In trying to hammer some sort of unified impression out of the
scattered pictures of Spain in my mind, one of the first things I
realize is that there are many Spains. Indeed, every village hidden in
the folds of the great barren hills, or shadowed by its massive church
in the middle of one of the upland plains, every fertile _huerta_ of
the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberian
characteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is an
illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the
desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be
due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized
government on a land essentially centrifugal.
In the first place, there is the matter of language. Roughly, four
distinct languages are at present spoken in Spain: Castilian, the
language of Madrid and the central uplands, the official language,
spoken in the south in its Andalusian form; Gallego-Portuguese, spoken
on the west coast; Basque, which does not even share the Latin descent
of the others; and Catalan, a form of Provencal which, with its
dialect, Valencian, is spoken on the upper Mediterranean coast and in
the Balearic Isles. Of course, under the influence of rail
communication and a conscious effort to spread Castilian, the other
languages, with the exception of Portuguese and Catalan, have lost
vitality and died out in the larger towns; but the problem remains far
different from that of the Italian dialects, since the Spanish
languages have all, except Basque, a strong literary tradition.
Added to the variety of language, there is an immense variety of
topography in the different parts of Spain. The central plateaux,
dominant in modern history (history being taken to mean the births and
breedings of kings and queens and the doings of generals in armor)
probably approximate the warmer Russian steppes in climate and
vegetation. The west coast is in most respects a warmer and more
fertile Wales. The southern _huertas_ (arable river valleys) have
rather the aspect of Egypt. The east coast from Valencia up is a
continuation of the Mediterranean coast of France. It follows that, in
this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian
snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected.
Here is probably the root of the tendency in Spanish art and thought to
emphasize the differences between things. In painting, where the mind
of a people is often more tangibly represented than anywhere else, we
find one supreme example. El Greco, almost the caricature in his art of
the Don Quixote type of mind, who, though a Greek by birth and a
Venetian by training, became more Spanish than the Spaniards during his
long life at Toledo, strove constantly to express the difference
between the world of flesh and the world of spirit, between the body
and the soul of man. More recently, the extreme characterization of
Goya's sketches and portraits, the intensifying of national types found
in Zuloaga and the other painters who have been exploiting with such
success the peculiarities--the picturesqueness--of Spanish faces and
landscapes, seem to spring from this powerful sense of the separateness
of things.
In another way you can express this constant attempt to differentiate
one individual from another as caricature. Spanish art is constantly
on the edge of caricature. Given the ebullient fertility of the
Spanish mind and its intense individualism, a constant slipping over
into the grotesque is inevitable. And so it comes to be that the
conscious or unconscious aim of their art is rather self-expression
than beauty. Their image of reality is sharp and clear, but distorted.
Burlesque and satire are never far away in their most serious moments.
Not even the calmest and best ordered of Spanish minds can resist a
tendency to excess of all sorts, to over-elaboration, to grotesquerie,
to deadening mannerism. All that is greatest in their art, indeed,
lies on the borderland of the extravagant, where sublime things skim
the thin ice of absurdity. The great epic, _Don Quixote_, such plays
as Calderon's _La Vida es Sueno_, such paintings as El Greco's
_Resurreccion_ and Velasquez's dwarfs, such buildings as the Escorial
and the Alhambra--all among the universal masterpieces--are far indeed
from the middle term of reasonable beauty. Hence their supreme
strength. And for our generation, to which excess is a synonym for
beauty, is added argumentative significance to the long tradition of
Spanish art.
Another characteristic, springing from the same fervid abundance, that
links the Spanish tradition to ours of the present day is the strangely
impromptu character of much Spanish art production. The slightly
ridiculous proverb that genius consists of an infinite capacity for
taking pains is well controverted. The creative flow of Spanish artists
has always been so strong, so full of vitality, that there has been no
time for taking pains. Lope de Vega, with his two thousand-odd
plays--or was it twelve thousand?--is by no means an isolated instance.
Perhaps the strong sense of individual validity, which makes Spain the
most democratic country in Europe, sanctions the constant
improvisation, and accounts for the confident planlessness as common in
Spanish architecture as in Spanish political thought.
Here we meet the old stock characteristic, Spanish pride. This is a
very real thing, and is merely the external shell of the fundamental
trust in the individual and in nothing outside of him. Again El Greco
is an example. As his painting progressed, grew more and more personal,
he drew away from tangible reality, and, with all the dogmatic
conviction of one whose faith in his own reality can sweep away the
mountains of the visible world, expressed his own restless, almost
sensual, spirituality in forms that flickered like white flames toward
God. For the Spaniard, moreover, God is always, in essence, the
proudest sublimation of man's soul. The same spirit runs through the
preachers of the early church and the works of Santa Teresa, a disguise
of the frantic desire to express the self, the self, changeless and
eternal, at all costs. From this comes the hard cruelty that flares
forth luridly at times. A recent book by Miguel de Unamuno, _Del
Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida_, expresses this fierce clinging to
separateness from the universe by the phrase _el hambre de
inmortalidad_, the hunger of immortality. This is the core of the
individualism that lurks in all Spanish ideas, the conviction that only
the individual soul is real.