Each bookie has a little rubber ball with a hole. In this hole, he
places a slip of paper declaring the odds of the moment, and by tossing
the ball to the man who has laid odds and to the man who has taken him
on, the bet is established. The true pelota fan does not wager once: he
wagers a dozen times as the game progresses: he concocts an intricate
system of varying odds: his mind is on the betting and his balance:
he is aware of the game only as the machine that automatically shifts
the chances. Indeed, to go to a pelota match and observe the game, and
refrain from betting, is so anomalous as to attract attention. The
sport is still there: the Basque players enact it: but the Spanish
public does not participate.
[30] Born 1870.
[31] Born 1874.
[32] Born 1875.
[33] Born 1881.
[34] Another remarkable expression of this state is the Valencian
Gabriel Miró (born 1879). Miró makes gorgeous word-tapestries of
legendary life, such as the Mystery of Christ. In his prose are lurid
and elementary colors that suggest some medieval canvas protected
for ages from the sun, together with pale modern water-tints of
psychological introspection.
[35] Ramón, as he calls himself, was born in 1891. His works
already fill sixty volumes. And yet his true artistic unit is the
paragraph--when it is not the sentence or the phrase.
[36] 1873-1874.
[37] 1839-1915.
[38] 1865-1898.
[39] Born, 1864.
[40] To go beyond Unamuno--into the present constructive period of
Spain’s waking, into the transition from her “old ordered sleep” to
the new ordered consciousness now dawning, would be to turn this
chapter into a discussion of writers and young literary movements: and
this would be to digress from the formal province of my book. Since
Unamuno answered Ganivet, there have arisen leaders in æsthetic and
social criticism, in the novel, in the drama, in the field of creative
erudition, whose aggregate work makes the contemporary literature of
Spain perhaps the most pregnant of the West. I regret that this is not
the place to analyze these younger men. The modern writers whom I have
mentioned at all I have chosen arbitrarily for the distinct formal
purpose of my portrait of Spain. It must be understood that whereas
I consider them important, I have been silent about others equally
important. Throughout, I have felt called on, no more to discuss all of
Spain’s great men, than to describe all her cities.
[41] A third name might be added: that of Manuel de Falla, Spain’s
leading composer and a pure Andalusian, also. Falla in tonal structures
hard, fluid, irreducible, conveys into æsthetic form elements of life
that are very close to those which we shall consider in Picasso and
Jiménez. He may be said to recreate the _body_ of Andalusian folk-song,
as Picasso recreates physical shapes and Jiménez physical sensations,
into a new arabesque.
[42] I--at least--know of no Forms, in the east, so great as (to choose
haphazard) the Medieval Church of Rome, the Gothic Cathedral, Dante’s
Poem, the music of Palestrina and of Bach, the Ethic of Spinoza. Yet
the concepts in these Forms are invariably of the east.
[43] Æsthetic creation is an act from the unitary self upon the
objective world. It is the contrary of analysis which breaks up that
world--_unreally_. But analysis may precede creation, if the elements
broken up by it are reabsorbed and fused into a new subjective unity.
[44] Born in 1881.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Mckor Hayim=> Makor Hayim {pg 113}
Mekor Hayim=> Makor Hayim {pg 159}