.

No Castilian poet since Luis de Góngora has equaled Jiménez in craft and virtuosic power. Jiménez makes of the language an instrument subtle and intricately ranged, whose farthest flexes yet lie within the natural genius of Castilian. This is his superiority as a craftsman over his master, Góngora. Góngora worked as if in minerals. His arabesques were cut and carved, like the original arabesques, in stone. In Jiménez, the arabesque is of organic substance: it is traced in flesh, blood, breath. This makes his work less assured, less sheer than the verse of Góngora which, after three centuries of misprizal, comes at last, with the work of his friend El Greco, into its kingdom of appreciation. At first glance, one doubts that the poetry of Jiménez can live as long: so fine are its lineaments, so exquisite its reliefs from the organic atmosphere on which it stands. Flowers of spirit, will they fade like flowers? The answer is, that such flowers do not fade. To examine this frail prosody, is to find it made of certainties. Jiménez has lifted from life his overtones into a form that is life’s natural emergence into consciousness from the eternal infraconscious flow. His arabesques are therefore as organic as their base. Jiménez belongs to the race of Góngora and San Juan de la Cruz--a race of poets who are immortal, and hermetic.

* * * * *

Again Spain is speaking for the world. This painter and this lyrist, in the true sense, are _poets_. Their word is a creation, immediate as life and as eternal: and this conjunction of time and of eternity is birth.

_CHAPTER XIV_

_THE PORT OF COLUMBUS_

_The Scene is a bare height over a little town, white huddled with shard roofs. Coppery, the río Tinto widens and swirls through sands into the Gulf of Cádiz. Upon the height, stand two old men, bare-headed. They are clad in the gentility of their days. But the cloth is thread, the brocade is dim, the velvet shines and yellow is the lace. The one is tall. He holds behind his back, martially, an arm with a crippled hand. He is erect. His features are hard and large: only his mouth, too delicate and his eyes, tender and dark as a womb, belie the warrior. The second man is short. Beaked is his nose, and the eyes have a watery gleam. His hair is silken white above the swarthy skin. The tall man speaks_:

CERVANTES--Why did you ask that I should meet you here?

COLUMBUS--This is Palos de la Frontera. [_There is a pause in which with a hard hand he wipes his watery eyes._] From here the first time we sailed. Here, seven months later, we returned. Bringing back----

CERVANTES--A world.

COLUMBUS--Nay. Bringing back a Grave.

CERVANTES--[_Regarding the town and not_ COLUMBUS’ _words_.]--Here, now, is nothing.

COLUMBUS--Look beyond the fat sands of the Gulf. Look beyond the sea.

[_They stand in silence toward the west. The low sun swims above the brooding water, vaults the hard roofs, and lights the shabbiness of the watchers._]

COLUMBUS--[_Nervously._] Well? Are you looking? Tell me what you see.

CERVANTES--I see America.

COLUMBUS--[_Rubbing his hands in ironic satisfaction._] They robbed it of my name, because they thought I did not know what I had found. They robbed me of my kingdom, because they thought I aspired to be a king. Because my eyes kept watch, they are dim.

CERVANTES--I shall tell you, friend, what I see.

COLUMBUS--Be careful of your eyes!

CERVANTES--A City of White Towers! The men who live in it are little motes. Yet they uphold these Towers! And in their hand, they wield a golden weapon making them the world’s master.

COLUMBUS--Look sharp.

CERVANTES--They are not masters of themselves. They are full of chaos----

COLUMBUS--Spain?

CERVANTES--Within this serried, glittering Order--Chaos! Chaos of races, traditions, dreams. They are uneasy. They build the Towers higher. The Towers are high, in order to enclose them safely from their chaos. Towers of stone, machines of subtle iron--to shut out bloods, dreams, words, making this Confusion which they hate.

COLUMBUS--[_Smiling shrewdly._] Are you looking at America, or Spain?

CERVANTES--They have lost sight of the True God. Yet they are full of God-hunger, of God-search. To their own works they turn--and worship God in these.

COLUMBUS--Look beyond: beyond the Towers.

CERVANTES--[_Heeding only what he sees._] They ban new pioneers! Lusting for Unity they crush what is not One. They shut out thoughts which might rise loftier than the highest Towers.

COLUMBUS--[_Chuckling._] Leap from your Spain, I tell you. Beyond the Towers----?

CERVANTES--Continents!

COLUMBUS--Now you hold me!

CERVANTES--What childish peoples, there! Beyond the Towers one can see them clearer, although they are the same as those beneath the Towers. Savages, who can not even speak, who can not even think--who spin about in quaint machines.

COLUMBUS--Where do you see them?

CERVANTES--Everywhere. Upon two Continents I see them, like an Itch on the rugose World. Yet within them, there is a world of Desire. I can hear their clamor; though they use words English, Spanish, Portuguese, I cannot read their reason. They are dumb as children.

COLUMBUS--They have their Inquisition, I suppose? They drive out the Infidel? They go to their Cathedrals, and would bind all men in Christ?

CERVANTES--Their names for these are different. And unlike Spain, I see that they have not succeeded.

COLUMBUS--[_Quickened._] There is my hope! If I could go and tell them: therein is _their_ hope! They shall not, like Spain, succeed.

CERVANTES--[_Not turning._] Your voice rings glad?

COLUMBUS--Why should I not be glad? The New World is in them, underneath the Towers. When they have learned that they can not succeed: that all the Towers and all the machines and all the gold on earth can not crush down this unborn need in them for a true New World--then it will arise.

CERVANTES--[_turns and looks at_ COLUMBUS.] You speak in Parables.

COLUMBUS--I am a practical man.

CERVANTES--I am sick of parables and stories.

COLUMBUS--Good. You want history? The Book of Moses--is that history enough for your hard sense? Well, do you recall how the Lord led the children of Israel out of Egypt? They too crossed a Sea. But did they come into their promised land, their new world flowing with milk and honey, when they had crossed the sea?

CERVANTES--Yes. After forty years.

COLUMBUS--You are a shallow reader. Not one came into the Promised Land--not even Moses! They went into the wilderness, and they died. From Marah to the wilderness of Sin, from Horeb to the wilderness of Moab--they roamed, and rotted, and were dead forever! Not Aaron the Priest, not Miriam the mother, not Moses the Prophet came to the Promised Land. For it is written that the Seed shall die, ere Life may be reborn.

CERVANTES--[_Incredulous._] If that is Death yonder across the sea, it is a death most stable and most splendid.

COLUMBUS--Death is the most sumptuous song. This golden-towered America is but the Grave of Europe.

CERVANTES--I do not understand.

COLUMBUS--What do you find there?

CERVANTES--Mighty stones----

COLUMBUS--Are not stones of Europe?

CERVANTES--Gold----

COLUMBUS--Is not gold a lust of the old world?

CERVANTES--Marvelous machines----

COLUMBUS--Did you, then, not know England, that you should think them new?

CERVANTES--Never with us were gold and stone and iron of so high a glory.

COLUMBUS--Does not Europe merit a high Sepulcher?

CERVANTES--Still you speak in parables, my friend.

COLUMBUS--[_Testily._] What would you have me say? Teach me the words for the New World, if you have them! Since its gold and its stones and its machines are unknown to the Old, what words can the old tongues give us?

[CERVANTES _looks in silence to the west, while the weak eyes of_ COLUMBUS _watch him. Suddenly_, CERVANTES _clutches at the short man’s arm_.]

CERVANTES--Look! Can’t you see?... No!... God, the Towers are falling!

COLUMBUS--Glory to Jehovah!

CERVANTES--They veer, they twist. They have sunk in this mire of men.

COLUMBUS--The Seed shall rot.

CERVANTES--They are a turmoil of blind maggots. Their world is become as were their souls--a quicksand. The gleaming Towers are gone!

COLUMBUS--Now shall be the birth of the World which I discovered.

CERVANTES--[_Sternly gazes west in a deep silence. Then he turns to his friend._] Gone is the city. Continents of chaos. What shall rise?

COLUMBUS--The Dream of the Old World, at last--a New World!

CERVANTES--Spain?

COLUMBUS--Nay. Spain’s Grave is over there, with Europe’s.

CERVANTES--I shall believe your dim eyes. Tell me, mariner, what your dim eyes see.

COLUMBUS--[_With a laugh._] Then keep your sharp eyes westward.

CERVANTES--[_He turns again, complying, to the west._] It is easy to look away from Spain, when one has loved Spain.

COLUMBUS--You shall not be alone, in loving Spain.

CERVANTES--Prophetic Spain.

COLUMBUS--Spain which, creating life, has never lived.

CERVANTES--Her fields are shrunken and her eyes are hot.

COLUMBUS--God has begotten on her, and He has passed her by.

CERVANTES--She is a mother.

COLUMBUS--A mother of beginnings.

CERVANTES--Always the Seed in her--never the life itself?

COLUMBUS--It was ever so. When Rome lived, Spain did not live in Rome: she bore her Stoics and her Saints for Holy Rome. When Holy Rome was hale, Spain was not holy. She bore, with her Jews and Arabs, the death of Christ. When Holy Rome was dead and Modern Europe flourished, Spain was not modern and Spain was not Europe. She bore America.

CERVANTES--Europe has used my mother! Even you, landless mariner, have used her.

COLUMBUS--God has used her.

CERVANTES--Why then are her fields hungry?

COLUMBUS--All worlds have come in, unto her: of all worlds, she has begotten worlds. And she has lain untouched.

CERVANTES--My tragic mother.

COLUMBUS--[_Suddenly remembering and exalted._] But the White Towers have toppled. Ready, Spain! You must stir again. You must give again. Europe has rotted at last into the Grave they called America. Your work is not quite done. You, most broken mother of all Europe, you have preserved a Seed.

... [CERVANTES _has turned from the west, and facing inland, kneels_. COLUMBUS _does not heed him_.]

COLUMBUS--Your spirit, Spain. They above all will need it, in the north: they whose speech is English and who have led in the building of the Towers which are the Grave of Europe. For it is written that these shall also lead in the birth of the true New World--the true America which I discovered. Let them see you, Spain; let them take from you, O mother. For their spirit is weak and childish. They are cowards, not masters, before life. But you, Spain, dared to be what you believed: you knew the wisdom of what small men call “madness.” You dared to make of life itself the Body of your Vision, the Word of your Prayer. You did not flinch, proud Spain, from being laughed at--from being wrong--from being right! Give to the New World now your spirit, that it may surpass you.

[_There is a silence, Columbus still facing west, while his comrade kneels toward Spain._]

CERVANTES--[_Still kneeling and praying._] I understand, my mother, why we have always loved Our Lady. What this man says is true. Unpossessed, you have borne a Word. And the Word, even as Christ unto His mother, has turned and has denied you.

COLUMBUS--[_Lifting_ CERVANTES _up_.] Look again. You are sure? The White Towers--?

CERVANTES--[_Rises and looks again westward, standing beside_ COLUMBUS.] The City of Towers is gone.

_As they gaze in silence_, CERVANTES _seeing_, COLUMBUS _understanding, the sun goes down in the sea. And over their shoulders to the east, the sky is suddenly aflame with sunrise._

FINIS

1921-1925

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The so prevalent notion that in Mohammedanism women have no souls and cannot gain heaven is false.

[2] To the west, sprawls another Fez which the old ruler would not know. This is Fez-el-Djidid--Fez the New--a Fez of the sixteenth century. It is a squat, chalk town filled with Bedouin types--Syrians, Arabs, Negroes, Spaniards, Jews: a conglomerate of squalid shops and _louche_ cafés. It is like Tangiers, the invaded and corrupted Moorland. Farther west, there is a third Fez--still stranger. Here are a railroad station, a wireless tower, and a _garnison_ for “Frankish” troops. Since 1911--this visitation of the wrath of Allah.

[3] One of a family tracing descent from Mohammed.

[4] Mohammed is generally supposed not to have been able to read; and his Chapters, brought to him haphazard by the angel Gabriel, were dictated to his disciples. These chapters (Suras) were not compiled until after the Prophet’s death.

[5] As mathematics becomes non-Euclidean, it tends toward the religious. In place of the pagan straight-line, we have the geodesic-line which meets its source and completes a body for gravitational and inertial forces.

[6] “The Iberians are the most warlike of all the barbarians.” Thucydides.

[7] The native women of Seville.

[8] Italian imitations of Tirso were innumerable. Doubtless through them Molière took his turn. Mozart, Byron, Zorrilla followed. Among the moderns who have rewritten him is Rostand. Tirso’s real name is Gabriel Téllez (1571?-1648).

[9] The desire to conform with foreign notions has produced a Spanish export in which the true genius of the Spanish dance is lost. To see Seville or Córdoba, you must go to Andalusia. To see the Andalusian dance, you must do likewise.

[10] Of the many explanations for this strange use of _flamenco_, that of Federico de Onís strikes me as plausible. He believes that _flamenco_ was first applied to the dress of Flemish courtiers of Carlos I. Nobles of Spain imitated these styles; the people of Andalusia finally adopted them, and so at last _flamenco_ was applied to the song and dance accompanying a style.

[11] To the reader who fears the difficulty of the old Spanish, I recommend a modern Castilian version of this perennial poem in which none of the flavor is lost: it is by Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican poet, and is published in the _Collección Universal of Madrid_.

[12] It must not be forgotten that the Jesuits of France who contributed so greatly to the creation of the Catholic strongholds of Canada were the instruments of a spirit and of a method born in Spain.

[13] Must I assure the reader that this is pure legend? The historical Cid was probably raiding “on his own” in Valencia when his king, who had exiled him, entered Toledo.

[14] El Gréco: ou Le Secret de Tolède.

[15] Author of the authoritative life of El Greco, and one of the world’s few truly great art critics.

[16] Like many other major works of art, the Escorial has its imperfections. The murals on the vaults of the Church are absurd; the murals in the cloisters of the Patio de Los Evangelistas are monstrous; and the pretty interiors of many of the Palace chambers are impertinent. But the blame for these defects does not lie with Philip II: they are the deed of successors. There is another flaw in the Escorial more significant, and miraculously appropriate. It is the presence of the _San Marcial_ of El Greco in the Salas Capitulares. Philip ordered this painting; and when it was delivered he disliked it and refused it admission. The story goes that El Greco insisted on being paid. Philip paid him and thrust the work into the cellar. It is customary, on this point, to make sport of the bad taste of the King. El Greco is the greatest of Spanish painters; the _San Marcial_ is perhaps his greatest picture. But Philip was right. This luminous and parabolic life did not belong in the frozen rigor of El Escorial. Today it serves with its gyrant aspirant forms to offset the brooding stillness in which it lives: a flame in an impenetrable night.

[17] The relatively great importance of honor to women in all lands is perhaps to be explained by analogue. The inherent social sense in women (beyond the family sense) is weaker than in men: hence their need of social approval is the more intense.

[18] There was of course Ramón Lull, the great scholastic poet and mystic of Majorca.

[19] A. S. Oko, the Hebrew scholar, is certain that the original was in Italian. José Ortega y Gasset, Professor of metaphysics in the University of Madrid, assured me of his personal conviction that an original Castilian MS. was lost.

[20] A mighty lineage of masters who made of the Castilian an immortal language. Among them are the Dominican Luis de Granada; the Franciscans Juan de los Angeles, Diego de Estella, San Pedro de Alcántara; the Carmelites San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa, Jerónimo Gracián, Miguel de la Fuente; the Augustinians Malon de Chaide, Alonzo de Orozco; and the Jesuits Nieremberg (Juan Eusebio) and Alonzo Rodríguez.... At the same time a literary æsthetic was developed (Ausias March, Fernando de Herrera de Sevilla) whose creative liberality rings refreshingly modern, beside the poetics of Boileau. Writes Herrera: “So long as a language lives and is spoken, it cannot be said to have run its course: for its constant tendency is to surpass itself and to leave behind what was formerly esteemed. We must constantly essay new forms....” This was the spirit which made possible El Greco and Góngora and Cervantes. It was one outcome of the monasteries and of the religious universities of the Age of Isabel. It proves how strong, in a way, the Renaissance was in Spain until the reactionary time of Philip II.

[21] The Jansenist belief in predestination and the Jesuit doctrine of free will appear to contradict this. The paradox is only of the surface. Acceptance of predestination and of pre-determined grace rests on acceptance of the inviolable autonomy of the individual soul and minimizes all objective--i. e., social--effect on it. The Jesuit free will actually puts the stress on possible change in the individual soul through social forces, thus minimizing the soul’s autonomy. That this interpretation is correct is borne out by the developments of Jesuit practice on the one hand and of French-Calvinist-Protestant cultures on the other.

[22] “When we lose our dominions, it will be said: You came here to evangelize and to commit outrage. It will not be said: You came here to mine coal.” Angel Ganivet.

[23] It must be added that this realistic art, and this realistic Europe, are doomed today. Cézanne, a disciple of El Greco, marks the turn of the tide, in the domain of painting.

[24] I hope it will be clear that in these parallels I am suggesting not identity but analogy. Elements of the Renaissance and of the modern world definitely distinguish these Spaniards from the true medievals. The beauty and the irony of the Spanish scene lies precisely in this.

[25] The elements which go to the making of a great _corrida_ in Madrid, Seville, Barcelona, Zaragoza, San Sebastián, are intricate and varied. If any of them fails, the consummation fails. The rearing of perfect bulls is a science in Spain. Only a few preëminent ranches--_ganaderías de toros bravos_--are equipped to supply them. They are either in the province of Salamanca or in Andalusia. The _toreros_ study the bulls in the field, coöperating in their upbring. Experts breed and train them, and prepare them for their supreme moment in the sun of the arena. And before the conflict, they are examined by veterinary surgeons. If they are one jot less than perfect, they may not enter the ring of a true _corrida_. They are then consigned to the _corridas de novilleros_: the innumerable encounters of the apprentice fighters--who must go through several seasons and win the applause of the most exacting critics ere they are admitted to the rank of _espada_.

Yet despite this care, imperfect bulls (bulls who refuse to fight, who fight erratically, who flinch at crucial moments) do enter the best _corrida_ and blot out the artistry of the most expert _matador_. Indeed, the skill of the _torero_ lies in great measure in his ability to control the bull. The genuine artist must possess hypnotic power. He must compel him in the instant of confrontation to forget the multitude, the flashing _capas_, the _banderillas_ that bite his flesh: to concentrate upon his own frail grace all the bull’s hate and all the bull’s vigor. He must compel a brute to be the partner of an exquisite dancer.

He must control his own body as perfectly as any artist on a stage. Utter purity of form, of pace, of measure must be preserved within this threat of death. There is no virtuosity like this in all the world. Beyond is the crowd, not at all loth to seeing him undone: before him, _his colleague_, is a maddened bull whose horns are more terrible than swords. He must control the crowd; he must model the lunges of the brute into the design of an essential dance. And all this he must do in coolness.

The _torero_ who can achieve this, not one time in a career but with reasonable frequency, and before the most savagely critical--and the most savage--audience in the world, comes not often in a decade’s passing. Most _toreros_ are at the mercy of the bull. If he behaves they acquit themselves with credit. If he baulks, they must trust to luck--to the saving _capas_ of the _banderilleros_--even to their heels. Hisses are more frequent in the _plaza_ than cheers.

All artists must labor against the inclement will of their materials. The temper of the bull, the action of the _cuadro de_ _banderilleros_, the mood of the crowd present the common problem of technique. What distinguishes the art of the _torero_ is the immediacy of death. If the dancer slips, he fails and that is all: if the acrobat misses, he lands in a net: if the actor forgets his line, he hears the prompter. If the _torero_ makes a false step, he is dead.

And the _corrida_ will go on without him! for he is never alone. But he is alone with his skill and with his nerve. The slightest trace of haste or sign of fear will spoil the pure line of his style. If for an instant he breaks from the perfection of his pose to save his life, he loses his art. And if in that moment he elects rather to hold to his art, he may not live to reap its glory.

In recent years, two _toreros_ of genius have arisen in Spain. One, Joselito, died on the horns of the bull: and the _corrida_ went on despite the mourning of the nation. Joselito shared with Belmonte the summit of his art. He was an Apollonian classicist. Chance and inspiration were reduced to a minimum. He had control over the brute: but it appeared to be less of hypnosis than of reason. He operated on the bull with so cool an accuracy that the infuriated beast was soothed into an obedient opposition to the _torero_. Joselito was exact, unostentatious. But when he had coupled with his enemy, his art became ornate. He moved facilely, he gave delicate steps. When he was killed in Valencia, Spain lost the most exquisite if not the profoundest of her tragic dancers.

Nature has aided Belmonte with its abstruse law of compensation for inferiorities. In this abnormally frail body live courage, rhythmic articulation, dionysian gesture. When Belmonte steps out to meet his bull the mind falls into heroic channels. For the head is brooding. And when, as once when I saw him, there is a white bandage across the brow with a touch of blood upon it, the effect is magic.

Belmonte at his worst is an ugly boy vaguely at odds with an unwieldy task. At his best, he is the propounder of rapture. He does not abstract the individuality of the bull like Joselito, and then perform his cold objective art. He measures the foe. He accepts him as he is. He plunges into the bull’s fury. And thence, he rises to his high victory. There is always a moment in Belmonte’s act when he is lost. The crowd gasps. Gone altogether beneath the fury of the brute, he emerges. His body sways in the prepossessive grace of one who has come through death. His art is perhaps greater than that of Joselito because its content is greater. Joselito excluded from his victory the reality of defeat. Psychologically, he crushed his foe first, and then worked on him at ease. Belmonte begins by submitting to the bull’s might. And then, from this submission of the man, from this faltering of the god, he creates a form sculpturally superb.

[26] In the winter of 1924 the Dictator of Spain, Primo de Rivera, on his own initiative conferred the municipal suffrage upon women. They did not agitate for it; and it seems clear that if they exercise this new privilege it will be in the same spirit of compliance with which they accede to all the demands of men.

[27] This statement is not literally correct. The Basques became eminent navigators in the sixteenth century; their American settlements ranged from Canada to the Argentine. Yet, intellectually and spiritually, they remained, as a people, rooted.

[28] The Basque language.

[29] The bookies serve as middlemen between the individual bettors. Each bookie has a little rubber ball with a hole. In this hole, he places a slip of paper declaring the odds of the moment, and by tossing the ball to the man who has laid odds and to the man who has taken him on, the bet is established. The true pelota fan does not wager once: he wagers a dozen times as the game progresses: he concocts an intricate system of varying odds: his mind is on the betting and his balance: he is aware of the game only as the machine that automatically shifts the chances. Indeed, to go to a pelota match and observe the game, and refrain from betting, is so anomalous as to attract attention. The sport is still there: the Basque players enact it: but the Spanish public does not participate.

[30] Born 1870.

[31] Born 1874.

[32] Born 1875.

[33] Born 1881.

[34] Another remarkable expression of this state is the Valencian Gabriel Miró (born 1879). Miró makes gorgeous word-tapestries of legendary life, such as the Mystery of Christ. In his prose are lurid and elementary colors that suggest some medieval canvas protected for ages from the sun, together with pale modern water-tints of psychological introspection.

[35] Ramón, as he calls himself, was born in 1891. His works already fill sixty volumes. And yet his true artistic unit is the paragraph--when it is not the sentence or the phrase.

[36] 1873-1874.

[37] 1839-1915.

[38] 1865-1898.

[39] Born, 1864.

[40] To go beyond Unamuno--into the present constructive period of Spain’s waking, into the transition from her “old ordered sleep” to the new ordered consciousness now dawning, would be to turn this chapter into a discussion of writers and young literary movements: and this would be to digress from the formal province of my book. Since Unamuno answered Ganivet, there have arisen leaders in æsthetic and social criticism, in the novel, in the drama, in the field of creative erudition, whose aggregate work makes the contemporary literature of Spain perhaps the most pregnant of the West. I regret that this is not the place to analyze these younger men. The modern writers whom I have mentioned at all I have chosen arbitrarily for the distinct formal purpose of my portrait of Spain. It must be understood that whereas I consider them important, I have been silent about others equally important. Throughout, I have felt called on, no more to discuss all of Spain’s great men, than to describe all her cities.

[41] A third name might be added: that of Manuel de Falla, Spain’s leading composer and a pure Andalusian, also. Falla in tonal structures hard, fluid, irreducible, conveys into æsthetic form elements of life that are very close to those which we shall consider in Picasso and Jiménez. He may be said to recreate the _body_ of Andalusian folk-song, as Picasso recreates physical shapes and Jiménez physical sensations, into a new arabesque.

[42] I--at least--know of no Forms, in the east, so great as (to choose haphazard) the Medieval Church of Rome, the Gothic Cathedral, Dante’s Poem, the music of Palestrina and of Bach, the Ethic of Spinoza. Yet the concepts in these Forms are invariably of the east.

[43] Æsthetic creation is an act from the unitary self upon the objective world. It is the contrary of analysis which breaks up that world--_unreally_. But analysis may precede creation, if the elements broken up by it are reabsorbed and fused into a new subjective unity.

[44] Born in 1881.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

Mckor Hayim=> Makor Hayim {pg 113}

Mekor Hayim=> Makor Hayim {pg 159}