"I have never hidden my admirations in literature. They have been and
are Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoievski and, now, Stendhal...." writes
Baroja in the preface to the Nelson edition of _La Dama Errante_
("The Wandering Lady"). He follows particularly in the footprints of
Balzac in that he is primarily a historian of morals, who has made a
fairly consistent attempt to cover the world he lived in. With
Dostoievski there is a kinship in the passionate hatred of cruelty and
stupidity that crops out everywhere in his work. I have never found any
trace of influence of the other three. To be sure there are a few early
sketches in the manner of Poe, but in respect to form he is much more
in the purely chaotic tradition of the picaresque novel he despises
than in that of the American theorist.
Baroja's most important work lies in the four series of novels of the
Spanish life he lived, in Madrid, in the provincial towns where he
practiced medicine, and in the Basque country where he had been brought
up. The foundation of these was laid by _El Arbol de la Ciencia_ ("The
Tree of Knowledge"), a novel half autobiographical describing the life
and death of a doctor, giving a picture of existence in Madrid and then
in two Spanish provincial towns. Its tremendously vivid painting of
inertia and the deadening under its weight of intellectual effort made
a very profound impression in Spain. Two novels about the anarchist
movement followed it, _La Dama Errante_, which describes the state of
mind of forward-looking Spaniards at the time of the famous anarchist
attempt on the lives of the king and queen the day of their marriage,
and _La Ciudad de la Niebla_, about the Spanish colony in London. Then
came the series called _La Busca_ ("The Search"), which to me is
Baroja's best work, and one of the most interesting things published in
Europe in the last decade. It deals with the lowest and most miserable
life in Madrid and is written with a cold acidity which Maupassant
would have envied and is permeated by a human vividness that I do not
think Maupassant could have achieved. All three novels, _La Busca_,
_Mala Hierba_, and _Aurora Roja_, deal with the drifting of a typical
uneducated Spanish boy, son of a maid of all work in a boarding house,
through different strata of Madrid life. They give a sense of unadorned
reality very rare in any literature, and besides their power as novels
are immensely interesting as sheer natural history. The type of the
_golfo_ is a literary discovery comparable with that of Sancho Panza by
Cervantes.
Nothing that Baroja has written since is quite on the same level. The
series _El Pasado_ ("The Past") gives interesting pictures of
provincial life. _Las Inquietudes de Shanti Andia_ ("The Anxieties of
Shanti Andia"), a story of Basque seamen which contains a charming
picture of a childhood in a seaside village in Guipuzcoa, delightful as
it is to read, is too muddled in romantic claptrap to add much to his
fame. _El Mundo es Asi_ ("The World is Like That") expresses, rather
lamely it seems to me, the meditations of a disenchanted revolutionist.
The latest series, _Memorias de un Hombre de Accion_, a series of yarns
about the revolutionary period in Spain at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, though entertaining, is more an attempt to escape
in a jolly romantic past the realities of the morose present than
anything else. _Cesar o Nada_, translated into English under the title
of "Aut Caesar aut Nullus" is also less acid and less effective than his
earlier novels. That is probably why it was chosen for translation into
English. We know how anxious our publishers are to furnish food easily
digestible by weak American stomachs.
It is silly to judge any Spanish novelist from the point of view of
form. Improvisation is the very soul of Spanish writing. In thinking
back over books of Baroja's one has read, one remembers more
descriptions of places and people than anything else. In the end it is
rather natural history than dramatic creation. But a natural history
that gives you the pictures etched with vitriol of Spanish life in the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century which
you get in these novels of Baroja's is very near the highest sort of
creation. If we could inject some of the virus of his intense sense of
reality into American writers it would be worth giving up all these
stale conquests of form we inherited from Poe and O. Henry. The
following, again from the preface of _La Dama Errante_, is Baroja's own
statement of his aims. And certainly he has realized them.
"Probably a book like _la Dama Errante_ is not of the sort that lives
very long; it is not a painting with aspirations towards the museum but
an impressionist canvas; perhaps as a work it has too much asperity, is
too hard, not serene enough.
"This ephemeral character of my work does not displease me. We are men
of the day, people in love with the passing moment, with all that is
fugitive and transitory and the lasting quality of our work preoccupies
us little, so little that it can hardly be said to preoccupy us at
all."
_VI: Talk by the Road_
"Spain," said Don Alonso, as he and Telemachus walked out of Illescas,
followed at a little distance by Lyaeus and the dumpling-man, "has
never been swept clean. There have been the Romans and the Visigoths
and the Moors and the French--armed men jingling over mountain roads.
Conquest has warped and sterilised our Iberian mind without changing an
atom of it. An example: we missed the Revolution and suffered from
Napoleon. We virtually had no Reformation, yet the Inquisition was
stronger with us than anywhere."
"Do you think it will have to be swept clean?" asked Telemachus.
"He does." Don Alonso pointed with a sweep of an arm towards a man
working in the field beside the road. It was a short man in a blouse;
he broke the clods the plow had left with a heavy triangular hoe.
Sometimes he raised it only a foot above the ground to poise for a
blow, sometimes he swung it from over his shoulder. Face, clothes,
hands, hoe were brown against the brown hillside where a purple shadow
mocked each heavy gesture with lank gesticulations. In the morning
silence the blows of the hoe beat upon the air with muffled insistence.
"And he is the man who will do the building," went on Don Alonso; "It
is only fair that we should clear the road."
"But you are the thinkers," said Telemachus; his mother Penelope's
maxims on the subject of constructive criticism popped up suddenly in
his mind like tickets from a cash register.
"Thought is the acid that destroys," answered Don Alonso.
Telemachus turned to look once more at the man working in the field.
The hoe rose and fell, rose and fell. At a moment on each stroke a
flash of sunlight came from it. Telemachus saw all at once the whole
earth, plowed fields full of earth-colored men, shoulders thrown back,
bent forward, muscles of arms swelling and slackening, hoes flashing at
the same moment against the sky, at the same moment buried with a thud
in clods. And he felt reassured as a traveller feels, hearing the
continuous hiss and squudge of well oiled engines out at sea.
_VII: Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs_
When we stepped out of the bookshop the narrow street steamed with the
dust of many carriages. Above the swiftly whirling wheels gaudily
dressed men and women sat motionless in attitudes. Over the backs of
the carriages brilliant shawls trailed, triangles of red and purple and
yellow.
"Bread and circuses," muttered the man who was with me, "but not enough
bread."
It was fair-time in Cordova; the carriages were coming back from the
_toros_. We turned into a narrow lane, where the dust was yellow
between high green and lavender-washed walls. From the street we had
left came a sound of cheers and hand-clapping. My friend stopped still
and put his hand on my arm.
"There goes Belmonte," he said; "half the men who are cheering him have
never had enough to eat in their lives. The old Romans knew better; to
keep people quiet they filled their bellies. Those fools--" he jerked
his head backwards with disgust; I thought, of the shawls and the high
combs and the hair gleaming black under lace and the wasp-waists of the
young men and the insolence of black eyes above the flashing wheels of
the carriages, "--those fools give only circuses. Do you people in the
outside world realize that we in Andalusia starve, that we have starved
for generations, that those black bulls for the circuses may graze over
good wheatland ... to make Spain picturesque! The only time we see meat
is in the bullring. Those people who argue all the time as to why
Spain's backward and write books about it, I could tell them in one
word: malnutrition." He laughed despairingly and started walking fast
again. "We have solved the problem of the cost of living. We live on
air and dust and bad smells."
I had gone into his bookshop a few minutes before to ask an address,
and had been taken into the back room with the wonderful enthusiastic
courtesy one finds so often in Spain. There the bookseller, a carpenter
and the bookseller's errand-boy had all talked at once, explaining the
last strike of farm-laborers, when the region had been for months under
martial law, and they, and every one else of socialist or republican
sympathies, had been packed for weeks into overcrowded prisons. They
all regretted they could not take me to the Casa del Pueblo, but, they
explained laughing, the Civil Guard was occupying it at that moment. It
ended by the bookseller's coming out with me to show me the way to
Azorin's.
Azorin was an architect who had supported the strikers; he had just
come back to Cordova from the obscure village where he had been
imprisoned through the care of the military governor who had paid him
the compliment of thinking that even in prison he would be dangerous in
Cordova. He had recently been elected municipal councillor, and when we
reached his office was busy designing a schoolhouse. On the stairs the
bookseller had whispered to me that every workman in Cordova would die
for Azorin. He was a sallow little man with a vaguely sarcastic voice
and an amused air as if he would burst out laughing at any moment. He
put aside his plans and we all went on to see the editor of
_Andalusia_, a regionalist pro-labor weekly.
In that dark little office, over three cups of coffee that appeared
miraculously from somewhere with the pungent smell of ink and fresh
paper in our nostrils, we talked about the past and future of Cordova,
and of all the wide region of northern Andalusia, fertile irrigated
plains, dry olive-land stretching up to the rocky waterless mountains
where the mines are. In Azorin's crisp phrases and in the long ornate
periods of the editor, the serfdom and the squalor and the heroic hope
of these peasants and miners and artisans became vivid to me for the
first time. Occasionally the compositor, a boy of about fifteen with a
brown ink-smudged face, would poke his head in the door and shout:
"It's true what they say, but they don't say enough, they don't say
enough."
The problem in the south of Spain is almost wholly agrarian. From the
Tagus to the Mediterranean stretches a mountainous region of low
rainfall, intersected by several series of broad river-valleys which,
under irrigation, are enormously productive of rice, oranges, and, in
the higher altitudes, of wheat. In the dry hills grow grapes, olives
and almonds. A country on the whole much like southern California.
Under the Moors this region was the richest and most civilised in
Europe.
When the Christian nobles from the north reconquered it, the
ecclesiastics laid hold of the towns and extinguished industry through
the Inquisition, while the land was distributed in huge estates to the
magnates of the court of the Catholic Kings. The agricultural workers
became virtually serfs, and the communal village system of working the
land gradually gave way, Now the province of Jaen, certainly as large
as the State of Rhode Island, is virtually owned by six families. This
process was helped by the fact that all through the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the liveliest people in all Spain swarmed
overseas to explore and plunder America or went into the church, so
that the tilling of the land was left to the humblest and least
vigorous. And immigration to America has continued the safety valve of
the social order.
It is only comparatively recently that the consciousness has begun to
form among the workers of the soil that it is possible for them to
change their lot. As everywhere else, Russia has been the beacon-flare.
Since 1918 an extraordinary tenseness has come over the lives of the
frugal sinewy peasants who, through centuries of oppression and
starvation, have kept, in spite of almost complete illiteracy, a
curiously vivid sense of personal independence. In the backs of taverns
revolutionary tracts are spelled out by some boy who has had a couple
of years of school to a crowd of men who listen or repeat the words
after him with the fervor of people going through a religious mystery.
Unspeakable faith possesses them in what they call "_la nueva
ley_" ("the new law"), by which the good things a man wrings by his
sweat from the earth shall be his and not the property of a distant
senor in Madrid.
It is this hopefulness that marks the difference between the present
agrarian agitation and the violent and desperate peasant risings of the
past. As early as October, 1918, a congress of agricultural workers was
held to decide on strike methods and, more important, to formulate a
demand for the expropriation of the land. In two months the unions,
("_sociedades de resistencia_") had been welded--at least in the
province of Cordova--into a unified system with more or less central
leadership. The strike which followed was so complete that in many
cases even domestic servants went out. After savage repression and the
military occupation of the whole province, the strike petered out into
compromises which resulted in considerable betterment of working
conditions but left the important issues untouched.
The rise in the cost of living and the growing unrest brought matters
to a head again in the summer of 1919. The military was used with even
more brutality than the previous year. Attempts at compromise, at
parcelling out uncultivated land have proved as unavailing as the
Mausers of the Civil Guard to quell the tumult. The peasants have kept
their organizations and their demands intact. They are even willing to
wait; but they are determined that the land upon which they have worn
out generations and generations shall be theirs without question.
All this time the landlords brandish a redoubtable weapon: starvation.
Already thousands of acres that might be richly fertile lie idle or are
pasture for herds of wild bulls for the arena. The great land-owning
families hold estates all over Spain; if in a given region the workers
become too exigent, they decide to leave the land in fallow for a year
or two. In the villages it becomes a question of starve or emigrate. To
emigrate many certificates are needed. Many officials have to be
placated. For all that money is needed. Men taking to the roads in
search of work are persecuted as vagrants by the civil guards. Arson
becomes the last retort of despair. At night the standing grain burns
mysteriously or the country house of an absent landlord, and from the
parched hills where gnarled almond-trees grow, groups of half starved
men watch the flames with grim exultation.
Meanwhile the press in Madrid laments the _incultura_ of the Andalusian
peasants. The problem of civilization, after all, is often one of food
calories. Fernando de los Rios, socialist deputy for Granada, recently
published the result of an investigation of the food of the
agricultural populations of Spain in which he showed that only in the
Balkans--out of all Europe--was the working man so under-nourished. The
calories which the diet of the average Cordova workman represented was
something like a fourth of those of the British workman's diet. Even so
the foremen of the big estates complain that as a result of all this
social agitation their workmen have taken to eating more than they did
in the good old times.
How long it will be before the final explosion comes no one can
conjecture. The spring of 1920, when great things were expected, was
completely calm. On the other hand, in the last municipal elections
when six hundred socialist councillors were elected in all Spain--in
contrast to sixty-two in 1915--the vote polled in Andalusia was
unprecedented. Up to this election many of the peasants had never dared
vote, and those that had had been completely under the thumb of the
_caciques_, the bosses that control Spanish local politics. However, in
spite of socialist and syndicalist propaganda, the agrarian problem
will always remain separate from anything else in the minds of the
peasants. This does not mean that they are opposed to communism or
cling as violently as most of the European peasantry to the habit of
private property.
All over Spain one comes upon traces of the old communist village
institutions, by which flocks and mills and bakeries and often land
were held in common. As in all arid countries, where everything depends
upon irrigation, ditches are everywhere built and repaired in common.
And the idea of private property is of necessity feeble where there is
no rain; for what good is land to a man without water? Still, until
there grows up a much stronger community of interest than now exists
between the peasants and the industrial workers, the struggle for the
land and the struggle for the control of industry will be, in Spain, as
I think everywhere, parallel rather than unified. One thing is certain,
however long the fire smoulders before it flares high to make a clean
sweep of Spanish capitalism and Spanish feudalism together, Cordova,
hoary city of the caliphs, where ghosts of old grandeurs flit about the
zigzag ochre-colored lanes, will, when the moment comes, be the center
of organization of the agrarian revolution. When I was leaving Spain I
rode with some young men who were emigrating to America, to make their
fortunes, they said. When I told them I had been to Cordova, their
faces became suddenly bright with admiration.
"Ah, Cordova," one of them cried; "they've got the guts in Cordova."
_VIII: Talk by the Road_
At the first crossroads beyond Illescas the dumpling-man and Don Alonso
turned off in quest of the trout stream. Don Alonso waved solemnly to
Lyaeus and Telemachus.
"Perhaps we shall meet in Toledo," he said.
"Catch a lot of fish," shouted Lyaeus.
"And perhaps a thought," was the last word they heard from Don Alonso.
The sun already high in the sky poured tingling heat on their heads and
shoulders. There was sand in their shoes, an occasional sharp pain in
their shins, in their bellies bitter emptiness.
"At the next village, Tel, I'm going to bed. You can do what you like,"
said Lyaeus in a tearful voice.
"I'll like that all right."
"_Buenos dias, senores viajeros_," came a cheerful voice. They found
they were walking in the company of a man who wore a tight-waisted
overcoat of a light blue color, a cream-colored felt hat from under
which protruded long black moustaches with gimlet points, and shoes
with lemon-yellow uppers. They passed the time of day with what
cheerfulness they could muster.
"Ah, Toledo," said the man. "You are going to Toledo, my birthplace.
There I was born in the shadow of the cathedral, there I shall die. I
am a traveller of commerce." He produced two cards as large as
postcards on which was written:
ANTONIO SILVA Y YEPES
UNIVERSAL AGENT
IMPORT EXPORT NATIONAL PRODUCTS
"At your service, gentlemen," he said and handed each of them a card.
"I deal in tinware, ironware, pottery, lead pipes, enameled ware,
kitchen utensils, American toilet articles, French perfumery, cutlery,
linen, sewing machines, saddles, bridles, seeds, fancy poultry,
fighting bantams and objects _de vertu_.... You are foreigners, are you
not? How barbarous Spain, what people, what dirt, what lack of culture,
what impoliteness, what lack of energy!"
The universal agent choked, coughed, spat, produced a handkerchief of
crimson silk with which he wiped his eyes and mouth, twirled his
moustaches and plunged again into a torrent of words, turning on
Telemachus from time to time little red-rimmed eyes full of moist
pathos like a dog's.
"Oh there are times, gentlemen, when it is too much to bear, when I
rejoice to think that it's all up with my lungs and that I shan't live
long anyway.... In America I should have been a Rockefeller, a
Carnegie, a Morgan. I know it, for I am a man of genius. It is true. I
am a man of genius.... And look at me here walking from one of these
cursed tumbledown villages to another because I have not money enough
to hire a cab.... And ill too, dying of consumption! O Spain, Spain,
how do you crush your great men! What you must think of us, you who
come from civilized countries, where life is organized, where commerce
is a gentlemanly, even a noble occupation...."
"But you savor life more...."
"_Ca, ca_," interrupted the universal agent with a downward gesture of
the hand. "To think that they call by the same name living here in a
pen like a pig and living in Paris, London, New York, Biarritz,
Trouville ... luxurious beds, coiffures, toilettes, theatrical
functions, sumptuous automobiles, elegant ladies glittering with
diamonds ... the world of light and enchantment! Oh to think of it! And
Spain could be the richest country in Europe, if we had energy,
organization, culture! Think of the exports: iron, coal, copper,
silver, oranges, hides, mules, olives, food products, woolens, cotton
cloth, sugarcane, raw cotton ... couplets, dancers, gipsy girls...."
The universal agent had quite lost his breath. He coughed for a long
time into his crimson handkerchief, then looked about him over the
rolling dun slopes to which the young grain sprouting gave a sheen of
vivid green like the patina on a Pompeian bronze vase, and shrugged his
shoulders.
"_!Que vida!_ What a life!"
For some time a spire had been poking up into the sky at the road's
end; now yellow-tiled roofs were just visible humped out of the
wheatland, with the church standing guard over them, it's buttresses as
bowed as the legs of a bulldog. At the sight of the village a certain
spring came back to Telemachus's fatigue-sodden legs. He noticed with
envy that Lyaeus took little skips as he walked.
"If we properly exploited our exports we should be the richest people
in Europe," the universal agent kept shouting with far-flung gestures
of despair. And the last they heard from him as they left him to turn
into the manure-littered, chicken-noisy courtyard of the Posada de la
Luna was, "_!Que pueblo indecente!_... What a beastly town ... yet if
they exploited with energy, with modern energy, their exports...."
_IX: An Inverted Midas_
Every age must have had choice spirits whose golden fingers turned
everything they touched to commonplace. Since we know our own
literature best it seems unreasonably well equipped with these inverted
Midases--though the fact that all Anglo-American writing during the
last century has been so exclusively of the middle classes, by the
middle classes and for the middle classes must count for something.
Still Rome had her Marcus Aurelius, and we may be sure that platitudes
would have obscured the slanting sides of the pyramids had
stone-cutting in the reign of Cheops been as disastrously easy as is
printing to-day. The addition of the typewriter to the printing-press
has given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked
thought. The labor of graving on stone or of baking tablets of brick or
even of scrawling letters on paper with a pen is no longer a curb on
the dangerous fluency of the inverted Midas. He now lolls in a Morris
chair, sipping iced tea, dictating to four blonde and two dark-haired
stenographers; three novels, a couple of books of travel and a short
story written at once are nothing to a really enterprising universal
genius. Poor Julius Caesar with his letters!
We complain that we have no supermen nowadays, that we can't live as
much or as widely or as fervently or get through so much work as could
Pico della Mirandola or Erasmus or Politian, that the race drifts
towards mental and physical anaemia. I deny it. With the typewriter all
these things shall be added unto us. This age too has its great
universal geniuses. They overrun the seven continents and their
respective seas. Accompanied by maenadic bands of stenographers, and a
music of typewriters deliriously clicking, they go about the world,
catching all the butterflies, rubbing the bloom off all the plums,
tunneling mountains, bridging seas, smoothing the facets off ideas so
that they may be swallowed harmlessly like pills. With true Anglo-Saxon
conceit we had thought that our own Mr. Wells was the most universal of
these universal geniuses. He has so diligently brought science, ethics,
sex, marriage, sociology, God, and everything else--properly
deodorized, of course--to the desk of the ordinary man, that he may
lean back in his swivel-chair and receive faint susuration from the
sense of progress and the complexity of life, without even having to go
to the window to look at the sparrows sitting in rows on the
telephone-wires, so that really it seemed inconceivable that anyone
should be more universal. It was rumored that there lay the ultimate
proof of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy. What other race had produced a great
universal genius?
But all that was before the discovery of Blasco Ibanez.
On the backs of certain of Blasco Ibanez's novels published by the Casa
Prometeo in Valencia is this significant advertisement: _Obras de
Vulgarizacion Popular_ ("Works of Popular Vulgarization"). Under it is
an astounding list of volumes, all either translated or edited or
arranged, if not written from cover to cover, by one tireless pen,--I
mean typewriter. Ten volumes of universal history, three volumes of the
French Revolution translated from Michelet, a universal geography, a
social history, works on science, cookery and house-cleaning, nine
volumes of Blasco Ibanez's own history of the European war, and a
translation of the Arabian Nights, a thousand and one of them without
an hour missing. "Works of Popular Vulgarization." I admit that in
Spanish the word _vulgarizacion_ has not yet sunk to its inevitable
meaning, but can it long stand such a strain? Add to that list a round
two dozen novels and some books of travel, and who can deny that Blasco
Ibanez is a great universal genius? Read his novels and you will find
that he has looked at the stars and knows Lord Kelvin's theory of
vortices and the nebular hypothesis and the direction of ocean currents
and the qualities of kelp and the direction the codfish go in Iceland
waters when the northeast wind blows; that he knows about Gothic
architecture and Byzantine painting, the social movement in Jerez and
the exports of Patagonia, the wall-paper of Paris apartment houses and
the red paste with which countesses polish their fingernails in Monte
Carlo.
The very pattern of a modern major-general. And, like the great
universal geniuses of the Renaissance, he has lived as well as thought
and written. He is said to have been thirty times in prison, six times
deputy; he has been a cowboy in the pampas of Argentina; he has founded
a city in Patagonia with a bullring and a bust of Cervantes in the
middle of it; he has rounded the Horn on a sailing-ship in a hurricane,
and it is whispered that like Victor Hugo he eats lobsters with the
shells on. He hobnobs with the universe.
One must admit, too, that Blasco Ibanez's universe is a bulkier,
burlier universe than Mr. Wells's. One is strangely certain that the
axle of Mr. Wells's universe is fixed in some suburb of London, say
Putney, where each house has a bit of garden where waddles an asthmatic
pet dog, where people drink tea weak, with milk in it, before a
gas-log, where every bookcase makes a futile effort to impinge on
infinity through the encyclopedia, where life is a monotonous going and
coming, swathed in clothes that must above all be respectable, to
business and from business. But who can say where Blasco Ibanez's
universe centers? It is in constant progression.
Starting, as Walt Whitman from fish-shaped Paumonauk, from the fierce
green fertility of Valencia, city of another great Spanish conqueror,
the Cid, he had marched on the world in battle array. The whole history
comes out in the series of novels at this moment being translated in
such feverish haste for the edification of the American public. The
beginnings are stories of the peasants of the fertile plain round about
Valencia, of the fishermen and sailors of El Grao, the port, a sturdy
violent people living amid a snappy fury of vegetation unexampled in
Europe. His method is inspired to a certain extent by Zola, taking from
him a little of the newspaper-horror mode of realism, with inevitable
murder and sudden death in the last chapters. Yet he expresses that
life vividly, although even then more given to grand vague ideas than
to a careful scrutiny of men and things. He is at home in the strong
communal feeling, in the individual anarchism, in the passionate
worship of the water that runs through the fields to give life and of
the blades of wheat that give bread and of the wine that gives joy,
which is the moral make-up of the Valencian peasant. He is sincerely
indignant about the agrarian system, about social inequality, and is
full of the revolutionary bravado of his race.
A typical novel of this period is _La Barraca_, a story of a peasant
family that takes up land which has lain vacant for years under the
curse of the community, since the eviction of the tenants, who had held
it for generations, by a landlord who was murdered as a result, on a
lonely road by the father of the family he had turned out. The struggle
of these peasants against their neighbours is told with a good deal of
feeling, and the culmination in a rifle fight in an irrigation ditch is
a splendid bit of blood and thunder. There are many descriptions of
local customs, such as the Tribunal of Water that sits once a week
under one of the portals of Valencia cathedral to settle conflicts of
irrigation rights, a little dragged in by the heels, to be sure, but
still worth reading. Yet even in these early novels one feels over and
over again the force of that phrase "popular vulgarization." Valencia
is being vulgarized for the benefit of the universe. The proletariat is
being vulgarized for the benefit of the people who buy novels.
From Valencia raids seem to have been made on other parts of Spain.
_Sonnica la Cortesana_ gives you antique Saguntum and the usual "Aves,"
wreaths, flute-players and other claptrap of costume novels. In _La
Catedral_ you have Toledo, the church, socialism and the modern world
in the shadow of Gothic spires. _La Bodega_ takes you into the genial
air of the wine vaults of Jerez-de-la-Frontera, with smugglers,
processions blessing the vineyards and agrarian revolt in the
background. Up to now they have been Spanish novels written for
Spaniards; it is only with _Sangre y Arena_ that the virus of a
European reputation shows results.
In _Sangre y Arena_, to be sure, you learn that _toreros_ use scent,
have a home life, and are seduced by passionate Baudelairian ladies of
the smart set who plant white teeth in their brown sinewy arms and
teach them to smoke opium cigarettes. You see _toreros_ taking the
sacraments before going into the ring and you see them tossed by the
bull while the crowd, which a moment before had been crying "hola" as
if it didn't know that something was going wrong, gets very pale and
chilly and begins to think what dreadful things _corridas_ are anyway,
until the arrival of the next bull makes them forget it. All of which
is good fun when not obscured by grand, vague ideas, and incidentally
sells like hot cakes. Thenceforward the Casa Prometeo becomes an
exporting house dealing in the good Spanish products of violence and
sunshine, blood, voluptuousness and death, as another vulgarizer put
it.
Next comes the expedition to South America and _The Argonauts_ appears.
The Atlantic is bridged,--there open up rich veins of picturesqueness
and new grand vague ideas, all in full swing when the war breaks out.
Blasco Ibanez meets the challenge nobly, and very soon, with _The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse_, which captures the Allied world and
proves again the mot about prophets. So without honor in its own
country is the _Four Horsemen_ that the English translation rights
are sold for a paltry three thousand pesetas. But the great success in
England and America soon shows that we can appreciate the acumen of a
neutral who came in and rooted for our side; so early in the race too!
While the iron is still hot another four hundred pages of well-sugared
pro-Ally propaganda appears, _Mare Nostrum_, which mingles Ulysses
and scientific information about ocean currents, Amphitrite and
submarines, Circe and a vamping Theda Bara who was really a German Spy,
in one grand chant of praise before the Mumbo-Jumbo of nationalism.
_Los Enemigos de la Mujer_, the latest production, abandons Spain
entirely and plants itself in the midst of princes and countesses, all
elaborately pro-Ally, at Monte Carlo. Forgotten the proletarian tastes
of his youth, the local color he loved to lay on so thickly, the
Habanera atmosphere; only the grand vague ideas subsist in the
cosmopolite, and the fluency, that fatal Latin fluency.
And now the United States, the home of the blonde stenographer and the
typewriter and the press agent. What are we to expect from the
combination of Blasco Ibanez and Broadway?
At any rate the movies will profit.
Yet one can't help wishing that Blasco Ibanez had not learnt the
typewriter trick so early. Print so easily spins a web of the
commonplace over the fine outlines of life. And Blasco Ibanez need not
have been an inverted Midas. His is a superbly Mediterranean type, with
something of Arretino, something of Garibaldi, something of Tartarin of
Tarascon. Blustering, sensual, enthusiastic, living at bottom in a real
world--which can hardly be said of Anglo-Saxon vulgarizers--even if it
is a real world obscured by grand vague ideas, Blasco Ibanez's mere
energy would have produced interesting things if it had not found such
easy and immediate vent in the typewriter. Bottle up a man like that
for a lifetime without means of expression and he'll produce memoirs
equal to Marco Polo and Casanova, but let his energies flow out evenly
without resistance through a corps of clicking typewriters and all you
have is one more popular novelist.
It is unfortunate too that Blasco Ibanez and the United States should
have discovered each other at this moment. They will do each other no
good. We have an abundance both of vague grand ideas and of popular
novelists, and we are the favorite breeding place of the inverted
Midas. We need writing that shall be acid, with sharp edges on it,
yeasty to leaven the lump of glucose that the combination of the ideals
of the man in the swivel-chair with decayed puritanism has made of our
national consciousness. Of course Blasco Ibanez in America will only be
a seven days' marvel. Nothing is ever more than that. But why need we
pretend each time that our seven days' marvels are the great eternal
things?
Then, too, if the American public is bound to take up Spain it might as
well take up the worth-while things instead of the works of popular
vulgarization. They have enough of those in their bookcases as it is.
And in Spain there is a novelist like Baroja, essayists like Unamuno
and Azorin, poets like Valle Inclan and Antonio Machado, ... but I
suppose they will shine with the reflected glory of the author of the
_Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_.
_X: Talk by the Road_
When they woke up it was dark. They were cold. Their legs were stiff.
They lay each along one edge of a tremendously wide bed, between them a
tangle of narrow sheets and blankets. Telemachus raised himself to a
sitting position and put his feet, that were still swollen, gingerly to
the floor. He drew them up again with a jerk and sat with his teeth
chattering hunched on the edge of the bed. Lyaeus burrowed into the
blankets and went back to sleep. For a long while Telemachus could not
thaw his frozen wits enough to discover what noise had waked him up.
Then it came upon him suddenly that huge rhythms were pounding about
him, sounds of shaken tambourines and castanettes and beaten dish-pans
and roaring voices. Someone was singing in shrill tremolo above the din
a song of which each verse seemed to end with the phrase, "_y manana
Carnaval_."
"To-morrow's Carnival. Wake up," he cried out to Lyaeus, and pulled on
his trousers.
Lyaeus sat up and rubbed his eyes.
"I smell wine," he said.
Telemachus, through hunger and stiffness and aching feet and the
thought of what his mother Penelope would say about these goings on, if
they ever came to her ears, felt a tremendous elation flare through
him.
"Come on, they're dancing," he cried dragging Lyaeus out on the gallery
that overhung the end of the court.
"Don't forget the butterfly net, Tel."
"What for?"
"To catch your gesture, what do you think?"
Telemachus caught Lyaeus by the shoulders and shook him. As they
wrestled they caught glimpses of the courtyard full of couples bobbing
up and down in a _jota_. In the doorway stood two guitar players and
beside them a table with pitchers and glasses and a glint of spilt
wine. Feeble light came from an occasional little constellation of
olive-oil lamps. When the two of them pitched down stairs together and
shot out reeling among the dancers everybody cried out: "_Hola_," and
shouted that the foreigners must sing a song.
"After dinner," cried Lyaeus as he straightened his necktie. "We
haven't eaten for a year and a half!"
The _padron_, a red thick-necked individual with a week's white
bristle on his face, came up to them holding out hands as big as hams.
"You are going to Toledo for Carnival? O how lucky the young are,
travelling all over the world." He turned to the company with a
gesture; "I was like that when I was young."
They followed him into the kitchen, where they ensconced themselves on
either side of a cave of a fireplace in which burned a fire all too
small. The hunchbacked woman with a face like tanned leather who was
tending the numerous steaming pots that stood about the hearth,
noticing that they were shivering, heaped dry twigs on it that crackled
and burst into flame and gave out a warm spicy tang.
"To-morrow's Carnival," she said. "We mustn't stint ourselves." Then
she handed them each a plate of soup full of bread in which poached
eggs floated, and the _padron_ drew the table near the fire and sat
down opposite them, peering with interest into their faces while they
ate.
After a while he began talking. From outside the hand-clapping and the
sound of castanettes continued interrupted by intervals of shouting and
laughter and an occasional snatch from the song that ended every verse
with "_y manana Carnaval_."
"I travelled when I was your age," he said. "I have been to America ...
Nueva York, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Chicago, San Francisco.... Selling
those little nuts.... Yes, peanuts. What a country! How many laws there
are there, how many policemen. When I was young I did not like it, but
now that I am old and own an inn and daughters and all that, _vamos_, I
understand. You see in Spain we all do just as we like; then, if we are
the sort that goes to church we repent afterwards and fix it up with
God. In European, civilized, modern countries everybody learns what
he's got to do and what he must not do.... That's why they have so many
laws.... Here the police are just to help the government plunder and
steal all it wants.... But that's not so in America...."
"The difference is," broke in Telemachus, "as Butler put it, between
living under the law and living under grace. I should rather live under
gra...." But he thought of the maxims of Penelope and was silent.
"But after all we know how to sing," said the _Padron_. "Will you have
coffee with cognac?... And poets, man alive, what poets!"
The _padron_ stuck out his chest, put one hand in the black sash that
held up his trousers and recited, emphasizing the rhythm with the
cognac bottle:
'Aqui esta Don Juan Tenorio;
no hay hombre para el ...
Busquenle los renidores,
cerquenle los jugadores,
quien se precie que le ataje,
a ver si hay quien le aventaje
en juego, en lid o en amores.'
He finished with a flourish and poured more cognac into the coffee
cups.
"_!Que bonito!_ How pretty!" cried the old hunchbacked woman who sat on
her heels in the fireplace.
"That's what we do," said the _padron_. "We brawl and gamble and
seduce women, and we sing and we dance, and then we repent and the
priest fixes it up with God. In America they live according to law."
Feeling well-toasted by the fire and well-warmed with food and drink,
Lyaeus and Telemachus went to the inn door and looked out on the broad
main street of the village where everything was snowy white under the
cold stare of the moon. The dancing had stopped in the courtyard. A
group of men and boys was moving slowly up the street, each one with a
musical instrument. There were the two guitars, frying pans,
castanettes, cymbals, and a goatskin bottle of wine that kept being
passed from hand to hand. Each time the bottle made a round a new song
started. And so they moved slowly up the street in the moonlight.
"Let's join them," said Lyaeus.
"No, I want to get up early so as...."
"To see the gesture by daylight!" cried Lyaeus jeeringly. Then he went
on: "Tel, you live under the law. Under the law there can be no
gestures, only machine movements."
Then he ran off and joined the group of men and boys who were singing
and drinking. Telemachus went back to bed. On his way upstairs he
cursed the maxims of his mother Penelope. But at any rate to-morrow, in
Carnival-time, he would feel the gesture.
_XI: Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile_
"I spent fifty thousand pesetas in a year at the military school....
_J'aime le chic_," said the young artillery officer of whom I had asked
the way. He was leading me up the steep cobbled hill that led to the
irregular main street of Segovia. A moment before we had passed under
the aqueduct that had soared above us arch upon arch into the crimson
sky. He had snapped tightly gloved fingers and said: "And what's that
good for, I'd like to know. I'd give it all for a puff of gasoline from
a Hispano-Suizo.... D'you know the Hispano-Suizo? And look at this
rotten town! There's not a street in it I can speed on in a motorcycle
without running down some fool old woman or a squalling
brat or other.... Who's this gentleman you are going to see?"
"He's a poet," I said.
"I like poetry too. I write it ... light, elegant, about light elegant
women." He laughed and twirled the tiny waxed spike that stuck out from
each side of his moustache.
He left me at the end of the street I was looking for, and after an
elaborate salute walked off saying:
"To think that you should come here from New York to look for an
address in such a shabby street, and I so want to go to New York. If I
was a poet I wouldn't live here."
The name on the street corner was _Calle de los Desemparados_....
"Street of Abandoned Children."
* * * * *
We sat a long while in the casino, twiddling spoons in coffee-glasses
while a wax-pink fat man played billiards in front of us, being
ponderously beaten by a lean brownish swallow-tail with yellow face and
walrus whiskers that emitted a rasping _Bueno_ after every play. There
was talk of Paris and possible new volumes of verse, homage to Walt
Whitman, Maragall, questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us was a
smell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz of the poignant musty ennui of old
towns left centuries ago high and dry on the beach of history. The
group grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not come yet, the Zubiaurre
brothers had abandoned their Basque coast towns, seduced by the
bronze-colored people and the saffron hills of the province of Segovia.
Sorolla was dying, another had gone mad. At last someone said, "It's
stifling here, let's walk. There is full moon to-night."
There was no sound in the streets but the irregular clatter of our
footsteps. The slanting moonlight cut the street into two triangular
sections, one enormously black, the other bright, engraved like a
silver plate with the lines of doors, roofs, windows, ornaments.
Overhead the sky was white and blue like buttermilk. Blackness cut
across our path, then there was dazzling light through an arch beyond.
Outside the gate we sat in a ring on square fresh-cut stones in which
you could still feel a trace of the warmth of the sun. To one side was
the lime-washed wall of a house, white fire, cut by a wide oaken door
where the moon gave a restless glitter to the spiked nails and the
knocker, and above the door red geraniums hanging out of a pot, their
color insanely bright in the silver-white glare. The other side a deep
glen, the shimmering tops of poplar trees and the sound of a stream. In
the dark above the arch of the gate a trembling oil flame showed up the
green feet of a painted Virgin. Everybody was talking about _El
Buscon_, a story of Quevedo's that takes place mostly in Segovia, a
wandering story of thieves and escapes by night through the back doors
of brothels, of rope ladders dangling from the windows of great ladies,
of secrets overheard in confessionals, and trysts under bridges, and
fingers touching significantly in the holy-water fonts of tall
cathedrals. A ghostlike wraith of dust blew through the gate. The man
next me shivered.
"The dead are stronger than the living," he said. "How little we have;
and they...."
In the quaver of his voice was a remembering of long muletrains
jingling through the gate, queens in litters hung with patchwork
curtains from Samarcand, gold brocades splashed with the clay of deep
roads, stained with the blood of ambuscades, bales of silks from
Valencia, travelling gangs of Moorish artisans, heavy armed Templars on
their way to the Sepulchre, wandering minstrels, sneakthieves, bawds,
rowdy strings of knights and foot-soldiers setting out with wine-skins
at their saddlebows to cross the passes towards the debatable lands of
Extremadura, where there were infidels to kill and cattle to drive off
and village girls to rape, all when the gate was as new and crisply cut
out of clean stone as the blocks we were sitting on. Down in the valley
a donkey brayed long and dismally.
"They too have their nostalgias," said someone sentimentally.
"What they of the old time did not have," came a deep voice from under
a bowler hat, "was the leisure to be sad. The sweetness of
putrefaction, the long remembering of palely colored moods; they had
the sun, we have the colors of its setting. Who shall say which is
worth more?"
The man next to me had got to his feet. "A night like this with a moon
like this," he said, "we should go to the ancient quarter of the
witches."
Gravel crunched under our feet down the road that led out of moonlight
into the darkness of the glen--to _San Millan de las brujas_.
* * * * *
You cannot read any Spanish poet of to-day without thinking now and
then of Ruben Dario, that prodigious Nicaraguan who collected into his
verse all the tendencies of poetry in France and America and the Orient
and poured them in a turgid cataract, full of mud and gold-dust, into
the thought of the new generation in Spain. Overflowing with beauty and
banality, patched out with images and ornaments from Greece and Egypt
and France and Japan and his own Central America, symbolist and
romantic and Parnassian all at once, Ruben Dario's verse is like those
doorways of the Spanish Renaissance where French and Moorish and
Italian motives jostle in headlong arabesques, where the vulgarest
routine stone-chipping is interlocked with designs and forms of rare
beauty and significance. Here and there among the turgid muddle, out of
the impact of unassimilated things, comes a spark of real poetry. And
that spark can be said--as truly as anything of the sort can be
said--to be the motive force of the whole movement of renovation in
Spanish poetry. Of course the poets have not been content to be
influenced by the outside world only through Dario. Baudelaire and
Verlaine had a very large direct influence, once the way was opened,
and their influence succeeded in curbing the lush impromptu manner of
romantic Spanish verse. In Antonio Machado's work--and he is beginning
to be generally considered the central figure--there is a restraint and
terseness of phrase rare in any poetry.
I do not mean to imply that Machado can be called in any real sense a
pupil of either Dario or Verlaine; rather one would say that in a
generation occupied largely in more or less unsuccessful imitation of
these poets, Machado's poetry stands out as particularly original and
personal. In fact, except for the verse of Juan Ramon Jimenez, it would
be in America and England rather than in Spain, in Aldington and Amy
Lowell, that one would find analogous aims and methods. The influence
of the symbolists and the turbulent experimenting of the Nicaraguan
broke down the bombastic romantic style current in Spain, as it was
broken down everywhere else in the middle nineteenth century. In
Machado's work a new method is being built up, that harks back more to
early ballads and the verse of the first moments of the Renaissance
than to anything foreign, but which shows the same enthusiasm for the
rhythms of ordinary speech and for the simple pictorial expression of
undoctored emotion that we find in the renovators of poetry the world
over. _Campos de Castilla_, his first volume to be widely read, marks
an epoch in Spanish poetry.
Antonio Machado's verse is taken up with places. It is obsessed with
the old Spanish towns where he has lived, with the mellow sadness of
tortuous streets and of old houses that have soaked up the lives of
generations upon generations of men, crumbling in the flaming silence
of summer noons or in the icy blast off the mountains in winter. Though
born in Andalusia, the bitter strength of the Castilian plain, where
half-deserted cities stand aloof from the world, shrunken into their
walls, still dreaming of the ages of faith and conquest, has subjected
his imagination, and the purity of Castilian speech has dominated his
writing, until his poems seem as Castilian as Don Quixote.
"My childhood: memories of a courtyard in Seville,
and of a bright garden where lemons hung ripening.
My youth: twenty years in the land of Castile.
My history: a few events I do not care to remember."
So Machado writes of himself. He was born in the eighties, has been a
teacher of French in government schools in Soria and Baeza and at
present in Segovia--all old Spanish cities very mellow and very
stately--and has made the migration to Paris customary with Spanish
writers and artists. He says in the _Poema de un Dia_:
Here I am, already a teacher
of modern languages, who yesterday
was a master of the gai scavoir
and the nightingale's apprentice.
He has published three volumes of verse, _Soledades_ ("Solitudes"),
_Campos de Castilla_ ("Fields of Castile"), and _Soledades y Galerias_
("Solitudes and Galleries"), and recently a government institution, the
Residencia de Estudiantes, has published his complete works up to date.
The following translations are necessarily inadequate, as the poems
depend very much on modulations of rhythm and on the expressive fitting
together of words impossible to render in a foreign language. He uses
rhyme comparatively little, often substituting assonance in accordance
with the peculiar traditions of Spanish prosody. I have made no attempt
to imitate his form exactly.
I
Yes, come away with me--fields of Soria,
quiet evenings, violet mountains,
aspens of the river, green dreams
of the grey earth,
bitter melancholy
of the crumbling city--
perhaps it is that you have become
the background of my life.
Men of the high Numantine plain,
who keep God like old--Christians,
may the sun of Spain fill you
with joy and light and abundance!