Waldo David Frank

“ Each is imbued with Spain’s imperious will to be whole and one: each grows great with this spirit: each wars upon them all. Spain was chaotic and diverse. Her will to be one serries her into antitheses. Her will to union breaks her into extremes. Irony works on Isabel’s fair fabric.
Perhaps the land itself is symbol of the process. Spain is desert—and garden; flat plain—and mountain; great heat—and winter. Spain is Europe—and Africa. In her events, she reveals this first ironic state of fusion—the splitting up into opposites of action. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Idea of Islam has forbidden its own growth.
But if this death from inanition is patent in modern Islam, it is implicit in the source. The fruit, only, of the religious impulse lives, for it alone holds the rounding of life’s circle. The religious act—be it art or be it ethics—cannot exhaust itself, because each forward step is an approach to the beginning. The man possessed of religion is possessed of a universal principle; and what he does cannot die. The forms and words of his activity may grow archaic—like the sculpture of Egypt, like the gods of the Rig-Veda. ”

“ Spain, like Isabel, is turbulent and complex.
What pouring of flesh and spirit upon Spain, since the Phœnician, the Berber and the Celt first made the Iberian fecund! A subtle chaos. For Spain is a diapason of hostile forces, needing each other to survive: the embattled parts have long since found their balance, and each is in love with itself.
Isabel works like an artist. She has her vision. Her instinct and experience evolve for it a form and for herself a method. She takes her material ruthlessly and transfigures it with a cold passion. But for a deeper reason, Isabel is an artist. ”

“ The tragic music of Spain is lightened, aerated and then, by the ultimate twist of Aragon, it is once more sicklied with a haunting gloom. But the gloom is pagan, not Christian. It is empiric. Its fluidity is of the east, but its will is a release come from the north.
The dance of the jota is a diluting, a quickening, above all a flattening of the sheer pure figures of the southern dance. The body loses all relationship with sculpture. It is given up to that easy dynamism whose language is the leap, the skip, the pirouette. ”

“ Burden heavy with ages of flesh, bright with ages of dream. Plaint of spirit, rush of blood miraculously woven. A body in dance, rigid as a column; a voice in song, light and swift as a bird. Many Orients are here. In the form, a slender mystic draughtsmanship—Byzantine; a clamor of soul, a submissiveness of body with all its sweetness and its joys merged in the ecstasy of an ideal—Jewish; an intensive thrust, lean, fierce, hunting—Arab. Rising like revelation from the Córdoban Plaza, this Andalusian song of many wills becomes the drama of Spain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lazarillo embodies Spain’s methods, which are brutal. San Juan is not abstract: he is an embodiment of purpose. Lazarillo is not mere flesh: in his trickeries and thefts, there is an inverted consciousness of Spain which makes his path through Old and New Castile almost as luminous as the path of the saint.
This consciousness is marked by irony: and irony is in the weave of every picaresque design. For the Spanish rascal is no mere reaction from heroic gesture. He is reversion as well. He is moved by the same energy that has uprisen in the forms of asceticism and crusade. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it is self-sufficient—the strong willed, resourceful crowd of Spain. Myriad calls and shreds of laughter, play of hand and foot twine about the Ring: agglutinate: the groups of clamor thicken and grow wider: the entire Ring is joined in the enterprise of shouting, shuffling, clapping. No Spaniards blackening the tiers, but this one sudden Spain! It has many means of making itself live. Boys scurry over the laps of matrons: men sing falling cadences to girls: babies shout. The aguero with an earth-jar large as himself, the vendor of pastas and of Arabic sweetmeats, weave through the mass. ”

“ The Arab is shrewd; his eyes glint, his fingers snap, his voice pelts. He is the survivor of countless children who have died.
Children not yet dead weave through the intricate clamor. The boys wear a burnouse over a naked body; the girls are bound in a thick wool garment that will announce to the men when the breasts bud. They beg, they snatch a date, they nibble. Half of them are blind in an eye. For Islam makes no answer to the Ophthalmia of Egypt: is not Allah good to the blind son, giving him fortune as a beggar, as a ballad singer, as a muedzin to call the prayer from the mosque tower? ”

“ Poetry must pay its tribute. If it sing a blade of grass, a kingdom, a divinity—yet it must make its tribute to the world: man in giving music gives himself. Al-Hambra, for all its matchless grace, is incarnate of no warmth, no joy, no agony, no love.... It is a jeweled monster; a sort of dissociate birth of human will. Although its tints are magic, its curves delicate as a woman’s mouth, its forms courteous, and its stuffs transfigurations of the elements into the radiance of silk and the sweetness of wool, yet it is but a fragment. ”

“ 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{277} 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. ”

“ It is the city of Salamanca. It lies in treeless mountains. Northward Zamora bristles warlike, westward Portugal turns an unfriendly back: and all about, Castile. Sierra de Gata, Peña de Francia, Sierra de Béjar, Sierra de Gredos ... from such wild quarries has come the mellow stone to build a scholar city: the city of the Wisdom and the Love of God within the crude dichotomy of Spain.
Salamanca is its University. Here in the first splendor of the Reconquista, Christian kings foregathered wise men of Israel and Islam and joined to them the aspirant scholars in Christ. ”

“ The people are dark and silent like the dusk. The sky is pale with a glow of convalescence. The houses, serried in the curving streets, are hot. The evening has a magic, it throbs and swells with tacit fervors. The whole of Córdoba is quick under the glow of night. The stone streets are flesh, willfully rigid, of a spirit possessed with the desire to dance. And in the dance are darker intimations: cries, ravage, conquest. But the slow streams of men and women are the sole expression. ”

“ The town clambers after it on steps, becoming at the top level a hidden maze of low houses. The Bridge, dwarfed here, disappears into the wall of a convent. Its massive granite shelters a patio with a pump, grapevines, geese—and a young girl stringing red clothes on the branch of an encina. Upon the other height from the Plaza del Azoquejo, the Bridge grows gradually less steep as the town rises slowly. Rome’s cool stones run ever closer to the Spanish streets, singing against sordid wineshops, almost touching a schoolhouse dismal as death, skirting a square where boys play at pelota. ”

“ They are life itself: like God a unity which miracle divides into three persons. And she is like her hearthfire, this woman of Old Castile: fecund and ensconced. She is the light of her shut home. She has jealous distrust of sun and of the open air. They are her rivals and she bars them out with her tiny windows and her divided door.
Her man moves slow through a strange outward world; for he is wholly embraced by the close of his home and his woman. He wears knee-breeches of hide that are tight as a skin and box his rump into a rigid square. ”

“ It strikes the top of the hills, it rolls down over the clay-maze; it strikes the level sand, down once more it bounds into the gorge, over drenched bushes, over hanging rock and fills the Oued. Here, knee-deep, with their thin gowns lashed to the thigh and the rondures of their bodies speaking, stand women: and the sun comes to them. Other women lay the washed clothes on rocks and with bare feet dance on them, mangling and rinsing in song.{21} The sun and the vigil of the hills, and the town distant, release the spirit of this flesh. Allah is far away, and the pure violence of Mohammed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is no Gothic aspiration. There is a maze of delicate shafts with their heads arched and arabesqued, prancing in cohorts between a dull floor and a dull roof. In the heart of this battalioned whirl, stands the Catholic Capilla Mayor which the Cathedral Chapter placed there in the sixteenth century. It is a formless embryon of gilt and marble. It replaces sixty Arabic columns and its heavy flesh rises far higher than the legion of shafts about it. It is perhaps the greatest monument in Spain of the inæsthesia of Spanish consciousness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet in this stifled frame, an artist quickens a magnificent world. The monks with their conventional background, the old town in flame of summer, the river panting through its fringe of trees,{164} the athletic freedom of the mind in search, the passionate reality of God—all Spain is in this antiquated book. Her extremes of waste and verdure, her turmoil of race, her traffic and speculation, her panoply of vision—Jew, Christian, warrior, priest—converge into the substance of prose. ”

“ Segovia’s ancient walls are bastioned, pierced with knotty towers and gates, and topped with the typical round cubos which Rome gave to Spain. The walls bind the precipitous rock which holds a park and the Alcázar, the usual pile of tessellated towers that gave Castile its name.
This is one end of the town. The rock goes higher toward the center. Houses are a clutter, unanimous like an army in the moment ere it comes forth to attack. A romanesque church, a feudal tower rise from the stony mob like leaders. And in the town’s heart, stands the Cathedral. ”

“ What is a castle?
It is a shut place that commands by its shutness the open place about it. A castle is builded of the stone of its world: it rises from the stone of its world: it is the stone of its world. A castle is austere toward the world which it defends. It is invariable, forbidding: its strength is that of a perpetual shutting-out of all which lies outside it. Sun beats on the castle wall: inside it is dark. Moon melts on its bastion and bathes its county blue: it is harsh and rigid. Water and wind make song of the green hills: the castle is silent. ”

“ There is a bastioned gate cut with the conquering arms of Leon and Castile.
In the east, a low sun. Its horizontal hand touches my face. It is hot, striking across cool dawn. Badajoz is houses gray and gold over shut streets around a Gothic church. The sun is outside the cool city. On the Cathedral porch sit two old women. Their day has begun: it is to sit with open claw and to close on coin and to bless the giver of coin.
In my pocket is naught but the moldy paper of Portugal and the silver duros of Spain. I shake my head at the two aged women. ”