architectural display. Here it scores another point over the modern
theater whose plush and murals and tapestries and candelabras so often
overbear the paleness of the play. The plaza has tiers of backless seats
terracing up to balcony and boxes. The seats are of stone: the upper
reaches are a series of plain arcades. The plaza is grim and silent. It
is stripped for action. It is prepared to receive intensity. The human
mass that fills it takes from the sand of the arena, glowing in the sun,
a color of rapt anticipation. These thousands of men and women, since
the moment when they have bought their tickets, have lived in a sweet
excitement. Hours before the bugle, they are on their way. They examine
the great brutes whose deaths they are to witness. They march up and
down the sand which will soon rise with blood.
Bright shawls are flung on the palcos. Women’s voices paint the murmur
of the men. A bugle sounds, and there is silence. The crimson and gold
_mantones_ stand like fixed fires in this firmament of attention. The
multitudinous eyes are rods holding in diapason the sky and the arena.
Two horsemen (_alguaciles_) prance forward through the gates. Black
velvet capes fold above their doublets. From their black hats wave red
and yellow plumes.
They salute the royal or presidential box; circle the ring in opposite
directions and return to the gate. The music flares. They proceed once
more on their proud stallions, and behind them file the actors in the
drama. The toreros are first: four of them: they wear gold-laid jackets,
gold-fronted breeches backed in blue, rose-colored stockings. The
banderilleros in silver drape their pied _capas_ across their arms. The
_picadores_ follow. They are heavy brutish men, with chamois leggings
and trousers drawn like gloves over their wooden armor. They are astride
pitiful nags, each of which is Rocinante. The shoes are encased in
stirrups of steel; the spurs are savage against the pitiful flanks.
Behind the picadores are the red-bloused grooms, costumed like villains.
It is their task to clean up entrails and gore. And the procession
closes with two trios of mules, festooned and belled, who draw the drag
to which the bodies of slaughtered bulls and horses will be attached.
The cavalcade crosses and salutes. Toreros, banderilleros, picadores on
nervous nags, scatter along the barriers. Again, the bugle sounds. Doors
open on the interior passage which two high barriers hold as a
protective cordon between the audience and the arena. A bull leaps into
the glare.
His massive body is a form for the emotion of rage and for the act of
plunging. The forelegs are slight beneath the heft of his shoulders
whence he tapers down, so that the shoulders and head are like a
swinging turret. The brute is all infuriated flesh pivoting the
exquisite ferocity of horns. They are slender and curved, needle-sharp,
lance-long. The bull is aware of the strange ten-thousand-headed
creature that shouts at him and drives its will upon him. He understands
that the mob is his foe. He bellows, circles, plunges at last to reach
it. The barrier jerks him up, splintering with his onslaught. He is
bewildered and stopped, pawing the sand, while the mob prepares to send
its single emissaries to engage him.
The first act of the drama is formless and ends in farce. Toreros and
banderilleros toy with the bull. They fling capes, side-step, dawdle
with him. But gradually they withdraw the brute’s first fury from the
indeterminate mob ringing him round to the accessible lives in the
arena. The bull sees a horse. It capers before him in a blind
presentiment of death. Its ears are tied, its eye is bandaged. Upon it a
picador levels an enormous pike, steel-pointed. The bull charges and a
horn sinks in the belly. Horse and rider rise and are flung in a clatter
of bone, in a drench of flesh, against the barrier. The bull draws out
his ensanguined horn and charges a banderillero whose cape is there
protecting the picador. The crowd roars. The horse is whipped to its
feet by grooms. The picador is hoisted back. The old nag’s entrails hang
in a coiled horror within a foot of the ground.
The horse is the comedian of the drama. The bull tosses him. He lies on
his back and his four anguished legs beat like drumsticks on the
barrier. Or, losing his saddle, he plunges mad and blind around the
ring, kicking his own intestines, until death takes him. Or the bull
mangles him at once, and he disappears in a swirl of flesh. This is
farce; and also this is the sense of the immanence of danger. The bull
is drunken with his victory. The crowd, beholding the fate of a horse,
laughs with a tinge of terror. For what has happened there, may happen
to a man.
Enough horses have been slaughtered: their poor flesh shredded into the
gleaming unconquerable sands. A bugle summons the second act of the
drama.
This is the scene of the banderilleros. They are the critics, the
epigrammatists, the _graciosos_, the chorus of the accelerant play. They
bespeak the bull. They test him. They show off his subtle points--and
their own. If he has faults--clumsiness, cowardice, lethargy--they
correct him. They call forth his finest rage; and as he plunges on them
they leave gay ribboned darts within his flesh. If he is slow to anger,
they will employ darts that explode beneath the skin of their victim.
They enrage him. But all the while, they sober him as well, making him
realize that the holiday of the horses is no more: a harder enemy is on
the field.
Often the bull is put into a meditative mood. He stands, panting in the
center of the arena. Blood drips from his mouth. His horns are carmine
and the laced _banderillas_ dance on the scruff of his shoulder, biting,
nagging. He wants to understand what his life has become. The fields of
Andalusia--the good grass, the warm care--have been wiped out in this
blare of terror. That background of pleasaunce merely serves to sharp
the tense present--this delirium of men and sun. A banderillero dances
up. The bull faces him, asking a question. But the man will not tell.
His smile is false; that swing of his cape is treachery. There is
nothing to do but plunge--whatever it means. The cape of red and blue
folds over the eyes of the bull and vanishes like a cloud: a dart bites
his flesh. The crowd roars. The good life behind and the peace beyond
are mist: life is this glare and this roar and this goad of steel.
The second act is over: the bull is chastened. He has been cleansed for
the tragedy, after his brief triumph. Once again the bugle: the torero
to whose lot this bull has fallen, selects his slender sword and his red
_capa_. He steps forward for the ultimate tragic scene.
Toreros are of many kinds. This one is called Belmonte and he is one of
two great _espadas_ of recent years in Spain. He is a small man, smaller
than the average and more swarthy. His body moves rhythmic and slight
into the hard glitter of the sand.
The elemental glare of Spanish sunlight makes that body, striding so
quiet toward the bull, frail and helpless. Could this man run away, as
do so many? could he, if need be, vault the high barrier to safety just
as the bull splintered the wood beneath him? The head is heavy. The nose
is large and sharp; the mouth is wide; the lower jaw thrust out. But the
brow is sensitive and smooth. Close by, this is the face of a neurotic.
The arena’s flame bakes it into a brooding gloom above the body so
ironically decked in gold and silk.
Belmonte in this instant has already awakened in the crowd the troubling
emotion of pity mixed with fear. He salutes the bull and spreads his red
mantle (the capa) across the fragile sword. He steps in close; and while
the arena hardens into silence, he lifts the mantle toward the eyes of
the brute.
Within an instant, breathless save for the breath of the bull, something
goes forth from Belmonte to the beast and marries them. The bull is the
enemy, and they are joined more close, more terribly than love. He
plunges. Belmonte, motionless, swings the mantle to his side and the
bull, as if attached to it, grazes the frail body. The mantle lifts. The
bull lifts and turns, as if ligated by the mantle to Belmonte’s will.
The cloth thrusts to the other side. The bull along. Back and forth they
go, in rigorous dance. The torero’s body does not break from its repose.
He is as cool as sculpture; he is as fluid as music. The bloody beast is
attuned by a will, hard and subtle as Belmonte’s sword. His clumsy
movements are molded into grace: his rage is refined into these
exquisite feints. He, too, like the torero, leaves the plane of nature,
and becomes a symbol.
As the torero stepped out to the sand, his rôle was god-like. His
minions had played with the great innocent victim: fed him victory and
blood: taunted him: taught him. Now he, to enact the ultimate rite of
life ... the ultimate gift of the gods ... the only gift which they
give unstintingly ... death.
But this dance has transfigured the torero. Meeting the brute upon the
plane of danger, he becomes a man. Those hypnotized horns graze human
flesh: where they touch they rend. That gold-lined body is a sheath,
holding the blood of a man. The bull could plunge through it ...
plunging so near, so rhythmically near ... as if it were indeed the mist
and dream of mortal life.
And now another change in the beauty of their locked encounter. The man
becomes the woman. This dance of human will and brutish power is the
dance of death no longer. It is the dance of life. It is a searching
symbol of the sexual act. The bull is male; the exquisite torero,
stirring and unstirred, with hidden ecstasy controlling the plunges of
the bull, is female.
The crowd acts its part. The little man is but a gleam of fire, the bull
but a tongue of dionysian act within this dark flame of ten thousand
souls. From them come dream and desire and memory of sense: concentrate
upon this spot of drama: merge with it and marry it to themselves. At
every pass of the bull from side to side of Belmonte, the crowd is
released in a terrific roar. So silent the dance of the two coupled
dancers: so vast the response of the crowd. Now, Belmonte kneels and his
mantle rhythmically wipes the furious bloody head, making the plunge of
horns diagonal athwart the torero’s breast. _Verónica_ is the name of
this classic gesture. And the allusion is to the handkerchief of the
Saint, which smoothed the sweat from the forehead of the Christ. The
ancient orgy of Dionysius and Priapus is tinged with Christian pity. The
commingled symbolisms of many Spains meet in the dance: become
abstracted and restrained. The whole is the silent balance of the wills
of Spain.
The bugle signals for the final action. Belmonte has risen; has
exchanged the capa for the small _muleta_ with which he covers his
steel. Now he withdraws the muleta from the slender sword. It is a
flexible two-edged steel, dipped at the end. He stands still before the
brute whose sweat rolls red from the heaving rugose flanks. He stands
with heels clicked together, holding the brute with his eye, and raises
the blade deliberately forward. The steel points not at the head, but
slightly above it. In that mountain of flesh beyond the deadly horns
there is an unmarked spot which the sword must find. It is the tiny
crutch formed by the bones of the shoulder. Within its aperture the
blade can strike, unimpeded, to the heart. Anywhere else, the blade will
not bring death but a mere ugly plunging rage.
Belmonte has chosen to stand and make the bull plunge on him. He is
frail and erect. His shoulders are flexed; his head is slightly forward.
Grace becomes subtly rigor. The bull obeys. He leaps. The blade sinks to
the gemmed hilt. A wave of blood gushes to the sand, as the dead bull
sinks.
* * * * *
This is the archetype of the Spanish bull fight. It describes a
masterpiece. And in an art so profound and dangerous, the masterwork is
rare, even as in other æsthetic fields. But if great toreros are rare,
one actor in the play is constant and is always masterful. The crowds of
Spain, against the agitation of intellectuals and of Church, hold to
their dear drama. In the _corrida_, all the desires which history has
bred and then denied an issue, find an issue. Conflict is the stratified
peace of the Spanish soul. For too many ages has the Spaniard lived on
war to be able to do without it. In war, the lusts of the world and the
lust for God became one. Christ and Priapus were joined in its full
ecstasy. And in this dumb show of a man and a bull, they are conjoined
again.
Gross comedy of blood; sex, dionysian and sadistic; the ancient rites of
the brute and of the Christ meet here in the final image of stability.
Spain’s warring elements reach their locked fusion--Spain’s ultimate
form. For although everything is in the bull ring, and although anything
may happen, _nothing happens_. Circus, blood, dance, death equate to
nullity.[25] Like life in Spain, this spectacle is self-sufficient,
issueless....
_b. Man and Woman_
Queen Isabel may rest in peace. She is having her will although she
would not recognize its way. Her conscious will was to make Spain one:
it has become the unconscious will of every Spaniard. Her concept of the
State of Spain has become a universal state of mind. Here was Spain,
this sea of elements tossing and titanic. Here was the Spaniard, pressed
by the amorphous world in which he lived to establish unity within
himself: to become a person, in defense from the chaos that was Spain.
In his will to create Spain, he could not change the theater of his
action. He must create Spain _within himself_. The first stage of his
endeavor was that of the intense crystallizations which made Spain’s
_siglos de oro_. These saints and sinners are not fragments: they are
entire forms of Spanish energy. And the elements which they personify
exist in every Spanish soul. If, therefore, Spain was to be unified
within each Spaniard, La Celestina must be equated with Saint Teresa,
Quixote and Amadis with Lazarillo and the Cid.... Although the energic
sum of all these forces might in each individual soul add up to zero!
To the intensely individual Spaniard, Spain became more and more
subjective: until at last the boundary to the outer world was lost.
Politics, war and church became subjective. The Spaniard saw the world
only in terms of himself. This is why he strove to make the State the
mentor of conscience: this is why he strove to make the domains of the
State a sort of spiritual body. To inculcate faith by Inquisition; to
establish truth by the sword; to drive dissenters in spirit from the
soil--these were the mad and logical acts of a man who beheld the world
in his own image. Willing to create a Spain, each Spaniard remained the
anarchic personal creature whose separatism Strabo had noted and Rome
endured.
The tragedy of Spain--her reaching of success! First her energy broke up
into dominant forms of will: then she equated these forms into the
equilibrium she desired. And no energy was left! All of her opponent
tensions merge to rest in every Spanish soul. The titanic efforts toward
conquest, toward art, toward God which have made Spain great balance
each other at the end. The energy is not gone, not weakened: it is
equated. And the result is sleep.
The energy of a people is the sum of its personal propulsions. The
dynamic race is that in which the individual _as an individual_ is
incomplete. Consider the United States. The immigrant in losing his old
land loses the completion which he achieved in his own share of its
life. As an American he espouses America’s incompletion. He injects his
restlessness into America; and conversely America’s lack of final form
becomes his lack and his need. The result is a social body moving toward
completion, and energetic in so far as it is barred from completion save
in the act of moving. In Russia, the incompleteness of the individual
soul is a paradoxical result of its consonance with the land. Russia is
vast, uncharted, indefinite. The Russian spirit, identified with the
soil, becomes imbued with a symbolic sense of vastitude and longing.
Spirit is therefore national in Russia: and spiritual energy floods the
land, precisely because the land is an incomplete experience in each
Russian mind.
There are indeed permanent forms of spiritual incompleteness, and one of
these exists in every energetic people. The Frenchman’s soul is part of
a social soul. The Frenchman is organically incomplete, in so far as his
mind and sense know themselves integral components of the nation. From
this knowledge comes the automatic flow of individual energy into social
channels: this is balanced by the impersonal character of the French
nation which receives the energy it requires and discharges back into
the individual life a transformed power: the protection and unity of
the enveloping organism. This perpetual interplay between the Frenchman
and his group is an equilibrium in incompleteness: it makes permanent
the impermanent achievement of individual and nation, the need of each
for the other, the flow of energy between them. The Jew possesses
another form of permanized incompleteness. The Jewish soul yearns for
Zion and for God. The Jew’s intelligence successfully places both Zion
and God beyond his reach. His incompleteness is hence perpetual: and the
Jewish energy has not ebbed.
But the Spaniard elected a form of achievement and a form of truth which
he could reach: and as he reached it, he stopped moving. Truth became
the Church of Rome: he attained that truth and rejected every other. His
ideal of unity was homogeneity: the simple fusion in every Spaniard of
thought and faith, according to a fixed ideal. To this end he
impoverished the elements of his psychic world into sharp antitheses:
these he balanced against each other: the result was indeed simplicity,
homogeneity, a neutralization of energy summing to zero.
The Spaniard is not decadent: neither is he weak. There is as great
force in him as in the days when his still unfused power conquered half
Europe, discovered America and poured the vision of Cervantes, Rojas,
Calderón and Velázquez upon the world. But now, all this energy is
_locked_ in its own willed equation. Its original dualisms are not dead;
they are controlled and neutralized. The equilibrium is complete: and
what energy is left from it the Spaniard must expend in holding the
equation. There is no energy unemployed: and it is precisely the excess
energy of man, the energy that is unable to find its goal within the
organism, which creates intellect and which creates creation.
Had he been less heroic in his will, or more objective in his way to it,
the Spaniard would not be this cripple: this giant shattered by his
success, this giant imprisoned in the reality of his ideal.
The most willful of men, he appears will-less. For his power of will
goes to dominate himself--and to hold his dominion. So that no power is
left wherewith to dominate the world. The unity of Spain exists,
subjectively and multiplied by millions. In consequence the Spaniard is
not adhesive: he is too complete: the motive toward adhesiveness is the
sense of incompletion. The most secret impulse of the Frenchman or the
Jew has its social dimension. No Jew can people Zion in solitude. No
French mystic or philosopher is an anchorite. Pascal and Descartes are
Catholic: Paul Cézanne strives to create a new museum art. The rebel in
France is a rebel against monarchs. But the Spaniard is an empire and a
god unto himself. The perfected Spanish person makes permanent the
social Spanish chaos.
The most intellectual of men, he appears unintelligent. He lives so
wholly within his Idea, that no energy is left for further ideation.
Creative intelligence is the birth of conflict between the personal will
and life: it is born of the pause between impulse and response and of
the excess energy which remains after the instinctive action. In the
Spaniard, this excess energy is small: he is too self-sufficient to know
richly the pauses between will and deed; and in the relativity of values
which springs from a chaotic or incompleted conscience he is poor.
Having achieved his Idea, he is weak in intellect: having created his
imagined world, he is weak in imagination.
Therefore he understands vaguely the causes of his incompetence, and
struggles weakly against them. His contemporary literature is strong in
plaint: it is wanting in self-knowledge and constructiveness. It is
weak, also, in creative imagination: even as it is strong in fantasy.
The Spanish mind has become like the mind of a child. The child’s
intellect is not inferior to the man’s: it is merely too preoccupied
within itself to have achieved the power of association and of objective
experience which comes with maturity and which begets analysis and
imagination. The child is credulous, because its belief is subjective
fantasy and finds no opponent in the real world. Also, the child is
cruel because it cannot imagine pain in others, it is anti-social
because it has not associated its life with the life around it. The
Spaniard is still the victim of the infantile beliefs of medieval
Europe. He accepts the literal Heaven and Hell, having no imagination
strong enough to make them real, and in consequence to reject them. He
is cruel. And his separatism, his want of the adhesive impulse make him
a ready victim to tyranny in government. Unable to organize a social
body, he accepts the simple body of the King or the alien body of the
Church of Rome.
He has the virtues of his state. His personal development brings him a
personal integrity, a true personal pride unknown in Europe. He has
natural dignity. Whatever his rank, he is a _caballero_: a true
microcosm of the Spanish nation. There is no artifice in him. He is
clean, self-controlled and independent. In his veins lives the impulse
of heroism; in his mind is the knowledge and the acceptance of heroism’s
price. Cowardice, compromise, hypocrisy are traits more common in more
social races. And cant requires no word in _castellano_. Even the
Spanish thief is sincere: the tradition of the pícaro has not died. And
the power of endurance, of sacrifice, of devotion is developed in the
average Spaniard beyond the dream of the romantic north.
The once furious and unleashed elements of the Spanish soul have been
woven into this counterpoint of rest: they make a quiet music. It is
natural that the Spaniard’s love of music and gift for music should be
supreme. This art of vigorous abstracted balance, so subjective, so
ruthlessly legal, is the symbol of the Spanish nature. And as with his
classic _canto hondo_, the effect in counterpoise and control is almost
that of silence. By the same token he is a great dancer: his dance is a
synthesis of movements equated to rest. And he loves the drama: where
the torrential forces of mankind are fused into a unitary form.
* * * * *
The world nurses two myths concerning Spain. The first, that she is
decadent, Spain believes herself, and thereby proves, if other proof
were lacking, her failure in self-knowledge. The other myth is that
Spain is romantic.
The first myth rests upon ignorance of psychological mechanics. The
second is a confusion of words. The philology of the term _romance_ is
clear. In the formative eras of modern Europe, the Latin dialects which
were to become French, Italian, Castilian, Portuguese, Galician,
Provençal, etc., were lumped as the _romance_ to distinguish them from
the pure tongue of Latin. They were popular vernaculars and despite the
early instance of such men as Dante and Petrarca, or the Arcipreste de
Hita, they were not deemed worthy vehicles of exalted thought. The
writer whose ideas were holy or philosophic was supposed to clothe them
in Latin. Only if he treated of such vulgar subjects as earthly love,
might he employ the vulgar language. By association, _romance_ was
transferred from the tongue to the subject for which it was disposed: a
story of profane love or profane adventure became _romance_; and
becoming so, remained trivial and vulgar. The essential attitude of the
Spaniard toward the subjects of romance was, however, the very contrary
of what we mean by romantic.