The Basques, like the Asturians and the people of Navarre, live in one of the satisfied areas of Spain—those coastal provinces of mild climate where the rainfall is regular and plentiful. They are either farmers on the family community system in which the property belongs to the family and the head of the family council decides on his successors among his children, or they are sharecroppers—and the success of this system lies in the liberal and reasonable spirit in which it has been worked. Yet every statement one makes about Spain has to be modified immediately. Navarre is a Basque province that has lost its language, and the Navarrese, shut up in their mountains, are in fact fanatical in religion and they are the main source of the ultramontane form of conservatism, called Carlism. Navarrese economy, too, is successful and prospers. But as the train travels south, the rainfall dwindles in Castile, the peasant farmer becomes poor; money, not crops, becomes the landowner’s reward, the religious quarrel begins. We are among a different race of more dramatic, more egotistical, less reasonable men.
In the rest of Spain the Basque is thought of as insular, obstinate, reserved, and glum, a pedestrian and energetic fatalist, working in his fields, putting his steel-pointed goad into the oxen that plough his land, making the wines of Rioja and Bilbao, and smelting his iron ore; or he is thought of as a sardine fisherman and packer in those reeking little fishing towns of the coast where they stack the tins. These sea towns are clean, prim, dour places. There is a narrow gap between the headlands through which the Biscayan tide races into a scooped-out haven or lagoon—all harbours of the Bay of Biscay are like this, from Pasajes, near the frontier, to the mountain-bound harbours of Corunna. It is a coast that smells of Atlantic fish, the sky is billowy white and blue, or the soft sea rain comes out of it. Basques who can afford it drive out of the grey, warm, glum days towards Álava and Castile, to breathe dry air and feel the sun, which reigns over the rest of Spain like a visible and ferocious god. There the Basque in his dark blue beret, which sits square on his stolid forehead, is thought of as an oddity. His family is matriarchal. The breaking of the marriage bond is forbidden. Even the second marriages of widows or widowers is disliked. Rodney Gallop, in his scholarly book, The Book of the Basques, describes the wedding night of a widow. The mockery was kept up with the beating of tin cans, the ringing of bells, and blowing of horns until sunrise. This custom is called the galarrotza (night noise). It occurs, of course, in many peasant countries.
My own collection of Basques contains indeed one dour character: a man who ran a bar in France, one of the exiles. He was a municipal employee and fought against Franco in Bilbao. He was also obstinately determined to visit his family there and did so twice secretly. But money affairs cropped up. It was necessary to go to Bilbao openly. The matter proceeded in the usual manner of the peninsula. First his relatives used what “influence” they could find, working through the relatives of relatives. He was told to come. This was about five years ago and required courage, for at that time there were tens of thousands of political prisoners; but in addition to courage this man had the insurmountable Basque conscience. He fought (he told the authorities) because his conscience told him to do so; not necessarily for Basque autonomy, but simply because it was the duty of municipal employees to obey the lawful government. Such a conscience must have maddened and annoyed the Falange who had done just the opposite, but, for all their revengefulness and intolerance, the Spaniards recognize the man in their enemies, and when passions have fallen, maintain their dignity and seek for the modus vivendi in the same glance.
The other Basques I have known were Unamuno and Pío Baroja, the novelist. In Unamuno one saw the combativeness, the mischief and pugnacious humour of the Basques. A brief light of unforgettable charm, delicacy, and drollery touches their set faces. In Pío Baroja it is the same. I sat in his dark flat in Madrid and listened to the gentle, tired, clear voice of the very old man talking very much in the diffident, terse way of his books, watched the shy, sharp smile that never becomes a laugh, and the sly naïve manner.
“But who else painted your portrait, Don Pío?”
“Many people. Picasso, I believe, did one once.”
“Picasso! Where is it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It may exist. Perhaps it got lost. It had no value.”
As evasive as a peasant, but say anything against the Pope or the Jesuits and he is joking at once. I asked about the puritanical Archbishop of Seville.
“Never trust a Spanish archbishop when he behaves like an Englishman,” Baroja says.
Baroja once signed the visitors’ book in some place and where he was expected to add his profession, rank, or titles, wrote: A humble man and a tramp.
He sat at his plain oak table in an upright chair, in needy clothes and the same blue beret on his grey hair—it seemed to me—that he had worn twenty years ago when I first saw him. His eyes were pale blue, his face very white—one can imagine the baker’s flour still on it, for he once ran a bakery with his brother. It is a sad sight, the old age of a writer who, in addition to the usual burdens, has to bear the affront of the Franco censorship, which refused to allow him to publish his book on the Civil War.
“They said it showed the Spanish character in a bad light. And that is true. We see now we are a nation of barbarians.”
Baroja and Unamuno were broken by the Civil War. Baroja has fallen into melancholy. Unamuno, who came out on Franco’s side as a good many liberals did, heard of the atrocities and rushed out into the streets of Salamanca screaming curses on Franco, the Falange, and his country, and went out of his mind.
Baroja is an exceptional Basque in his hostility to the Church and in his anarchism; he has lived chiefly in Madrid. But he is thoroughly Basque in his obstinacy and his tenacity and his droll humour. Unamuno had the same obstinacy. His book Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida—The Tragic Sense of Life—is one of the most important works in the last fifty years of Spanish literature. He was the outstanding figure in the movement towards Europeanization, which began after the loss of Cuba in 1898, and he was all the more important because he embodied the ambiguity of the Spanish attitude to the modern world. The Basques live in prosperous and liberal-minded community; the rhetorical exaggerations and the desuetude of the rest of Spain are alien to them. They are, in fact, “modern” to a degree of modernity which not even the Catalans have attained. All the more, therefore, was Unamuno conscious of the need of Europe, all the more of the price. His life became a battleground for the quarrel between Reason and Faith, between the European consciousness and the mediæval soul. The Tragic Sense of Life sets out the essence of a profound conflict in the Spanish mind on its opening page, where he describes the subject of his book: not man in the abstract, but “the man of flesh and bone, who is born, suffers and dies—who, above all, dies and who does not wish to die.”
Unamuno’s book is a search for the solution to the problem which cannot be solved: man’s agonized desire to be assured of personal immortality. We cannot have this assurance, but out of the agony our soul must found its energy. With its pugnacious egoism, and its Quixotic quality, Unamuno’s philosophy described the positive side of the Spanish spirit, and came closer to the positive spirit of the Spaniards in the Counter-Reformation than their reactionary successors have done. There was more than a touch of the Protestant preacher in Unamuno, and the great figures of the Counter-Reformation were, in fact, counter-protestors who had not yet dulled and hardened into an oligarchy. Unamuno’s energy and truculence, his non-conformity before the Castilian mind and authority, were very Basque.
CHAPTER 5
In the mornings in Madrid we used to go to the Prado. The slow walk was like a swim through the sunlight, and it was a preparation for the intense life we should see there. The Spanish streets prepare one for the unabashed records of Spanish painting—a dwarf, an idiot, a deaf and dumb couple laughing, a pair of blind lovers, a beggar or two have their picaresque place in the unpreoccupied crowds. We used to go, for a moment and m
ainly to get out of the heat for a minute or two, into any church on our way, and we used to notice the difference of worship between Spanish and Italian custom. For whereas in Italy the churches were places for wandering in and camping in, places used by life, which continually flowed into them from outside, and God’s familiar market places, the Spanish churches were used by people with a strong sense of purpose and tenue. It was on our way to the Prado that I saw an old man kneeling before the crucified Christ in one of the Jesuit churches, a figure splashed by blood specks and with raw wounds, gaping as they would upon the mortuary slab, the face torn by physical pain, the muscles and tendons stretched. One imagined that the sculptor must have copied a crucified model to be so inflexible an anatomist and that the thought of imagining the agony of Christ had been beyond him. Before this figure kneeled an old man, and tears ran down his cheeks like the real-seeming tears glazed on the cheeks of the Christ; and, as he prayed, the old man kissed and caressed the toes, the calves, the knees of the figure and held them also with his hands. What grief, what dread or longing the old man was thus transposing one could not know, but one saw how his prayer depended utterly upon the communication of the senses, that he worshipped carnally and conceived of his acquaintance with God as a physical thing. If he described his God, the description would be physical, and the nature of his God would be a minute copy of his own or, if not a copy, a detailed response in the man’s own terms.
I am not an art critic, but since I live chiefly by the eye, I get more pleasure out of painting and sculpture than any other arts. I have a purely literary point of view; that is to say, when I see a picture I find myself turning it into writing about human nature, habits of mind, the delight of the senses—all that is meant to me by “the pride of life.” As one looks at the paintings of the Spanish, sombre as so many of them are whether they are earthly or religious, one sees what a great volume of emotion these minutely watched figures contain. How closely the great Spanish painters watch, sometimes for every detail, always for the key dramatic detail, the clue to a character, the spring of action! The faces and the bodies are caught at the moment of movement from one state of mind or feeling to another. The painters are not copyists from a still model; they are readers of nature; their view of nature might be described as the view of creative criticism. At the first acquaintance, with Velasquez’s portraits of the court of Philip IV, even with that enchanting picture of the naughty Princess, Las Meninas, or with the picture of those arrogant and stubborn dwarfs, one sees the infinitely patient copyist who never conveys more than the visual scene before him; but presently we observe he is a painter of light, a critic of reflections. We see that he has caught the trance of human watchfulness, as if he had caught a few hard grains of time itself. Life is something pinned down by light and time. He has frozen a moment, yet we shall feel that it is a moment at its extreme point: that is, on the point of becoming another moment. If he is the most minute observer in the world, notice how his subjects are caught, themselves also minutely watching the world, with all the concentration the hard human ego is capable of. This is what living is to the human animal: it is to look. To look is to be. We see in Velasquez, as in all the Spaniards, the marriage of mind and eye. No painting could be, in the northern sense, less suggestive of a life without other accoutrement than the body and the habit of the hour.
The sensibility, the pride, the sensuous weakness of the court of Philip IV, where the decadence put out its first flowers in Spanish life, before the fruit formed and rotted, are seen in the realism of Velasquez. In an earlier painter like Zurbarán, in Greco, even in Murillo, and finally in Goya, the same basic, psychological dramatic realism can be seen. We cannot doubt that thus life was, was seen and felt to be. And it is part of the genius of such exact penetration to horrify us with the tacit questions: What for? To what end? Behind such certainty is the certainty of death. The mad pride of the Duchess of Alba, her eccentric vanity! The homely foolishness of Charles IV, the total crookedness of Fernando VII! Goya caught the lowness of his world, its surrender of all style, its survival by a sort of ape-like impudence and by the shamelessness of Spanish vitality. The court did not object to these blistering portraits, but having no idea of themselves and no idea by which they lived, were grossly contented with the sight of their own likenesses.
Goya’s savage anticlerical pictures are not now shown in the Prado, but they are well known. The satire of Goya is savage, but this distortion—like the very different distortions of El Greco—does not lessen his realism. This realism in Spaniards proceeds out of hot blood, not coolness. When Goya draws scenes of war, he feels the madness of action, its giddy and swooning movement, the natural boiling up of all human feeling towards crisis and excess, and it is in this state of mind that his eye becomes receptive to detail. Once again: psychological realism is not psychological analysis or speculation after the event, but the observation of the event in the tremor and heat of occurrence. Goya does not draw torture, rape, murder, hangings, the sadism of guerrilla warfare rhetorically, patriotically, or with a desire to teach, but he is as savage in his realism or his satire as the war itself. He is identified with it, and eventually he was driven out of his mind by acts which he could not forget. The nightmares themselves are horrible in their animality.
The terrifying quality of Goya’s Disasters of the War springs, in part, from the comeliness and vanity of the human victims, from their complacency. There are no standard figures, but a great gallery of diverse characters whose ruling passion is clear in their faces. Each one palpably lives in his senses and, in the moment of death, their horrified eyes see the loss of the body. Goya’s realism marries fury, insanity, corruption, whatever the state or passion is, to the body; it gives body to the sadism, the venom, the thieving, the filthy-mindedness, the smugness, the appalled pity of massacre.
Goya lived in a revolutionary age and turned from the traditional obsessions of the Spanish, with their religion and their lordliness, to the life of the populace of Madrid. There were three cults of the people in his time; some members of the upper classes took pleasure in following popular fashions in dress and put on the exaggerated, bold finery of the dandy or majo. The Duchess of Alba’s picture in the Prado shows her in the costume of the maja—the full yellow dress, the black mantilla. There was a taste for fantasy and vulgarity in behaviour, ornament and exhibitionism in speech. The celebrated Spanish oath Caramba is taken from the stage name of a singer of tonadilla or one-act comic opera popular at the time. Goya drew her portrait, too. Goya’s picture of the royal family represents them as ordinary people without kingliness or pride. Maria Luisa looks like a washerwoman, Fernando like a lackey. The cult of the people also had its political aspect and derived from the welcome given by the liberal-minded to the ideas of the French Revolution, but here “the People” is one of those alien political abstractions which Spaniards always, in the end, reject. The Spanish populace rose in Goya’s time—but against the Revolution and the invader. The emotion was primitive, chauvinist, and patriotic. It was spontaneous, brave, and wild. The men who are being shot down in Goya’s Dos de Mayo are ordinary Spaniards off the street.
This popular spirit has always existed in Spain; it is the bottomless well of Spanish vitality and exuberance, so that where there is deadness and corruption in the higher levels of society, there is always this creative energy underneath. It shows itself in the vitality of the popular arts. The Spaniards have a genius for popular display: the bullfight, the religious procession, and the fiesta. They have a genius for dancing and for the popular song. In the past thirty years there has been a slight decline in the typical regional character of this popular culture, but it remains easily the strongest and most lively in Europe. Even the decline, which is due to industrialism and better communications from one region to another, is less dangerous than it might seem. Spanish vitality is so great that it can digest the most awkward extraneous elements. The Spaniards have a genius for adapting everything to their own life; t
heir indolence, the obstinate, individual refusal to break easily with custom, has given them enormous, natural power of resistance.
The radio blares from every street corner, but it is not often blaring the last American songs and dance tunes. Almost always the tune is flamenco, or cante hondo, a song from a popular zarzuela or musical comedy, a Spanish march. Once one is across the frontier, one is aware of being outside of Europe musically. One hears a new cadence, haunting, monotonous, yet also of pronounced dramatic rhythm. It is the rhetoric of music, sometimes tragic and grave, sometimes swanking and feverish with a swirl of skirts in it, sometimes Oriental and gypsy-like, lyrical and sad. The ear catches the strange notes of the cadence at once—la, sol, fa, mi—in the singing voice or in the guitar.
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