progression. Sere towns lie in the sere waste. The houses are clay.
There are wooden doors, but windows of glass are still rare. The peasant
chooses the desert bottom for his house. South and north rise the walls
of the Sierras, naked as flint: and the winds sweep through his narrow
passage, bringing the rigor of the rocks into the air he breathes.
This low tier of the world of Aragon has no clement weather. It has no
spring and no autumn. Winter is a rigid siege: summer is fire. When the
weather shifts between the seasons, the winds make a runway of the
valleys. Frost, flame, storm are the angry cycle. And its dwellers are
worthy of their weather. They are not degenerate like the inbred natives
of Las Hurdes between Extremadura and León. Nor are they spiced and
strained with eastern bloods, like the cave-dwellers of Murcia and
Almería. They are simple human stock extraordinarily coarsened.
Dull-eyed, crude-lipped, slow-moving, slow-talking: they lack the
mineral sheerness of the mountain men. The air that they breathe is not
snow-swept. Their flesh has no crystal tarn for neighbor. They live in a
roadway of unleashed elements. Dust, clay, salt, drug their air and clog
their pores. But there is something else. There is the roadway, and the
mobile spirit of the roadway. Movement and action infuse this brutish
people.
_b._ _The Way of the Atom_
The men of the mountain and the desert store up great energy within
their core: the outer world harries, arouses: the virgin force grows
aggressive. East of Aragon are two rich and fluid lands: the Christian
Principality of Catalonia, the Moorish Kingdom of Valencia. Frankish
Barcelona rivals Marseilles and Venice, in ships. (Ramón Lull, Spain’s
most original schoolman, lived here: he wrote in Latin, Catalan and
Arabic, books on love and wisdom. Chasdai ben Crescas, Spain’s most
original Jewish thinker, lived here: he founded a new Prophetic lineage
which three centuries later grew to be Spinoza.) Farther down the coast
are the lush huertas of Valencia: a great port facing south as Barcelona
east, a seat of Moorish culture.
As Rome once the subtle nations to her east, tough Aragon comes to
control these affluent worlds. When in 1149 Ramón Berenguer IV of
Barcelona wedded the daughter of Ramiro II of Aragon, the mountainous
kingdom did not lose its sway. Catalonia became part of Aragon: and the
currents of its open life the veins of the uncouth inland realm. A
century later, Jaime I of Aragon with Catalonian help conquered
Valencia. Valencia had been in Christian hands before: El Cid had won it
rather by treachery than arms. But after the great freebooter’s death,
the Moors came back. Now that Aragon sits down within its valleys,
Valencia is Christian forever. It loses even its name of tributary
kingdom. It becomes simply part of Aragon. Catalan blood has helped win
it--for Aragon. Now Catalan, Valencian, and Castilian, led by the Great
Captain of Córdoba, win Sicily and Naples--in the name of Aragon again.
Aragon of the desert and the mountains has in its stone-like men an
energy which informed the mental mobility of the Catalan, the sensuous
fervor of the Valencian: prevailed upon them, dominioned them and made
them tools at last to its own activity in Europe, to its ultimate
partnership with Castile in Spain. Within itself, Aragon has little
else. It lacked the elements for the creating of an indigenous culture.
Aragon the core remained prehistoric: its history is its power to
accumulate forces about it.
But this elemental virtue through its very neutralness served to fuse
the diverse natures upon which Aragon worked. The initial urgency was
Aragon: and Aragon was the name of the amalgam which resulted. When at
the close of the fifteenth century the nation of Spain was born, its eye
toward Europe was Aragon. Isabel of Castile was the spirit and the
religious motor of that birth. Ferdinand of Aragon, with his infusion of
Frankish-Catalan and Jewish bloods, was the diplomat and politician who
turned the mystical Castilian dream into a European fact. Aragon took
its place in that polyphony of elemental fusions which was Spain. But
with this difference. That fusion, in Castile, Galicia, Portugal,
Andalusia, had a preponderance of parts native to these provinces. In
Aragon the fusion was of outer elements. Aragon was the port of Spain:
it had become a power in Europe. But its own integral rôle in the
cultural life of the Aragonese nation was that of a catalyst in a
solution.
* * * * *
Although historic Aragon is dead, in the capital city, Zaragoza, the
process is revealed. Zaragoza is Spanish: yet its parts speak all of the
east, of the south, and of the north. The streets have a dark fluidity
which suggests Naples. They are not rigid and bright like the streets of
Castile. Their warmth is freeflowing like a blood under the swarthy
stones. They brood, they rot: they are not transfixed in contemplation
of their unity, nor in rapt service of their own high fate. They are not
noble, not inspired streets like the most sordid in Avila or Burgos.
Italy’s ageing paganism darklies them: and the Moor’s mobility which
lifts Valencia into a dance gives them an elusive charm, a play of light
and shadow which Naples lacks.
Upon the dusty shores of the Ebro where the trees bend in a gray burden
to the tawny waters, Spain speaks through Zaragoza. Here stand two
monsters, the cathedrals. Nuestra Señora del Pilar is a long pile, drear
as a Jesuit college, dull as a bull-ring: and from its mournful mass
rise suddenly, inappositely, the huge _azulejo_ domes, their
hypertrophic rhetoric gleaming of Andalusia and Morocco. Within is a
church in the style of Louis XVI of France! The other cathedral is more
mellow, but not less hybrid. La Seo is Gothic. There is a Romanesque
window: the façade is rich in Moorish bricks and tiles. The columns are
Gothic; the walls are exuberant tissues of plateresque. Yet the whole is
harmonious, is impressive. It is Aragon. There is here something at once
pagan in mind and Christian in mood. The cathedral indeed is like the
Latin Sea: a converted heathen whose thought holds to the limits of
youth and from the Christian infinite has taken a boundless and vague
melancholy. This crossing of sun and shadow is Aragon. Light is here--in
eclipse: storm--sun-tinged. The immutable atomism of the Aragonese
shivers in contradiction. The sun of Italy breaks into motes, dancing on
a grave: the Spanish burden of death becomes the irrational refrain of a
gay song.
In La Seo, Aragon works its transformation upon elements chiefly of
France and the east. In the _jota_, the basic material is Spanish. What
is known as the first jota is a birth of the defense of Zaragoza in 1808
against the forces of Napoleon. It swears to the Virgen del Pilar that
the men and women of Zaragoza never will be French. Jota songs and
variants of its dance are legion throughout Spain, and its musical
elements hark back to Arab days. The formation of the jota is the
couplet; the music is an adaptation, in three-quarter time, of
Andalusian _cante hondo_. The classic southern song becomes romantic.
Its abstract lines, devoted to the elemental passions, become vehicles
for commentary verse in which religion, politics, wit and satire are
barbarously mingled. The tragic music of Spain is lightened, aerated and
then, by the ultimate twist of Aragon, it is once more sicklied with a
haunting gloom. But the gloom is pagan, not Christian. It is empiric.
Its fluidity is of the east, but its will is a release come from the
north.
The dance of the jota is a diluting, a quickening, above all a
flattening of the sheer pure figures of the southern dance. The body
loses all relationship with sculpture. It is given up to that easy
dynamism whose language is the leap, the skip, the pirouette. It has
abandoned the dynamism of the soul whose infinite motions conform into
an almost motionless figure. The classic dance of Spain, drenched with a
facile nervousness from Europe--this is the jota of Aragon.
* * * * *
So the prehistoric atom begets this baroque romanticism of Aragon. There
is nobility here. These are the people who fought the establishment of
the Inquisition: the heroic defenders of their land against Roman,
Visigoth, Arab, Frenchman. But the toughness of Aragon is vulnerable, if
not to its invaders, to its own conquests. Valencia and Barcelona become
conduits through which a motley of elements pour in. The alliance with
Castile brings another bewilderment of forces. The primitive stuff of
Aragon has no _organic_ response for these racy cultures. They overwhelm
it: they form an amalgam _about_ the rigid core. And the harmony of
Aragon is indeed one of flashing dissonances: brilliant, appealing,
evanescent. It is a surface fusion, and its charm is flight from an
impenetrable center.
Triumphant Aragon disappears in the living peoples it absorbs, in the
great neighbor with which it is allied. As cultural beings, its vassals
all survive it. Its own primal core survives it....
These men of the Sobrarbe and the desert have been too ruthlessly
hardened by their world to receive the juices of spirit. Like a steel
mirror, they reflected for an hour the suns of Italy, of Araby and
Spain. This is the greatness of Aragon--a swift reflection in which
affluent worlds were fused in the reflector and took on the form of the
reflector’s contour. But the worlds swung past, life shifted: the light
no longer fell on Aragon. Its surface becomes dull once more, and
unillumined.
_CHAPTER V_
_CASTILE_
_a._ _The Castle of the Cid_
_b._ _The Stones of Wisdom_
_c._ _The Water Bridge_
_d._ _The Miracle of El Greco_
_e._ _The Tomb_
_a._ _The Castle of the Cid_
The valley of the Ebro is a vein of green, deep within wastes of earth
and tiers of mountain. Northward the Solana, sudden as a fort, stands
before the snow-clad Pyrenees. Southward the sierras of Aragon and
Castile are walls of flint upon a yellow floor. Slender and sinuous, the
Ebro leads up to the head of Spain.
This way came the Romans, met by the nut-hard Aragonese and the Basques
of Navarre. Here the Visigoths were fought and were absorbed. When the
Arabs faced north of Andalusia, they veered to the east: and the Ebro
was their path back to Spain’s center. Commerce and nurture went this
way: but were the servants of War. Signs of War still mark the valley
for its own. Encased in desert and rock, the towns rise above the
plethoric vineyards like parts of the stone world. War has brought the
desert ranges down and has made cities of them. The Valley, pressing up
through Aragon, through Navarre to Castile, is clad in armor of rock
towns. So weighted, it could not keep pace with the world. It was great
when mountains were barriers and when a river was a highway. It has
remained as the past sealed it. North of Zaragoza no great city lies
within the valley. It has become an agricultural, above all a
viticultural center. Haro, Logroño, are towns of the wine-growers. But
even when new houses are put up, they are made of the eternal rock--the
warlike rock of the past.
At Miranda the invader leaves the Ebro, and stands at the climax of
Castile. The south is a breakage of treeless moor. In the crevices of
heights, small towns hide, and church steeples are indistinguishable
from the rock. But the earth mellows. Angles are replaced by curves.
Wheatfields plaid the rolling slopes of hills. There are dingles,
copses. This is the head of Old Castile--the part of the hard land where
men lived best, and where they first united against the Moslem to call
themselves Castilians. This is Burgos: _La cabeza de Castilla_.
* * * * *
Bristling castles, castle-like sierras exist everywhere in Spain. Why is
just this portion called Castile? Look at Burgos, nestling in the bosom
of a hill and green with springtime. The río Arlanzón has leaped from
the savage Pico de Lara. But when it reaches Burgos, it is gentled: it
is an idling pleasant little river. And the folk of Burgos have built
along its banks an esplanade, a park of meticulous shrubs and gravel
walks, a street of clubs and cafés where music, at nightfall, answers
the tripping water and the wheatfields bending in breeze.
The town goes up from a seven-sided Plaza. It is stone, but mellow. Its
streets are criss-crossed with surprising squares, irregular in shape
and level. Old houses bearing shields seem to stoop as if time-softened
in the mounting swirl. The cathedral stands waist-high among roofs. Its
grandiloquent splendor is town-bound. Only the loftiest windows catch
the free heaven for the nave. The doors of the cathedral open on many
levels. Far up in the transept is a golden window topping a stair of
carven oak: and this window is a door upon a street. Burgos begins to
terrace up less gently. Houses, streets, arched galleries over steps are
all one stone: but everywhere the gray walls crack: lilacs bloom in
every crevice. Windows are open: flowers wave in them. Black-gowned
women make shadows. In the gutters which are clean, play children, warm
like their mothers, lyric like the lilacs.... A running bloom in Burgos
mounts with the streets until they match the steeples of the churches,
until the harsh high churches are engulfed. A green hill dappled with
cherry is the height of Burgos. And here is a castle.
It is a famous Castle. It belonged to the first Counts of Castile, ere
Castile was a kingdom. It witnessed the marriage of Ruy Díaz de Vivar,
_el Cid_, to Ximena: and in its shadow stood the Cid’s _solar_, his
“city dwelling.” It dominates the town. But it is ruin. It appears to
have no importance. A paltry mass of rock it is, weeds in its cracks,
gashes in its sides, and its top agape with earth and shrubs. It stands
alone upon the top of the hill and crumbles into dust. Behind it are
shanties: asses, dogs, hens possess the theater of its glory. The walls
that once enclosed the city go down irrelevant now from the castle ruin:
their cubos and bastions droop into a row of modern tenements, one spot
of which is a tavern--a noisy mouth--filled with the red coats and red
calls of soldiers.
What is this castle in the life of Burgos? A disused memory. It stands
above a town whose fluent smile is turned away from it. Surely, it is no
symbol?
Nor does the Cid’s spirit, more than that of Burgos, appear to chime
with the ruin. The Cid lived in the eleventh century. Shortly after his
death, he was immortalized by the poet of _El Cantar de Mío Cid_,
probably a Christian menestral, residing in the Moor country of
Medinaceli. The _romancero_ painted the Cid afresh. He was a mobile
scoundrel. His king, Alfonso of León, distrusted him and ordered him
forth from his seigneurial seat Vivar. Ruy Díaz was penniless: but he
possessed a trunk whose iron-thonged flanks you can still admire in the
chapel of Corpus Christi of the cathedral. He filled this coffer with
rock and sand, and sealed it. By his friend, Martín Antolínez, he caused
it to be carried to Raquel and Vidas, rich Jews of Burgos. “These are my
treasures,” he told the wily Jews. “I am exiled. Guard my wealth for me
as security and loan me six hundred marks. The contents of my coffer are
worth vastly more; but I am a simple knight and I need cash to pay my
people at Vivar, and to lodge my wife with the monks of Cardeña. Six
hundred modest marks.”
The Cid crosses into the Moor country of Aragon and begins his raid on
the Moslem. Like the Jew, the Moslem is free game--a wilder sort of
boar. God sent him into the world for Catholics to prey on. The Cid is
out for spoils. It does not occur to him to convert a Moor: he strips
him. But he is canny: he never quite strips him bare. He wants him for a
friend as he turns his back to go on other raids. At last, the Cid
captures Valencia, by guile rather than arms. He is a rich man now! He
has sent gifts to mollify Alfonso, and to Ximena and to the monks of
Cardeña. (Of course, he does not repay the Jews.) But he imports a
bishop to Valencia del Cid, one completely fitted out with all the
latest golden implements of worship--quite as a millionaire of
Pittsburgh imports a chef from Paris. Listen to mío Cid reflecting on
his luck.
All these winnings the Campeador made his.
“Thanks be to God who of the world is master!
“Before I was poor, today I am rich;
“I have money and lands, I have gold and wide possessions,
“And for sons-in-law I have the Counts of Carrión,
“All battles do I win, it is the will of the Lord.
“Muslim and Christian hold me in great fear.
“Yonder in Morocco where are the Muslim mosques,
“They might open to my attack. Who knows? perhaps they have
“The dread that I may come: but I am not so minded.
“I’ll not go seek the Moor; here in Valencia I’ll stay.
“And let them bring me their wealth: with the help of the Lord
“They’ll keep on paying me--or whomever I delegate.”
This is the constant temper of the first hero of Castile whom the
changing mood of Spain was to turn at the last into a fanatical
crusader. He has conquered another Moorish town:
“Hearken to me, Albar Fánez, and all my valiant knights!
“With this castle we have won great spoil;
“Many Moors have died; few do I see still living.
“As to survivors, both the men and the women, there’s no
one who will buy them
“If we cut off their heads. Nary a bit would we gain.
“Let’s save them for ourselves; now that we are the masters.
“We’ll lodge in their houses; we’ll make them wait on us.”[11]
The Cid reminds us vividly how far his Spain was yet from the ultimate,
classic Spanish character, four hundred years after the battle had begun
between the Moor and Christian. In the Cid are all the elements of that
character--in their raw, chemically unfused state. But in the sense that
Isabel was Castilian, and that the Castle is Castilian, he is not
Castilian and he is not Spanish. His spirit is pagan and is European. No
such light-hearted, almost comic bellicosity exists among the Semites to
whom warfare was a solemn, religious matter. The Cid is the
knight-errant, the medieval sportsman, stripped, however, of the mystic
and amorous sentiment which Christianity later put upon the freebooters
of the northern forests. The Cid is cheerful and fluid as any pagan: but
he has a trait which no true Teuton knight possessed: his extreme
concern with money. The Cid fights like a Goth: but he figures like a
Phœnician. And, like an Arab, he keeps moving.
From time to time, the Cid is minded that he is fighting for the Lord,
that Christ is his captain, and that the Moor (aside passing alliances
and friendships) is his spiritual foe. He gets this notion from the
Moor himself: and it is well to realize how weakly the Christian has
adapted it after four centuries of fighting. Meantime, the Arab who had
crossed the Strait in a flame of religious passion, cooled and lost his
sectarian, desert ardor. Spain was become a simmering chaos with no
clear elements. Christian and Moslem were often in alliance. The Ideas
of Cross and Crescent resided unalloyed only in monasteries. The process
of osmosis whereby the Christian was to inherit the religious fanaticism
long lost by the Moslem did not reach its climax until the Age of
Isabel.
The Cid--gay, ambulant, fluid, mercenary pragmatist of arms--lived under
the shadow of no Castle. The Castle of Burgos had as yet no spirit for
its bristling body. It was not yet Castile. But though the Castle’s body
is a ruin over Burgos, and Castile is wrecked among the modern nations,
their spirit lives. It created a hard kingdom to tower over Spain, to
dominion the world, and stratify at last the Spanish soul.
* * * * *
What is a castle?
It is a shut place that commands by its shutness the open place about
it. A castle is builded of the stone of its world: it rises from the
stone of its world: it _is_ the stone of its world. A castle is austere
toward the world which it defends. It is invariable, forbidding: its
strength is that of a perpetual shutting-out of all which lies outside
it. Sun beats on the castle wall: inside it is dark. Moon melts on its
bastion and bathes its county blue: it is harsh and rigid. Water and
wind make song of the green hills: the castle is silent. It is lord of
its county because it is apart from it. A castle is hot in a cold land:
a castle is cold in a hot land: a castle is high in a low land: a castle
is full in a land of dearth: a castle is dry in a land of verdure.
Within the castle walls, anarchy may flame: the walls are law enough.
The walls are spirit and sanctity enough, so that within life may be mad
and fleshly. A castle draws on the affluence of its world to save its
world: it lifts itself into a desert peak, that the low lands may
flourish: and then it sucks the land.
Castile becomes a castle. The chaos of running passion and idea hardens:
Christian Spain, weary at last of ages of dissension, steals the
discarded fervor of the Moor: becomes one passion, permanent and
crystal, to withstand all others. Upon the crest of Spain forms this
stony essence of her will. The actual struggle dies: the Moslem world
droops away toward Africa. But the spirit of the struggle becomes rock.
A castle to defend the soul of Spain; and Spain’s soul at last a castle.
The walls raised to minister to an open land grow higher, grow ever more
remote from the reason of their being. Become at last a reason unto
themselves.
See the castle now, stirred from its mooring in a fertile world! The
fertile world itself must turn into a castle! This will of service
destroys the served. This vision is so intense that it is blind. The
castle is become an unleashed monster, mobile as the Arab or the Cid. It
lives--to be a castle. And it devours the spirits and fields of men
which raised it up in order to protect them.
The castle, become Spain, moves through Europe: moves across the sea.
Its shut erectness is the measure of good. Its sunless cells are the
measure of light. Its turrets are the church. Its trampling march over
the pliant earth is music. Its dream is to make a castle of the House of
God.
_b._ _The Stones of Wisdom_
The Province of Valladolid in Old Castile is fertile. The plain has the
aspect of a verdant sea swept by long tides, the hills. In Spring the
fields of wheat and barley unfurl their delicate green illimitably to
horizons where white clouds stand like enchanted caravels. In the soft
grass and the turf, velvety with rains, the flowers sparkle like myriad
splinters of sky. And on this vastness, under a solid Dome, towns stand
as sudden islands.
Such a town is Medina del Campo--City of the Field: a huddle of clay
huts about a bastioned castle where Isabel the Catholic loved to live
and where at last she died. The plains are at low ebb against the walls
of Medina. They recede with their lush rhythms from this ruined
arrogance which once housed Glory. Medina is like a penniless hidalgo.
The town’s pride--the Castle--is a molder within the walls. And the town
itself is a lay of sordid houses on mud streets, a conglomerate life of
stamping peasants and braying mules and women occult like the hidden
fires of their kitchens.
West of Medina del Campo lies the Province of Salamanca. It is the
southern spur of the kingdom of León which Castile absorbed in the
eleventh century, and it is contiguous with Portugal. It is less fertile
than Valladolid. That sea-like plain roughens and grows abrupt. The
Castilian _borrico_ is less frequent; and likewise the crude _carro_
which it draws with the driver bouncing on its rump. Here is a land of
oxen. Slow and inevitable as the day, they swing and steam beneath their
wooden yokes, drawing the stone plow through the rocky loam or the cart
with axleless wheels on the harsh ruts of a road. The cool young
grain-shoot trills less in this land. It is a world of flocks. Sheep
fleck the hills; goats cast their jagged shapes like living stones
within the stony valleys. It is a world of ranches--of _dehesas_. Bulls,
reared for the bull-ring--_toros bravos_--browse in great sweeps of
meadow.