Chapter XII: Part THREE: Beyond Spain (9)

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.