larger currents of the Dream is set the exquisite, scholarly Ramón
Pérez de Ayala.[33] Ayala, who is an Asturian, is his epoch’s most
cultivated novelist and most fanciful poet. This man who in _Política y
Toros_ has written the profoundest apologia of the bull fight and the
subtlest satire on Spain’s political abulia, beneath his disguise of
timeliness is an archaicizer also: one who dwells as deep as his
neighbor Valle-Inclán within Spain’s narcistic adoration. But it is the
schools and cloisters which haunt Ayala: his way to the past is that of
meditation and of learning. Like Azorín, Ayala has not been proof
against French literary currents. The note of Anatole France is a bit
too clear in his novels. But perhaps there is an organic kinship between
the Spaniard and the last master of the French contemplative tradition.
Like Anatole France, Ayala is a musing man: a man of satiric, wistful
fancy rather than of imagination. His style progenitors are those
amazing mystics of sixteenth century Spain who managed to endow ecstasy
with Horatian polish. The sedulous, synthetic texts of Ayala are a
panoply of dream: Spain dreaming of her cathedrals and her schools,
Spain blowing lovely and seductive patterns--two volumes upon the Names
of Christ--from the effluvia of medieval culture. The modern in Ayala is
the ironic salt of intellectual awareness.[34]
* * * * *
There is a moment between sleep and waking, when the mind spans the
abyss between eternity and time. Consciousness turns inward on the realm
of sleep; the materials and meanings of the dream form to the measure of
thought, live an instant the spatial, temporal life ere they dissolve.
In this encounter the worlds of sleep and waking are both broken up.
Their fragments make a counterpoint of exquisite discord; but the
relation between them brings a subtle vision. The minute and the
infinite merge. Essence of dream takes the conforming shape of the
categories of the intellect; and the objective sense for once is applied
to what is real. This mysterious hinterland Ramón Gómez de la Serna has
made his realm. He has mastered it. He has been mastered by it.[35]
Spain stands at this transition, between sleep and waking. Ramón is the
elegist of its dissolving colors, of its shattered and luminous shapes.
Valery Larbaud has compared Ramón with Arthur Rimbaud. The æsthetic
object of Ramón is indeed the atom; but whereas in Rimbaud the atom is
explosive, bursting the cerements of cultured France, the atom in Ramón
merges forever with the intricate flow of waking sense and thought. His
true fellow is not Rimbaud but Marcel Proust. Proust made a portrait of
a society in deliquescence: of its break-up into the essences, atoms,
maggots of dissolution. Ramón also weaves the filmy spell of a
dissolving world, although in him the dissolution is not social but
subjective. Spain stirs in this limbo: her eye peers back into the
fleeting images of dream. Ramón is her eye.
Wherefore the contradictions in his work. Rich in color, it is
evanescent. Affluent in intimations of form, it is formless. His books
are collections of uncollectible items. His true form is chaos. He is
indeed the runner of a rainbow; and should he stop one moment, he would
fall through mist. His one subject is the instant of palpable
inarticulation. But his world is still the dreamed Body of Spain.
However dissolute her state, Spain yet looks inward on her slumber.
Ramón is no prophet; save unconsciously. In him, Spain says to herself:
“I am asleep”--the sign of waking....
_b. The Awakeners_
The entire nineteenth century of Spain was the stormy and dark threshold
of this waking. In 1898, Spain suffered more from the loss of the Isle
of Cuba than she had suffered from the previous loss of the worlds from
Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. So the “generation of 1898” became the
symbol, when it was but the sequel, of Spain’s stir. Spain suffered more
in 1898 because she was nearer waking.
The earliest signs were perhaps political. The extraordinary
Constitution of 1812--more radical than the present one of England--gave
way to absolutism. Quixotism tremored on, in the sleep of Spain.
Carlism, the extreme of reaction, swung back into a republic. But the
republic[36] was a mere parade of presidents. High-minded, eloquent men,
they had no contact with organic Spain. The face twitched; the mind
slept.
More prophetic of spiritual action was the work of a professor and
scholar, Francisco Giner de los Ríos.[37] Don Francisco was the friend
of the makers of the brief republic. But instead of holding office, he
founded a school. (His _Institución libre de Enseñanza_ stands still in
Madrid, environed by convents.) And instead of delivering orations, he
gathered about him the intelligent discontent of Spain. He was a leader
and nourisher of men. And the sons of his spirit have written the
dynamic books of the age. Giner’s weapon for awakening Spain was Europe.
He sent his followers to France, Italy, Germany and England--to bring
home seed and leaven. He saw the problem of his land as a simple one of
retardation. Spain for organic reasons had lagged. Let her catch up.
While his school flourished--a little hearth of Europe at which the
Spanish intellectual might warm his hand--a young diplomat, Angel
Ganivet,[38] published a work that was the antiphony of this Modern
hymn. The _Idearium Español_ looms large in the tale of Spain’s
renascence. Ganivet was a poor historian and a weak logician. His little
book bristles with arguments, æsthetic and ethnic, which no one can
accept. Yet it holds a deep philosophy of Spain’s career. To Ganivet,
Spain is not of Europe: the trend of her growth must be toward Africa as
it has been from Africa. All of the adventure in America and Europe was
a false step. The “Age of Gold” was an age of madness. The effort to
adopt the pragmatic materialist culture of the West was doomed to
failure. Spain is Christian; not Roman; Christian in the way of the
Spanish Stoic, Seneca, of the African patrists, Origen and Augustine, of
the Semitic spirit of Don Quixote. Ganivet scorns the standards and
success of modern Europe. He senses the heroism--the need of heroism--in
the Spanish soul: its peculiar way of sudden climaxes followed by
periods of sleep. The down leveling of Europe is as alien and abhorrent
to him as it was to Nietzsche. He fears the _aurea mediocritas_ of
England as a poison to the Spanish blood. He looks with equanimity on
Spain’s colonial disasters since Spain colonized “not for coal but for
souls”; and on the nadir of Spain’s culture, since from it shall rise
again such sudden giants as were Cervantes, Velázquez, Góngora, Lope. He
pleads for the acceptance, in the spirit of a religious sacrifice, of
Spain’s difference from the brilliant capabilities of France and
England. His book, appearing in 1896, urged the relinquishment of the
last Colonies. Two years later, Cuba and the Philippines were gone. But
though his book was a Jeremiah’s prophecy, Ganivet lacked the strength
to face the apathy of his people. In that same year, he died by his own
hand.
Not, however, before he had met the opposing, clamorous word of the man
who, gradually, was to veer to his own vision. Miguel de Unamuno[39] had
corresponded with Ganivet while they were young in Madrid. The result of
their exchange was _El Porvenir de España_, a volume in which they
estimate the opposing doctrines: that Spain must be awakened by letting
in “ultra-pyrenean currents,” and that Spain has been ruined precisely
by these currents. To Ganivet, the history of Spain reveals no “Spanish
period.” Let there be one! he cries. Unamuno counters that eclecticism
is the unity of Spain. “Spain is still to be discovered,” he thunders,
“and will be discovered only by European Spaniards.” In the volume which
defines this attitude of his youth, _En Torno al Casticizmo_, he
diagnoses the abulia of Spain. The Inquisition was bad because it shut
out the four winds of Europe: Spain was forced to feed upon herself.
Spain’s historical tradition was bad, because it was anti-European. He
declares for the _corrientes ultrapirenáicas_. Ganivet was dead. Even
had he lived, this mystic afield in history must have lacked the power
to answer Unamuno. Unamuno is the strongest moralist of our day. Wells
and Shaw have thin voices beside his well-aimed uproar. There was no
one, then, in Spain to answer Unamuno. Unamuno answered himself.
His answer is not analytic. This radical mystic scorns the fuss of
argument. The Inquisition, shutting out the “four winds” from Spain was
indeed “bad.” Its purpose--unity--was good. Its confusing homogeneity
with unity and its means of action were not Spanish at all: were of
Rome, of France, of Europe. Spain had been the most tolerant land of all
the West: even Islam grew tolerant in Spain: Rome alone, making the
Visigoth into crusader and winning Isabel to its own waning theoditic
dream, made Spain intolerant. The historical tradition which won in
Spain was also European: it was a mixture of the state policy of France
and the church policy of Rome. (France was never guilty of such
nonsense: France the State was consistently anti-Roman.) Finally,
whence came these “ultra-pyrenean currents” that were to flush Spain
once more with fecund air? They were ideas that reached Western Europe
by the very ethnic worlds of which Spain is the organic integer. Ideas
from the Greek and Alexandrian, from the Jew and Egyptian and Arab: many
entered Europe directly by the door of Spain; none came to Spain by way
of western Europe. They came by the sea and the south--in that long
germinal embrace whereby Phœnician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Jew,
Copt, Arab, Moor were poured into Spain’s womb. What Western Europe did
was to transform and finally to betray these living thoughts. The
Visigoth minority represented Spain’s medievalism: and its action was a
retarded and arbitrary form of what in Germanic Europe produced the
noble synthesis of Catholic culture. In Spain, the naturalistic Semites
were too dominant for a culture based on transcendental values.
Medievalism in Spain became a maniacal gesture. Modernism? It is the
breakdown of the medieval culture: its intellectualism, its
systematization is a vast Machine proficient at destroying, and creating
nothing. Is this what Spain must come to, to be saved? Unamuno
reconsiders; and by 1905 he has his answer--which is indeed a
conversion.
Unamuno is an expression of dynamic egoism. This atom has got loose from
the locked coil of Spain; and what a surge it has! Yet all his doctrine
comes rather simply down to the assertion of an immense personal will
emerging from the stratified social trammels of his land. The intrinsic
substance of Unamuno’s thought will strike the Western mind as meager;
but the drama of its formulation is a new act in Spain, the flesh of its
assertion is a fresh embodiment of the Spanish spirit.
This announcement of a personal will recalls at once earlier apocalypses
of the north: Blake, Whitman, Dostoievski, Nietzsche. Unamuno’s
assertion is important, because it is made up of the conflicting
substances of Spain. The voice of this man declaring that he will never
die, and that he will never live according to the herd-patterns of
modern Europe, becomes palpable and true, because it is so deeply
Spanish. Perhaps the æsthetic value of the utterances of Whitman,
Dostoievski, Nietzsche, Blake is similarly grounded in racial substance.
The case is evident in Unamuno. Freeing himself from the still equipoise
of Spain he frees himself from nothing that is Spanish.
In Unamuno, the same Spanish spirit heretofore held in tragic unison--in
the actless unison of its will--swings once more into motion. Instead of
equating each other, the elements of the Spanish soul line up _behind_
the soul of Unamuno and serve to project him, parabola-wise, into his
personal heaven. Here is Spain’s neo-medieval sense of the futility of
life; here is Christ; here is Spain’s narcistic love of the extremes
within her, whence arose the pícaro and the saint. Here above all is
Spain, enemy of pragmatism and of rational progress, worshiper of the
Absolute--Spain that will be heaven or hell, and never merely earth; and
yet will not loose her hold on earth, in all her visions of heaven.
Unamuno transfigures the despised and comic person of Don Quixote. This
symbol of his land’s wrong-headed action becomes for Unamuno the god of
a new Order, the prophet of a new national revelation. Don Miguel de
Unamuno of the Basques identifies his cause of pure and personal effort
with the crusade of the old hidalgo of La Mancha. Like that knight, he
will construct his world platonically from the ideals of his inheritance
and go forth _really_ that it may prevail. As Quixote fought common
sense, Unamuno fights “business.” The old windmills are now factories,
the old inns are industrial cities, the old King’s police are the
votaries of Demos. Where all that is glorious has become so sterile, all
that is serious so low, let Don Quixote be savior. The final jest of the
bitter, broken Cervantes becomes our Man of Sorrows. Does not the
mockery of modern Europe call for a ridiculous Messiah? The sterile and
impotent meseta of Castile--that butt of Europe--shall be the mount of
the new Zion, for the new Sermon.
So with inimitable verve and wit, Unamuno identifies his will with the
old body of Spain: and hobbles forth, like Quixote, to enact justice. He
wants it for himself. But since Spain is in him, since Spain is his
Rocinante, Spain must go along. Spain must wake, if only for his sake.
Unamuno’s philosophy is a tissue of compensations: which by no means
proves it to be false. He feels inferior in Europe as a Spaniard? he
will assert his immortal soul against all Germany and England. He feels
his peopled cultural impotence before the sure voice of France? he will
turn this anguish into the travail of birth. The method is persuasive.
Our modern world is so very shoddy, that any honest light can show it
up. The prose fabric of our civilization is so thin, that any song can
tear it. And Unamuno is essentially a poet, even though his best vehicle
is the short personal essay which, indeed, his pen has made a powerful
æsthetic organ.
The atomic individualism of Unamuno is strictly modern: it springs from
Rousseau and the German romantics. It is the inevitable impulse to
“return to a beginning” which has overwhelmed the modern soul since the
breakdown of the Medieval House. But if this atomic will is modern, the
values it propels in Unamuno remain medieval.
* * * * *
The intrinsic value of such work either as thought or as æsthetic form
is very slight. Interest in Unamuno hinges on interest in Spain. The
power of this soul, one feels, approaches that of Whitman or
Dostoievski. But the substance in which it has clothed itself is less
negotiable. Like Don Quixote, Unamuno fails to realize that the modern
world can be defeated only with modern weapons. Our multiverse, our
chaos of sterile facts, is the result of an abuse of analytic methods.
The true savior will have to understand and accept this analytic world,
ere he can transform it. Unamuno, believing that he preaches to the
world a new Salvation, is merely rousing Spain from her old ordered
sleep.[40]
_c. The Sleepless Spirit_
In this new stir of Spain, it is not wonderful that the land which
created Córdoba, Cádiz, Seville, which perfected the Dance and the cante
hondo, which gave birth to Gabírol, to Góngora, should lead in the fresh
emergence of Spain’s perennial spirit. For Andalús achieved the Spanish
Balance without the Castilian rigor; obeyed like every part of Spain the
will of Castile to make Spain’s chaos into One and yet contrived to keep
that Oneness green. A painter and a poet of modern Andalusia voice so
clearly the spirit of the land, that they speak again for the world.
They are Pablo Picasso and Juan Ramón Jiménez.[41]
Picasso is a man of Málaga who came to Paris, and by the strategy of
time and place conquered the plastic world. To the French, he appeared
the Heaven-sent inheritor of Cézanne. Cézanne, naturalistic mystic and
lover of El Greco, made of each stroke of his brush a preachment of the
sanctity of form. Pure form, in his work, had its ritual of sacrament in
its intrinsic stuffs. The Body and the Blood of life were to Cézanne the
volumes and the movements palpable to the eye. El Greco, in a devout
Catholic Age, was able to retain the legendary forms of Christianity as
at least subsidiary means to express his vision. Cézanne was driven back
on what seemed to him “primary” matter: the hills and the haystacks and
the human body. His work implicitly rejects the concepts of European
culture by its refusal of them all, as aids to revelation. Not religion,
not ethics, not “beauty” shall be syllables for Cézanne, as for his
predecessors, in the spelling of his Word. In this sense, Cézanne
aspires to the primitivism which accepts the essences of previous
culture and rejects its forms. Ideationally, he created and bequeathed a
void: but an expectant and a fertile one. The successor of Cézanne was
bound to be a man with concepts to fill in his abstract wording.
Concepts come to Europe from the east. It appears that Western Europe
can create no concepts of the Real, although she creates the greatest
Forms for concepts.[42] Like Cézanne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Dostoievski, Blake, Whitman, Wagner were in this sense inviters of the
east; the line of nineteenth century masters was long, who in their
rejection of the conceptual forms of their inheritance, filled the world
once more with a clamorous hunger for fresh Ideas to make incarnate. It
is this hunger that explains, in art, the vogue of El Greco, of African
sculpture, of Picasso.
The Idea in Picasso is the _arabesque_. The Moslem needed to harmonize
his love of beauty and his fear of idols. He required a plastic form
which would not, like the forms of physical nature, recall the old
idolatries of the desert. The letters of his holy Arabic language served
him, even as the Hebrew letters served, in the Kabbala, to make a Temple
for the medieval Jews. These letters of the Arab held Allah and all the
world of Islam, and yet were freed of natural associations. In Picasso,
there is a similar impulse. His need also, as an artist, is to make
designs; but his fear was an idolatry of another sort. The associations
attached to physical forms--religion, sentiment, moral value--were
already so unconvincing in the nineteenth century that Cézanne refused
them, as Moses the Golden Calf. Now, even the sensory organisms formed
by the eye must be rejected. To the hand of a Raphael, a woman’s body is
amenable to art through its motherhood, its sanctity, its sexual appeal.
These are cogent means for his æsthetic work. To Cézanne a woman’s body
is still a woman’s body. Picasso rejects even the associative concept of
_woman_: her body becomes a configuration of planes, densities, colors.
This formal use of transfigured substances is old in Spain. Spain’s
wildest excess of sculpture and ornament in the _plateresque_ holds an
element of transformed abstraction that recalls Egypt. The Spanish dance
resolves dramatic gesture into a formal end. And now, Picasso makes an
_arabesque_ of the letters and signs of nature.
Paris has worked perhaps too much upon Picasso. It has made him a
“court” painter. This is intrinsically no ill thing: Ronsard and Racine
were poets of the Court. The essential dynamism of Picasso has been
urbanized; his intellectual stuffs have been turned at times into
theory, into impulse. From creation, he has been deflected into analysis
which is the antithesis of creation.[43] All this, because Paris is a
Court of painters, with the tendency to cultivate the statement which
clarifies at the expense of the creation; to address only itself; to
polish surfaces rather than plumb new depths. Or, perhaps, the trouble
is that this Court of Paris is not Picasso’s. It has needed him, more
than he Paris. Too often has Picasso fragmented his invention into sharp
annunciations of the theory others builded from his work. Yet for all
that, he has brought light to the west: it came with him from Málaga:
it rises from Andalusian depths older than Spain and yet forever
Spanish.
* * * * *
Juan Ramón Jiménez[44] has come far indeed since the early poems and the
sweet idyll, _Platero y Yo_, which appeared in 1907. That book was
written in a prose crisp as young leaves. Yet it was the conveyancer of
old emotions. The poet’s spirit was already old; only his senses urged
him to the gait of youth. Such delicacy promised rather to crack than to
reveal in later years what is perhaps the profoundest poetic
intelligence today in Europe.
Jiménez has lost the audience which his earlier work won him. He is very
little read. He has sloughed off cleverness and minor sentiment. His
work has become stark and stripped. He has gone from exquisite grace to
a virtuosic clumsiness and uncouthness, which brings astoundingly close
the face of truth, and turns it into a strange, impersonal thing. He has
become a recluse. Yet his seclusion has not divorced him from contact on
his own terms with his generation. No poet serves youth more sedulously
than he. He is the master and the friend of the young poets of
Castilian, not alone in Spain but in the greater Spain across the sea.
He is in touch with Paris, with Germany and Austria. And he has read the
work of Whitman, of Emily Dickinson, of Frost, of Robinson and
Sandburg....
Jiménez, indeed, is a mystic of the naturalistic order of Walt Whitman.
He traces the constant divine in life; he ignores the transcendental. He
finds God in the sea, in the subtle sense-play of love, in the
landscapes of Spain; or in the gyring thoughts of his own meditation.
Yet no poet’s accent could more radically differ from that of the Bible,
of Spinoza or of Whitman. Not the least magic of Jiménez’ work is its
perpetual counterpoint of meaning and substance. The meaning is cosmic,
the stuff is light and casual. Often a seeming haphazard of expression
fringes the ineffable; a drop of water miraculously turns into a
universe. No tinge of cosmic rhetoric mars the body of his words. The
universe is implicit. The ultimate gift of Jiménez is a song of life,
liquid and gemmed, within whose moment silence is an inner flame. This
flame is simple and constant. The variation in the poems is the
outturning into surfaces of mood and color. The flame is One. Life’s
mystery is its becoming form, its creating for itself out of a single
depth numberless facets, out of whiteness many tints, out of silence,
song. This is the process of life: and this is the process of Jiménez’
writing. When he speaks of _La Obra_ he means his record of these
inscrutable _becomings_, of which he is a rapt and consecrated witness.
If his poems are many, so are the shapes of life: if they are fleet,
fragmentary, snatches of a Form whose symmetry lies in dimensions beyond
the fragments, so is our visible world a phantasm of shreds, thrusts,
flashes. And to see it whole, the eye must be beyond as well as within
it.
Jiménez’ work is a sort of _comédie mystique_. Singly, the poems have
variety of notes. Yet there is a cryptic quality in them, and a subtle
allusiveness to something not explicit, which must repugn the shallow
sense, even as it entrances the mind hungry for great vistas. His poems
have prosodic value. Yet their chiefest value is that they _create
æsthetically_ a sense of incompleteness. Æsthetically, they are whole
because they contain this _lack_--this positive surge toward an
apocalyptic sense which lives in them only by the imprint of its
absence. Each of his poems is at once a sensory form, and a spiritual
inchoation. Like the atom, it is complete, yet holds in the whirlwind of
electrons an infinitude and a contingency with infinitude: it is
appearance forever tending to disappear into the Real. One might say
that a poem of Jiménez is like an instant in a human life: full-limned,
full-equipped with thought, emotion, will; and yet this fullness is but
the passing function of an implicit unity which transcends and subscends
it.