Santayana did not believe that the people of Ávila had, at bottom, very much respect for their conventions or even their religion. Yet by bowing to custom, he says, their want “could preserve its dignity.” It is that quality, uncommon in freer civilizations, that attracts us to the Spaniards.
The smell of Ávila is the aromatic smell of the wilderness which comes into every street, the reek of frying oil, or the cold sour smell of polish and charcoal in its stone doorways, of urine and excrement in the ruins, of the black pigs driven in at the great stone gates in the evening.
But the sense of being in a fortress—if nowadays only a fortress against sun and wind—is dominant in Ávila, for the walls are so strong and have lasted. As always, it is driven home to one that the Spaniards are the great builders of Europe, the true heirs of the Romans. No place brings home so dramatically the fact of the nearness of war to the men and women of the golden age. What—with our hindsight—we can see as the disastrous triumph of reaction, to them was the crest of positive and expansive action. When Santa Teresa was born, in 1515, Ávila was a place of fifteen churches. Her family’s house was in the Jewish quarter of the town—a new biographer has suggested there may have been Jewish blood in the family—and, only twenty-three years before, the nation had enthusiastically and confidently expelled the Jews from Spain. She must have heard that Jews had been burned just outside the town by Torquemada’s orders; her father’s family had fought against the Moors, and for a generation after the final defeat of the Moors in Granada, in 1492, all Spaniards feared a new invasion from Africa as an act of revenge. When the people of Ávila feared for the Christian religion, they saw in their mind’s eye physical enemies. The Jew and the morisco might be the traitor burrowing from within. But the fear was not defensive, it had an aggressive, idealistic, and reforming spirit. Yet to reform was dangerous. Were the Protestants not reformers? Was not the Inquisition there to question every act, to test its ideological purity? In all the Spanish lives of that time one sees the war of the spirit, with its open and its secret battles, succeeding the victories of physical warfare. And in her own lifetime Santa Teresa must have seen the fatal decline. Those empty Jewish and Moorish houses must have already indicated the disaster in work, craftsmanship, and trade. Over 11,000 Jews it is said left Ávila in 1492, though perhaps that figure refers to the province, not the town. If the town, it must have meant not much under half the population. Whether for province or town, the disturbance caused to economic life must have been violent.
Philip II, Saint Ignatius Loyola, Cervantes, they are all soldiers—and their lives run with Santa Teresa’s. Santa Teresa herself wished for the liberty of a man, and longed to go off as her brothers had done to the new conquest of America. She told her nuns to regard themselves as soldiers. The interesting thing is the effect of the romances of chivalry upon the ruler and the two saints. When he wrote Don Quixote, Cervantes was not mocking some bookish old gentleman with eccentric literary habits. Don Quixote was reading what everyone who could read did read. The chivalry he described, praising its nobility and mocking its pedantries and magical wonders, was out of date, yet it occupied the common imagination. Santa Teresa read the romances eagerly when she was a child, and they roused the desire for brave action in her; Loyola read them at the time of the crisis of his life. We can say that these two lives were an adaptation of the romance of chivalry to practical use. Many writers have perceived the analogy between the Spanish resurgence at the time of the Counter-Reformation and the tragedy of Don Quixote, and, indeed, his book has been called, rather wildly, the book that killed a nation. When Cervantes came home, maimed at the Battle of Lepanto, and from his prison in Algiers, he too was a man who had made the knightly effort and who experienced the disillusion. The deeply sceptical Spanish spirit in that book arrives at its scepticism only after the plunge into intense experience. There can be no Sancho Panza unless Don Quixote goes out into the world of shadows. I do not mean that Don Quixote is conscious allegory, for it goes far beyond the Spanish situation in its time; it goes into the tragedy of the human imagination, carries it from the noble to the absurd, from the fantastic to the twilight of madness.
The great period of Mount Carmel, the religious house of Santa Teresa, was brief; less than a decade. What has survived is Santa Teresa herself: a woman gracious, positive, practical, and sober, not very imaginative, but of delightful poetic intuition. It is a character that survives. With Loyola the case is very different. From Luther, the Reformation; from Loyola, the Counter-Reformation, the Society of Jesus, and the Jesuit victory at the Council of Trent. From Luther the sectaries and their freedom, from Loyola the new ubiquitous commissars of totalitarian religion, the great explorers, the educators, powerful and mistrusted. To Teresa the soul was a garden; there was the will to purify but not the will to great power.
Jesuitism is European, the fruit first of Loyola’s journeys outside of Spain; then of the transformation of his teachings by the Italian Jesuits, who introduced Machiavelli’s doctrines into religious strategy. Machia-velli’s error, they said, was in conceiving the political Prince; the only proper application was to religion—that is, to the greater glory of God.
Loyola belongs to the earlier, heroic and chivalrous time: well-born, first a page at court and then a handsome soldier and gallant, proud of his effect on women, brave in fight, and rich. He also added to these qualities subtlety and astuteness. The decisive crisis of his life occurred in battle. Both legs were broken by a missile in the siege of Pamplona, and he was left a cripple. This was a terrible blow to the great vanity he had in his physical appearance. He was tortured by the thought of being ridiculed for his limp, and he had the will and courage to make the surgeons break his legs a second time in order to make the cure complete. It was not, for he still limped, but his vanity was appeased.
For months he lay in bed, idle and dreading the loss of his life of pleasure, his love affairs, and his career as a soldier, and in this period he started to read the popular romances of chivalry. Amadis, the hero of Don Quixote, became his hero too. He also read works of pious biography: The Flowers of the Saints. He has told in his autobiography of how, as he lay powerlessly in bed, he was tortured by the desire for his old life as a lover and soldier, and how gradually—-when he realized this was impossible—he decided to become the soldier of Christ, how the Virgin replaced in his mind the memory of his mistresses. When he was cured, he set off on his horse, giving out that he was going to rejoin his fellows in arms, but in fact privately deciding to go to the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat: not an exceptional decision in those times in Spain, for the army or the priesthood was the only acceptable vocation for men of condition.
On his journey across the mountains of Aragón to Montserrat, Loyola had his famous argument with the Moorish traveller. In the years of tolerance before the reconquest and the expulsion of the Jews, religious disputation had been common between the religionists and had even been formally organized, but the Moor added jokes to his arguments and made fun of the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary. Loyola was a soldier, but he was now on his way to becoming a mystical knight, and he was unable to decide whether or not to kill the Moor for the insult to his Lady. He left the decision to his mule. If the mule took the Moor’s road when the two travellers parted, Loyola would kill the Moor. This prudent hesitation, this cautious looking for the guidance of the world or the pause in which other authority can direct the course, was prophetic of the Jesuit habit of mind and of the disturbing opportunism that appears side by side with the cult of obedience. The mule took the road to the Abbey. At Montserrat, Loyola made his knightly vigil in conscious imitation of Amadis.
Like Luther, like Santa Teresa, like all men in religious crises at that time, Loyola mortified his flesh. By fastings, which lasted a week, by daily scourgings. After his vigil at Montserrat he gave away his rich clothes and dressed himself in some rough garment and went limping to Manresa. This was a mountain village
and he lived in the poor-house there. He punished his vanity by neglecting his hair and letting his nails and his beard grow. He begged in the streets. By prayer, hunger, and self-torture he crushed the memory of his sins. It was at Manresa, where twice he nearly died of the suffering he inflicted upon himself, that the famous, Quixotic episode of the cave of Manresa occurred—one can compare it with the experience of Don Quixote in Montesinos’s cave—in which he saw two knights of Good and Evil fighting in armour for possession of his soul. At Manresa, Loyola wrote his mystical work the spiritual exercises. They were written under the influence of a devout lady of the place. Indeed, Loyola has been accused of plagiarism. He wrote the rules “for overcoming oneself and for regulating one’s life without being swayed by any inordinate attachment.” They aim at the destruction of the imagination and the will, the reduction of the soul to the state of obedient automaton, but in arriving at this result they take the student through a terrible course of shamed self-knowledge and the subtleties of scruple. They give him, if he survives, a capacity and taste for power. Loyola is the great schoolmaster soldier: like Lenin, the great Commissar of his age. Blind obedience to the commander: that has always been the pole that magnetizes the anarchic Spaniard in his moments of energy; when that energy dies, then, “se obedece, pero no se cumple”—the casuistry begins.
Jesuitism is not a Spanish phenomenon; it is European. What is characteristically Spanish was its original military form and the doctrine of obedience to military orders. Many have noted the curious analogy of contemporary Communism: obedience was not possible until a revolution had taken place and Loyola had reformed the Papacy.
The Jesuits [says the Portuguese historian Martins in his History of Iberian Civilization] conceived and carried through the reform of the religion of the people of the South … by modifying the terrible doctrine of Grace, glossing over the rigid rules of the doctrine of the Church, and inventing a tolerant spiritual direction, a lax morality, an easy casuistry, a facile devotion, and the doctrine of probablism. They made a suitable and indulgent religion, and, to make it consistent, entrusted to a methodical and mechanical guidance of the imagination the part which in Protestantism belonged to the voice of conscience and an orderly existence. With the clear vision of genius, the Society discovered the true principle of educating men: to build up a sensuous atmosphere of the imagination which might give birth to ideas, suitably to preface the material in which to mould and fashion thoughts. Protestantism proceeded from the inside to the outside of man. Jesuitism reversed the process. The one was a republic, with the problems of its doctrines treated idealistically, the other was Caesarism with all the practical problems of a religious state.
What is Spanish in Jesuitism is that short period of crisis and intensity in Loyola’s life; and Jesuitism is so Italianate in its inspiration that, after Loyola’s creative outburst, it has little connection with his life.
Chapter IV
Twenty-Five years ago Madrid was a flat Spanish city hardly visible on its cliff above the river Manzanares except as a low line of heavy red roofs. Only the large façade of the Royal Palace disclosed the existence of a city as one approached it. Now skyscrapers and tall white blocks of flats like upended sugar tablets break the horizon and give the city an American appearance from the distance. Large white suburbs have sprung around it, and, like Barcelona, the capital has doubled its population in a generation. Although it is despised by foreigners, who find little of old Spain in it, for Madrid was built in the seventeenth century at the orders of the King, it is an agreeable modern city in the spring and the autumn. Its harsh, wet or snowy, winter climate is hard to bear, and the heat in July and August is intolerable. At this season all who can afford to do so get out of the capital to the mountains or to the north; those who stay resign themselves to very little sleep because of the heat, and the population sits up half the night in the streets.
The Talgo arrives at the right hour—the time of the paseo, when the cafés are packed and the streets are crowded with people in the sacred evening promenade of Spanish life. They have gone to the main streets in the centre of the city, which has become a hive. In some towns at this hour one is drawn by a sustained, dry roar of voices which sounds like the roar of a football match, a bullfight, or a political meeting; but, making one’s way towards it, through streets that are strange because they are empty, one arrives at the Plaza Mayor, or some street where the traffic has been barred, to find most of the population has gathered there by custom, to talk and walk endlessly round and round. The Spaniards have little social life in their houses—though a little social life imitated from Europe does go on among the better off or the very Europeanized; tea parties and cocktail parties are occasionally given by such people; but the majority of Spaniards treat the street as their place of entertainment.
At this hour the women appear and display themselves as if they had walked into a drawing-room. External display is important to Spaniards; they will spend more on their persons than on their houses, in which they easily dispense with the mania for furnishing and interior decoration which possesses northerners, and not entirely because the general standard of wealth is much lower. But in the streets they dress well. Any Spanish crowd, even in the poor districts, is the best-dressed crowd in Europe, but they are rarely elegant or fashionable. They have simply a firm conservative sense of what is fitting, not of what attracts extravagant attention. Only in their jewellery do the Spanish women display extravagance.
There is no chic and there is no sophistication in Spain, not even in Madrid, except when it has obviously been imitated from Paris or brought in and Frenchified by South Americans; one is always struck by the conservative temperament of the people, their love of the purely formal, and even by a national provinciality. They have always kept to their own ways, have always sustained their own genre, and they withdraw, with a sort of disapproving or even positive scorn, from the contagion of other manners. In this they are resolute rather than complacent, homely rather than hostile—perhaps a little snobbish. In their preoccupation with what is “suitable” they resemble the English.
One finds a seat in a café and orders a glass of their iced beer and watches the crowd. One is deafened by their voices and the violent noise of the traffic. In England the general standard of looks is low; one is struck only by the large number of very individual faces which suggest that the English are characters out of Cruikshank’s drawings. In France the standard of looks is not much higher than in England; at any rate in the north of France it is not. The Spaniard level is high; indeed, a certain regularity of feature, boldness of nose, and brilliance of eye appear to have been standardized. The amount of Jewish blood is, one would think, high. This is not as fantastic a generalization as it may sound: the Jewish population, open or hidden, was enormous in Spain and the exodus cannot have excluded its deep racial infiltration altogether. There is a classical Spanish type, grave, dark, sallow, a little heavy sometimes; and there is the small monkeyish type, quick, melancholy, mischievous. The crowd falls into those natural divisions which may be broken by an occasional woman of great beauty or a figure of grotesque ugliness. Only the old, bent, and ill carry themselves badly. Round shoulders are rarely seen. The dry, electric air of the city enlivens these walkers. One has the impression of great natural vitality, undistracted by northern nerves.
Many travellers have noticed what has seemed to them an almost racial difference between Spanish men and women. (The difference is really social: the life of the Spanish male is likely to be more anxious, less fulfilled than the life of the Spanish female. He is encumbered, as the woman is not exclusively, by the condition of Spain, the frustration of the will.) The women of Madrid, as they go by in their twos and threes, and so rarely with a man, have a militant, formal, prim appearance. Sociable and talkative—for all Spaniards love talking for its own sake—they are trained to a double role: they display themselves, they have great personal pride; yet never for one moment do they allow their eyes
to meet the eyes of a man as they walk the street. The decorum is complete and is distinctly Victorian.
The Spanish language is decisive and quick, packed with turns of phrase. What is called “gracia” a gay shrewdness in repartee rather than wit, is always sought. To a foreign ear, the language sounds granular and rapid, rather harsh and unmusical, and this gives a male assertiveness and roughness to the voices of the women. As they walk by, carrying themselves so well, they are rather a collected, rather severe female race. For all this dominant appearance—and they clearly dominate the men by having their role in life firmly marked out and mixed with the male role very little socially—they have the reputation of being homely, innocent, and sensual. They are passionate lovers of children: there is marriage and eight children in their eyes. Yet in the past ten or fifteen years Spain has gone through revolutionary changes, and Spanish girls are experiencing a belated and relative emancipation. One unexpected effect of the Civil War, although it ended with the victory of reactionary forces in religion and politics, is this emancipation of women. In the twenties and thirties, it is true that in educated families there was considerable freedom for women, especially for those who went to the Free or International schools. They could go about a good deal on their own, they took up intellectual careers, they travelled; most revolutionary, they read what they wanted and did not accept the censorship of the priests. (This is far from saying these girls were non-Catholic; they were deeply Catholic, but Spanish notions of what is suitable for girls to read are simple and severe. Spanish literature is barred to them—if they are obedient.) In the reaction that has followed under Franco, it is the fashion to despise the educated generation socially. It is not done to be educated; yet, paradoxically, the young girls now growing up have far more freedom of movement and go to university courses. Some cynical people think that this passion for socially despised education is a scheme for getting out of the house.
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