And so Castile stretches towards its backbone, the Guadarrama and the Gredos mountains. There will be miles where the soil looks like stripes of red lead or ochre, distances of sulphur and tin, the sharp colours of incineration, as if great areas of the kingdom had been raked out of a furnace. As the train climbs to Santa Teresa’s Ávila, there will be miles of wilderness where granite is piled up among the oaks or the short pines, and one sees the red fan of the partridge as it flies and the hunter standing with his horn and his gun. One feels lonely and free in the vast space of Castile, and the few roads suggest long, monotonous journeys. The eye picks up the green of the rare acacias or poplars which mark the metalled roads. On some mule track we mark the figure of some peasant riding away on a mule: miles between that figure and ourselves—who is he? What is the solitary insect thinking? What peasant with skin incised by wind and sun? We become absorbed, in these dawdling hours, in the task of overtaking a man who would greet one openly, talk in a pure, almost Biblical tongue, and who will speak his business straight out and expect to hear all yours.
“Good day. I am going to Santa X with this corn. I am from that village. There I have my family, my so many brothers, my so many sisters. Where do you come from? What country, what village? Where is England? Is that in France? Are you married? How many children have you? If you have, good; if you have not, bad. God has not granted them. What is your employment? How much do you earn? In your country”—the final deciding question—“is there plenty to eat?” And after that—some string of proverbs, a page of Don Quixote, a page of Sancho Panza. And then that lordly Spanish sentence of farewell and one’s impression that one has been talking as a nobleman to a nobleman—as the Aragonese say, “We are as noble as the King but not as rich.”
The egalitarianism of the Spaniards is not like the citizenship of the French, nor the anonymity of the English or American democracy, where we seek the lowest common denominator and try to hide our distinctions. The Spanish live in castes, but not in classes, and their equality—the only real equality I have met anywhere in the world—is in their sense of nobility or, rather, in the sense of the absolute quality of the person. One will hear this sentence spoken of people living in the lowest wretchedness: “They are noble people.” These words are not especially a compliment, nor do they convey resignation, pity, or regret; they are meant, almost conventionally, to describe the normal condition of man.
If we were to travel with this man on the mule or donkey, we would not see his village until we were right upon it. It is some ruinous, dusty place, the colour of the soil it stands in, and most houses will be of a single storey. Only the fortress wall of its church will stand out, plainly buttressed high above the hut roofs of the village and built to last till the end of the world. It is the spire, the belfry, or the dome of the church that one sees first in the plain, rising inch by inch like a spear or a helmet, and it will give to the mind a lasting sense of a bare, military country, frugal and hard. In the wars of reconquest against the Moors, some of the churches—and cathedrals like Ávila—were built as forts, and of that time it has been said that the Spaniards did not know which they wanted most—the Kingdom of God or their own land. The centre of the village is a square of tottering stone arcades; the mule carts or the occasional lorry stand there. The inn, if there is one, will not be a hotel, nor even a fonda—the Arab word—but perhaps a posada: a place one can ride into with mule or donkey, where one can stable an animal and lie down oneself on a sack of straw, the other side of the stall. There are grand posadas like the Posada de la Sangre of Cervantes, which still exists in Toledo, places of heavily beamed roofs, and of courtyards upon which one may look down from the interior galleries; if the village is small enough there may only be a venta or tavern for the sale of wine and aguardiente. But there will be a ewer of water in the corner of the stone floor with a tin dipper in it, and that is what, in this dusty country, you make for. The water is cold and beautiful. Everyone praises its purity, and the man or woman staring at you with that prolonged and total Spanish stare will tell you soberly that this particular water is famous throughout the world as the best water on earth.
At nine o’clock at night they will ask you what you want to eat.
“What have you got?”
“Whatever the señor wishes.”
And a Dutch auction begins. Meat, alas there isn’t any; chicken, they regret; it comes down in the end to garlic soup and how many “pairs of eggs” can you eat, with a chunk of garlic sausage thrown in? They have “wonderful wine, the finest for miles”—but it turns out to be thin, vinegarish, and watered. The oil is rancid, but the stick fire blazes, the smoke fills the room, and there is war in your stomach that night unless you are used to the crude Spanish fry and to garlic as strong as acetylene. The food might turn out better than this, of course; there might be bacalao, if you can eat dry salted cod; there might be pork off the black pigs; and resinous wine, scraping the top off your tongue, with flavour of the pine cask. They might catch and kill that screeching chicken in the yard or give you goat cheese and the close white bread which has come in again after the years of war and starvation. But good or bad, full or meagre, the meal will not be squalid or sluttish. There will be a piety and honourableness about it, no scrambling round the trough. The woman’s hard voice will command the room and one will break one’s bread with the dignity of a lean person who speaks of other things. “We give what we have”—not the “you eat the official portion which you’re given or go without” of our sour democracies. They still—even after the Civil War, in which so much of Spanish custom died—turn to their neighbour before they eat and say: “Would you like this?” and even lift the plate.
“Please enjoy it yourself,” is the reply.
Being so noble, they could (they convey) do without food altogether; or like the penniless starving lord in the picaresque tale of Lazarillo de Tormes, send in the starving servant to say: “Thank you, we have eaten already.” Sober, frugal, austere is the Castilian living in these small towns that look like heaps of broken pottery in the plain.
Desert, cornland, wilderness of rock, mountains blade-sharp and bare, miles of umbrella pine near Valladolid, vines and white-walled towns south of the mountains, and richer oases of green: so are the two Castiles. A place of great castles visible for tens of miles, and a hard look of war upon a great deal of it. Spain is changing on top. The peasants are leaving the land, the population is multiplying, the cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Granada, are doubling their size, and enormous, generally ugly, buildings are going up, turning Madrid and Valencia into suburbs of South America. The old Spain of the night watchmen who called out the hours through the night in towns like Ávila and Buitrago; of the scarlet-lined velvet cloak in Madrid and the scarlet uniforms, the portero with his lamp and javelin, the lover spread like a butterfly against the iron grille—all these have almost gone in the last twenty years. There has been a revolution. Certain things do not change. Castile has not ceased to be the unifying, the dominating force in the peninsula, the centre that holds the disparate parts together. What has Castile held together? The whole of Spain. It has forged the greatness of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it has created the dominant Spanish character; it has written out in life the whole of the Spanish glory and the Spanish tragedy, what is superb and what is abominable in them. And Castile has created worlds outside of Spain. If Spain strikes the traveller as an exhausted country when he considers its political power or its institutions, a place where the vitality has been drained away from its public life and has flowed back into the people themselves, it is exhausted because it is one of the great mother countries in Europe, a founder of nations in the New World. Only the British have made a comparable expense of energy in the founding of nations, in the imposing of an order and a peace beyond themselves. The Spaniards and the British—and also the Portuguese—have far exceeded the French or the Dutch of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the short rev
olutionary aggression of France in Napoleonic times, in the pouring out of their vitality.
Thirty-one miles north-west of Madrid, on a platform of the mountains three thousand feet up, stands the royal monastery, palace, and burial house of the Escorial, the supreme architectural symbol of Castilian ambition and its tragedy. The eye comes suddenly upon the monotonous prison-like façade, and the first pleasure which the sight of gravity and order give us, as they break the wild mountain scene and the grim wilderness of pine and boulder, quickly gives way to awe and melancholy before the cold statement of military power and the governing will. Built from the bluish granite of these mountains, so that it seems to be a projection of them, and coldly slated, the sombre establishment is one of the overstatements of the Castilian genius. Its thousands of windows stare and blink in the mountain light.
The Spanish genius is for excess, for excesses of austerity as well as excesses of sensual decoration. The soldier architect of the Escorial and the King, half-monk, half-bureaucrat, who built it, disdained the sunlight of the Renaissance and built their tomb in the shadow of the wild mountains and in the hard military spirit of the Counter-Reform. The Escorial is the mausoleum of Spanish power.
So it must seem to the foreign traveller, and most have been chilled if they have not been appalled by the sombreness of the place. To go there in the sharp Castilian winter when the snow is piled in the streets of the village and lids every one of the innumerable sills of the palace with white; to go when the wind bites, and when the halls, refectories, and chapels are dark, takes the heart out of the European. In the summer, when one gets out of the heat of the plain, the pine woods are cool and gracious and the palace is then grateful to the eye. The village has indeed become a week-end resort.
Yet calm, repose, or even that resignation which is exquisite to those who have learned obedience, are not suggested by the outward aspect of the Escorial. Outwardly it displays the platitudes of great power and, inside, though there are dignity and beautiful things, we are haunted by the melancholy of the founder, his morbidity, and the tragic quality of his faith and of his defeat. Here Philip II is said to have boasted that he ruled an empire from two inches of paper; here, like some bureaucrat, he tried to do all the work of the state, delegating nothing, devoid of the imagination or the gifts of his father, the Emperor—the prototype of the inadequate son who has been left an estate too large for him.
What were the estates that Philip II inherited from his father, the Emperor Charles V, who had come in with his crowds of Flemings to rule the country? There were the kingdoms of Sicily and Sardinia and Naples. There was Holland under the Spanish jackboot, brutalized by the Duke of Alba, ruled by the Inquisition. There was land in Africa and Northern Italy; and there were the Indies, which Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro had added a century before. The largest empire on earth since the time of the Romans was the possession of the melancholy, uncertain, and mistrustful King who looked out of the windows of the Escorial and saw in his lifetime the beginnings of the Spanish disaster—the estate too great to manage, the stupendous act of will which cannot, in itself, sustain a nation for very long.
The Escorial is the oppressive monument to the first totalitarian state of Europe, for what distinguishes Spain in its short period of world power is its attempt to impose an idea upon the mind and soul of its own people and the people it conquered, completely.
“He saw the deaths of almost all those whom he loved well, parents, children, wives, favourites, ministers, and servants of great importance”; Azorín quotes from Baltasar Porreño in Una Hora de España. “Great losses in the matter of his estates, bearing all these blows and trials with an equality of soul which astonished the world.”
The Spanish effort to impose the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, to be the apostles and soldiers of the only truly reformed Catholic faith, to rule in that name, and to prevent by exhaustive means every deviation, was a continuation in Europe of over six hundred years of war against the Moorish occupation. Spain has lived for long periods of its history in a condition of passive or active civil war, and behind the rubber stamp of the Escorial lies a history of a country struggling against its own natural anarchy. No Roman conception of law or citizenship, no Napoleonic notion of worldly glory and order, no English feeling that the self-interest of the individual must make a manage de convenance with the self-interest of society, was strong enough in the Spaniards to control their natural anarchism—how much this simultaneous tendency to anarchism and despotism is a racial inheritance from the uncontrollable Iberians, and how far it has been formed in the long struggle with the Moors, no one can say. Their wars against the Moors encouraged the Spaniards to consider that they were cast for the part of the saviour who arises at great crises in history: they saved Europe from Islam, they spent themselves completely and forged themselves completely in this struggle. There was a psychological justice in it, too, for of all the European peoples the Spaniards—as descendants of the Iberians—were closest to the Moors they fought against.
The dark-skinned Berbers who crossed the straits of Gibraltar in 710 were barbarians, but, as wave followed wave in the following centuries, they built their own civilization in the rich lands and kind climate of Andalusia. They were conquerors—and it is now thought relatively few in number—whose aim was to exploit the Spaniards, not to assimilate them. Though many Spaniards became Mozarabs—or half Arabs—they were in the main treated as barbarians and they were disdainfully permitted to retain their religion and their customs. They were even allowed, in many places, to practise the Christian religion in the churches that had been turned into mosques. In some, the Jew worshipped Jehovah, the Moor Mahomet, and the Christian Christ, side by side. As the reconquest of Spain from the Moors gradually took place in centuries of continual guerrilla warfare, and in raids that grew into periodical campaigns, it was aided by the fact that Christianity had been allowed to exist in the Moorish territories. To the Spaniards, the war became religious before everything else, and by the time of the final conquest at the fall of Granada in the fifteenth century, the Spaniards knew themselves to be more Catholic than the semi-pagan Popes.
Six hundred years of foreign occupation and the wars against it had brought into existence three groups of people: the enemy, the conquerors, and those who had by force or in self-protection taken the colour of whatever side had become dominant in their region. There were Christians who became Moslem converts, there were Moslems who became Christian converts. There was the special category of the Jews. In their sense of crusade, in their drive for unity, the Spaniards began to imagine the internal enemy, the fifth-columnist or secret party man. The more they proclaimed unity, the more they suspected its absence. Purity of doctrine and of blood became an absolute demand. Was the Christianized Arab really Christian? Was the Jewish convert really a secret Jew? And especially the Jew was suspect because, following his earlier persecution in Spain, he had sided with the Arabs and aided them in the conquest.
The Inquisition was the instrument by which the Spaniards sought to stamp out the doubtful and especially the Jews. They were deported from Spain in 1492 after years of violent pogrom.
The institutions of a world power like Spain are inevitably blackened by those who eventually break that power. Spanish absolutism, Spanish dominion, and its instruments were the natural enemies of the English and the French and certainly of all Protestant peoples. “The black legend” of Spanish fanaticism, cruelty, and rapid decadence is, to some small extent, the propaganda of the successful Protestant states. The Inquisition has become a byword in the world for the trial where there are no named accusers and no precise charges, and where confession is “spontaneous,” where indeed confession is the only possible end; no question of guilt or innocence arises. It is the infamous model of all ideological tribunals. The Inquisition was the arch-destroyer of the free-minded, for though it began as a hunter-out of papistical traitors and false converts, it ended as a party instrument, so that—to ho
stile historians—the intellectual life of Spain was nipped off at every point when it could have flowered. No comparable institution outside of Spain was so intellectually relentless. The apologists of the Inquisition say that its terror and its burnings and imprisonments for heresy have been exaggerated. The Spaniards themselves do not seem to have thought there was anything abominable in it and many have held that it preserved Spain from the witch-burnings and religious massacres of western Europe and was no worse, in the use of tortures and secrecy, than other tribunals of the period. Obviously the Holy Office had no immediate effect on the intellectual life of the nation, for the golden age of Spanish greatness in literature and the arts, as well as in political power, corresponded to the height of the Inquisition’s authority. But the Inquisition was more papist than the Pope, and its corruption was an insidious social evil—”every sentence of death or imprisonment“ carried with it the confiscation of goods which passed into the royal exchequer, the historian Altamira tells us, “but as part of them were paid to the functionaries of the Inquisition, they came, in practice, to be ceded to them as remuneration and this gave rise to great abuses.” And the rigour of the oppression, this reliable historian pointed out, was very great at first. In the first auto de je at Seville, he says, ten persons were condemned to death at the stake; “and, according to a contemporary, in the course of eight years 700 people suffered this fate and 5,000 were condemned to prison and other punishments.” In Ávila, between 1490 and 1500, more than 113 persons were burnt. In one auto de fe alone, at Toledo, 1,200 accused appeared. In another, 750.
The Spanish Temper Page 4