Francisco de Vitoria. Salamanca, fostered by the Catholic King, becomes
the leading university of Spain. Spain becomes Austria, Artois, the
Netherlands, Franche-Comté, North and South Italy, Sicily, the Balearic
and Canary Islands, Africa from Ceuta to Oran, the Moluccas, the
Philippines and the Americas from Florida to Tierra del Fuego. Carlos,
son of the mad daughter of the Catholic Kings, becomes head of an empire
like the dream of Isabel. He, too, is a creature of her will. The
vastness of his realm has blotted out his sense of time and space. His
religious fervor blurs his vision of mortal values. He will ride Spain
as he might ride a horse in battle. He has inherited Spain as a weapon
to be wielded. Spain is his, in order that the world be Christ’s.
The Dominican monk at Salamanca moves within the will of Carlos and of
Spain. The blood of Isabel’s empire is justice. Justice nourishes and
cleanses. Carlos must be ruthless, but he must not be wrong. He will do
what he desires: it must be proven right. The Americas make new
challenges of conscience. Vitoria in Salamanca meets the king’s need:
and modern International Law is ready for the world.
A full century before the Dutchman Grotius (Huig van Groot), Vitoria
lays down a rationale of justice for existing Powers, a structure in
diapason between their economic needs and their inherited morale. He
works for a modern state whose ideal is a theodicy of medieval Rome. The
ideal has become more abstractly ethical, more economic. But Woodrow
Wilson and the statesmen of the League of Nations are exact heirs of a
Dominican monk.
Vitoria studies the problems of America in his _Relectiones de Indis_:
the general problems of war in _De Jure Belli_. Both these works, it is
significant to note, form part of his _Relectiones theologicæ et
morales_. A true creature of the will of Isabel, he has turned
international problems into a problem of conscience. He denies
independent form to his subject. The law of nations and of peoples is a
moral law: it is outside the activities of lawyers. A question rises
between the king of Spain and the Indians of Mexico. The “savages” are
not subject to the king by human right. Their dealings with him cannot
be determined by human law. Only a divine law, moving Spain as a
theodicy, has brought about this juncture between the Indians and the
king. Only divine law is competent to rule.
Vitoria expands his thesis. There exists this same divine law--_jus
inter gentes_--between all States. The States are interdependent. There
is a _societas naturalis_, a natural Society of Nations. The link is
God. Free to the Spaniard to assume that God’s agent in the link be the
king of Spain. The world is one society: and between peoples of one
society peaceful intercourse may not be forbidden. France may not impede
a Spaniard from visiting France, even from settling in France, provided
he violate no law and cause no damage. If this is true between Frenchman
and Spaniard, it is true between American and European. Through the fact
of their civil rights in a society of nations the Indian cannot exclude
the Spaniard. There exists therefore _jus communicationis_: the right of
immigration. There exists also the freedom of the seas. Spain stands
justified in her American penetration.
We are at the mere beginning of Vitoria’s subtle structure. _Jus
commercii_--the right of commerce--applies not only to the exchange of
merchandise between free peoples, but as well to the exchange of ideas.
The Spaniard has the right to preach the Gospel to the Indian. The
Indian has the right to preach heathenism to the Spaniard. Either may
resist conversion (even as either may decline to purchase proffered
goods).
Since no State may prevent a stranger from settling on its lands, nor
even from becoming a lawful national, here are the Spaniards legally at
home in the Americas. But strong Powers must defend by arms the menaced
liberties of smaller States. That is a prerogative of a true society of
nations. How much more readily therefore shall strong Powers defend the
menaced liberties of individuals in every State! All States are “organs
of human justice.” Spain shall protect the innocent from “religious
sacrifice” and “from cannibalism in America.” If need be, to protect the
innocent, a State may subjugate wholly an unjust nation.
The theologian brings to Spain her “cosmic place” in the Americas as
Christ’s agent in the society of nations. But this is not enough. That
she may be at peace in Zion, she must be alone. So Vitoria evolves in
1500 the modern theory of “spheres of influence.” Pope Alexander was
_divinely_ just in submitting to Spain and Portugal, as God’s best
tools, the mission of Christianizing the Americas. But the Pope had no
_human_ right to partition the property of the red man. Vitoria with all
the Dominicans behind him stands against Pope and king: declaring that
“the Indian has as much right to possess property as the Catholic
peasant.” The Indians, he holds, are potential equals of the Spaniards.
They have the right to plebiscite. A majority of their votes alone can
justify America’s _annexation_ to the empire of Spain. Beyond the divine
and human privileges that are general in a society of nations, “Spain
must commit no act in the New World, except by treaty.”
The Dominican legists part company with the deeds of Spain. Already,
Isabel had been misled when her adventurous “tools”--the
Conquistadores--instead of saving the Indian, enslaved him. Now the
followers of Vitoria raise their voices against the behavior of Cortés
and Pizarro. Bartolomé de las Casas in his _Brevissima relación de la
destrucción de las Indias_ writes pages that are good reading in our
own epoch of a “Society of Nations.” But the abstract logic of Vitoria
was more useful to the State of Spain than the ethical conclusions of
Las Casas. That supreme apologia for villainy and greed--International
Law--is born and baptized under Christ.
Thus Vitoria: “War is justified when it is forced on a State in the
rightful pursuit of commerce, in the rightful propaganda of ideas--and
_if the Spaniards have observed all precautions against taking their
interests for principles, and their avarice for duty_.” What empire
since has not “taken these precautions?” Christianity had been
theoretically pacifistic. Jesus was reported to have declared against
all violence and the resisting of evil. Being the Son of God, of course,
His words were not to be literally construed. Yet such men as
Tertullian, the Manichees, Saint Francis, Wyclif, More, Erasmus, had
declared unconditionally against warfare. Chiefly, that prophetic
Berber, Augustine, took war to be a usable weapon of the just. Vitoria,
his neighbor in race and land, leans on Saint Augustine. The anarchic
and endemic sin of war is lifted at last from Europe’s conscience. Spain
invents the Moral War.
“War,” says Vitoria, “is justified to right a wrong.” But Vitoria is
careful:
“Difference of religion is no just cause for war.
“Aggrandizement of empire is no just cause for war.
“_Principis gloria propria, aut aliud commodum, non est causa belli
justa._ The Prince may not wage war to further either his glory or his
own interests. And the wrong to be righted by war _must be commensurate
with the results of war itself_ (death, confiscation, rapine) ere a just
war can be induced to right it.”
The friar seems to be going too far. Hear him:
“The end of war must be, not evil to the foe, but good.
“And victory must be enjoyed in Christian moderation.
“The people shall not suffer through the faults of their princes.
“_Finally, a treaty imposed by force--even after victory--is not
valid._”
Modern International Law is after all no growth from these uncomfortable
precepts of a monk: it is a lapse and a decadence. The legal dicta of
Vitoria are of an old tradition: they are a birth of the old breaking
Synthesis of medieval Europe. International Law is the theoretic shred
of what was once a spiritual Body.
_e._ _The Rogue_
The Spain of Isabel and Ferdinand, of Carlos and Philip II--wherein is
she great? In her idea and Will. These prove the Globe and bind it:
these in their own way prove and make her one with God. But Spain, the
body of men living in towns and huertas, is indigent and disordered.
At her spiritual climax, under Isabel, Carlos and Philip II, Spain was
squalid. By contrast with the state of England, of France, of the German
towns and of the cities of Morocco, she was an economic laggard. Her
nobles with their retinues cut swathes of gold through the landsides.
She was full of heroes and of saints. But the land was arid with
neglect. War had razed her forests. Seven centuries of Reconquest,
making labor despicable beside the guerdons of battle, had sapped her
burghers. What the long wars began, the Inquisition and Expulsions
carried on. Jews--a solid class of craftsmen and middlemen--were
expelled. The Granadan Moors--ablest of Spain’s cultivators--were making
homesick songs about their Andalusian farms, in Fez and Marrakech. There
were more vagabonds in Spain than farmers, more soldiers than laborers.
There were more hidalgos and caballeros than artisans and merchants.
There were seven million Spaniards--and nine thousand convents!
Some men are poor because they are weak and dull: some are poor because
they are men of genius. Amsterdam and London grow rich, because such is
their will. Avila and Toledo remain dingy, because their will is
elsewhere. Spain is virile, brilliantly equipped. But Spain has resolved
to be a hero and a saint. Spain has no time to pave streets, who paves
the way for Christ beyond the sea. Spain has no time for natural
science, for agriculture and for the tricks of trade, who is so expert
in theology.[22]
In the extremes of her life, none is wider than this between the Spirit
of Spain’s enterprise and the fact of her condition. The crass and
earthly elements of Spain are not destroyed nor repressed by her
religious will: they are engaged. They must serve in her armies, even
though the fight be a crusade. They must man her ships, even though the
mariner’s compass be divinely pointed. They are intensified indeed, like
all the parts of Spain. And like the other elements of her world,
brutality and lust assume in a particular form the wholeness of Spain’s
will.
Spain is adventuring. Now the sheer impulse of adventure is embodied.
The pícaro is born. He has in him the aboriginal Spaniard: that unruly,
lusty, atomic man whom Rome encountered, whom the Cid personified. He is
an anarch, brutal as the Iberian of the north, shrewd and subtle as the
Phœnician of the south. He is this aboriginal, complex man of Spain
shaped by the Spanish will. The pícaro is not lawless: he is an outlaw.
He reacts from Spain’s social purpose, from Spain’s social structure,
from the mysticism and heroism of this later Spain. Like all reactive
bodies, he resembles his opponent. And it is this union in him--the
direct issue from the source of Spain and the direct response to Spanish
culture--which makes him so true an element in that culture.
The pícaro was long in coming. The Cid promised him in the twelfth
century, and the romancero on the eve of the age of Isabel. The genial
Juan Ruiz, archpriest of Hita, in 1300 came close to his spirit in the
graphic form ... a mingled piety and license ... of his great _Libro de
buen amor_. Fernando de Rojas who began _La Celestina_ in 1499 did not
create the pícaro only because he created something deeper. Like _Don
Quixote_ at the end of the cycle, _La Celestina_ ere its beginning
transcends the pícaro and contains him. Now come the Castilian versions
of Amadís de Gaul. The spirit of errant adventure waxes so strong that
it invades the hagiographa: Spaniards of the age of Carlos read
histories of the saints fully as marvelous and picaresque as the
profaner tales in the library of Don Quixote. Finally, after these ages
of annunciation, the pícaro arrives, full-fleshed. His name is Lazarillo
de Tormes: his date is 1554: his author is unknown.
In this pattern of antithesis whose symphony is Spain, the response to
Santa Teresa is the procuress of Rojas, the Celestina, that most tender,
robustious, scoundrelly, womanly woman. The response to the flame-like
San Juan de la Cruz is Lazarillo. San Juan personifies Spain’s purpose,
which is divine. Lazarillo embodies Spain’s methods, which are brutal.
San Juan is not abstract: he is an embodiment of purpose. Lazarillo is
not mere flesh: in his trickeries and thefts, there is an inverted
consciousness of Spain which makes his path through Old and New Castile
almost as luminous as the path of the saint.
This consciousness is marked by irony: and irony is in the weave of
every picaresque design. For the Spanish rascal is no mere reaction from
heroic gesture. He is reversion as well. He is moved by the same energy
that has uprisen in the forms of asceticism and crusade. His antiphony
is but a subtle swerving back from the life he wars on, to Spain’s
common base. The pícaro has the resource, the intensity, the method, of
conquistador and crusader: he preys on his own land. He has the
passionateness of the saint: it is directed toward woman. He is a
casuist like the Jesuit: his aim is to filch a purse. He navigates
uncharted wastes like Columbus: to fill his belly and to save his skin.
This continuous awareness of Spain’s noble world, this subtle swerve
transforming it into villainy and lust, make the ironic pattern. The low
tricks of the pícaro, weaving through the high fabric of his land, once
more limn Spain in her fullness.
Lazarillo is but the first of a long line. The book that tells of him
has scarce a hundred pages: yet it seems wide and deathless as the land
from Salamanca to Toledo which its hero crosses. Lazarillo is a lad born
of poor but unworthy parents. A blind beggar teaches him how to survive
as a rascal in a rascally world. The young virtuoso outdoes his master.
He becomes the servant of a starving, haughty knight, of a parsimonious
churchman, of a shrewd and lecherous canon with whom he makes a treaty
which includes the sharing of his wife.
Lazarillo encounters Spain; and the land grows alive at his touch.
Disorder, corruption, folly beneath the façade of splendor. But now, an
acute principle synthetizes the chaos: the pícaro like a wistful agent
of intelligence, envelops Spain and makes Spain one with pity. This pity
is of a new order, among the emotions of art. It is neither mystical nor
sentimental. It is the child of a modern autonomy: it is the pity of
reason.
The author of Lazarillo does not insist. He has created an engine so
revealing that he can afford to rest within his quiet prose. He writes a
tiny book: plastic portraiture, tender and bitter humor, sweet spirit,
dark flesh--all Spain indeed is in it, as is the tree in the seed.
Lazarillo is a seed, from which has sprung a forest. In Spain, the
picaresque merges quickly with profounder worlds; loses its æsthetic
sharpness, and has its share in the birth of a book which is a
Scripture: _Don Quixote_. The true form shrinks to formula. The symbol
of the rogue, preying on society and so divulging it, is exploited by
minds more analytic than creative. In the hands of such masters as
Quevedo, the pícaro becomes a concept of pessimism: a chemic force with
which to test and to destroy the world. The pícaro voyages to France.
But in Le Sage and Marivaux (to name but the greatest), the physical and
intellectual movements of the rogue are stressed. France veers backward
toward Scapin--toward the scamp of the classic comedy--whose essential
difference is great. England borrows more deeply. The pícaro’s animal
joyousness, social revelation, bitterness turned sentimental come back
to life in Smollett, Fielding, Sterne. But they unite in no one work
comparable with _Lazarillo_. Even De Foe wants the luminous poetic
atmosphere whereby the crass materials of the tale have their dimension.
No master outside Spain can recreate the pícaro entire. For the Spanish
rogue is sterile without the aspirational afflatus of his race, in which
he adventures, from which he reacts, and which he embodies in ironic
contrast. That is why the greatest heirs of the pícaro of Spain are not
his direct sons in eighteenth-century France and England. They are his
collateral and remote descendants of a modern world in which once again
energy has become aspirant and religious. They are the heroes of
Stendhal. Above all, they appear in Russia--that other extreme of Europe
which touches Spain in the domain of spirit: they are the hero of _Dead
Souls_ of Gogol, the mystic criminals of Dostoievski....
_f. Velázquez_
Antithesis even within the personal will of Isabel and her king. Isabel
looks to Africa and the west. Mysterious horizons claim her. Africa is
the home of Origen and Augustine--Berber Christians and true Spanish
minds. America casts a parabola of search alluring to her mystic
appetite. But Isabel is wedded to a man who looks toward Europe. The
Aragonese king comes from the most assimilated part of Spain. In him, as
in his realm, lives the spirit of Catalan, of European Trader. His
hungers strain toward Italy and France. And this dichotomy within the
will of the monarchs--Europe and the south, politics in Europe and high
adventures across the western sea--is stamped upon the classic will of
Spain. The concept of the State which Isabel and Ferdinand adapt is
Europe. Louis XI and Machiavelli would have hailed it. The purpose of
that State would have been better pleasing to Mohammed or Saint Paul.
The spirit is Isabel’s and is accepted by her husband. But the form is
Ferdinand’s and here his wife is disciple.
Now, of this division within the will of Spain, that term which is
Europe finds a canon. Velázquez, better than the policy of the kings,
better than the victories of their captains in Sicily and France,
incarnates Spain’s desire to be Europe.
But here, too, irony is at work. Velázquez is the favorite painter at
the Court of Philip IV. He lives at the Palace; he is sent on diplomatic
missions. His career corresponds almost literally with the reign of his
king. And this reign marks the rapid ebb of Spain’s affairs in Europe.
Her will toward Europe has flung her power high into the north and
clear across the Latin Sea. Now, while Velázquez molds that will into
organic form, his king loses Portugal, loses the Netherlands, loses the
Roussillon, half the Pyrenees, and faces insurrection in Barcelona,
Spain’s European port.
The will of Velázquez’ art is objective form. Bodily substance becomes
real. Man’s moods and passions in themselves suffice. They have their
value not in some rapt design beyond man’s body or in employing it to
mystic ends: the world of appearance _is_ the world. Velázquez’ traits
are traits of modern Europe. Mysticism disappears, both in immanent and
transcendental form. The beauty of spiritual strain, so eloquent in
Ribera, is replaced by the beauty of physical poise. The hot fluidity of
El Greco which recalls the Prophets, the creative incompleteness of the
Byzantines, becomes a static peace. In El Greco, as in all mystic art,
the moving materials reach the immobility of form only through the focus
of a world beyond them. But in Velázquez, there are no colors save those
of face and fabric; there are no forms save those of the body. Velázquez
is a realist in the restricted modern European sense. He is
impressionistic and he is mechanistic. The vast autonomy of the
subjective vision is renounced in him. He makes his eye a literal
_receiver of impressions_: whereas the mystic eye (and the Spanish eye)
has ever been a _creator of expression_.
This type of æsthetic will which, from the Renaissance to Courbet, is to
reign in Europe wins perhaps its highest triumph in the alien Velázquez.
What tribute to the energy of Spain! For this is not Spain, this is but
a fragment. The vision yearning to become complete, the mystic marriage,
the parabolic search, the lyric plaint, the ceaseless _cante hondo_, the
arabesque which transforms words to body--these, too, are Spain: these
are the virtues which create El Greco, Calderón, Lope, Ribera,
Cervantes. Velázquez will have none of them. Velázquez will be wholly
European. Europe, accepting the world of appearance as the entire world,
pours all its energy to the creating of the immense material universe
which is our shambles of the machine and applied science. Spain does not
follow. But Velázquez leads.[23]
Velázquez was a great lover of El Greco. Manuel Cossío tells us that in
his private chambers at the Palace, the court painter had works of the
great mystic. His love and study of his antithesis helped to confine him
within his own domain. In his religious subjects, Velázquez shows the
direct influence--chiefly in composition--of El Greco. And in these
works, the graphic might of Velázquez fades: they are the least of his
pictures. Where Velázquez is great, El Greco is excluded: the younger
man seems willfully to avoid what he must have felt should denature his
æsthetic. And in this response, Velázquez achieves once more the miracle
of Spain: the infusing of a part with an intensity and essence of the
Whole. El Greco is Spain of Africa and of the Semites, Spain the High
Priest of Rome, the mystic Spain. And Velázquez is Spain of Europe: the
land of analytic grace, of luxuriant elaborations, of immense
exclusions.
Spain’s craft goes far, when Spain resolves to be “efficient.” Study
_Las Hilanderas, Mercurio y Argos_, the portrait of Margarita de
Austria. This grace is the ecstasy of cool and obvious metals. It
suggests the modern æsthetic of the Machine. Modeling and texture are
composed of immediate masses which are self-sufficient. Neither in part
nor in whole are they transmuted into the subjective. Or take the
portrait of Mariana de Austria, Philip’s second wife. Of the woman there
is naught save the weak face and the flat hands. But the black and
silver gown is volumnear. Its fringes and its lace hold power that
appears almost to be a symbol of this Court--this Court of Spain
striving to hold a world within its forces.
The will of Velázquez, at least, does not falter. _Las_ _Meninas_ is
forever a shut and earthly room. No glimpse here of the arcana of the
soul, of the soul’s subtle modeling of arm and face. Think what El Greco
would have done with that group: the royal family, the painter, the
dwarf, the dog. How they would have flamed; how heaven and hell would
have come in and metabolized these bodies!
* * * * *
In the palace of the king of Spain, there were simpletons and dwarfs.
They formed part of the Court and Velázquez painted them. He painted
them so well because they were part of himself.
The forces which aspire beyond the body, beyond the domain of sense,
died not in Velázquez. His æsthetic will allowed them no immediate word.
This explains the cramped discomfort of his religious pictures. Here
within him were these instincts, these intuitions, unable to speak,
unable to die. And here were the twisted courtiers of the king. A good
court painter could portray them; for they were of the palace. And since
they were pitiful victims of Nature’s law, the despised and
dispossessed, an artist’s soul could use them as a symbol.
In the world there lives a spirit whose name is Christ and his saints.
When the world denies, that spirit ceases to be Christ: it becomes a
dwarf and a madman. Velázquez has discovered this: he sets down his dark
confession after all. Here is a record of the grotesque and the pitiful
world, born of his deep denials.
What a page it is! _El Bobo de Coria_: the simplicity of the inane
issuing from the breakdown of complex power: sweetness, candor, poetry
and grace surviving in the death of idiocy. _El Primo_: a little man
beside a gigantic book; pathos, tenderness, pride--the song of
frustration. _Don Sebastián de Mora_: a huge body squats, the head
empty, the outstretched legs short as a child’s--so eloquent, so
helpless. And the _Niño de Vallecas_, most poignant of all, for he
bespeaks fecundity without intelligence: he is the lush plasm of life,
purposeless, spiritually bereft.