for God, for Mohammed, for the King: for anything but what we call
_romantic_ reasons. The Iberian north is Celt and is contiguous with the
Celtic cultures of Britain and of France. The Iberian knight went
northward out of Spain; and when he returned he had become what today we
call a “nordic.” He was sentimental, tender, monogamous, and chaste. He
was the very converse of the old Spanish knight, Arab or pagan-Christian
whose canny materialism speaks so clear in the _Poema del Cid_. He was,
indeed, Tristan, Arthur, Lancelot, or Amadís of Gaul. The books that
were written about him were published in romance: so that the qualities
of passionate devotion which in Spain has been confined to the
religious--to subjects too high for romance--became romantic.
The romance, therefore, is of the south: the romantic is of the north;
and they negate each other. It is the German metaphysicians who invented
the romanticism of Calderón; it is Byron and the French æsthetes who
created romantic Spain. But the best efforts of Schlegel, Goethe,
Mérimée, Gautier, Byron have failed to make the Spanish man or woman in
the least romantic.
* * * * *
She is serene and she is incurious. Her Anglo-Saxon sister would call
her inactive, even as the _Parisienne_ would find her dull.
Since sexual adventurousness is normally the result of intellectual
curiosity--sensual stimulation by ideas--she is chaste and
dispassionate. But if her lack of amorousness is due to her lack of
thinking, her serenity and her external inactivity are due to her
tremendous power. Women are most clamorous for “rights” in lands where
culturally they have counted least. Witness England or the United States
where for all her liberties woman is spiritually sterile. In contrast
witness France whose women are the subtle partners of all deep events;
or matriarchal Spain in which suffragists are as rare as they would be
superfluous.[26]
The Spanish woman is a pragmatist in love. Love to her is the means of
raising children in the grace of Christ. No less sensual, no less
amorous woman exists in Europe. As a girl she is lovely: a crisp
expectancy makes her flesh sweet and rounds her darkling eyes. She looks
to marriage as the highest and most powerful career. Once she is mated,
the natural coquetry of Spring falls from her like a season: she is
instantly sedate, full-fleshed, maternal. She has no instinct for the
game of love. Sexual virtuosity in woman is a slow process nurtured at
the expense of the maternal passion. This diversion is rare in Spain.
The French or American woman’s sexual science is an undeciphered, an
irrelevant perversion to the woman of Spain who wears upon her head an
invisible crown of matriarchal power.
For she is powerful: this discreet female in a land of furiously
dreaming males! Events have sobered her and made her worldly-wise. Her
man is the theater of opponent passions, ideals, hungers equating into
nothing. She is the compensatory act. She is steady, unemotional,
unmystical, canny. She distrusts excess--even of maternal service. Her
man has made magic of such words as State, God, Honor. Hers the task to
materialize these words which in his mouth bespeak inaction. The family,
the garden, the morrow; these become her Word.
The woman of Spain leans on the Church of Rome. No small part this of
her dominance in a land incapable of social institutions. Spain with her
separatist nature, her inadhesiveness, could never have created Rome:
but Rome has gone far toward giving Spain that minimum of organic body
which the millions of individual “Spains”--her men--required. The
Spanish woman by her massed support makes the Church Spanish.
If the Church belongs to the woman, ruling Spain through her, she has
remained outside the exhaustive activities of her husband. The Spanish
woman has been untouched by metaphysics: her heroine, Santa Teresa de
Jesús, is an ennobled _house-cleaner_, a glorified matron of Christ. The
Spaniard’s wife has not, like him, been split into intricate traits of
will and of expression: nor in the sequel need she spend herself to win
back unity from an inner chaos. She is naturally whole: she is the foe
of even the fairest anarchies of the spirit. There is in her an heroic
amplitude that recalls the poised women of the Hebrews. She is the
savior of Spain, for she is the Responder to Spain’s excesses of action
and inaction.
The land has become a matriarchy--by default. The Spaniard has been too
busy establishing theodicy on earth to rule Spain well: at last too
involved in the equating of his embattled impulse to rule Spain at all.
Imperceptibly, unofficially, woman has taken hold. She allows man many
liberties--trivial liberties of the sort she would call romantic, if she
knew the word. He may “govern,” vote, own; he may fight; he may drink,
gamble, whore. He may act indeed the perfect child thinking himself the
center of the world because of his exultant vices (of which politics and
journalism are the most absurd). Meantime, she with her compass Christ,
and her wheel, the priest, steers the slow ship of Spain. In her
disposal are the education of her children, intellectual and moral, the
molding of those customs which go deeper than statute. In her hands is
the family, and the family is Spain. She is the true controller of
finance. It is a common thing in Spain for the man to own the money of
his wife, and for the wife to distribute the money of her husband. In
the peasant classes, she is arbiter of culture and thought: in the
middle classes she is economic judge: in the noble classes the lineage
descends through her in equality with her husband.
The nature of Spain calls imperatively for the dominance of woman.
Woman’s mind is individualistic, and Spain is a congeries of consonant
parts rather than an organism. Woman builds her familial molecule from
the Spanish atoms: she erects a great simplicity in which her man can
dwell.
In Spain there are two kinds of women: the mother and the prostitute.
And both are mothers. The land is sensuous in its air, its flowers. The
Spaniard is not sensuous at all. In the nineteenth century, a group of
romantic Spanish poets endeavored to sing of Spain as had the Germans
and the English. No more frustrate coldness exists in all the literature
of failure. “_Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehen_” could never
have been written by a Spaniard about Spain. For the Spaniard is as
abstract in his bodily lusts as he is concrete in his ideals. Of his
wife, he seeks the haven of morale: of his prostitute, he seeks the
peace of respite. The Spanish prostitute with her Cross lying within her
breasts is the least mercenary, the most womanly of her class. She is
mellow and maternal. She bears with her a great sense of sin: and the
man who touches her lips touches pity. From man she receives two
treasures, bread and shame: she is eager to give, in return, her
humility and comfort. She has no delights of subtle sense to barter: but
he who comes to her, weary and broken, will find her arms mysteriously
soothing, as if her acceptance of sin were a Christian solace, as if her
acceptance of shame were heartening to his pride.
And the Spanish wife knows of the prostitute and suffers her. She brings
for the husband an escape from the chaste rigors of family and church
into the anarchy of unorganized affection and of Christian pity. She
makes the work of the wife less arduous.
* * * * *
Human happiness is the full deep flow of human energy. It has many ways,
nor is it rare. The madman is happy since all of his thought and sense
falls into the pattern of his will. The lover is happy. Children are
happy, eating or at play. Soldiers are happy in battle. And everyone is
happy in dream.
There are happy nations: nations at war, nations in the madness of any
enterprise, whether it be of growth or dissolution. But Spain is not
happy. Her energy does not flow. It stands locked in a diapason of
pause.
Nor is Spain unhappy. Unhappiness is the thwarted need of energy to
flow. Spain’s energy is not thwarted. It does not flow: it does not need
to flow. It is absorbed in its own perpetual balance.
Spain is a dark soul. Sun is a flame in her land, and her land is a
storm of color. But the soul of Spain is neither sun nor storm. It is
neither gayety nor grief. It is a dark contentment, midway held between
ecstasy and sleep.
Outside the tremor and traffic of spiritual movement, Spain moves like a
somnambulant. Her body moves: but within her shut eyes there is a vision
truer than her stirring: a vision stirless and composed.
Her mood is dark and stagnant. Yet it is pleasant, for it is not pain.
Her soul is caressed passively by this rhythmic swing between the
extremes of action: as if the long ages of Spain’s agitation had bred
this sensuous delight in their denial.
Within her heroic memory, within her heroic land, Spain wanders
unobtrusively and scatheless. She does not forget nor remember. Upon the
surface of her life, intellect pricks, passion stirs, action clamors.
But her depths are limpid in a dark and dreamless slumber....
_c. Madrid_
In the eighteenth century one Spaniard out of three is an ecclesiastic,
a noble or a servant. (This takes no toll of rogues and beggars.) The
special rights of Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia are annulled. Those of the
Basques are a dead letter, although they linger on the books until the
Carlist wars. Spain has become a receding unity, under a single monarch.
Her American possessions wait only the full tide of growth in order to
set loose. Castile’s will has leveled Spain. Her huertas give wine and
fruit just in the amount to balance the desert dearth about them. Her
high towns are fossils of recalcitrance, or backfires smoldering against
each other. Although the diapason of will has its home in every Spanish
soul, no one city is its symbol. Toledo, Avila, Seville, Barcelona,
Jaca, Murcia, Mérida, Oviedo ... they bespeak their pasts, their
individual dynamisms, whose sum is zero. To be the symbol of this
sum--Spain’s tragic consummation--there must be a modern city.
Madrid stands for the ultimate achievement--and for none of its factors.
It is the capital of Spain--and of no old Spanish region. It is a
pleasing town. Its populous quarters bespeak the eighteenth century. The
cabs blotched under gas-lamps, the shuttered stores, the sumptuous
theaters, the cobbled streets and alleys holding a bar, a flower-stand,
a beggar, recall old prints of Paris. The reminiscent age of Balzac and
of Daumier has taken refuge here. In Paris, the twentieth century has
jostled out the last; it seems to keep better terms with the Paris of
Louis XIV, of Henri IV, even of François Villon than it does with the
Paris of Voltaire. But in Madrid, the eighteenth century has mellowed to
the next; they strike together a plaintive reminiscence against the
modern city: the Madrid of broad Avenidas, of the Gran Via, of dapper
taxicabs and monumental banks. This Madrid is pleasant also: it might be
almost any provincial capital of central Europe.
Madrid is noisy. In the modern streets, the chauffeurs toot as if they
had just discovered horns and were intent, like children, to break the
new toy ere bedtime. In the older, more populous streets there is a
texture of ancient voices. Shut your eyes and the windowed walls of
Europe fade away: the breath of the desert and the steeps of the
mountain north, the watery chatter of the Catalan, the grunt of the
Aragonese, the gracious Andalusian palaver merge into a music of the air
and make Madrid a maze of memory.
Yet for all the noise and all the business, there is upon the town a
subtle and a gentle quiet. This assertiveness is only for itself: it is
a heightened murmur of assent to Spain’s rich past. Beneath the bruit,
Madrid is silent, like Spain’s history. Beneath its animal turbulence it
broods. And for all its mingled moods, its final one is a dream.
On Sundays, the _rastro_--the great city fair--boils down hill, a human
torrent through a canyon of tattered houses to the dry _Manzanares_. On
feast days in spring or summer, the town roars at the bull-ring. And
when the last death is written in the sands, it swarms in lorries,
motors, tally-hos, back to the Plaza de la Cíbeles; it spreads in
numberless café tables on the broad sidewalks of the Alcalá. The Puerta
del Sol--theater of revolutions--is a somber well whose sides are gray
soiled houses and whose crowds are a thick condiment. Trolleys, lottery
vendors, beggars, loafers, make a bright shuttle through the sluggish
maze. At the Carnival of Spring, the gutters of the barrios de Toledo
and de Manzanares pour their lives into the Castellana. Rogues,
prostitutes, shopgirls, mothers with babes at the breast flow back and
forth under the statue of Columbus and the austere walls of the
Biblioteca Nacional: queer costumes grimace through confetti clouds; a
murmur of sexual release agglutinates the swarms; a glow as of rich
earth breaking to grass rises beneath the sere March sky.... And yet,
there is a silence, there is a stillness on Madrid. The songs of the
turbulent streets are songs of silence. This parade of pleasures and of
passions, of crimes and revolutions, is somnambular.
Populous Madrid falls from the Plaza Mayor fan-wise to the arid curve of
river upon whose treeless banks are stuck the shanties of the breadless.
And above the river and the shanties is the Palace of the King, a cold
and granite jewel set upon misery. If you would see it well, go down to
where the starving _madrileños_ stack their huts and air their tattered
shirts--ironic flags under the flag of Spain.
Through populous Madrid--a massive flesh--runs the artery of the calle
de Toledo. The cobbled streets are moist with sweat of lives. The high
walls rise, blind in a mood of siesta under the blazing sun. Winter
presses like icy steel upon the open wound of Madrid’s poverty. But even
in winter, the fever is there. It is damp in summer, in winter it is
frozen. These streets have a cellar mood. Their stones seem porous with
a fungus warmth or with a fungus odor. They are straight and steep--not
gyring Moorish streets; they funnel the dark song of life, or let it
escape like fume into the dry air of the meseta. Some of them are short:
the leisurely streets of the old inns--posadas--of the stagecoach, of
the itinerant milker with his flock of goats. Through a huge oak door,
one passes into a patio. A fig tree, old as a satyr, thrusts its
branches through the ancient iron balcony. Below is another patio with a
pump, a rose-bush, a pile of manure, a flock of hens and a woman
kneeling before a basin. Her hair and her gown are black, her lips are
scarlet. Vice and compassion rise from the old close like perfumes; for
this aged posada was once a convent, and bright fleshed maidens told
their rosaries where now this woman looks into her mirror.
All the people are emanations of the past. Girls in the street are
lovely and rank, roses over-blown. Women walk like wafts of a hot night
through the day. Men are lean, high-tensioned, and isolate as lusts. But
though they tide the streets, though their deeds are a storm, this
agitance and lushness of Madrid fades to mirage ...
It has become a very modern city. Its boulevards are superb; it is full
of smart shops and theaters; it has restaurants as expensive as the best
of Paris. Its traffic is dense and efficiently controlled; its wealthy
sections have the empty glitter of similar districts of Paris or New
York. Madrid cannot overcome the spirit of its being, which is a spirit
of stillness. Other towns in Spain grew from the needs of conquest, of
commerce, of defense. God--or profit--gave them energy. But Madrid is of
no such beginning: Madrid is of the _end_. It is a consummation. It
stands for the Spain that has annulled its motions.
Its greatness is but the stubborn Castilian will to remain and to hold
all Spain in perfect equilibrium of forces. Madrid is the town of
politicians, of social servants, of soldiers. It is a _conservative_
town. It wants things as they are. From here goes forth the will to
repress Barcelona, to exploit the Basques, to muzzle Unamuno, to tax
Andalusia, to play at empire in Morocco. A town of government--a
parasite town, it is the converse of such towns as London or Paris. For
in these, greatness came first, and made them govern.
There is this subtle melancholy in Madrid, this silence under all its
voices--of a life come to dark pause. And yet this same dark element is
fecund. Like a culture-bed, it nurtures even with its rot.
Beside the parasite, here is the thinker; beside the exploiter, here is
the creator. Along the Gran Via, the calle de Alcalà or near the Puerta
del Sol are the _tertulias_. They are cafés in which the men of the town
congregate each night. You will find each of them in his appointed
place, from close of work until nine, when the householder returns to
dinner. The café is dark and the smoke fumes are thick. The muscular
integument of the Castilian language is darker and thicker. It fills the
air with a heavy yet swift texture. It is fluent, agile, potent. The
plastic rigor of the Spanish world is in this tongue of Spain. The men
sip coffee or vermouth. They are small drinkers. One can live in Spain a
year and see no drunkard. They are too busy in talk, to think of
alcohol. They are talkers, neither brilliant nor dull. Their speech has
weight, acuity, vigor. It is too solid to be bright: it is like the
pigment of a Velázquez.
Most of these men in the tertulias are of the intricate army of
bureaucratic Spain. Postman or Minister, clerk, alguacil or General--all
attend their tertulia with a ritual devotion. They think that they are
“running Spain”--directing a State more or less modern and which, since
the choice of Ferdinand and Carlos, has willed to be European. But like
all Spaniards, they are unselfconscious and are actors in a drama deeply
beyond them. They are the tools of the Spanish will to remain in
equilibrium--to remain in sleep. All their conservative energy goes to
this end, whose symbol is Madrid.
But beside them, at other tables, in the tertulias of other cafés, are
other men who form the antiphony of their neighbors. These are the
intellectuals. They too are largely unselfconscious. They believe,
perhaps, that they are artists creating in word or color things of
intrinsic beauty, like their Parisian models. So they also put their
heads close together over smoky tables and drink coffee and talk “shop.”
But in truth, they are the inevitable response--the stir against and
within the sleep of Spain. They are the germs of dissolution. The
bureaucrats hold Spain together--in sleep. The intellectuals plot and
dream to burst Spain asunder--in a new waking.
END OF PART TWO
_PART THREE_
_Beyond Spain_
_CHAPTER XI_
_THE RIFT IN BARCELONA_
The cathedrals of Spain are splendors heaped by the hand of chaos. Well
they sing the discord of a world too full of life to find perfection
save in the dream of death. Most of them rise from stones that formed a
mosque; the mosque ofttimes was a converted citadel of Visigoth or
Roman. And here Spain brought her will to unity. Where could these rank
lusts of a hundred factions, these voices of continents and peoples
meet, save in death? The simple romanesque is buried under the aspiring
jungle of baroque, plateresque, Gothic, _churriguera_. Window, _reja_,
_retablo_, altar flourish like fevers and sum up to silence.
If this is Spain, Barcelona is of another land. The cathedral of the
great town of the Catalans is luminous and graceful. Although it could
be lost in the vastitudes of the cathedrals of Seville or Salamanca its
voice is clear and carries farther: it bespeaks the living.
Yet here, too, the church is dark. The brown-black stones are lifted by
the day of the deep windows into a rosy flush. The Choir is so low that
the line from _cimborio_ to _capilla mayor_ is free. Toward the Altar,
the Choir is open. Its sides are exquisite spires that rise in tremulous
shadow. The windows are small. They hold light in their stained glass
like eyes. The church is a reticent life gazing within itself. And what
it sees is an inset of twenty columns making a sort of inner body, a
dark and mystic body in the gaze of the glowing outward walls.
The loveliest monument of the Catalans, their church bespeaks them. It
is a thing of beauty: but unlike the beauty that resides in Spain, it is
not tragic. Beauty is consummation: in Castile the goal is immobility or
death. Here the perfected mood is wakefulness. The grace is gentle and
assured: it is not tortured, neither is it prophetic. Close is the ease
of the fields of France, of France’s churches. Close is the balance of
Attica....
Islam had short shrift in the Catalan Province which rests upon the
Pyrenees and faces east across the sea toward Italy and Greece. When the
Moslem came, the Catalan retreated into France. And in less than a
hundred years (in 797) the great town of Gerona (you can still see its
walls and its fortress-church) fell to the Frankish Christians. In 801,
the vassals of Charlemagne drove out the Crescent forever. Barcelona
became Frankish: Catalonia was apportioned to Frankish nobles. This
strain of alien blood is a symbol of the wavering dissonance that has
endured in Catalonia forever. For the yearning of Spain was to be Spain:
and the will of the Catalans was to be part of Europe.
The Teuton element in Spain is Visigothic. With the Franks there came
across the dwindling spurs of the Pyrenees the Gallo-Romans of
Provincia, a different intensity of the Idea of Rome from that of the
Ibero-Romans. Catalonia straddled the mountains, mingling in spirit and
in affairs with France. Almost at once after the Reconquest, it took the
lead in the Mediterranean trade of the Provincian littoral. Feudalism
flourished here, as it never did in Spain--a true French feudalism,
heritage of Charlemagne who indeed had held Spain clear to the Ebro. The
domains of the great Counts of Barcelona were as wide north of the
Pyrenees as south. And already, sharing this participance of France, in
the eleventh century there are Italians (Pisans) fighting under the
pennants of Barcelona against the Valencian Moor. Even today, the spirit
and the tongue of the Catalans bestrides the Eastern Pyrenees from
Lérida to the French Roussillon, from Tarragona to the French Port
Vendres.
The Catalan of Spain is an outsider within the gates. Ere Spain
stratified her chaos into locked unity, Catalonia was free to be
exploited by the hardier will of Aragon. But as Aragon was set within
the grip of Isabel of Castile, Catalonia became an irrepressible
motion--needing to be repressed. Its flow of energy in an immobile
State meant anarchy: its lyrism was discord within Spain whose
counterpoint of themes summed into silence. Spain achieved her union.
Madrid on the roof of Castile became the symbol of union: Barcelona, at
the half open gate which led to Italy and France, to Greece and Africa,
became the symbol of disruption.
Castile tried to woo this province, as it wooed Valencia, Galicia,
Extremadura, Andalusia. But the Catalan blood could not respond to the
immobile ecstasy of Castile: nor could the winds and the songs which
blew in at the door of Barcelona be shut out. The Catalan remained
light, moving, gay. When the unity of Spain was strong, the Catalan was
a tonic discord. Now that Spain’s unity is flaccid, the Catalan is a
menace.