It is argued by the apologists of the Inquisition that, at any rate, it saved Spain from the slaughters of the religious wars in Europe; but Spain had been conducting what was essentially a religious war for centuries within its own borders and in Holland. How can historians weigh up these deaths in the balance? There is not the evidence available.
We can only repeat that the vigour of the Spaniards was exhausted in the pursuit of unity and religion, and they had no regard for the price. In expelling the Jews in the name of the purity of the faith and nation, the Spaniards performed a characteristic act of quixotry and idealism. They banished the practical and rational elements in the country. A million and a half settled people were replaced, Marcu says in The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, by 300,000 adventurers who poured into the country to exploit it. Lacking the Jewish advisers and bankers who had held high office, the Spaniards fell into the hands of a foreign race famous for their avarice: the bankers of Genoa. The Genoese administered the estates of the grandees who had before employed converted Jews as their agents, and the Genoese did not keep their wealth in the country as the Jews had done, but sent it out. Marcu quotes a Spaniard of the period as saying: “Three hundred and sixty thousand foreigners in Castile have completely driven the Spaniards out of trade … without them we are unable to clothe ourselves, for without them we have neither linen nor cloth, without them we are unable to write, for we have no paper.” The Spaniards who had become, by centuries of war, the knights of the new order and the purified faith, the superb conquistadors who founded the nations of America, had by a tragic retribution unfitted themselves for the rational tasks of civilization. They could conquer, win treasure, keep the faith, but not work. The humanism of the Renaissance had seemed weakness to them, the rebellion of the Reformation had seemed impiety—though it resembled their own effort to reform a pagan Church. They fought to preserve, and for a long time successfully preserved, the spirit of the Middle Ages. It was their triumph, their distinction, and their tragedy.
The Escorial is the tombstone of an achievement. It was in this mortuary that Philip II heard the news of the defeat of the Armada, which marked the end of his total power, and the end of an epoch in the history of the world. It was from the Escorial that this envious, suspicious, and cultivated man chose his leaders, as if to spite them. The Duke of Medina Sidonia had protested, when he was given command of the Armada, that he had no experience of the sea. It was from the Escorial that Philip, though the theologians had asked him to allow religious freedom in Flanders, had insisted that he would not dishouour God by ruling over heretics and that they must be exterminated; and fearing, every year more, the contagion of foreign ideas and the sin they would contain, closed the universities. In his book The Spaniards in Their History, the historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal says that Philip used means out of all proportion to the need, in his steps to preserve Spanish unity:
In the early years of his reign in 1558, Philip II prohibited under penalty of death and confiscation, the importation and publication of books without a licence from the State Council, lest those books might contain heresies, new-fangled notions against the faith, or “vain matters,” that might give evil example. Let us note how the penalty had increased, for in 1502 it only consisted in a fine and disqualification. In the following year, 1559, Philip II also disqualified Spaniards from studying abroad, except at Rome, Naples or Coimbra, or the Spanish college at Bologna. He gave two reasons for these restrictions: first because Spanish universities “are daily diminishing and in bankruptcy,” that is to say he took the absence of the students as a cause, whereas it was only an effect of the bad state in which the Spanish universities found themselves. The second reason was that the intercourse with foreigners involved the students in extravagance, dangers, and distractions. And so as he did not find in the world any universities free from dangers except those at home or practically at home, he closed the doors and windows of the decayed Spanish schools so that the inmates might breathe nothing but their own confined air.
What is so hard to realize is that, to Spaniards, this policy of negation must have seemed positive, progressive, and the very expression of Spanish enlightenment at the height of its power. It was an assertion on the part of the richest, most powerful and vital country in the world of the sacredness and superiority of “the Spanish way of life.” To ourselves, the heirs of liberal civilization, the policy of Philip appears as the irrevocable step backward. If Philip heard the news of the defeat of the Armada at the Escorial, his people were already creating a great empire overseas. It was the exhaustion of their impulse, rather than anything we can moralize about, that was fatal. It is only peoples (we reflect) who lack deep unity who will put such fatal emphasis upon it and who will corrupt the idea of unity and make it uniformity; and when we turn from the Spanish idea to the Spanish reality, as far as we can pick it up from commentators of the time, we see the anarchy in which Spain really lived. Azorin in An Hour of Spain quotes the historian Cánovas del Castillo:
But in accepting this unity, each district remained as it was, with unchanged customs, with its own character, its own laws, its traditions, varying or opposed. Nor was even the footing of all the states equal: there were some of more or less noble standing, more or less privileged; some free, and some almost enslaved; for the Union had been carried out with very diverse motives, some districts coming into it voluntarily, as the Vascongadas claim to have done; others through matrimony, like Castile and León, Aragón and Catalonia; some through force of arms like Valencia and Granada, still populated by Moors; some half by way of justice, half by force, such as Navarre. And not only so, but even within the province every town had its code, every class its law. In this way Spain represented a chaos of rights and obligations, of customs, privileges, and exemptions, easier to conceive than to analyse or reduce to order.
“The perpetual tumult of opposing passions,” says Azorin—that is Spanish history. Confederations, tribunals, committees. Cities rebel, juntas are formed, the fever spreads, the government is cut off. Citizen militias were created by the parties in the nineteenth century, as they had been in the time of the Catholic kings. The ashen façade of the Escorial, its bureaucratic frown, its appearance as of an infantry regiment drawn up in stone in the mountains, is the sign of an attempt to meet individualism, anarchism, and chaos by an iron and absolute power. Between the extremes the Spanish character swings.
The Castilians, indeed the Spaniards generally, one might say, are people who are one thing or the other, black or white, as if there were a failure to connect between their senses and their intelligence. They are fatalists, yet they swing to the belief in free-will; that is, they are resigned to the law that is imposed on them or they reject it, suffer it, or combat it—nothing in between. Conquered they are fatalistic; victorious they are for extreme free-will. They have the bull’s indolence, the bull’s total courage and blindness in the charge. They are equal because they are comrades in arms. Their loyalty is to the chief. He is absolute and he rules by ordinance and pronunciamiento. These declarations stamp them, integrate them, pull them together, have the authority of a military order—and then, like old soldiers, they have their escape in the famous Spanish saying: “Se obedece, pero no se cumple”—“We obey the order, but we do not fulfil it or carry it out.”
The Romans described the Spaniards as people adapted for abstinence and toil, for hard and rigid sobriety, a heedlessness of comfort, as indeed may be seen in their houses. They are born disciples of Seneca, natural stoics who bear and forbear.
“This shows itself,” says Menéndez Pidal, “in the general tenor of their life, with its simplicity, dignity even in the humblest classes, and strong family ties. The Spanish people preserve these deep natural qualities unimpaired as a kind of human reserve, whereas other races who are more tainted by the luxuries of civilization find themselves constantly threatened by a process of wear and tear which saps their strength.”
The Spaniards resist th
e pressure, this writer says, of material necessity, and he contrasts Columbus, the Genoese, the calculator and procrastinator who postponed his voyage until he had secured the promise of enormous rewards, with the “host of Spanish explorers despising material advantage,” who went recklessly forward gambling on their gains. The Spaniard is arrogant and self-confident, despises the patient following-up of activity, despises foresight. In the Escorial, Philip II solved the cost of the wars of the Counter-Reformation by borrowing from the Genoese bankers, never made allocations from one year to the next, and lived for the day, meeting each difficulty as it came along.
The Escorial is a monastery, the house of the dead God who hangs on the Cross or lies on the earth beside it. The sense of martyrdom and death can hardly have been more starkly conveyed by any edifice. It is a stone statement of the end. In it is the mausoleum of the Spanish kings, a chamber for the caskets of the monarchs, a chamber for the caskets of the princes, and empty caskets awaiting those yet to die. The new king in the days of the monarchy saw his future resting-place. To the traveller, Philip II has seemed the horrifying personification of a death morbidly longed for. One sees the couch brought down to the corner from which he could gaze every day at the high altar, a shrivelled bald man with all the crimes of a great empire on his head, a man now covered with ulcers, swollen in arms and legs by gout, rotting with gangrene. Few people attended him, for few indeed could stand the stench.
“I had meant to spare you this scene,” he said after he had taken the sacrament, “but I wish you to see how the monarchies of the earth end.”
One walks out into the peace of the little town of the Escorial and smells the thyme and the lavender of the buzzing wilderness; one meets again the immense Spanish light. One will never be able to take that clarity for granted, for it is a material presence in itself. Light, which in the north is thought of as something relative, as an arrangement of varying degrees of shadow, a changing and filtering of colour, and which has no definition, is here positive and absolute. In the hot weather the tableland is like some lake or sea on fire; in the cold weather the light goes up higher than any light we know and transmits the sight to distances our eyes are not accustomed to. Above all, since it brings so much more of the world to our eyes, it has the effect of a tremendous accession of the sense of life. Here most earthily and most powerfully one feels oneself alive. Yet here one is confronted (and above all at the Escorial) with the Spanish preoccupation with death. No other race in Europe has this consuming preoccupation; where it has appeared in the German culture or in the addicts of the funerary urn and the skull in the English seventeenth century, it has been a passing mood. In Spanish life and art the preoccupation is continuous. ¡Viva la muerte! was the slogan of the Falangists in the Civil War, and bloody pictures of the death of Manolete, the bullfighter, may be seen in the bars off the Puerta del Sol. The popular signs of the cult of death are as noticeable as the more sumptuous. One recalls the black-plumed horses of the ornate death coaches that move up the Castellana in the Madrid winter, the balconies and doorways hung with black cloths and sashes, the houses that are sombrely decorated for a period of mourning, not for the mere day of the funeral alone. Death, too, is a fiesta. In this cult no doubt some of the Spanish love of state and pomp and spectacle has its part. What contemporary foreigners could not but observe in the autos de fe was the solemnity of the occasion: the whole pomp of court and state displayed in person at the burnings. In Spanish painting and sculpture the theme of death is treated again and again by every artist. The gloom of the mortuary, the luxury of a lying-in-state, is their favourite subject. The preoccupation is common in Catholic art, but no Catholic artists in other countries have had so exclusive a passion; it appears also in non-religious painting. Goya’s pictures of the terror and madness of war owe their dramatic force not only to the carnal realism, but to the sense of the life-and-death struggle, to the sense of life corroded at the height of its contest by mortal decay. In how many ways (Goya seems to have asked himself) can human beings be shown meeting their death? In Toledo, in the Church of San Tomé, we shall find the supreme expression of this emotion; in El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz1. It is contemporary with Philip II. The body is lowered into the grave, the grandees of Spain stand stiffly by. They are literal portraits of a ruling caste, proud, ascetic in appearance, their minds turned away from this world in a satisfied contemplation of the next; and some have seen in this picture the idea of the living death of a caste, the suggestion of a racial suicide. They will rule in the Kingdom of God; we must neglect this life and hunger for death and the life to come.
Some writers have seen a mystical conjunction of voluptuousness and death in the nature of Spaniards. To Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life, the human tragedy was a passion: the sensual man of flesh and bone is born and will die, but there is planted in his mind the desire for immortality. In every moment of his life, he is living out this intense and dramatic agony. The sense of death is a continuous presence, as a fact and not as the shadow of a fear, and is therefore as intense as the sense of life. Man—for this Spanish egotist—must live out his life in absolute terms. Once more (one reflects) the preoccupation with death shows us the Spanish desire to see everything and live everything in black and white. Like Tolstoy, the Spanish egotist cries out: “What is Truth if a man dies?” But Tolstoy expected an answer; the Spaniard does not.
The foreigner need not think the strangeness of Spanish life has deceived him on this point. Menéndez Pidal directs us to the writings of Jorge Manrique, a Knight of the Order of Santiago in the fifteenth century, who describes three phases of life: the temporal life of the body, the life of fame, which is more enduring, and then eternal life, which is the crown.
“Now, these two lives after death,” Menéndez Pidal says, “are as consciously felt by the Spaniard today as in the past, and so intense is his awareness that it contrasts with the attitude of neighbouring races…. The thought of death, which is thirst for immortality, is the profound concern of the Spanish people.”
It is the individualist’s thirst for a freedom that is absolute.
Chapter III
We have gone on too fast. Back over the Guadarrama mountains the long-horned oxen graze in the scrub, those oxen whom the peasant guides not by a fierce stab of the goad in the Basque fashion, but by a gentle touch from the tip of his stick. The deep ox-bell and the small tinkle of the goat-bells are the sounds of the silent Guadarrama. One climbs through miles of pine shade where the lizards run; in the spring one sees patches of tiny daffodils, and will step across the sinister processions of caterpillars as fat as one’s finger, that crawl head to tail in strings a quarter of a mile long. Wild dogs and wolves are sometimes met in these savage mountains. Over the top one descends to Ávila in its wilderness of rock. So gigantic and strange are the up-ended boulders of this wilderness, so thick the scrub where the large red Spanish partridge flies, that the eye at first misses the town which Philip II loved, where Torquemada has his tomb and where Santa Teresa was born. Then presently one’s eye catches the perfect ring of mediaeval towers and battlements which still contain the greater part of the town. They are like a great crown of granite in the wilderness and stand up against the hard violet wall of the Guadarrama and the Gredos mountains. Cold for half the year, burned by the sun in the terrible Castilian summer, Ávila is a plateau town, four thousand feet above the sea.
The spirit of Castile is austere, frugal, and inhibited. It is puritan and grave. The greatness of Ávila is in the sixteenth century; after that, it is the old story of sudden disastrous decline until now it is a lifeless provincial place. At Mass one stands in one of the packed churches and will hear the priest rattle off, in that loud, nasal, disparaging hurry of the Spanish clergy, a sort of guidebook lecture on the journeys of Santa Teresa. The glory has been reduced to a mechanical repetition, suited to dull people. In his reminiscences, Places and People (London: Constable & Co. Ltd.; 1944), Santayana has described what life
was like in the late nineteenth century, when he was a child there, and later when he was a grown man, in the twentieth:
The place in my time was in part ruinous and neglected, reduced to 6000 inhabitants from the 30,000 it is said to have had in its day. Almost half the area that slopes down to the river from what might be called the upper town was deserted within its circle of battlements and towers; then appeared heaps of rubbish, a few nondescript huts, and some enclosures where occasional stray pigs and poultry might be encountered. Even in the upper part many old mansions and chapels were closed; sometimes only the great door, with a wrought iron balcony over it, attested their ancient dignity. Yet dignity was not absent from the good people that remained, leading a simple, serious, monotonous provincial life, narrowed by poverty and overhung more obviously than busier places seem to be by the shadow of illness, sorrow and death. Almost all the women appeared to be in mourning and the older men also: people were simply resigned to the realities of mother nature and of human nature; and in its simplicity their existence was deeply civilized, not by modern conveniences but by moral tradition. “It’s the custom,” they would explain half apologetically, half proudly to the stranger when any little ceremony or courtesy was mentioned peculiar to the place. If things were not the custom, what reason could there be for doing them?
The Spanish Temper Page 5
