Renaissance, echoes the shouts of women at their sheds. Oranges in tons,
winesacks like human bodies, dates from Elche, potatoes, flowers,
donkeys towing _tartinas_ ... all produce of the lush Valencian huerta.
The women wear great red aprons and have purple eyes....
Valencia in chaos is a masquerade. Greece, Carthage, Rome, Alexandria,
Mecca, Fez annul each other here. Turbulent Valencia does nothing, says
nothing. It is a dream of Spain, laden with her ages.
END OF PART ONE
_PART TWO_
_The Tragedy of Spain_
_CHAPTER VII_
_THE WILL OF THE CATHOLIC KINGS_
Young Isabel, sister of the king, sits in her castle tower at Medina,
and looks beyond Castile: looks south to the Moorish realm, Granada;
looks east and north to the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre; looks west
to Portugal. “Let there be Spain,” says Isabel of Castile.
Her own land is riven in chaos. Ferdinand the Saint who won Córdoba and
Seville from the Moslem was a strong monarch. But Alfonso the Learnèd
was not wise in ruling. There have been two hundred years of banditry,
of baronial insolence, of royal wavering. Castile is a quicksand upon
which no will can march. Only the penniless submit to taxes. Nobles are
outlaws. Rome parcels out appointments in the Church to alien lackeys.
Prelates of Spain go their own way with their own crimson armies, or
sulk in arrogant safety in their fortress-churches. Tolerance has
begotten anarchy. Ideas annul each other in the too free sun. And God,
with many faces, turns against Himself.
Isabel, looking from the bastioned windows of her tower out upon Castile
is a luminous quiet heart in the storm. King Henry, the Impotent, is
fertile of disaster. His favorites juggle with the scepter, scribble
upon the royal parchment commands of idleness and of ambition. One of
his favorites, Beltrán, has begotten on the Queen a daughter: and
Joanna’s growth is the growth of fresh dynastic war. Alfonso, the king’s
brother, claims the throne and writes his claim on the sparse
wheatfields of Castile, making them desert. Portugal pushes: France
plots and watches. Each fortune has its army. Each church is a castle.
Each mountain is either an ambush or a throne. “Let there be Spain,”
says Isabel of Castile.
She will be queen: but in her own way. And her way, like her will, is
her rapt possession by the spirit of her land. Her brother, Alfonso, has
died: his faction demand of her that she assume the Crown and drive out
the impotent king. Isabel refuses. She bargains with Henry. While he
lives, he is to rule. But his pseudo-daughter shall renounce: his
adulterous wife shall return to Portugal: Isabel shall be acknowledged
heiress of Castile. Henry gives his word, and breaks it. He is neither
friend nor foe. He is a symbol of Spain’s brackish chaos. Isabel holds
to her castle. She is almost penniless; but she has for confessor a
couched eagle, Cisneros, who is to second her mysterious work. Isabel
learns that her brother the king plots to imprison her for the sake of
Joanna whom the heir of Portugal has married. Isabel summons Ferdinand,
heir to Aragon, to come and wed her. She is thinking of Spain; and her
articulate will has convinced the old King Juan of Aragon, Ferdinand’s
father, that she is going to win--and that the union is good.
Disguised and penniless, Ferdinand crosses the hostile land and reaches
the princess in Valladolid. He is seventeen: a lissom, romantic knight,
the impact of whose bloods--Latin, Goth and Jew--has kindled a swift
fire in his face. He sees this girl, tall and stately and one year his
elder: her ruddy hair is a braided glow about her brow, the great blue
eyes are a sky for the large rigor of her features. He enters the
mansion of her love, to dwell forever within the sway of her will. For
her will is Spain. He is brilliant, sharp, ubiquitous: but her will has
place for him. Let him move from Italy to Peru: he will yet be within
the will of Isabel.
The married boy and girl are fettered by penury in Castile; and like a
breath to move them wait the death of Henry. He dies when Isabel is
twenty-three. Portugal marches eastward for Joanna. His great army is a
shadow in León. Isabel’s faction dwindles. Ferdinand, wise consort,
proposes peace with Portugal at the price of Zamora and other bastions
of the west. Isabel refuses. She is pregnant. She makes long night
journeys on horse, to her recalcitrant towns. She pleads before rough
communes and proud _ricos hombres_. She spends her woman’s strength--she
and Spain will suffer for it--but she does not entail her still shadowy
queen’s power. She makes recruits. She has a good field general in her
husband. Portugal loses heart before this hearty mother of unborn Spain.
The stubborn towns of Castile rally to her. In 1479 Juan of Aragon dies:
Ferdinand becomes king: Castile and Aragon at last are wedded with their
monarchs.
“Let there be Spain,” is the rhythm of Isabel’s thought.
“We have not yet won Castile,” she tells her husband on the march to the
long, last war for the conquest of Granada.
From ages of invasion and dissent, Spain has become this throbbing swarm
of aroused centrifugal impulse. Ideas, races, communities, men: a
boiling tumult to be summed and stilled. Spain longs for peace: Spain
longs to become Spain. From her multiverse of wills, she has willed a
symbol: this person, fair and strong. She has willed Isabel who is the
flesh of Spain’s will.
Isabel is one possessed. Her vision, thought and sense move in one
cycle. To her, physical love is not this tenderness between herself and
her man: it is a joining of Aragon and Castile. To her, physical
fecundity is not her woman’s flower: it is the providing by a queen of
counters for dynastic matches.
But she is deliberate and wise. She has more than her will and the
weapon of her body. She has ideas for weapons. The modern State
functioning under an almighty monarch, the medieval Church with its
source in Rome and Christ, and for her people Justice: this is the
triune tool whereby to weld the anarchies of Spain into her Spain at
last.
Strabo already wrote of the separatism of Spain: Rome suffered here as
nowhere else to unify her conquest. Spain lacked a nervous system and a
base: she had to be subdued bit by bit--and so held. Since the Romans,
twelve hundred years have stratified the chaos. Each new strain of
blood, each fresh disposal of culture and of faith has become a
claimant. The Spaniard bears in his nerves the variance of a past--all
anarchy of dissent and self-assertion.
The Catholic Kings sit weekly in open court and dispense justice. The
nobles are leveled down: the commoners are lifted. Finance is once more
farmed from plenty, not extorted from indigence. Rome is compelled to
relinquish to the Kings the right of nomination to high office. In all
of this, the monarchs meet Spain’s intricate problem with the
conventional measures--those which are unifying France and Britain.
In Spain, this is mere prelude. Spain’s chaos is more organic, and is
unique in Europe. Isabel follows the logic of her weapons. What disrupts
Spain is not banditry, not the insolence of nobles: but Spain’s free
life of inimical ideas. All else is consequence, not cause. To the south
is a whole kingdom of the Moors. Everywhere live Mussulmans and Jews.
More insidious still, there are the converted Jews--_los conversos_--who
under cover of acquiescence spread the poison of their immemorial
discord. When France was truly Catholic with Saint Louis for king, her
Dominican friars backed by Pope Gregory set up an Inquisitional
Tribunal. France showed her mettle against the Albigenses. Isabel has
even a closer precedent to hand: Aragon defended herself against the
heretics in 1242; and six centuries before, the Visigoths made
protective laws against the Jews--the accursed Jews who freed themselves
from oppression by letting in the Arabs! They are the same Jews still:
few in number, but with the strength of ferment. They turn Christian:
they achieve power and wealth: they marry with the nobles: they become
princes of the Church. And their anti-national nature, their passion for
free thought and independent action rot the weak royal fabric. Isabel
applies for a Papal Bull: the Inquisition is set up, not against open
Jews and Moors, but against the subtle and treacherous _conversos_.
Granada, decomposed under the affluent Moors, falls to the Catholic
Kings. The Inquisition, captained by Torquemada, sends thousands of
souls upon their way to Heaven and fills Spain with the anguish of torn
bodies. Her roads are safe, her nobles and churchmen buckle under; the
last Moorish prince has crossed the Strait to the Moghreb. And yet Spain
is not One. Spain must become a Being, rapt and single, serving Christ
and conquering for Christ. She who is the symbol of Spain’s will strives
to make her land in her own image. Spain, like her, must become chaste
and absolute: a Catholic people as she is a Catholic woman.
The Jews are offered a merciful alternative: to be Catholic or to quit
the land. Isabel argues that the _conversos_ will lose their secret
virulence if they have no nourishment from open Jewish neighbors. In
1492 a goodly fraction of the Jews of Spain “exchanging a House for an
ass, a Vineyard for a coat,” leave the cities where they have lived for
ages. Ten years later, the Moors of the conquered kingdom of Granada,
meet the same fate. Again, a host of intellectuals, artists, tradesfolk
is bled away. The peasants do not stir: they become Catholic with the
same inert response which had made them Moslem seven centuries before,
or Arian under the Visigoths, or pagan under Rome.
Isabel looks at her work--and nods--and is not satisfied.
She says: “We do unto the body of our beloved land as Christ did unto
the possessed: we have cast out devils. But this is not enough. True
disciple of our Lord, Spain must take up her burden and go forth: must
forsake comfort and family and the long-sued peace: must bring His Word
to all that dwell on earth. Spain is Christ’s true apostle. France turns
away in trickery and ambition. Henri IV, Louis XI--how far they are from
Saint Louis! Italy is helpless. Spain is the well-beloved: Spain is
Israel, and Rome’s right hand. Let my king, Ferdinand, go with his
hardened troops to Sicily and Naples.
“But even this suffices not. The Apostles did not stay among the Jews:
they went out to the Gentile. There is more than Europe. Can this
strange religious mariner, Cristobal Colón, be right?”
Isabel ponders what she has heard of Columbus. He is the author of a
book of _Prophecías_. He has found and plotted in the Old Testament his
rationale for a westward route to the Indies. God perhaps wrote down in
Isaiah, not alone Christ and the Word of Christ in Europe, but Spain and
how Spain shall bring the Word to the East. Columbus a prophet? (He says
there is gold in the Indies. Spain needs gold, for her crusade.) He is
the friend of holy men in Spain: the Dominicans bespeak him and his
cause. He has been rejected by Juan II of Portugal, by Henry VII of
England, by Anne of Beaujeu, Regent queen of France.
“Let Colón go westward to the heathen east,” the Catholic Kings ordain.
“Let him carry the Christian word to the heathen, and bring back gold to
carry the Word farther.”
Isabel’s will is religious. She is a woman incarnate of an idea:
passionately eager to make all her realm, all the world flesh of her
purpose. This means that her design must be practicable, also. Kingship
is acceptance of the immanence of God. Isabel thinks she understands,
looking over the turmoiled centuries of Spain: those of the Reconquest
from Moor and Arab. She knows that the _mind_ of these shifting wars was
of this world and for the spoils of the earth. She knows that the Cid at
times fought Christian, and that Saint Ferdinand could not have won
Seville without the aid of the Moslems of Granada. God used mundane
weapons for His purpose. No archangel did He send to drive Târik and
Al-Mansor from Santiago, but mercenary treacherous knights who knew of
the Infidel that he had gold, rather than that he spat upon the Cross.
And unto this day, the Moor is respected in Castile! He is learnèd,
liberal: he has fought well and lived well. Isabel accepts the strange
ways of her Lord. She, too, must use mundane weapons. Ferdinand is
ambitious: let his lust be a weapon. He is sharp, swift, hard like
Toledo steel: no king of France can outwit him, no Italian cardinal
withstand him. Isabel cherishes the good tool. A more conscious tool is
Columbus. His ships have blundered on a new rich continent. His fortune
has foundered: he is in chains--as were the older prophets. But the
wealth is Spain’s! His mariners are bullies--worldly tools of the Lord:
yet even by them the Indian can be saved. Even by them and their greed,
Rome can bring grace to the Indies. Isabel accepts the immanence of God,
in the lusts of her servants.
She is a tall, fair woman. In the camp, in the castles that raise her
constant journeys across Spain--Córdoba, Valladolid, Medina, Burgos--she
lives the frugal life of the campaigner. She has paid for her forced
night rides: the heaviest price, perhaps, is the feebleness of her
children, none of whom survives to inherit or give an heir to Spain,
save the mad second daughter, mother of Carlos the Great. The queen’s
splendors are reserved for display that shall bespeak her greatness to
the world. When she enters Avila or Seville, it is upon a tide of gold
and rubies. But when the doors shut upon her castle and the drawbridge
rises, when she is alone with her family or her confessor, the jewels
and the cloth of gold are gone: a woman, resolute and stark like the
Castilian mountains, looks within herself for God’s next message.
She is the spirit of Spain. Her husband, often unruly, often rebellious,
is muscle, skill, craft--he is not the spirit of Spain. Her spiritual
father, Ximenez de Cisneros, whom she chose for confessor because he had
no respect for a queen, and whom she exalted to be Primate of Toledo
because he abhorred all greatness--he is the nude projection of her
conscience upon the widening splendor of her realm. Beneath the
sumptuous robes of Cisneros is a shirt of hair. Deep in his vast castle
is a cell, a bare and bedless floor on which the Primate sleeps after
the penitential rope each night has lashed into his flesh the words of
Christ. He is a formula of her immaculate will: but he is not the
spirit of Spain. His fanatical asceticism is too simple. Spain, like
Isabel, is turbulent and complex.
What pouring of flesh and spirit upon Spain, since the Phœnician, the
Berber and the Celt first made the Iberian fecund! A subtle chaos. For
Spain is a diapason of hostile forces, needing each other to survive:
the embattled parts have long since found their balance, and each is in
love with itself.
Isabel works like an artist. She has her vision. Her instinct and
experience evolve for it a form and for herself a method. She takes her
material ruthlessly and transfigures it with a cold passion. But for a
deeper reason, Isabel is an artist. This design which is her vision and
her will and to which she conforms her world is her world’s will and
vision. The creative circle is closed. For he alone is the true artist
whose personal will is the will of his land and of God: only in this
marriage of wills can there be true creation. Isabel makes Spain over
into the image of Spain.
Behold the saintly, the murderous woman! She is the face of irony, and
her smile is tragic. With what tender hand she sets up the Inquisition:
“Unity in Christ, enforced by the power of the modern State.” With what
warm eyes, she bids her marauding mariners godspeed: “America brings
recruits for Christ--and gold for the winning and holding of more
recruits.” How fondly she gives her insane child, Joanna, in marriage to
the heir of Hapsburg; how resolutely furthers her husband’s ambitions in
the east. Spain, kingdom of God, surely cannot embrace America and
neglect Europe? Infidel Africa, false France must be surrounded and
crushed--“Austria, Artois, Netherland, Africa, America,” she counts the
organs of her embodied Christ.
And the heart of the Body, Spain herself, with Portugal long since
joined by blood alliance: it must be pure and solid like the heart of
the Queen. This is the kernel of her work. Isabel looks back upon her
life and finds again her measure and her method. She will create a race
of Spaniards whose every unit, man and woman, in intimate thought shall
strike a single note: so that this note, myriad-repeated, fill the
world. Spain, mother and child of chaos, shall become the archetype of
unison on earth.
Isabel is ruthless, she is unafraid: she is certain. Such feeble virtues
as tolerance, freedom, joy of life--Spain was celebrated for them beyond
all Europe--must be given up. Shall Isabel spare her land, when she has
not spared herself?
She was young and tender. She has known what it is to lie in a man’s
arms. She has been a mother. She has sacrificed love to become a
captain. She has lost her children, unborn or born, because of her
forced marches in the saddle. She has mortified not alone her lusts and
vanities, but her gentleness and sweetness, to become this Weapon of the
Lord.
Let Spain do as much. Let there be laws against the wearing of gold
braid: against display of luxuriance and ease. Let there be laws against
the idleness of doubt, against the vice of willful search of truth.
(Rome has the truth!) Let there be laws against any wavering whatsoever
from the pure unity of Spain. And what element offends against this
white simplicity, let it be cut away--though the land bleed.
Above all let there be no peace. Isabel’s art reaches its ironic climax.
Spain’s hunger for unity was the hunger for peace. Disunion and
multiplicity had made perpetual war. Now unity was achieved, the Spanish
rhythm--which was war--went on. The new ideal nourished the old mode.
Spain is the apostle of Christ. Spain has become a state to establish
Christ on earth. Let Spain not rest. Christ brings not peace, but a
sword.
* * * * *
The vision, a theodicy: the form, the Church of Rome: the dynamic means,
a State. In the impossible marriage of these three elements lies the
tragedy of Spain.
For seven centuries Christians have fought Moslems. Their motive was
conquest of power. But their pretext became the Cross. The opposing
Crescent determined this. The Cross grew, because of the faith of the
Moor. Very early the Christians found it well in their raids against the
Mussulman, to enlist the Presence of the Church. The priest became an
auxiliary soldier: he brought the poetry and spirit of a religious
slogan to enhance the fleeting motive of the Raid. And now at last the
slogan has come true! Saint Ferdinand took Seville because he wanted
more land. But Isabel sends ships to the Indies because she wants more
Christians. A millennium of brutish restlessness has mothered this
religious restlessness of Spain which would embroil the world till all
the world be Christian. Ages after the Crusades of France and England,
ages after the decadence of the Arab, the troops of Isabel become
crusaders.
A modern State with a medieval God. In France and England, the medieval
God has already vaporized away. England breaks literally with Rome.
France dissolves her bonds into mere gesture. _The modern State must
have no God but itself._ It must create its own pragmatic, its ethic,
its metaphysic, finally its religion upon the unitary plan of its own
health and progress. France knows this: henceforth the State of France
will act unhindered by any ideal external to its future. And England
knows this. Two mighty States move forward with a unity of program and
of control born of the need of the State.
But in Spain, the State is not cause and effect, not ideal and goal, not
master and dispenser. In Spain, the State shall be the tool of a Vision
hostile to the State’s essential nature.
The State must be materialistic, possessive, selfish. Spain’s ideal is
visionary, creative, altruistic. The State must steal and hold. Spain’s
ideal spends. The State murders to enhance itself. Spain’s ideal murders
to enhance Christ. The State is anti-individual. Spain’s ideal makes and
controls by law the yearning of each soul.
Isabel is an artist: she has the logic and the integrity of the artist.
But in the form of her work live elements that disrupt and that belie
each other. She makes of Spain a modern State: she sends this monster,
lustful, treacherous and dull, upon a Christian errand....
_CHAPTER VIII_
_THE WILL OF SAINT AND SINNER_
_a._ _Irony and Honor_
_b._ _The Mystic_
_c._ _The Jesuit_
_d._ _The Jurist_
_e._ _The Rogue_
_f._ _Velazquez_
_a._ _Irony and Honor_
The Catholic Kings have builded ruthlessly: absolutism, the grace of
Christ, intolerance, universal justice, arms and prayer were to make
Spain one. Now each of these qualities takes form and grows personified
in Spain. Each is imbued with Spain’s imperious will to be whole and
one: each grows great with this spirit: each wars upon them all. Spain
was chaotic and diverse. Her will to be one serries her into antitheses.
Her will to union breaks her into extremes. Irony works on Isabel’s fair
fabric.
Perhaps the land itself is symbol of the process. Spain is desert--and
garden; flat plain--and mountain; great heat--and winter. Spain is
Europe--and Africa. In her events, she reveals this first ironic state
of fusion--the splitting up into opposites of action. Columbus, mystic
captain who charted his voyage in the Prophets, becomes enchained in the
lust of avarice. His men, sent to Christianize the Indies, enslave the
courteous American and sack his cities. Spain’s past transforms! The
Cid, that playful knight, becomes crusader. Saints turn knight-errant.
Moderate Stoics (like Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius whose father was a
Spaniard) inspire the ascetic fury of the hermits. And the humane
Arcipreste de Hita, Castile’s first poet, is turned into an apologist
for license.
In her pageant of extremes, Spain’s Middle Class is crowded out. The
land has warriors--and beggars; nobles and rascals: saints and
scoundrels. Charity is practiced with the sword and the mystic walks
with the thief. Santa Teresa answers La Celestina. Don Quixote sallies
forth with Sancho Panza.
One spirit moves them all. They have each the same whole pride in Spain,
the same faith in her destiny, the same mind that Spain is their
inheritance. The Spanish mystic is no aloof and transcendental man: he
works for Spain. The Spanish rascal is no shallow rascal: he has the
almost metaphysical conviction that Spain must feed him. And every
Spaniard, from prostitute to saint, from king to beggar, moves within a
sense which reveals this terrible will to _social unity_: the sense of
Honor.
* * * * *
The Spanish sense of Honor is the need of Spain to resist the social
chaos of her land. The member of an integrated world completes it with
self-approval. Self-approval the Spaniard does not need. He was a
person, long before he had a nation. The Spaniard knew what was right,
what was true. His need was to make others know as he did: for in this
social conformity, he would feel himself at last the member of a group.
The _pundonor_ was the point of contact whereby he graphed, not his
place in Heaven, but his place in the world. The stress was upon others.
And this was the trait of a land in which individual unity was achieved;
in which rights of personality needed no insistence; but in which social
unity was lacking and was longed for.[17]
This need was so intense that it inspired a literature and informed a
religion. Æsthetic worlds were built upon this impulse and it infused
the writings of mystics as well as the histories of rascals. Spain in
her great Age--a pattern of sharp-limned individuals--was symphonized in
the key of Honor.
_b._ _The Mystic_
The mystics of Catholic Spain who in act and word gave utterance to the
will of Isabel rose from a high tradition in the land. They were indeed
the fulfillment ... as was the Queen ... of a religious vision older
than Spain herself. When Salamon B. Judah Ibn Gabírol was born in Málaga
in 1021, there was not yet Spain. Gabírol looked about him at this land
in which three continents and three religions were embroiled. And he
said: