It was after a lecture at an exhibition of Basque painters in Madrid,
where we had heard Valle-Melan, with eyes that burned out from under
shaggy grizzled eyebrows, denounce in bitter stinging irony what he
called the Europeanization of Spain. What they called progress, he had
said, was merely an aping of the stupid commercialism of modern Europe.
Better no education for the masses than education that would turn
healthy peasants into crafty putty-skinned merchants; better a Spain
swooning in her age-old apathy than a Spain awakened to the brutal
soulless trade-war of modern life.... I was walking with a young
student of philosophy I had met by chance across the noisy board of a
Spanish _pension_, discussing the exhibition we had just seen as a
strangely meek setting for the fiery reactionary speech. I had remarked
on the very "primitive" look much of the work of these young Basque
painters had, shown by some in the almost affectionate technique, in
the dainty caressing brush-work, in others by that inadequacy of the
means at the painter's disposal to express his idea, which made of so
many of the pictures rather gloriously impressive failures. My friend
was insisting, however, that the primitiveness, rather than the
birth-pangs of a new view of the world, was nothing but "the last
affectation of an over-civilized tradition."
"Spain," he said, "is the most civilized country in Europe. The growth
of our civilization has never been interrupted by outside influence.
The Phoenicians, the Romans--Spain's influence on Rome was, I imagine,
fully as great as Rome's on Spain; think of the five Spanish
emperors;--the Goths, the Moors;--all incidents, absorbed by the
changeless Iberian spirit.... Even Spanish Christianity," he continued,
smiling, "is far more Spanish than it is Christian. Our life is one
vast ritual. Our religion is part of it, that is all. And so are the
bull-fights that so shock the English and Americans,--are they any more
brutal, though, than fox-hunting and prize-fights? And how full of
tradition are they, our _fiestas de toros_; their ceremony reaches
back to the hecatombs of the Homeric heroes, to the bull-worship of the
Cretans and of so many of the Mediterranean cults, to the Roman games.
Can civilization go farther than to ritualize death as we have done?
But our culture is too perfect, too stable. Life is choked by it."
We stood still a moment in the shade of a yellowed lime tree. My friend
had stopped talking and was looking with his usual bitter smile at a
group of little boys with brown, bare dusty legs who were intently
playing bull-fight with sticks for swords and a piece of newspaper for
the toreador's scarlet cape.
"It is you in America," he went on suddenly, "to whom the future
belongs; you are so vigorous and vulgar and uncultured. Life has become
once more the primal fight for bread. Of course the dollar is a
complicated form of the food the cave man killed for and slunk after,
and the means of combat are different, but it is as brutal. From that
crude animal brutality comes all the vigor of life. We have none of it;
we are too tired to have any thoughts; we have lived so much so long
ago that now we are content with the very simple things,--the warmth of
the sun and the colors of the hills and the flavor of bread and wine.
All the rest is automatic, ritual."
"But what about the strike?" I asked, referring to the one-day's
general strike that had just been carried out with fair success
throughout Spain, as a protest against the government's apathy
regarding the dangerous rise in the prices of food and fuel.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"That, and more," he said, "is new Spain, a prophecy, rather than a
fact. Old Spain is still all-powerful."
Later in the day I was walking through the main street of one of the
clustered adobe villages that lie in the folds of the Castilian plain
not far from Madrid. The lamps were just being lit in the little shops
where the people lived and worked and sold their goods, and women with
beautifully shaped pottery jars on their heads were coming home with
water from the well. Suddenly I came out on an open _plaza_ with
trees from which the last leaves were falling through the greenish
sunset light. The place was filled with the lilting music of a
grind-organ and with a crunch of steps on the gravel as people danced.
There were soldiers and servant-girls, and red-cheeked apprentice-boys
with their sweethearts, and respectable shop-keepers, and their wives
with mantillas over their gleaming black hair. All were dancing in and
out among the slim tree-trunks, and the air was noisy with laughter and
little cries of childlike unfeigned enjoyment. Here was the gospel of
Sancho Panza, I thought, the easy acceptance of life, the unashamed joy
in food and color and the softness of women's hair. But as I walked out
of the village across the harsh plain of Castile, grey-green and violet
under the deepening night, the memory came to me of the knight of the
sorrowful countenance, Don Quixote, blunderingly trying to remould the
world, pitifully sure of the power of his own ideal. And in these two
Spain seemed to be manifest. Far indeed were they from the restless
industrial world of joyless enforced labor and incessant goading war.
And I wondered to what purpose it would be, should Don Quixote again
saddle Rosinante, and what the good baker of Almorox would say to his
wife when he looked up from his kneading trough, holding out hands
white with dough, to see the knight errant ride by on his lean steed
upon a new quest.
_IV: Talk by the Road_
Telemachus and Lyaeus had walked all night. The sky to the east of them
was rosy when they came out of a village at the crest of a hill. Cocks
crowed behind stucco walls. The road dropped from their feet through an
avenue of pollarded poplars ghostly with frost. Far away into the brown
west stretched reach upon reach of lake-like glimmer; here and there a
few trees pushed jagged arms out of drowned lands. They stood still
breathing hard.
"It's the Tagus overflowed its banks," said Telemachus.
Lyaeus shook his head.
"It's mist."
They stood with thumping hearts on the hilltop looking over
inexplicable shimmering plains of mist hemmed by mountains jagged like
coals that as they looked began to smoulder with dawn. The light all
about was lemon yellow. The walls of the village behind them were
fervid primrose color splotched with shadows of sheer cobalt. Above the
houses uncurled green spirals of wood-smoke.
Lyaeus raised his hands above his head and shouted and ran like mad
down the hill. A little voice was whispering in Telemachus's ear that
he must save his strength, so he followed sedately.
When he caught up to Lyaeus they were walking among twining wraiths of
mist rose-shot from a rim of the sun that poked up behind hills of
bright madder purple. A sudden cold wind-gust whined across the plain,
making the mist writhe in a delirium of crumbling shapes. Ahead of them
casting gigantic blue shadows over the furrowed fields rode a man on a
donkey and a man on a horse. It was a grey sway-backed horse that
joggled in a little trot with much switching of a ragged tail; its
rider wore a curious peaked cap and sat straight and lean in the
saddle. Over one shoulder rested a long bamboo pole that in the
exaggerating sunlight cast a shadow like the shadow of a lance. The man
on the donkey was shaped like a dumpling and rode with his toes turned
out.
Telemachus and Lyaeus walked behind them a long while without catching
up, staring curiously after these two silent riders.
Eventually getting as far as the tails of the horse and the donkey,
they called out: "_Buenos dias_."
There turned to greet them a red, round face, full of little lines like
an over-ripe tomato and a long bloodless face drawn into a point at the
chin by a grizzled beard.
"How early you are, gentlemen," said the tall man on the grey horse.
His voice was deep and sepulchral, with an occasional flutter of
tenderness like a glint of light in a black river.
"Late," said Lyaeus. "We come from Madrid on foot."
The dumpling man crossed himself.
"They are mad," he said to his companion.
"That," said the man on the grey horse, "is always the answer of
ignorance when confronted with the unusual. These gentlemen undoubtedly
have very good reason for doing as they do; and besides the night is
the time for long strides and deep thoughts, is it not, gentlemen? The
habit of vigil is one we sorely need in this distracted modern world.
If more men walked and thought the night through there would be less
miseries under the sun."
"But, such a cold night!" exclaimed the dumpling man.
"On colder nights than this I have seen children asleep in doorways in
the streets of Madrid."
"Is there much poverty in these parts? asked Telemachus stiffly,
wanting to show that he too had the social consciousness.
"There are people--thousands--who from the day they are born till the
day they die never have enough to eat."
"They have wine," said Lyaeus.
"One little cup on Sundays, and they are so starved that it makes them
as drunk as if it were a hogshead."
"I have heard," said Lyaeus, "that the sensations of starving are very
interesting--people have visions more vivid than life."
"One needs very few sensations to lead life humbly and beautifully,"
said the man on the grey horse in a gentle tone of reproof.
Lyaeus frowned.
"Perhaps," said the man on the grey horse turning towards Telemachus
his lean face, where under scraggly eyebrows glowered eyes of soft dark
green, "it is that I have brooded too much on the injustice done in the
world--all society one great wrong. Many years ago I should have set
out to right wrong--for no one but a man, an individual alone, can
right a wrong; organization merely substitutes one wrong for
another--but now ... I am too old. You see, I go fishing instead."
"Why, it's a fishing pole," cried Lyaeus. "When I first saw it I
thought it was a lance." And he let out his roaring laugh.
"And such trout," cried the dumpling man. "The trout there are in that
little stream above Illescas! That's why we got up so early, to fish
for trout."
"I like to see the dawn," said the man on the grey horse.
"Is that Illescas?" asked Telemachus, and pointed to a dun brown tower
topped by a cap of blue slate that stood guard over a cluster of roofs
ahead of them. Telemachus had a map torn from Baedecker in his pocket
that he had been peeping at secretly.
"That, gentlemen, is Illescas," said the man on the grey horse. "And if
you will allow me to offer you a cup of coffee, I shall be most
pleased. You must excuse me, for I never take anything before midday. I
am a recluse, have been for many years and rarely stir abroad. I do not
intend to return to the world unless I can bring something with me
worth having." A wistful smile twisted a little the corners of his
mouth.
"I could guzzle a hogshead of coffee accompanied by vast processions of
toasted rolls in columns of four," shouted Lyaeus.
"We are on our way to Toledo," Telemachus broke in, not wanting to give
the impression that food was their only thought.
"You will see the paintings of Dominico Theotocopoulos, the only one
who ever depicted the soul of Castile."
"This man," said Lyaeus, with a slap at Telemachus's shoulder, "is
looking for a gesture."
"The gesture of Castile."
The man on the grey horse rode along silently for some time. The sun
had already burnt up the hoar-frost along the sides of the road; only
an occasional streak remained glistening in the shadow of a ditch. A
few larks sang in the sky. Two men in brown corduroy with hoes on their
shoulders passed on their way to the fields.
"Who shall say what is the gesture of Castile?... I am from La Mancha
myself." The man on the grey horse started speaking gravely while with
a bony hand, very white, he stroked his beard. "Something cold and
haughty and aloof ... men concentrated, converging breathlessly on the
single flame of their spirit.... Torquemada, Loyola, Jorge Manrique,
Cortes, Santa Teresa.... Rapacity, cruelty, straightforwardness....
Every man's life a lonely ruthless quest."
Lyaeus broke in:
"Remember the infinite gentleness of the saints lowering the Conde de
Orgaz into the grave in the picture in San Tomas...."
"Ah, that is what I was trying to think of.... These generations, my
generation, my son's generation, are working to bury with infinite
tenderness the gorgeously dressed corpse of the old Spain....
Gentlemen, it is a little ridiculous to say so, but we have set out
once more with lance and helmet of knight-errantry to free the
enslaved, to right the wrongs of the oppressed."
They had come into town. In the high square tower church-bells were
ringing for morning mass. Down the broad main street scampered a flock
of goats herded by a lean man with fangs like a dog who strode along in
a snuff-colored cloak with a broad black felt hat on his head.
"How do you do, Don Alonso?" he cried; "Good luck to you, gentlemen."
And he swept the hat off his head in a wide curving gesture as might a
courtier of the Rey Don Juan.
The hot smell of the goats was all about them as they sat before the
cafe in the sun under a bare acacia tree, looking at the tightly
proportioned brick arcades of the mudejar apse of the church opposite.
Don Alonso was in the cafe ordering; the dumpling-man had disappeared.
Telemachus got up on his numbed feet and stretched his legs. "Ouf," he
said, "I'm tired." Then he walked over to the grey horse that stood
with hanging head and drooping knees hitched to one of the acacias.
"I wonder what his name is." He stroked the horse's scrawny face. "Is
it Rosinante?"
The horse twitched his ears, straightened his back and legs and pulled
back black lips to show yellow teeth.
"Of course it's Rosinante!"
The horse's sides heaved. He threw back his head and whinnied shrilly,
exultantly.
_V: A Novelist of Revolution_
I
Much as G. B. S. refuses to be called an Englishman, Pio Baroja refuses
to be called a Spaniard. He is a Basque. Reluctantly he admits having
been born in San Sebastian, outpost of Cosmopolis on the mountainous
coast of Guipuzcoa, where a stern-featured race of mountaineers and
fishermen, whose prominent noses, high ruddy cheek-bones and square
jowls are gradually becoming known to the world through the paintings
of the Zubiaurre, clings to its ancient un-Aryan language and its
ancient song and customs with the hard-headedness of hill people the
world over.
From the first Spanish discoveries in America till the time of our own
New England clipper ships, the Basque coast was the backbone of Spanish
trade. The three provinces were the only ones which kept their
privileges and their municipal liberties all through the process of the
centralizing of the Spanish monarchy with cross and faggot, which
historians call the great period of Spain. The rocky inlets in the
mountains were full of shipyards that turned out privateers and
merchantmen manned by lanky broad-shouldered men with hard red-beaked
faces and huge hands coarsened by generations of straining on heavy
oars and halyards,--men who feared only God and the sea-spirits of
their strange mythology and were a law unto themselves, adventurers and
bigots.
It was not till the Nineteenth century that the Carlist wars and the
passing of sailing ships broke the prosperous independence of the
Basque provinces and threw them once for all into the main current of
Spanish life. Now papermills take the place of shipyards, and instead
of the great fleet that went off every year to fish the Newfoundland
and Iceland banks, a few steam trawlers harry the sardines in the Bay
of Biscay. The world war, too, did much to make Bilboa one of the
industrial centers of Spain, even restoring in some measure the ancient
prosperity of its shipping.
Pio Baroja spent his childhood on this rainy coast between green
mountains and green sea. There were old aunts who filled his ears up
with legends of former mercantile glory, with talk of sea captains and
slavers and shipwrecks. Born in the late seventies, Baroja left the
mist-filled inlets of Guipuzcoa to study medicine in Madrid, febrile
capital full of the artificial scurry of government, on the dry upland
plateau of New Castile. He even practiced, reluctantly enough, in a
town near Valencia, where he must have acquired his distaste for the
Mediterranean and the Latin genius, and, later, in his own province at
Cestons, where he boarded with the woman who baked the sacramental
wafers for the parish church, and, so he claims, felt the spirit of
racial solidarity glow within him for the first time. But he was too
timid in the face of pain and too sceptical of science as of everything
else to acquire the cocksure brutality of a country doctor. He gave up
medicine and returned to Madrid, where he became a baker. In
_Juventud-Egolatria_ ("Youth-Selfworship") a book of delightfully
shameless self-revelations, he says that he ran a bakery for six years
before starting to write. And he still runs a bakery.
You can see it any day, walking towards the Royal Theatre from the
great focus of Madrid life, the Puerta del Sol. It has a most enticing
window. On one side are hams and red sausages and purple sausages and
white sausages, some plump to the bursting like Rubens's "Graces,"
others as weazened and smoked as saints by Ribera. In the middle are
oblong plates with pates and sliced bologna and things in jelly; then
come ranks of cakes, creamcakes and fruitcakes, everything from obscene
jam-rolls to celestial cornucopias of white cream. Through the door you
see a counter with round loaves of bread on it, and a basketful of
brown rolls. If someone comes out a dense sweet smell of fresh bread
and pastry swirls about the sidewalk.
So, by meeting commerce squarely in its own field, he has freed himself
from any compromise with Mammon. While his bread remains sweet, his
novels may be as bitter as he likes.