I talked about the destruction of Poblet to the custodian there. At one moment he was saying how rich Poblet used to be, and the next, referring to the attacks on the priests and the burning of churches in the Civil War, he sighed piously and said:
“What wrong have the priests done, these good men? The mob, in its blindness, always attacks the innocent.”
Innocence is a word one could certainly use to describe the humbler priesthood; but it is not a word one can apply to the Party—whether it is ripe and mediaeval or raw and modern. The authority of the Church in Spain has passed out of the spiritual life into the social, political, and temporal. There one meets the packed committee, the Party nominees, the infiltrations of the members of Opus Dei who work, exactly in communist fashion, to frustrate professional groups. It is impossible for a foreigner to state or judge the extent of the struggle: the liberty of the press has gone, and it is as impossible to publish an anticlerical view, or one hostile to the view of the Church on any matter in Spain, as it would be to advocate private capitalism or non-official views in Russia.
One is bound to digress, in this fashion, when one is looking at Spanish architecture and art, for at its highest it is ideological and restrictive. How restrictive, how violently anti-humanist, one can see when one compares any example of it with the supreme genius of the Italians. Yet when one looks at Spanish painting and sculpture of the great masters, one is moved by an intense and individual quality, some strong and native strain which will not: be found elsewhere. It is a quality of mind and temperament; a large part of it can be called dramatic psychological realism. I have known hundreds of Spaniards in all classes, and it has never seemed to me that they were, on the whole, very imaginative people, for their powerful egotism has been of the kind that cannot put itself in another creature’s place or transcend its own personality. One is told, by Spanish writers, that Spaniards day-dream very little. Race and climate have, however, turned them into brilliant intellectual observers, more penetrating than affective or sympathetic. No aspect of real life repels or shakes them. They are subtle psychologists, though not to the point of speculation. Above all, they see the mind in the body, and the spiritual world is the physical world for them: the sanctity of the saint is to be seen in his literal wounds, his sick body. To Santa Teresa the soul is a garden. The love of the soul for the divine spouse is indistinguishable, in its phases, from earthly desire; because of the process of transference, her apprehension of love is sharper and more exact. French writers have also been superb psychologists, but, in their case, they have worked within the abstract frame of a general idea: hatred is this, avarice is the other, love and anger are yet other intellectual concepts. Such intellectual concepts are lacking in the Spaniards, who look to a personal statement first. There is no ideal love, there is no abstract love; if they lay down an absolute towards which we toil, it will be in human terms—the love of the divine spouse, the love of the Virgin. And so, as psychologists, they excel in the photographic portraiture of psychological action. For them, in other words, any state of the soul is a state of observable drama. Spanish realism is bold, minute, unafraid, carnal, and limited to itself.
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 mainly 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 Velásquez’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 Velásquez, 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 Velásquez. 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 Goy
a 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-minded-ness, 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, for 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; their 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 latest 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.
After midnight in Madrid, when one has just finished dinner one goes off into those packed, narrow streets lying off the Puerta del Sol in the middle of the city. They are streets of small bars crowded with men roaring away at each other, drinking their small glasses of beer or wine, tearing shellfish to bits and scattering their refuse and the sugar-papers of their coffee on the floors. The walls are tiled and in gaudy colours. The head of a bull will hang there, or some bloody painting of a scene at the bullfight. Through the door at the back of the bar one makes one’s way into a private room, tiled again, like a bathhouse, and furnished only with a table and a dozen chairs. There one can invite a guitarist and singers and listen to cante flamenco.
Less respectably, one can find some cellar in the same quarter, some thieves’ kitchen which will probably be closed by the police in a week or two, and there one may hear cante flamenco and, even better, the true cante hondo, or deep song, brought up in the last thirty years from the south, and sung not for the traveller’s special entertainment but, as it were, privately, for the singer’s own consolation. For, despite its howling, it is also an intimate music, perhaps for a singer and a couple of friends only. It can be sung in a mere whisper. The dirty room, lit by one weak and naked electric-light bulb, is full of wretched, ill-looking men; the proprietor wanders round with a bottle of white wine in his hand filling up glasses. In one corner four men are sitting, with their heads close together, and one notices that one of them is strumming quietly on the table and another is murmuring to himself, occasionally glancing up at his friends, who gravely nod. The finger strumming increases and at last the murmurer breaks into one low word, singing it under the breath in the falsetto voice of the gypsies. “Ay,” he sings. Or “Leli, Leli,” prolonging the note like a drawn-out sigh, and when he stops, the strumming of the fingers becomes more rapid, building up emotion and tension and obsession, until at last the low voice cries out a few words that are like an exclamation suddenly coming from some unknown person in the dark. What are the words? They are difficult to understand because the gypsies and, indeed, the Andalusians, drop so many consonants from their words that the speech sounds like a mouthful of small pebbles rubbed against one another:
Cada vez que considero
Que me tengo que mori
the voice declaims:
“Whenever I remember that I must die—”
wavering on its words and then suddenly ending; and the strumming begins again until the rapid climax of the song,
Tiendo la capa en el suelo
Y me jarto de dormi
“I spread my cloak on the ground
And fling myself to sleep.”
The manners of the thieves’ kitchen are correct and unmarred by familiarity. A yellow-haired and drunken prostitute may be annoying a man by rumpling his hair, but otherwise the dejected customers at three in the morning are sober. One night, in a place like this in the middle of Madrid, we sat next to one of these private artists who was murmuring away to his friends. When we nodded our admiration to the whispering singer, he sang a polite love song of delightful conceit to the lady in our party and asked afterwards for “the loan of a cigarette until next Thursday.” He became obviously impatient of a gypsy singer and guitarist who had smelt us out. He objected, on the usual Spanish grounds, that the young singer—who also danced—was not keeping to the rigid requirements of his art, and was introducing unclassical extravagance and stunts in order to show off to foreigners. The criticism was audible. The gypsy, egged on by criticism, scornfully tried to surpass himself. He had a weak chest and was inclined to be wild and raucous on his top notes, but he was not bad. Finding himself still mocked
by the quiet man in the corner, the gypsy decided to silence him by a crushing performance, which meant a display of whirling fury. He moved one or two chairs, to make room to dance in: the customers murmured at this move. They were prepared to put up with it and hold their hand. But when the gypsy started taking off his jacket—the supreme symbol of male respectability in Spain—there was that alarming and general shout of “¡Eso no!”—”None of that!”—from everyone in the room, and half the men stood up. The proprietor rushed out at him. The gypsy put back his jacket. He knew he had gone too far.
The Spanish Temper Page 9
