must be another question: what did Spain make of Islam? Spain was there
when the Arab came. She was far older than Islam, far more populous.
This Celtiberian base which it is simple and safe to call the Spaniard
is a strange people. It is warlike,[6] yet submits to conquest: it is
indolent yet dwells in a harsh land: it is inarticulate and savage yet
transforms its masters. Carthage has come and gone. Rome has faded,
after creating in Spain a spirit that is not found in other parts of
Rome. The Visigoths make their easy conquest. They are touched by urban
Rome already ere they come; they are no longer the rude Germans of the
Rhine. Rome has annulled their savagery. Their nature is rural but their
will is urban. Their nature is the foray, but their will is Pax Romana.
They have no metaphysical hunger, yet they spend their might defending
Arianism against the cross-fires of North Africa and Europe. Their
history in Spain is their dissolution; their complete absorption in the
mute, indefeasible mass of Spain which they are supposed to rule. When
Târik defeats Roderick, last Visigothic king, the business is done. But
henceforth, German blood suffuses like a golden glow the flesh of
Iberia which has already drunk the Celt, the Semite, the Greek, the
Latin.
There has been no drama. This process is instinctive. Spain lives like a
tree with her roots close and her branches harboring the seasons. She
has taken to herself the nourishment of wind and rain, the steadfastness
of sun. All Spain takes in is Spain. In her own vague life, an Idea has
been born, expressive of her chaos. Now, she takes in an alien Idea to
work upon her.
The Arabs found their kingdom. In 755, but a generation after their
arrival, Abd-er-Rahman I who sits at Córdoba breaks with the Moslem
east. Almost at once, the Islam that came to Spain assumes a separate
being, grows into a body independent of Bagdad and Damascus. This
separation means a transformation. And the cause of it is Spain.
The nature of Islam, we have seen, is like the nature of the pioneer.
Pioneer values--motion, violence, acquisition, conquest--bear the Idea
of the desert race, moving toward horizons. The Idea is not the horizon
nor the water beyond it: it is the moving forever _toward_ the
unmastered goal. Earth, in such psychology, takes on the delusive aspect
of a flying road. And mortal life is synonymous with earth. It is a
passing stretch. And it is close to death; for it is unreal and it is
dark. The true life, the life of the Idea is that forever unattained, is
that toward which our mortal days are an incessant moving. True life,
then, is beyond that death which this life truly is. And to attain it,
this life should be trampled like a road.
The Idea has its adornments: as in pioneering, they will be simplicity
of living and of thought; violence, cruelty, intolerance for all that
bars the goal; and the equally violent reflex from these--the narcotics
of sleep and sensual relaxation.
Islam’s Idea now comes in the land of Spain. And the Moslem hosts who
bear it and live to nourish it, settle in the south where settling is
easy. And having settled down, they build a culture whose like the
world sees seldom and whose causal spirit is essentially opposed to the
Idea of Islam. For the Idea of Islam cannot settle down.
Mohammed and his captains knew no such world as this that sends its
radiance from Córdoba. Nor would they have found it good. The Prophet
would have thundered: “This is blasphemy and failure. This is turning
from the commands of Allah. Rather than invent new forms of splendor for
your mosques, ye would do well to push on. What? Ye consort with the
Jew? Ye are tolerant with the Christian? suffering his monasteries to
abide in Islam? Ye turn a peaceful back on the Frank and leave to the
Christian Basques the holy labor of driving Charlemagne and Roland from
Roncesvalles? And ye study Aristotle? when the Koran holds all wisdom?
Ye tolerate schools who explain the creation of the world by natural
laws? when I have taught ye of the Hand of Allah.” Mohammed was wise. He
knew that the nature of the Arab, the Idea of Islam, the conduct of the
people must be one, else the Idea would fall. But if Mohammed was wise,
this kingdom of south Spain was luminous. Jews collaborated in
government, science, art. Christians brought their mysteries and their
music; and those who chose to pray in convents were not molested. An
architecture was developed. Poetry and thought flourished like grass of
the fields.
What had happened to Islam? The Idea born of the desert had become
detached from the life of the desert people, when it lay down in this
smiling southland. Life relaxed from the stern rigor of the Faith and
took unto itself new forms, consonant with its relaxation: Islam whose
health was war desired peace.
Meantime, Spain’s absorption of invading bloods went on. Christian,
Arab, Berber, Copt--each with a past mingling--mingled. There lived soon
again in southern Spain, one people: but there lived now three Ideas.
The Christian was the least self-conscious, the least active; the
Jewish was an insidious minority; the Moslem was dominant. These three
Ideas were fleshed in human beings; and the human beings were virtually
one. There were Moslem lords, whose ancestry counted Visigoths and Jews;
there were Christian bishops in whose veins flowed Yemen and Berber
blood; there were Jewish poets whose mothers had been reared in a Harem.
Under all, there was the immemorial base outnumbering the rest. It had
been pagan, Catholic, Arian, Catholic again. Now for a while, it was
Moslem. Within a hundred years of the African invasion, Spain was once
more inhabited by Spaniards.
Yet a new element had arisen, which was destined to grow tragic. The
Idea of Islam touched into new intensity the Ideas of Jew and Christian.
Jew, Christian, Arab, settled down and married. But the three Ideas,
grown virulent, did not marry. They made war.
* * * * *
Islam, meantime, moves from Andalusia north. And as it conquers Spain,
the Catholic Reconquest which for near eight centuries holds Spain in
blood is cradled in the tiny mountain kingdoms of Asturias and Aragon.
Where the Moslem settles, the land becomes Moslem. Often it changes
hands in the long war’s tides. But the people, like a tree, stays with
its roots. Fresh Moslems may perhaps come to live in a province soon
reconquered by the Christian. They will become Christian, too. It is one
people. The struggle is between a Cross and a Crescent. And the hands
which bear them are of a single body.
Islam, battling in the desert north, has settled to peace in the south
and fallen from the Idea of Islam. But battling in the desert north it
takes its Idea along--its temper and its nature. And these, it gives
unto the Christian foe! Rigorous desert traits flourish in Christian
Aragon and Castile. For here is desert again, and violence as the matrix
of the world. So the Christians of the north, facing Islam in battle,
live ever closer to the Idea of Islam. War is an embrace fertile like
love. Traits of Christian and Moslem pass in osmosis. And there comes
the day when warlike Catholics from the north press on the gentled
Mussulmans of the south with true Islamic rigor. And the Moslem south
must look to Africa for Moslems close enough to the Idea of Islam to be
able to withstand these northern Christians. And the war has no cease,
being a war not of bloods but of souls.
We are still in the first scenes of the play whose tragedy begins only
when the clash of arms is over. Let us dwell awhile in Andalusia, first
home of the Moslem and his last in Spain.
_b._ _The Eye_
There are places of earth like eyes. They have more than a proportionate
share of the light and the fire. They hold, within a fragile cup of
space, measures infinitely deep. Córdoba is an eye within the face of
Spain.
But Córdoba is dead? This whirl of houses is a husk of splendor, a strew
of ancient ash here and there speaking still in remnant eloquence of
arch or Square? Córdoba is not dead. Its life is impalpable like that
within an eye. Something has lived on in Córdoba. There was vision here:
that quickening of the nerves to the spheres of life which we call
vision. Here was an eye that saw; and it still sees despite the
catalepsy of the ages. Perhaps no eye that truly sees is ever blind.
Perhaps if within this cup of the Sierras there was today no Mosque, no
subtle nerve of house and street, Córdoba still would be an eye; and if
our sense were sharp enough to meet it, there would rise to us yet the
Word of its incarnate knowledge.
* * * * *
The Mosque is open to a _patio_ with orange trees, palms, fountains
whose pallid water runs in counterpoint with the fervor of mosaic and
tile. Women with their children stand about, filling their huge earth
water-jars, setting them down in the shade of a palm to talk. A girl
sings quiet and incessant: like the cool water over the stones her notes
diverge from the hard hot day. On the medieval _Puerta del Perdón_ the
Christian saints and regal arms set up their theme against the Moslem
mass of the Mosque. To the sides are colonnaded cloisters. But to the
south under the blare of sun in the white sky is the Mosque itself.
Nineteen arched gates make way into its open forest.
Hundreds of columns various like trees. They are all low: from their
smooth shafts the arches of red and white rise agilely to the ceiling
which once was a maze of lace-like wood, inlaid. The movement of the
columns becomes horizontal. Pillars of many marbles, of jasper, of
porphyry, merge in the sweeping spread. There is no Gothic aspiration.
There is a maze of delicate shafts with their heads arched and
arabesqued, prancing in cohorts between a dull floor and a dull roof. In
the heart of this battalioned whirl, stands the Catholic Capilla Mayor
which the Cathedral Chapter placed there in the sixteenth century. It is
a formless embryon of gilt and marble. It replaces sixty Arabic columns
and its heavy flesh rises far higher than the legion of shafts about it.
It is perhaps the greatest monument in Spain of the inæsthesia of
Spanish consciousness. But with the worst intentions, it has not broken
the spirit of the Mosque. The dance of the pillars moves toward this
obtrusion, swirls before it to the right and left, sweeps graciously
beyond into the shadows. Svelte and exquisite columns with
their double-arched head-dress, with their fleet ankles and
shoulders--marshaled like an army--move with the undulance of earth to
the _Mihrab_ of Abd-er-Rahman and Al-Hakim. The Mihrab is the cynosure
of prayer. Before it sits the Master to direct discourse with Allah. The
Mihrabs of Córdoba are gems so bright that they make a ghostly swirl of
the columns. Individual vibrancies of gem, of mosaic, of marbles frail
as sea-shells, fuse into fixity. The Mihrab is the goal of the columns.
So, within Córdoba, stands and lives today the Idea of Islam. Though the
Spaniards call it a Cathedral, it is still the _Mesjid al-Jâmi_, open to
the fountains and the _naranjeros_, open to the skies. It is a place
whose spirit in racing columns bespeaks the horizontal swarm of Islam to
the ends of Spain. Islam speaks; and Córdoba, which is far more than
Islam, answers. The Córdoban streets press and swerve to the north of
the Mosque. They are a compact of stresses doubly held together: the
Guadalquivir turning back upon itself and the rim of mountains in whose
heights still live the fertile prayers of hermits, hold the streets.
Córdoban streets are not like those of Fez, of the Kasbah of Algiers, of
Lisbon. Fez, within its translucent hills and vales, swarms like the
entrails of a body. Algiers mounts sinister from the gleaming sea, its
streets a blackened coil within the white sepulcher that strikes the
sun. Old Lisbon is explosive, gyrant, tragically repressed in its march
upward, losing the sky as it comes closer to it. Córdoba is proud. Its
pride is intricate as the Talmud; hard and abstruse as the mystic creed
of the Sufi; open as a page of Aristotle. This eye that is Córdoba is
neither secret nor flinching. And its pride is not willful. Córdoba is
unassertive. Its light speaks for it: Seneca the Stoic, Averroës the
Commentator, Moses ben Maimun first rationalist of the Jews, Lucan, and
Spain’s greatest lyric poet, Luis de Góngora ... such are the light of
Córdoba. It is the home of the most perfect Arab Knight, the quiet
Al-Mansor who, ruling Spain, decreed Sunday to be a day of rest in
deference to the Christians.
Córdoba lies within tumultuous mountains and a lazy river. It is a poise
of mountains and river. It is a kingly city within chaos; it is
masculine in a feminine land. The Christian Copts brought their woman
worship to Seville; the gypsies found haven in Granada for their Black
Sea spells. Córdoba forbids such fascinations. It is quiet as its river,
dense as its mountains, open as its mosque. The streets turn just enough
to throw shade to the patios. Ox-teams survive, yet splash no mud on the
immaculate walls. Here a miracle of life has overtaken the lunge and
death of Islam: here grew a kingdom of balance and of peace.
For Córdoba is not the rock of Seneca, not the intellectual play of
Averroës and Maimonides, not the deep current underneath of mystical
devotion. Córdoba is the balance, and the contemplation, of all its
parts.
* * * * *
The summer night is cool as wisdom; it is a poise against day like that
of Seneca the Stoic against the fever of life. When the sun falls behind
the roofs, the town opens as northern towns with the dawn. Day indeed is
often fiery night on Córdoba. The good folk have gone to bed; houses
have been swathed to keep this white night out. Now, houses are opened
wide. Air from the world is permitted to come in to the shut courts
where geese patter and women seat themselves at looms.
The people are dark and silent like the dusk. The sky is pale with a
glow of convalescence. The houses, serried in the curving streets, are
hot. The evening has a magic, it throbs and swells with tacit fervors.
The whole of Córdoba is quick under the glow of night. The stone streets
are flesh, willfully rigid, of a spirit possessed with the desire to
dance. And in the dance are darker intimations: cries, ravage, conquest.
But the slow streams of men and women are the sole expression. Are they
puritans, then, these Andalusians? They wear easeful masks for faces.
The women are clad in black, and their soft flesh within the shrouds
seems not the flesh of lovers but of matrons. Even the girls, sinuous
walking lilies, promise a snare of momentary passion: their will of men
is not to be initiates of love, but to be mothers. All is easeful--the
masks on the faces, the dark women’s weeds. They have been worn so long!
They are like the streets whose stones are mellow and whose curves and
windings have the fatality of forest paths. If these be puritans, these
men and women, with their heritage of war, privation, pioneering--they
whose ancestry is Islam, the Cross, the promised Zion--long since has
the hard fruit ripened. They are firm and condignly whole within their
city whose maze of streets is whole within the mountains....
This evening, Córdoba, released from day, is going to the Bull-Ring.
There is no moon; the bowl of the arena holds a winey night in which the
stars are bubbles of effervescence. The seat tiers are deep. Men and
women clamber noisily from perch to perch. But the thousand voices and
footbeats are segregate and aloof within the Ring holding this wine of
the night. Upon one side, the seats have been roped off and are empty.
Below hang two electric lamps and cast their naked glare upon a stage
improvised with unpainted planks. The stage is a little tongue thrust
into the arena.
The crowd has come and paid for a good time. But it is
self-sufficient--the strong willed, resourceful crowd of Spain. Myriad
calls and shreds of laughter, play of hand and foot twine about the
Ring: agglutinate: the groups of clamor thicken and grow wider: the
entire Ring is joined in the enterprise of shouting, shuffling,
clapping. No Spaniards blackening the tiers, but this one sudden Spain!
It has many means of making itself live. Boys scurry over the laps of
matrons: men sing falling cadences to girls: babies shout. The _aguero_
with an earth-jar large as himself, the vendor of _pastas_ and of Arabic
sweetmeats, weave through the mass. But still the Bowl holds its uncanny
silence. The night bubbles at its brim.
On the stage step forth two figures: the lamp-glare sharpens and deforms
them. A man, stout and short, clad in black broadcloth with a wide
purple sash and linen that is green in the electric glare: he carries a
guitar. A woman, slender and tall: her black _mantón_ is like a subtle
fur over the angular brightness of her shoulders. She wears a large
_sombrero ancho_, black as the two black eyes in her white face.
They stand within the night, within the crowd. The man takes a chair:
the woman remains isolate beside him. The man’s hands brush the strings
of his guitar. The woman’s mouth opens, and her breast rises. Under the
laced clamor of the crowd she sings unheard--under the silent night....
A note, hard like silver, high and sharp as an arrow, rises above the
clamor and is heard. Far up, it soars, surrounded by the stars. It
falls. And as it falls, reaching the crowd, it links itself within the
vast confusion. This rough-hewn Spain falls along with the note: is
drawn by it down to the naked stage, down to the red mouth of the
singing woman. The crowd is transfigured. The woman’s voice fades into
rest, within an utter silence.
The hand of the guitarist is not lean: yet his fingers make a murmur
like a breeze: clear in the silence is the music’s breathing. The music
has conquered: it is the night’s silence, speaking; the night’s quiet,
moving. The woman’s body stands rigid, her heels beat a tattoo of subtle
restraining: her voice is confident and exultant.
Burden heavy with ages of flesh, bright with ages of dream. Plaint of
spirit, rush of blood miraculously woven. A body in dance, rigid as a
column; a voice in song, light and swift as a bird. Many Orients are
here. In the form, a slender mystic draughtsmanship--Byzantine; a clamor
of soul, a submissiveness of body with all its sweetness and its joys
merged in the ecstasy of an ideal--Jewish; an intensive thrust, lean,
fierce, hunting--Arab. Rising like revelation from the Córdoban Plaza,
this Andalusian song of many wills becomes the drama of Spain.
The woman’s body scarcely moves. Even as she circles the stage, her arms
slowly rising and falling, her heels in periodic showers of sharp
strokes, it is as if she did not move: rather the stage, rather the Ring
and the crowd move than this plastic fixity of dance. Torment, passion,
vision, ruthlessly compress in a thin body.
The music cadence is vertebral. There is a time counterpoint of two
adverse factors: a rising lilt, a falling plaint. And they become the
skeletal arabesque which is the backbone of the Spanish music. All the
voices of Spain’s world are laced. The Jew’s sensual mysticism, conflict
between his homely passions and his cosmic fate, rises in a line more
Arabic than Jewish. And the tendency of the music to transcend its scale
is Byzantine; it bespeaks the North African shores of Porphyry and
Plotinus, of Origen and Augustine. But the stress is more barbarous than
platonic. And the _form_ is forever Spain. Its elements do not suffice
to make this music great. It is greatly moving, because its moving parts
become articulate, not in moments, not progressively, but all at once:
in restraint, in defeat--in the triumph of the artist’s will upon them.
The passion does not depart; a woman’s body holds it and we are moved
not by the passion but by the unmoved victory over passion. This cadence
is a plaint of agony. It does not bend her. This peal is pathos. The
high head, the arms crushing the breast, the torrent of heel-notes rivet
a triumph over pathos. The mouth sings languorous desire; but the body
is hard. Sudden the song flares like a vision from that mouth. But the
body circles the stage in a crisp gayety, the eyes smile, the knees dip
in courteous bestowal.
At the other end of Córdoba, the night lives among the columns of the
Mosque. With arched head and heel of arabesque, they dance their
mystery--a forest of willful movement under the will-less stars. This
woman is a column too; rigid, and stone-like and adance. But the dance
of the Arab columns is horizontal; it is an easeful running with the
earth. The dance of this woman which is a dance of Spain, is deep and is
high. It is not horizontal. So calm, it touches hell. So still, it
reaches God.
_c._ _The Bowels_
The Spanish is the fusion of the warring elements of Spain into dramatic
wholes. As the proportions of these elements change, the wholes change:
and yet are Spanish. Granada, then, is the least Spanish of the towns of
Spain; for, with all the elements there, they have remained disparate.
Even physically, Granada does not resolve its discords. It is cast in
confusion. Two steep spurs come down from the Sierra Nevada. They are
divided by the gorge of the río Darro. Smaller, arid gorges break them,
they expire in a plain. And within this broken sea of rock and ridge and
wood, Granada sits uneasily. One height is Al-Hambra, palace of kings.
From its towers the precipice cuts to the river; and in the west rises
Al-Baicín, a populous suburb. North, beside the river straggles a gypsy
village. And eastward, on another height, is the cascaded, terraced,
tawdry splendor of the Generalife. Physically chaos; culturally,
spiritually chaos.
For near five hundred years, Granada was the capital of a Moslem state.
After the fall of Córdoba, it was independent. And in 1492, when Boabdil
fled from Ferdinand and Isabel, there died the last political body of
Spanish Islam. For close three hundred years, Granada was the richest
and most populous state of Spain. Castile, Aragon, Catalonia were
rustics beside it. But the barbarous states spread; and Granada had
energy neither to spread nor to glow. The barbarous states had fused
their differences in the terrific lust of religious conquest. Castile
and León were closer then to the spirit of Mohammed than the Andalusian
Town in which the muedzins called his name and the people spoke his
tongue. Toledo, Valencia, Badajoz, Seville, Córdoba fell: Granada came
to be the last resort in Spain of the driven Moslems. A veritable city
state it was, going north to Baza, west to Málaga, east to Almería.
Meantime, Spain had converged into an austere camp. Her forests became
deserts, her towns were empty of men, her women suckled warriors, her
churches were the centers of recruiting. And Granada shone with ease. In
Granada, the wide lands were gardens; husbandry was an art. The cities
sang with ceramic and jewels. The mosques were models for the mosques of
Africa.
Córdoba had been the seat of Arab Spain. Granada was the heart of the
Moor. When the Arabs were too wasted by peace and thought and quarrel to
withstand the pressing Christians, they turned to the south whence four
hundred years before they too had come, clad only in the harsh will of
the Prophet. In the Moroccan mountains and the deserts, dwelt still
virgin tribes in whom the Idea of Islam worked with the virulence of
birth. This was the need of Spanish Islam. So the Moors came to Spain to
do what the Arabs had done and could do no longer. The Moors drove back
the Christians. Then they turned and subdued the Arabs. Arab Andalusia
was Moorish.