unique organic compound of the Mediterranean, of the Mountain and of
Spain. His cathedral is set in a town that beats with a rich fervor. The
_Ramblas_--wide, gay avenues--descend to the sea and the town faces with
them from the wooded hills. It is an old ripe city: a labyrinth of
streets that are fresh with the salt, dark with the feudal yoke, yet
glamorously flowing as if in cognizance of the genius of this people to
outlast all yokes. This is no strong race, as the Aragonese or even the
Basques are strong. It is a subtle and a gracious people. Its secret of
survival is manifest in the women: delicate daughters of Eve, perhaps
the fairest of all Europe, hued like April orchards, and with eyes like
twilight. They have the permanence not of the eternal, but of the
evanescent which returns. The flower that was Greece has been cast here
upon a coast of Spain and has grown afresh. This life does not resist:
it returns. France mastered the Catalans: and they returned. Aragon used
them ruthlessly in war: they returned. Castile stifles and racks them:
they are returning. For they are like the Spring, the evanescent
Spring--which returns....
Their rising song begins to be heard over the shut land. It is not
heroic song: it is after all the assertion of a race of traders. It is
not thunderous. What thunders is the Castilian silence. And the heroic
is the Spanish sleep. And the enduring is the Spanish drama of which the
Catalans, even in their apartness, must be part. Spain has a dawning
will to break from the unity which its will created: her atoms, anarchic
but pregnant, stir to be loosed and to begin again. Despite its denial,
Catalonia shares in this unborn Spain. Once the resistance of the
Catalans helped to rouse Aragon and Castile with greater energy and
clearer mind: helped to create Spain. Now this same resistance of the
Catalans, even if it disrupts, may serve to create Spain again.
_CHAPTER XII_
_THE COMEDY OF THE BASQUE_
In the north where the Cantabrian ranges and the Pyrenees rim the Bay of
Biscay, lives a peculiar people. Even its land is different from
Spain’s. The air is temperate, moist. Mountains are clad in forest.
Fields of high grass bring honeyed redolence. The green plateaux come
down above the sea, like masses of the Alps brought to the Spanish
coast. These lands, so like Europe, so unlike Spain, are studded with
stone towns. Houses are gabled, narrow streets are cobbled: there is a
note of canniness and of seclusion in the towns of the Basque.
When the Romans made a province of Iberia, the Basque lived unconcerned.
When the Moslem swept north, the Basque withdrew into the mountains and
withstood him. When the Visigoth came through the passes of the
Pyrenees, the Basque stood aside and let him go. When Catholic Roland
with the troops of Charlemagne followed the Visigoth, it was the Basque
not the “Saracen,” who beat them at Roncesvalles. When, finally, the
kings of Castile, having cleared Spain of Moor and Jew, turned to subdue
the Basque, he submitted only as a vassal bowing the head to a more
powerful alien. By decree, Fernando VI ennobled all the Basques in the
Province of Vizcaya: already in 1200, the entire population of the
Province of Guipúzcoa had been declared hidalgos.
An indelible, an archaic people! They seem to be a race in an archaic
fashion: a race _by blood_! Spaniards, Chinese, Frenchmen, Jews are a
race _by culture_. But the Basques appear to have had no culture. Their
language was unwritten. They possessed no history, no social records, no
underlying base of ethic, or religion. If they possessed a culture, it
was almost biologic. It persisted in blood, in instinct, rather than in
concept. A certain haleness of self-sufficiency, a certain gusto for
aloofness kept them intact and unique in a land which for three
thousand years boiled with invasion.
In their survival they became neither tragic nor heroic. Naught could be
farther from the Basque than such other peculiar peoples as the Armenian
or Jew. The Basques had no separate Book, no separate God. Very early,
they accepted Christ. He did not make them merge with their Catholic
neighbors, because their instincts were differently attuned. Spain is a
world of Tragedy, of mystic ideals, of devotion to unseen spirits. The
Basque is concrete, light, canny. The Spaniard faces all that he
encounters: this confrontation is the genius of Tragedy. But the Basque
_evades_: and this evasion is the genius of Comedy.
Who the Basques were is not clear: doubtless early dwellers in the
Peninsula--part of the peoples whom the Phœnicians found when they first
skirted Spain. Their music suggests kinship with the Celt; but this may
well be due to the neighborhood of the Celts who named the Spanish
province of Galicia. Their music as well suggests kinship with the
Berbers--the Rifians of Morocco. Their language is inscrutably alone: it
bears no relation with any of the tongues of Babel. But whoever they
were they remain. Their blood in the small towns is little mixed; and
their heads unmixed also. While through the ages, Spain drank a torrent
of Ideas--Greek, Roman, Moslem, Christian, Jew--and bent to the tragic
fusing of Africa, Asia, Europe, America into a single Spain, the Basque
quite simply kept on being himself.
His virtues, like those of his mountains, are conservatism and power of
non-absorption. The Basque language paints this well. It contains no
word for _God_, no word for _spirit_. This is a people rooted to the
earth and which kept to its pastures and farmyards.[27] Not alone had
the Basque mind not reached metaphysics and religion when his tongue
was formed: even common concepts were beyond it. There is a Basque word
for dog, pig, cow, lizard: there is none for _animal_. There is a Basque
word for oak, pine, chestnut: there is none for _tree_. A most
excellently defended, anti-platonic people! Their mountains and their
mountain-courage warded them free of many floods of races. And their
heads kept them clear of metaphysics. Concepts of God, time, substance
are drains upon the business of life. For the interims of business,
there is the singing of songs, there is the gathering in eights to dance
the bland _aurrescu_.
The towns of the Basques express them. The little Guipúzcoan village
lies between the mountains and the sea. The mountains slope into a level
field with cattle and kine growing fat in the lush grasses. The field
rolls to a precipitous edge of rock which falls a thousand feet into the
Bay of Biscay. The beach is a conch with sand as smooth and white as the
heart of a sea-shell. Through the town, a road girding the villages runs
on the seawall. On the one side of the road, the Bay of Biscay--blue as
a bluebell: on the other, the precipice with stone-hewn steps that lead
to an Alpine verdance of pasture and of dingle.
The streets of the town are massive. The houses look as if builded for
siege. But they are not forbidding: they are too sure of themselves.
They are smiling even; though they are dense and strong. Through the
narrow streets moves a mellow race in gesture of traffic and trade. Like
the houses, these men and women face the world in sober colors. But
their eyes are large, and here one reads peace: the lips have the fret
of a smile, and there is laughter tingling the cadence of their talk. At
night they gather in the Plaza, lined with cafés: and while the old ones
drink, the young ones dance. Their dance is a pleasant casual
exercise--not far from the usual way of walk and word. It is a hopping
and bobbing of couples, a weaving of bodily life and bodily sense into
the already existent pattern of their social ease. That is why they
dance in the public Square, while the old ones gossip....
Every Sunday morning, as the sun tips over the town, three men--one with
a drum, two with _dulsínya_ or _chistu_ (a shrill metallic pipe which
bears much resemblance to the pipe of the African Berber)--march through
the silent streets, through every street and alley of the town,
incessantly playing: so that no Vasco, good or bad, shall oversleep the
Mass. This music trills through the morning like the cool sun-filaments
through dawn. It has the dogged filigree of a Scottish bagpipe. It is
more resolved, however, shriller, less fluid: and its notations are
wider. The tune of the _chistu_ interweaves with the plang of drum, and
makes the houses smile and dance a bit ere they are quite awake.
* * * * *
The dance, the smile, the song are never absent. Afternoons, when work
is done in shop or field, the girls will sing till the late hour of
_cena_. Rosa is not pretty. Her face is a little long and has a tilt
which is not of Europe. The nose droops, the mouth is large, the eyes
are resilient and black under the strangely curving brow. But Rosa is
charming. A white kerchief lies on her shoulders, pointed to the throat.
The naked arms are bright against the marron velvet of the bodice; the
breasts are caught by a diagonal sash something like the straps of a
grenadier. Rosa’s hips are wide; her legs, stockinged in gray wool, have
a full firmness--like her breasts--that bespeaks valiance in emotion.
The room is cool and bare: through the high windows comes the mellow
murmur of the folk walking the rigid street, between the sea and the
mountain. The girls are a warm fragrance in the room. They sing. The
songs warm them: they dance. Their heads sway, their throats pulse,
their arms rise and fall.
These songs are older than the tambour and the pipe: the girls sing them
without accompaniment. Many have sad themes. But even as tragedy
invades the brightest _fado_ of Portugal, so here a tripping flexible
gait overbears the pathos. The music bespeaks a clever, winning people.
It has mobility, but it is not plastic. It has the nature of sun
splintered on cloud or running upon water, of the patter of rain on
house-tops, of waves pelting the hull of a sail-boat. It is a music of
light, of surface-patterns of light. On all the earth, there is no music
stranger to that of Spain--to the plastic, sculptural, soul-deep song of
Spain.
It is good music: its mobile patterns are abstracted into grace and
hardness: its swiftness never blurs, its poignance does not become
sentimental. It is not deep music. It remains of the periphery, and its
moods are varieties of reflection, rather than of creation. The Basque
remains _one_. What varies is the circumstance of life; so he wards it
off, he holds it well outside him. Through a hundred ages, Spain has
moved in a processional whose faiths and passions the Spaniard has
absorbed. But the Basque shuts out. So his song--trilling, skipping,
flashing in color and light--is a music of intimations, rather than of
experience.
Was this pagan people first enticed to become Catholic, because of the
occasions offered by a Calendar of Saints for singing and for dancing?
Every church festival is a _fiesta_, a _romería_ for the Basque. The
fiesta of San Iñigo de Loyola is one of the great days of the land, for
Iñigo Lopez de Recalde, founder of the Society of Jesus, was a Basque.
The day of the author of the ruthless Exercises, of the chronicler of
Hell, becomes a day of merriment: foot races, water races, trials of
strength lead up to the climax--the contests in the arts of song and
dance. The Spaniard is no sportsman. His bull fight is an ordeal and an
art. His games are pretexts for gambling. His Carnival is a means of
fierce release for the instincts repressed by morality, caste and honor.
But the Basque is a sportsman. He is incapable of the true carnival
spirit. He turns his feast-days into sport-days.
An altar has been decked out on the façade of a house in the Plaza.
Under a bower of gilt, the priest harangues in _vascuence_.[28] His
theme is the curse of Modernism and Socialism, the hellish lust which
hides in the laborer’s appetite for better wages. (The Basques are the
industrialists of Spain: the ore and factories of Bilbao are not far
off.) On one side of the Square is the summer palace of an Andalusian
Duke. His balconies are hung with great mantones; gorgeous splotches of
gold and green and crimson in the sun. The altar faces an esplanade
which steps down to the sea. But the Basque throng is aloof from the
priest in his garish altar, from the flash of Spain on the walls of the
Duke’s palace, aloof even from the sea. It is a packed, resilient body.
It is waiting to play. Its mood is very like the mood of a sporting
crowd in England. Here is none of the hot dark fervor which Spain brings
even to the bull fight.
The races are over, and the last Mass. The crowds circle the platform
for the dance contest. There is a piper and a drummer. The cadences of
the _chistu_ are thin and cool. The drummer weaves a tattoo that becomes
the matted background for the imponderous figures of the pipe. When the
dancer and piper cease, the drum goes on in an incantation which is
moving precisely because it is so unemphatic, so subhumanly cool, so
pale. It reminds one, indeed, of the nixies of the Celt, the blond green
creatures of the northern marshes. It seems as far from Spain as are the
braes of Scotland. The designs of the dance are brief. Here is grace in
line and point: daintiness; above all spiritual aloofness. In the pauses
of dance and music, ever unceasing the weave of the drum. The elves also
of the Atlas are around the corner: but Spain is miles away.
_Agura_, _contrapas_, _anarxuma_, _zaspi_, _trititzka_, _soka_,
_aguruku_, _taladera_--numberless Basque dance-figures. What
distinguishes them is that they are all social: that they are stylized
from details of the common life. The dance of Andalusia is a plastic
form for the soul. These dances are scenes of bodily acts. Their stuff
is not spirit, nor essence of emotion. It is a synthesis of homely
gestures taken from farm or field. Here is an _apple dance_, an
intricate elaboration of the bestowal of apples. Here is a _chair
dance_, a design of men and women in easy social converse. The _Siete
Saltos_ is a stylization of the walk--of men walking together. The music
is major; the dance is comedic. Indeed, it holds the trait of social
comedy which in France produced Molière. But also, it has a purity of
abstract line which recalls the classic dance of the Pueblo Indians or
of the Pacific Negroes. With, again, a difference of tone and subject:
the dances of the “savage” are elemental, they call rain, they invoke
harvest, they enact sexual passion.
In another part of town there is a match of _pelota_. This game is
originally Basque; its pure form of sport lives still in the Basque
village where boys play on a dirt court against a plaster wall, or
against the wall of the church if the hamlet is very modest. The
Spaniards, however, have taken to pelota. It has become a game for
professionals; and although all the crack players are Basque, the spirit
of the sport has been transformed. It is played in the _frontón_: a
court, three sides of which are high walls of cement. The fourth side
(the long one, to the right of the players who all face one way) is for
the public whose tiers of seats are placed in a sort of open building. A
pair of players make a team, and two teams make a match. To the right
hand of each athlete is strapped a thin short wooden bat called _pala_,
or else, in a variant of the game, a basket, known as _cesta_, or
_remonte_, shaped a little like the curved beak of some bird, scooped
and long and narrow. The principle of pelota is like our handball which
may indeed be a derivation. But the Basque game with its great distance
of service and return, its complexity of movement due to the use of
three walls for the rebounds of the fast ball, achieves an extraordinary
brilliance. Volleys last for minutes: the ball flashes back and forth
from the front wall to the side and rear ones. There is something of
the delicacy of billiards, the grace of tennis: and there is a spill of
sheer physical prowess which tennis does not approach. It is a beautiful
game: the game of a sane, healthily outward people. But in the hands of
the Spaniard, all this becomes minor.
Between the public and the court is a railing which until the game
starts is empty. With the first volley, however, a large group of men in
red _boinas_ line up here, facing the public, with their backs to the
players. They are the _cobradores_, the bookies: the true principals in
what Spain has made of pelota. With the first service, they gather their
first odds and cry their bets. And until the last of the game, the
shifting of odds, the placing of bets continue: the players themselves
serving as a mere pretext for the gambling, like the _petits chevaux_ of
wood at a gaming table.[29]
* * * * *
These are invasions of Spain upon the Basque land. There are whole towns
in Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Alava, where Castile has rooted and worked havoc.
Such a town is San Sebastián, summer capital of the king and of the
intellectuals of Madrid. There are even towns which Castile has
destroyed....
The _carrera_ runs along the breasting cliffs from San Sebastián to
Santander beside a sea blue as the summer sky. It crosses the tip of a
little city resting on land that tongues from the mountain far into the
Bay. The land is high and steep: the streets twine. And in their midst,
coiled all about by alleys, stands a smothered church. It is blackened
by the salt of seven hundred years. It stands low: there is a street at
its door, and there are other streets at rising levels on its four
façades, so that it is plunged and buried in the town. And the windows
are rare, or are blanked by pavements and by the cellars of adjoining
houses. Only the steeple is sheer to the open heaven.
It is an ignoble church, foul like a ship’s bottom after a voyage round
the seven seas. Its nave is foul with shadows; its windows have a yellow
blear like the eyes of the beggar at the gate.
The town is stifled and somber: it is like an apple rotted by this old
church at its core. The Basque here has forgotten how to dance. He has
not turned his saints’ days into merry making. The church has conquered:
the Empiry of Castile.
But more significant than such invasions of the end of old Spain upon
the Basque, are the invasions of the modern Basque into the life of
Spain. While the Spaniard gave himself to crusades and conquest, the
Basque held aloof with his energy untapped. To resist invasion of body
and of spirit took courage. But the effort was as naught beside the
effort of the Spaniard to fuse Moslem, Jew, German, Roman, Celt, into
one Spanish soul. The Spanish soul was achieved: but Spanish spirit
locked in the exertion. This was the moment of the Basque with his
reserve of virgin power. He had no culture but the most primitive; no
world for the expanding of his might save a strip of rocky soil. Spain
offered a profound culture and the sea, and worlds beyond the sea. Now
the Basque passes from his spiritual sleep--passes into Spain, through
the door which Spain herself had battered open....
_CHAPTER XIII_
_TWO ANDALUSIANS_
_a. The Sleepers_
_b. The Awakeners_
_c. The Sleepless Spirit_
_a. The Sleepers_
Spain is not a failure; Spain is not decadent; Spain is complete. By the
too literal achievement of kings and mystics, the vital forces of a
vital land lock as in sleep. This sleep is one of the two moods of art
and letters in contemporary Spain. It has been long upon the land and
the land loves it. Poets have found in it all the delight of cradled
balance, all the delight of dream. They have made of this sleep of Spain
a passionate Nirvana in which the actions of Spain’s waking life return
in pageantry. The ghosts of fire and blood are here: and a pleasant
hopelessness which saves from the scourge of ambition. Spain becomes a
mirrored play of faces and of scenes, for her own self-adoring. First of
all despair. This perennially ironic race has distilled the love of
failure from its too great success. Spain in the nineteenth century knew
an ecstatic impotence which only Russia equaled. It was about 1835 that
Larra wrote: “_Escribir en Madrid es llorar_--to write in Madrid is to
weep.” “Do not attempt to create,” he told his fellows. “Ye are
Spaniards; the task is hopeless. Must ye wield a pen? Then translate
from the French.” Larra’s last logical act was to blow out his brains.
But the spirit of Larra is still upon the tables of the cafés of Madrid.
Sleep here is a wine of Spain’s historic act. Despair is voluptuous.
Incompetence is a cult. And votaries of this narcistic trance are among
Spain’s finest writers.
Chief of them all perhaps is Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán.[30]
Cervantes had a crippled hand; Don Ramón lacks an arm. Rojas who wrote
_La Celestina_ four centuries ago split his novel into dialogue and
acts. Don Ramón does likewise--and interweaves with his Castilian words
and forms that even Rojas would have found archaic. Don Ramón’s books
sell not for current pesetas, but for obsolete _reales_. His typography
is studiously ancient. Upon his works is printed _opera omnia_: and they
are illumined with medieval wood-cuts. His texts reveal a virtuosity in
the use of old Castilian with a mingling of the pure vocables of
Galician, once the poetic tongue of Spain, so imaginative as to be an
art. It is an art of tone and verbal plastic. Don Ramón is an hidalgo of
Galicia, that rocky northwest province which the Arabs scarce pierced:
and he boasts of his Celtic blood. There is a strong and curious kinship
between the dialogue of his books and that of Synge. But the kinship
goes no deeper than an echo. The volumnear body of Valle-Inclán’s prose
serves to mass a death: his drama is one of furious rhetoric. All the
more glorious ghosts of Spain stalk in his books. The Church with its
“charity of the sword,” chivalry mildewed and broken from its long
passage southward, clan warfare, mystic fealty and love are personified
in the were-wolf bombast of his scenes. But though these shapes be
ghosts, they have no charnel odor: the salt of modern irony--the
perennial Spanish irony--is on them. Their puissance is not to be
challenged. The dark firm candor of this prose is so enchanting that one
accepts the nightmarish or sentimental dumb-show: this gesturing
pageantry of Dream which is the Dream of Spain.
A pendant to Don Ramón is José Martínez Ruiz, known as Azorín.[31]
Valle-Inclán is dramatic and dionysian: his mood is perpendicular like
the mountain steeps of his Galicia. Azorín’s elegiac tone is smooth as
the subtle huertas of Valencia where he was born. His books are
haunting, climaxless: they spread the nostalgia which inspires them. In
them lives the small _pueblo_ of high Spain. He loves the village for
the pure success of its equilibrium in sleep. He loves to follow Don
Quixote over the _llanura_ of La Mancha. He loves to doze in the
manure-soaked inns of the Castilian desert. For this world is full of
ghosts. And Azorín casts the wide net of wistfulness to snare them all.
His prose, unlike the mighty, archaic organ of Valle-Inclán, has been
tinged with the perfumed winds of France which mingle oddly enough,
across the Pyrenees, with the rank heat of the posadas of Toledo or with
the ciceronian rhetoric of a peasant from Medina. Azorín’s passive,
apollonian state has left him open to invading foreign accents. Yet his
central impulse is authentic, and his form is Spanish. Here is the
pleasant pain of dream--against the nightmare mood of Don Ramón: a minor
note within Spain’s sleep. After the battalions of Moor and Catholic
have trampled on, here is the plaint in which the fields and towns sink
back upon themselves....
Spain’s most popular poet, Antonio Machado[32] is an Andalusian: but he
sings of Castile. His theme is the robust and brutal world in which the
pícaro careered. Unlike Valle-Inclán, Machado does not recreate this
world of four centuries past with archaic language or atavistic mood.
His means is more subtle. That world lives on, evaporate and refined, in
the subconscious tone of Spain. Machado captures the old splendor by
imaging its reverberations. His prosody is a canon of echoes. The echo
is the shell of the shout. So the rounded and mellow music of Machado
suggests the hollow form of an heroic life. The graphic density of life
in heroic Spain has left this pattern. If the hard bodies of the Spanish
soil were bubbles holding a void as hollow as the Spanish sky, they
would be the poems of Machado. He harks back to Velázquez: the supreme
graphic master reappears in words, diminished, lyrical, plaintive. The
voice of the stark past of Spain comes muffled in this sleep.