In the Spain of to-day these things are seen as through a glass,
darkly. Since the famous and much gloated-over entrance of Ferdinand
and Isabella into Granada, the history of Spain has been that of an
attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. In the great flare of the
golden age, the age of ingots of Peru and of men of even greater worth,
the disease worked beneath the surface. Since then the conflict has
corroded into futility all the buoyant energies of the country. I mean
the persistent attempt to centralize in thought, in art, in government,
in religion, a nation whose every energy lies in the other direction.
The result has been a deadlock, and the ensuing rust and numbing of all
life and thought, so that a century of revolution seems to have brought
Spain no nearer a solution of its problems. At the present day, when
all is ripe for a new attempt to throw off the atrophy, a sort of
despairing inaction causes the Spaniards to remain under a government
of unbelievably corrupt and inefficient politicians. There seems no
solution to the problem of a nation in which the centralized power and
the separate communities work only to nullify each other.
Spaniards in face of their traditions are rather in the position of the
archaeologists before the problem of Iberian sculpture. For near the
Cerro de los Santos, bare hill where from the ruins of a sanctuary has
been dug an endless series of native sculptures of men and women,
goddesses and gods, there lived a little watchmaker. The first statues
to be dug up were thought by the pious country people to be saints, and
saints they were, according to an earlier dispensation than that of
Rome; with the result that much Kudos accompanied the discovery of
those draped women with high head-dresses and fixed solemn eyes and
those fragmentary bull-necked men hewn roughly out of grey stone; they
were freed from the caked clay of two thousand years and reverently set
up in the churches. So probably the motives that started the watchmaker
on his career of sculpturing and falsifying were pious and reverential.
However it began, when it was discovered that the saints were mere
horrid heathen he-gods and she-gods and that the foreign gentlemen with
spectacles who appeared from all the ends of Europe to investigate,
would pay money for them, the watchmaker began to thrive as a mighty
man in his village and generation. He began to study archaeology and
the style of his cumbersome forged divinities improved. For a number of
years the statues from the Cerro de los Santos were swallowed whole by
all learned Europe. But the watchmaker's imagination began to get the
better of him; forms became more and more fantastic, Egyptian,
Assyrian, _art-nouveau_ influences began to be noted by the discerning,
until at last someone whispered forgery and all the scientists scuttled
to cover shouting that there had never been any native Iberian
sculpture after all.
The little watchmaker succumbed before his imagining of heathen gods
and died in a madhouse. To this day when you stand in the middle of the
room devoted to the Cerro de los Santos in the Madrid, and see the
statues of Iberian goddesses clustered about you in their high
head-dresses like those of dancers, you cannot tell which were made by
the watchmaker in 1880, and which by the image-maker of the
hill-sanctuary at a time when the first red-eyed ships of the
Phoenician traders were founding trading posts among the barbarians of
the coast of Valencia. And there they stand on their shelves, the real
and the false inextricably muddled, and stare at the enigma with stone
eyes.
So with the traditions: the tradition of Catholic Spain, the tradition
of military grandeur, the tradition of fighting the Moors, of
suspecting the foreigner, of hospitality, of truculence, of sobriety,
of chivalry, of Don Quixote and Tenorio.
The Spanish-American war, to the United States merely an opportunity
for a patriotic-capitalist demonstration of sanitary engineering,
heroism and canned-meat scandals, was to Spain the first whispered word
that many among the traditions were false. The young men of that time
called themselves the generation of ninety-eight. According to
temperament they rejected all or part of the museum of traditions they
had been taught to believe was the real Spain; each took up a separate
road in search of a Spain which should suit his yearnings for beauty,
gentleness, humaneness, or else vigor, force, modernity.
The problem of our day is whether Spaniards evolving locally,
anarchically, without centralization in anything but repression, will
work out new ways of life for themselves, or whether they will be drawn
into the festering tumult of a Europe where the system that is dying is
only strong enough to kill in its death-throes all new growth in which
there was hope for the future. The Pyrenees are high.