From whatever point you penetrate into the Spanish peninsula, you will
find yourself confronted almost at once by a region of hills; you
will then enter into a labyrinth of valleys, gorges and ravines; and
finally, after a longer or shorter ascent, you will emerge upon the
central tableland, barred by the naked sierras whose wide and deep
valleys form the mighty cradles of mighty rivers. Across this tableland
stretches Castile, the land of castles.
Like all great expanses of earth, this tableland receives and
irradiates heat more quickly than the sea and the coast-lands which
the sea refreshes and tempers. Hence, when the sun scorches it, an
extreme of heat, and as soon as the sun forsakes it, an extreme of
cold; burning days of summer followed by cool fresh nights during
which the lungs gratefully inhale the breeze from the land; freezing
winter nights following hard upon days which the bright cold sun in
its brief diurnal course has failed to warm. Winters long and hard and
summers short and fiery have given birth to the saying, “_nueve meses
de invierno y tres de infierno_”--nine months of winter and three
months of hell. In the autumn, however, there is a serene and placid
breathing-space. The sierras, shutting out the winds from the sea, help
to make the winter colder and the summer hotter; but while they impede
the passage of the gentle low-trailing clouds they form no barrier
to the violent cyclones which burst among their valleys. Thus long
droughts are succeeded by torrential deluges.
In this severe climate of opposing extremes, in which the transition
from heat to cold and from drought to flood is so violent, man has
invented the cloak with which to isolate himself from his environment,
a personal ambience, constant in the midst of external changes, a
defence at once against both heat and cold.
The great storms of rain and snow bursting upon these sierras and
drained thence by the swollen rivers have in the course of centuries
scoured the soil of the tableland, and the succeeding droughts have
prevented the retention of the rain-washed soil in a network of fresh
and robust vegetation. Thus it is that the view presents a wide and
desolate expanse of burning country, without foliage and without water,
a country in which a deluge of light throws dense shadows upon a
dazzling surface, extinguishing all intermediate tones. The landscape
is seen cut out in hard outline, almost without atmosphere, through a
thin and transparent air.
You may sometimes range over leagues and leagues of desert country
without descrying anything save the illimitable plain with its patches
of green corn or yellow stubble, here a sparsely extended array of
oaks, marching in solemn and monotonous procession, clothed in their
austere and perennial green, there a group of mournful pines, holding
aloft their uniform crests. Now and again, fringing a bright river or
half-dry stream, a few poplars, seeming intensely and vividly alive in
the midst of the infinite solitude. As a rule these poplars announce
the presence of man: yonder on the plain lies some village, scorched by
the sun, blasted by the frost, built of sun-baked bricks very often,
its belfry silhouetted against the blue of the sky. Often the spinal
ridge of the sierra can be seen in the distance, but if you approach it
you must not look to find rounded bossy mountains, fresh with verdure
and clothed with woods, with the yellow of the gorse and the carmine of
the heather flecking the bracken. Here is nothing but a framework of
bony fleshless rock, bristling with crags, sharp-cut hummocks nakedly
displaying drought-cracked strata, covered at most with a scanty scrub,
where flourish only the hardy thistle and the naked scented broom,
the poor _genestra contenta dei deserti_ of Leopardi’s poem. Down in
the plain the highway with its festoon of trees loses itself in the
greyness of the earth, which kindles into an intense warm red when the
sun sinks to rest.
The setting of the sun in these immense solitudes is full of beauty.
The sun dilates as it touches the horizon as if greedy to enjoy still
more of the earth and in sinking it sheds its light upon it like blood
and fills the sky with a dust of gold. The infinite dome of the sky
grows paler and paler, then swiftly darkens, and the fleeting twilight
is followed by the profundity of a night tremulous with stars. Here are
no northern twilights, long, soft and languorous.
Broad is Castile! And beautiful with a sad quiet beauty this sea
of stone beneath its expanse of sky. It is a landscape uniform and
monotonous in its contrasts of light and shade, in its sharply
juxtaposed and unmodulated colours. It presents the appearance of an
immense floor of mosaic, without variety of design, above which is
spread out a sky of intensest blue. It is lacking in gentle transitions
and its only harmonic continuity is that of the immense plain and the
massed blue which overspreads and illumines it.
It is a landscape that awakens no voluptuous sensations of _joie de
vivre_, that inspires no longings for ease and idleness. Here are no
lush green meadows inviting indolent repose, no dells that beckon like
nests.
Its contemplation does not call forth the sleeping animal in us, the
animal that delights to drowse in a leafy paradise, brooding over the
remembered satisfactions of those appetites which have been kneaded
into the flesh since the earliest dawn of life.
Nature does not here recreate the spirit. Rather it detaches us from
the low earth and enfolds us in the pure naked unvarying sky. Here
there is no communion with nature, no absorption in her exuberant
splendours. This infinite landscape is, if it may be so said,
nonotheistic rather than pantheistic. Man is not lost in it so much as
diminished by it, and in its immense drought he is made aware of the
aridity of his own soul.
* * * * *
The population of the Castilian country-side is concentrated for
the most part in hamlets, villages or towns, in groups of clustered
dwelling-houses, separated from one another by immense and naked
solitudes. The villages are compact and sharply delimited, not melting
away into the plain in a surrounding fringe of isolated homesteads,
the intervening country being entirely unpopulated. The houses seem
to crowd together round the church as if for warmth or for defence
against the rigour of nature, as if the inhabitants sought a second
cloak in which to isolate themselves from the cruelty of the climate
and the melancholy of the landscape. Thus it is that very often the
villagers have to journey considerable distances on mule-back in order
to reach the fields where they work, one here, another there, in
isolation, and it is already dark before they return to their homes to
stretch themselves on the hard kitchen settles and sleep the comforting
sleep of toil. A notable sight it is to see them at nightfall, mounted
on their mules, their figures silhouetted against the pale sky, their
sad, slow, monotonous songs dying away on the sharp night air into the
infinity of the furrowed plain.
While the men labour in the sweat of their brow on the hard land,
the womenfolk perform their tasks at home, filling the sunny arcades
in front of the houses with a murmur of voices. In the long winter
evenings it is usual for masters and serving-folk to assemble together,
while the latter dance to the accompaniment of the sharp dry tap of the
tambourine or sometimes to an old ballad measure.
Go into one of these villages or drowsing cities of the plain, where
life flows slowly and calmly in a monotonous procession of hours, and
there you will find the living souls beneath whose transitory existence
lies the eternal essence out of which is woven the inner history of
Castile.
Within these towns and villages lives a breed of men of a dry, hard
and sinewy constitution, burned by the sun and inured by the cold, a
sober, frugal breed, the product of a long process of natural selection
by searching winter frosts and intermittent periods of scarcity,
tempered to withstand the inclemency of the skies and the asperities
of penury. The peasant who gave you a grave “Good day” as he passed by
on his mule, huddled in his cloak, will receive you without overmuch
courtesy, with a kind of restrained sobriety. He is collected in
his movements, circumspect and deliberate in his conversation, with
a gravity which gives him the air of a dethroned king. Such at any
rate he appears when he is not cunningly ironical. This sly biting
irony--_socarronería_, a racy word full of racy character--is the
classical form of Castilian humour, a quiet and circumspect humour,
sententious and phlegmatic, the humour of Sanson Carrasco in _Don
Quixote_ and of Quevedo, he who wrote the discourses of Marcus Brutus.
His slowness is matched by his tenacity, qualities that have an
intimate association. His reaction-interval, as the
psycho-physiologists would express it, is long; it takes him a
considerable time to realize an impression or an idea, but once he has
grasped it he does not readily relinquish it, does not in fact
relinquish it until another has impinged upon it and driven it out. The
slowness and tenacity of his impressions would appear to be due to the
lack of an environing and unifying nimbus, blending them into a
conjunctive whole; they do not merge into one another by subtle
gradations, but each one disappears completely before the next takes
its place. They seem to follow one another like the succession of
uniform and monotonous tones in the landscape of his country, sharp
edge against sharp edge.
Go with him into his house. On the front wall the violent contrast of
strident blue paint against a snow-white background exposed to the full
blaze of the sun is almost painful to the eye. Sit down to table with
him and partake of his simple dinner, prepared without much culinary
art, accompanied only by keen and fiery condiments, a meal that is at
once both frugal and violent, providing the palate with sharp-edged
sensations. After the dinner, if the day chances to be a holiday,
you will witness a dance, a dance slow and uniform, danced to the
monotonous beat of drum or tambourine, a series of stabbing sounds that
strike upon the ear like blows. And you will hear songs, wailing and
monotonous, full of long-drawn-out notes, songs of the steppes, with
the rhythm of the dragging labour of the plough in them. They testify
to an ear that is incapable of appreciating the finer gradations of
cadences and semi-tones.
If you are in a town and there are any pictures there of the old
traditional school of Castile, go to see them--for in the great days
of its expansion this race created a school of realistic painting, of
a rude, vigorous, simplified realism, very limited in range of tone,
which has the effect of a violent douche upon the vision. Perhaps you
will come across some canvas of Ribera or Zurbaran--your eye is held
by the bony form of some austere hermit, whose sinewy muscles are
presented in high light against strong shadows, a canvas meagre in
tones and gradations, in which every object stands out sharp-edged.
Not infrequently the figures fail to form a single whole with the
background, which is a mere accessory of insignificant decorative
value. Velazquez, who of all Castilian painters possesses most of the
racial character, was a painter of men, of whole men, men all of one
piece, rude and emphatic, men who fill the whole canvas.
You will find no landscape-painters, you will discover no sense of
tone, of suave transition, no unifying, enveloping atmosphere, which
blends everything into a single harmonious whole. The unity springs
from the more or less architectonic disposition of the several parts.
* * * * *
In this country of climatic extremes, without any softness or mildness,
of a landscape uniform in its contrasts, the spirit likewise is dry
and sharp-edged, with but a meagre ambience of ideas. It generalises
upon raw facts, seen in a discrete series, as in a kaleidoscope, not
upon a synthesis or analysis of facts seen in a continuous series, in a
living stream; it sees them sharp-edged like figures in the Castilian
landscape and it takes them as they appear, in their own dress, without
reconstructing them. And it has given birth to a harsh popular realism
and to a dry formal idealism, marching alongside one another, in an
association like that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but never
combining. The Castilian spirit is either ironic or tragic, sometimes
both at once, but it never arrives at a fusion of the irony and the
austere tragedy of the human drama.