subtle dichotomy of arch and gate marks in plastic terms the way from
Moslem Musa to Christian Philip. Best strike down from the Cathedral to
the ferry. These are the oldest and the poorest streets. And here are
children--naked children, and naked patches of rock and turf within the
filth of alleys. Dark, over-ripe, mute. These streets on the
mountainside are as the hive of some subterraneous bee whose honey is
bitter-black. The people are blind. They behold neither the river below
that flows to the sea, nor the Cathedral above that touches God. They
live compressed within the surging forces of Toledo. They live in a
limbo of balance. Their obscurity is poignant, within so aspirant a
world. The ferry is a round and ancient bark with a carved prow and two
unwieldy oars to pilot it, for better or for worse, athwart the current.
And above the precipice of the other side, is the rocky chaos where El
Greco sat to paint his city....
Rigor, rigor inflexibly holds. Toledo’s streets are stone veins
imbedded. The Alcázar is a higher rock above the rocky huddle of the
town: its rectangular loom is a peak of the mountain, polished by the
sun. At the summit bristles the Cathedral. Towers, turrets, crested
pediments, flying buttresses and chapel roofs are pressed aloft by the
Toledan wave, and rise from it like foam. All of the sharp volutions of
the streets, even the sheer Alcázar, converge and aspire into this jet
of granite. And over the Cathedral is the sky--God’s empty answer to
this blast of icy aspiration.
* * * * *
This is one Theme of Toledo: the word of traditional Castile and of its
castle towns. The mountain is refuge of friend, menace to foe. The face
of the Christian warrior is set. Moor and Jew are driven out. And all
the Toledan world becomes a symbol of the mood that drove them. The soul
of the Spaniard becomes a castled mountain; masters its chaos by turning
it to stone. And what will not ply to immobility, it shuts without the
drawbridge.... One theme of Toledo. But a typical Castilian town--no
more--is not Toledo. Castile surpasses itself. Spain grows universal.
Color, flame, live too in the shut town. They are everywhere. And in
their protean form, they are one. Halfway up from the Puerta Visagra
stands Cristo de la Luz in a rough field of rocks. In 1085, the
conquering Castilians passed through the Arabs’ gate. Their titular head
was Alfonso VI. But Ruy Díaz de Vivar, the Cid, rode first. The streets
then were not different from now. Crude stone paved the steep, and the
gray houses hid their eyes about the inner verdure of their courts. The
Cid came to a little mosque. His horse fell to his knees and the
Campeador could not avail to budge him. At last, he dismounted from the
rapt steed and strode into the mosque. He beat away the gold-encrusted
Mihrab and disclosed a Visigothic chapel. In the altar place, before the
Christ, was a brass lamp; and it was burning even as it had burned three
and a half centuries before, when Musa walled it up to make his
mosque.[13]
The mosque stands first in the unkempt garden. Its entrance is
double-arched. Through the three columns topped by a lyric arabesque,
lies the round depth of the altar. Upon the walls are paintings of
ascetic Christians, lean with the Byzantine projection of their color
into the life of their forms. These paintings were recent when the Arab
came to Toledo in 711. They are recent today--in the Toledo of El Greco.
Cristo de la Luz is delicate. Its counterpoint of German, Byzantine and
Arab themes makes it a song wavering flute-like from the stiff music of
the Castilian town. On the other slope, in the Judería that leaned so
fatefully over the gorge of the Tagus, are other dissident jewels. Two
synagogues have survived. One of them consecrated as a church under the
tutelage of Santa María la Blanca, later became the asylum for penitent
prostitutes, later a barrack for cavalry and a stable. The other was
made over by the Catholic Kings to that most unjewish of cults--the
death (Tránsito) of the Virgin Mother. Builded by the Jews, the houses
speak across the stormy ages of the Jews, their builders. The sultry
masquerades to which they have submitted fade away. This is Toledo
indeed. The Toledo of Abraham Ibn Ezra, descendant of Gabírol and
forefather of Spinoza; of the munificent and tragic Samuel, treasurer to
Spain’s most cruel king; of Ibn Daud, Talmudist, and of his great foe,
Jehudah Ha Levi.
At the time of Paul, there were already Jews in Spain. Like the
Phœnicians and the Greeks before them, they became protagonists of
Spanish urban culture. The Visigoths who inherited the land upon the
Roman death, were an agricultural folk. Their will to control this
peninsula of cities failed, because they lacked the spirit of the city.
At the end, when disaster neared they oppressed the Jews--masters of
urbanity--for economic reasons. It was natural, that the oppressed
should welcome the Arabs: and that the Moslem captains, aware of the
possible ally in a hostile land, should overlook the chief hate of their
Prophet by welcoming the Jews. Jews were placed in control of Seville,
Málaga, Córdoba, Granada, Toledo. Under the Córdoban Caliphate, they
throve and Spain became their land. Jewish Wisdom crossed the sea from
Babylon and founded the first Academies of Europe.
During four centuries, the Jew was a master in Spain. But it is doubtful
if his number ever equaled half a million. He was a leaven and an enzyme
in the land. He was artisan, tradesman. No guild of the cities failed to
count him in. He was physician and teacher. He became scientist and
philosopher. The majority of Jews lived, of course, in the humble
circumstance of a farmer or a weaver. But a few grew great. Jews became
diplomats and statesmen for Moslem and for Christian princes. As the
modern economy gradually evolved, they became ministers of finance; they
waxed wealthy. And with their power they builded in the towns of Spain
centers of liberal, luxuriant culture whose like was not then in
Europe. They were masters of many tongues, masters of many
illuminations. When Arab Córdoba had rotted and the courts of Italy were
yet swarming knots of bandits, the Jews of Spain dwelt in a world which
embraced Asia, Africa, Europe. Indeed, they were among the eyes of
Portugal and Spain, yearning across the seas. They were cartographers;
they were promoters of trade. And from Gabírol who was born in Málaga in
1021 to Hasdai ben Crescas who died in Barcelona in 1410--a period of
time nearly as great as that which separates the Discovery of America
from our day--they traced an incessant thought in Spain.
The modern State sounded once again a Jewish doom. With the birth of its
fanatical will came persecution. The Jews’ internationalism was a
subtle, psychologic poison. The servants of royal unity became aware of
an enemy in their household--of an enemy in their blood. In 1391,
Spain--the liberal theater of ideas whose like had not been known since
Alexandria (for here argued men who believed, not in abstract gods, but
in flaming Prophets and in Incarnations)--lurched to one modern way of
progress. Massacre rose from Seville to Toledo. A century later, the
Jews were ordered to give up either their faith or their home. They had
been in Spain for centuries; their urban genius had helped build Spain’s
cities. They had kindled a fire to warm the world and to illumine
heaven. They were artisans in the body and in the mind of their land.
They were ordered to die. For to leave the home of Spain or the home of
Bible and Talmud was no mere uprooting. Probably not much more than a
hundred thousand left. The moiety stayed and were lost in the great
Catholic amalgam. Their organizations for action and for thought were
reft from them. They had no halls or synagogues. They had no language.
Worst of all, they had to abandon--those who stayed--the immemorial
_forms_ of feeling which were Jewish and in which they were beginning to
mold (witness Crescas and Leon Hebreo) a new Enlightenment, a new
Naturalistic religion! An end ... not the first, not the last ... came
to Jewish Wisdom. And while Europe whose spirit they had nourished rose
in Renascence to the bloody dawn of our “liberal” age, the Jews sank
down into the very night of mumbled ritual and superstition from which
they had upraised their oppressors.
As they pass from the stern city or are lost within its rigorous stones,
the Jews give to it a color and a theme without which it would not be
Toledo. By their acceptance of death, they have won life unceasing: and
here in Toledo which once gave them death, they have bestowed a spirit
which has not died.
The house of Samuel Levy stands, gracious and simple, in its garden. (El
Greco lived here.) The arched columns of Santa Maria are unhurt. The
Tránsito still breathes, darkly, like a rose over-ripe. It is a
rectangular building, higher than wide. Its walls are white under the
cedar ceiling. Around runs a frieze, margined in Hebrew texts. Above are
arches in relief, _rejas_ that suggest the Arab, and a higher line from
the Old Testament. But the base wall of the synagogue is its full glory.
It is a façade wholly of Hebrew. (Two Castilian seals thrust in to mar
it have no more effect than a spot on a sublime illumined page.) The
letters of stone make a warm intricate music. The æsthetic inspiration
is Arab. But how these Jews have deepened and dimensioned it! The
arabesque is a delicate, wavering line; without denseness, without
integration. It is like a silhouette, against a desert sky; it is like
the trail of life on desert sands. The Hebrew letters are slower, less
emphatic, more volumnear. They are far mellower in curves; they are far
deeper. They build, in this façade of a Toledan synagogue, a poem that
is history. They march on the stone surface of a wall, resolute,
self-effacing: symbols of a world whose spirit seems by miracle to
survive its body.
Color and aspirant light, throughout Toledo. How has it
survived? Not alone the Cristo de la Luz: not alone the Judería.
Athwart the Cathedral, in a little Square, is a building--the
_Ayuntamiento_--bright, warm, almost fancifully gay with towers. (El
Greco builded it.) There are Churches like San Vicente, Santo Tomé, in
which a wall grows suddenly glorious in color and sings above the
dolorous shadows. (Here, El Greco painted.) Even the Cathedral turns
traitor to its stones! The cloisters are a perfumed close. The choir has
rows of wood-carved stalls that shout their sensual delight against the
heavy columns. And in the Sacristía hangs an altar piece--an
_Expolio_--that is a sunny jewel. A genius--from across the sea--has
infused this conventional matter with prophetic spirit: space moves,
spirit grows manifest in flesh. A red-robed Christ becomes a ritual
flame, transfiguring the human shapes about him.
And this, in Catholic Toledo, the stone grim city! Because there came a
man to dwell here in whom dwelt the old Prophecies, and who resolved
them into shapes which Catholic Toledo could not deny. Color against
stone, fire against rigor--this had been the Argument in Toledo, until
Isabel and Cisneros put a stop to it, by blotting out the one in favor
of the other. A simple resolution. Moor and Jew go forth. Dogma and
Conventual remain. The Cardinals of Toledo--Popes of Spain--espouse the
iron purpose of Castile. And the long blank walls of the streets with
their hidden monks and nuns--these seem the victors of Toledo.
Comes, now, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century a young Cretan
painter to make his home in the town. His name is Doménico Theotocópuli.
He has studied in Italy with Tintoretto. He is a wanderer. He learns
that there is much gold to earn in Spain, and little talent to earn it.
A handy place in which to make a fortune. He comes and stays: and
although the fortune proves shy, Toledo becomes immortal.
The question of the actual blood which flowed in El Greco’s veins is of
no consequence. Child of the Mediterranean _Völkerchaos_, there must
have been echoes of many voices in his soul. Maurice Barrès[14] plays
with the unestablished notion that he was a Jew. The certainty is the
prophetic spirit of his work; the certainty is the vision of the East
with which he dowered Spain. He came to Toledo, disciple of a realist in
Florence; and he produced an art as opposed to the paganism of his
master as it is close to Isaiah.
The spirit of Israel and Byzantium does not die in Spain, because a
Catholic has come to make it flesh of the body. The Jew may go into his
alien ghettos; the Arab may rot in the Levant. Here is a man to blaze
their truth upon the walls of churches--and with a color so wise, that
the walls crumble ere his word grows dim.
The work of El Greco was misunderstood by his own age and scouted by the
criticism that came after. The wonder is, that it was tolerated--the
invasion in it of a world condemned. Manuel Cossío[15] has explained
this plausibly by the personal prestige of the man. His contemporaries,
failing to grasp his apocalyptic and “inaccurate” art, were moved by the
deep power of the man and by his own self-confidence. His work is the
crowning plastic of the West. More and more, as the walls of his stiff
world molder, El Greco is seen to express not alone Toledo, not Spain
alone, but the Christian Synthesis of Europe at its highest luminous
pitch.
His æsthetic is one of incarnation. He possesses an idea, dynamic,
mystical. He makes his figures immediate forms of that idea. Not
symbols, not representations--not even emanations in the separatistic
sense of the Brahmins. The spirit _informs_ these heads and torsos, much
as the spirit informs the Substance of Spinoza. This is an æsthetic to
be found in Egyptian sculpture. The archaic Greeks knew it and the
classic Greeks, growing analytical, abandoned it. It has come closest to
the West in the word of the Hebrews. Isaiah, Hosea, Job, the Song of
Songs, the Psalms, and the Alexandrian Pseudepigraphia rose, all, from
a like æsthetic law. Byzantium rewon it wanly in its painting. El
Greco’s idiom is close to the Byzantine. In his essence, the fierce
passion of its flaming, he is far closer to the Hebrews. This does not
mean that Doménico Theotocópuli had Jewish blood. It proves rather that
Christianity had Jewish blood, so that the Toledan ambiance of Semitic
rhythm and Semitic thought could call forth for Rome a vision very close
to the old vision of the Prophets.
El Greco must be regarded as a partaker, crucially, in the Toledan
scene. Thus only can the mystical culmination of his work be understood.
In Toledo, two antithetic Themes: a will of rigor and a flame of the
East. What mystery shall fuse them? In El Greco, two dominant traits:
volumnear color, movemented form. The mystery is at hand! Color creates
plastic mass; mass, formed through configuration into bodies, creates a
flow. But the flow is not of fluid; it is of fire. Fire flows and is
steadfast; an essential object and an immutable circumambiance mold its
motions to immobility. So now the flowing of El Greco’s forms. Massing
colors, thrusting shapes, parabolas of expression round spherically into
a balance _with no outlet_. Ecstasy lies within itself. Life aspires--to
life. Here is the vision of a Mystery which like flame flows forth from
God, is held to God and is a form, in its commotion, of God’s immutable,
immobile essence. Here is a Mystery not transcendental, not
neo-platonic. But Dante and Spinoza would have hailed it. And Toledo’s
stones could be transfigured to express it, without loss of their own
nature.
Thus did the essence of El Greco’s art resolve the two themes of his
city. Once again, the God of the East upon the body of the West creates
a masterpiece....
_e._ _The Tomb_
The ultimate Word of Castile....
A gray rectangle on the bleak Sierras. Behind, upon three sides, the
immense mountains. Below, the rock and clay that join Madrid to Avila.
Four stories of gray granite. A delicately arched slate mansard roof.
Upon each corner a tower and three more tiers of windows tapering
through the slender roof to a ball and a cross. Within, sixteen patios,
making the design of a Gridiron: symbol of the gridiron upon which San
Lorenzo, patron of the Escorial, was roasted. This Gridiron is cold. A
mighty central patio, its walls of invariant granite broken by the
church façade which rises within the building like a prayer wrung from
the rigor of that stony life. Doric columns, gigantic and harsh figures
of the Hebrew kings standing upon the pediment. Two towers at the
corners, and within, a Dome lifting above the building like a Tomb and
making death the dominant of this invulnerable music.
The Escorial stands on a stone platform whose inelastic might is
emphasized by the severe cropped hedges. The green of the box, the green
of window-sills and shutters chimes faintly against the silence. To the
south, under the granite terrace, is a little pond. Its square surface
mirrors only granite: that of the monastery walls or of the Guadarrama.
Within also silence. A monastery with its cloisters and chapter halls, a
church, a college, a Palace ... in square stone rigor. Walls are thick
like fortress walls; rooms are vaults; floors are bare. Below ground is
an octagonal chamber of vermilion marble piled to the peaked ceiling
with coffins of kings. And beyond, like the streets of some lugubrious
town, are the vaults of the Infantas--a procession of marble mansions,
body-large. This city of the dead holds the Escorial.
Eastward slopes a little park, and south from the artificial pool there
is a lawn. It ends in a granite front flush with the grass. This brief
pleasaunce is like a spot of verdure within desolation. Against it rises
the Escorial, framed by the scoriant Sierras, based and topped by
death--the profoundly stylized and essential form of the bleak Coronal
of Castile.
It is the masterwork of Philip II. And Philip is a masterwork of Spain.
The Spanish will to forge a unity from the warring elements of its life
won no darker victory than his. He was the great grandson of the Most
Catholic Kings. He was the true heir of their impossible purpose. His
Empire spanned the world. Never has there been its like. Portugal,
Holland, Franche-Comté, Austria, the Americas were bulwarks of his
House. He strove to make of this delirious chaos a unitary Word to
bespeak Christ. He gave his country’s blood and his life. He took at
their full value the accoutered lists of his imperial titles. He was the
Catholic King; let his land express God. He was Monarch; let him know
his children. His personal correspondence immensely regarded every city,
every hamlet, every estate in his realms. Each curate of each parish was
invited by the King to send detailed reports of the persons of his
flock. But the curate might err in perspective. Each report was tested
and criticized by another. Philip lived in the scaffolding of a Dream.
The Dream was good, for it was to create and rule a unitary world. But
the scaffolding was warfare, intrigue, laborious documentation. For
peace, he went to war: for light, he plowed the dark. He spent his years
and his people: and at the end he felt death.
This was the hour when the Escorial shaped in his dark mind. The pretext
was the desire of his father Carlos I, that the kings of Spain possess a
worthy tomb; and was the victory over the French on San Lorenzo’s day.
But the work that grew was strangely different from the plan, and far
profounder.
The will to unity must come to this? Philip had dreamed of a monument of
Life: a Spain that was to be the symphony of continents and seas, of a
hundred peoples and a hundred tongues fused in the grace of Christ. Now,
in the ardor of his maturity and in the glamour of his bloody conquests,
Philip knows he has failed. Unity ... the health of Unity ... must be
sought elsewhere. Not in the piling up of worlds but in their giving up;
not in life but through death.
Many-mooded death. Death of the senses, death of the mind, death of
glory, death of the will to live. From his imperial splendor and from
the ranges of his kingly sway Philip steps forth an ascetic. He will
have his Solution within the ken of his eye--this master upon whose
realm the sun does not set. He is the lord of the earth; and lives with
one last mastering desire: to build a tomb for his glory.
Philip searches the waste fastness of Castile, until he finds his site:
this barren spur of the Sierra below whose rock spreads the desert. Now
he calls his slaves--they are the painters and the architects. Juan
Bautista de Toledo and his successor Juan de Herrera, builders of the
Escorial, are tools in the fever-cold hand of the king. Their plans are
studied, revised, rejected. Their ebullient moods are flayed, their
dignity is slurred. They are slaves--mere cutters of stone--they are
tools.
And so, in a land of bastard architectures, where the Gothic is
deformed, where Renaissance and baroque and Oriental forms are puddled
and hypertrophied and belied, rises this masterwork. In its brutal
chastity, speaks the tragic spirit of him who made it. The Escorial is
to unverdant, fanatically ordered Spain what the green tragedies of
Racine are to open, sweetly measured France.[16]
* * * * *
Across the valley on a wooded height is a rocky bench known as the Seat
of the King. Here Philip comes each day and watches the Escorial grow
before him. He fears he might die ere it is done. He drives his slaves
the artists; imports whole corps of them from Italy and Flanders. And
when he is stricken with the illness which he thought his last, he is
carried in a litter from Madrid, eight dolorous days upon the bleak
meseta. He seeks the bare cell that is his Palace in the Escorial
basement; he lies in the bedroom built beside the Altar so that he may
hear Mass from his pillows. And so indeed he died. But still he sits
each afternoon upon the _Silla del Rey_, and watches.
Below him, the sun goes down and a cold moon rises. Below him a patch of
lawn and a flume float within this world splintered of granite and
twilight. A wood of encina stands like an army of cowled saints. They
are gnarled, gray-armored in moss, and their leaves are little
refulgences of prayer, holding the sunset above the sodden ground. They
look up, as Philip looks, toward the Escorial. It is matriced in jagged
rock; it is sheer from the sun and the moon light....
_CHAPTER VI_
_THE DREAM OF VALENCIA_
Spain, with face turned east away from the sun, takes her afternoon
siesta. She has dined well. Soup of seven meats, codfish, the seven
meats, cheese rich as manure, Galician greens, Toledan mazapan, Sevillan
_dulces_, wines from Málaga, Jérez and La Mancha, heroic tobacco from
the Canary Islands, fill her. She was hungry. For her day had been
active. She had served and fused the wills of many peoples: swift
Phœnicians, heavy-headed Romans, meteor Greeks, Goths with wild hair and
tender eyes, intricate introvert Jews, Arabs with convictions about the
materiality of Cosmos, Moors whose blood was fierce like Atlas
avalanche, sportsmen like the Cid whose charity was of the sword, whose
religion was of the moment, mystics of Castile parsing Christ with
Horace, Spaniards at last ... Torquemada, Isabela, Celestina ... makers
of the dominance of Castile. So Spain was hungry and heartily ate: was
weary and heavily slept. And her dream was a city of the eastern coast.
Its name Valencia. Its streets a Carnival. Its life a Masquerade.
Medieval towers stand over streets that shrill with modern shops. Great
Gates of Rome pinion the labyrinths of Orient. Arches of Islam throw
into shade white mansions built by American concerns of sewing machines
and fountain pens. All masquerade. The people speak a tongue close to
the French languedoc: they ride in Citroens and Fords. Put no trust in
this, they are not European. These open knots of barter, these entrail
alleys, murmurous and fluid, speak of Fez and Tunis. Fraud again: this
is not Africa. Islam puts a mockery on Rome. Judah redargues the
Castilian dogma. Moorish marts belie the modern measure. Avenues of
villas stretch straight from the town in gleams, and end in rice swamps:
near the bungalows toss galleys on the tide, with sails like the sails
of Carthage. Masquerade.
Here is the market place. _Lonja de seda_, the silk exchange, is Gothic.
(The mulberry trees are thick upon the huertas.) But the base from which
the Gothic rises is a Moorish palace. And from the noble height hangs
Arab ornament. The gargoyles indeed lean down like muedzins--fossil
muedzins with a frozen Allah on their lips. Under the holy walls, upon
the floor, squat merchants: they masquerade for Greece of the
Völkerchaos, for Talmudry of gain. And their commercial heads bathe in
the light of a fairer east--the Sun.