Virgin Spain

[CONTENTS]
[FOOTNOTES]
[TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE]

VIRGIN SPAIN

by WALDO FRANK

The Unwelcome Man
The Dark Mother
Rahab
City Block
Holiday
Chalk Face

The Art of The Vieux Colombier
Our America
Salvos
Virgin Spain

and Introductions to

Adventures in The Arts, by Marsden Hartley
Cane, by Jean Toomer
The Plays of Molière (Modern Library)
Lucienne, by Jules Romains.

COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

First printing, March, 1926
Second printing, June, 1926

To
those brother Americans
whose tongues are Spanish and Portuguese
whose homes are between the Rio Grande
and Tierra del Fuego
but whose America
like mine
stretches from the Arctic to the Horn.

Often, meditating on the fervor with which Spain has ever defended and proclaimed the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, I have thought that in the depths of this dogma there must be a mystery akin with the mystery of our national soul: that perhaps this dogma is a symbol ... of our being. ...

Angel Ganivet.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

¶ The wanderer upon the face of the earth will love these lands whose drama is the burden of my book, if for no other reason for the pure hospitality of their peoples. To move from the Sahara of the Arabs to Biscay of the Basques, is to move from hospitable home to hospitable home: is to be chained forever in the remembrances of kindness. Unto all my friends, whose names are not too numerous to mention but whose grace would feel itself abused by public thanks, my thanks, then.

¶ Acknowledgments more intellectual are more easy. Above others, I am indebted to Federico de Onís, Head of the Department of Spanish Literature at Columbia University. Professor de Onís, whom I was fortunate to find in Spain, carried me to his native Salamanca (whence alas! Unamuno had just been exiled). After my book was written, he took time to read the proofs and to give me the unstinted, generous, invaluable aid of his erudition. I must name also José Ortega y Gasset, the outstanding intellectual master of the younger generation in Spain; Juan Ramón Jiménez, the poet; Luis Araquistáin, the satirist and social critic; Manuel Cossío, the authority on Greco; Azorín and Pío Baroja, Spain’s leading novelist; Ramiro de Maeztu and Enrique Díez-Canedo, critical leaders in Spain’s cultural renascence; Ramón Carande, the historian, and Pedro Salinas, the poet. All of these eminent men of Spain, in long conversations, helped me with a hospitality truly of their land, to my search for understanding of a people notoriously poor in critical and historical tradition. Nor can I neglect to mention Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican poet and Ambassador to the Argentine Republic, and Baldamiro Sanín Cano, the Colombian essayist, who helped to clarify for me that so urgent aspect of the Spanish spirit which is American. It must, however, be understood that none of these men is to be held responsible for the conception or for any of the ideas of this book.

¶ Much of the materials of my work has appeared in article form in magazines. To the Editors of The Commonweal, The Dial, The Menorah Journal, The Nation, The New Republic, The North American Review, La Revista de Occidente (Madrid), The Saturday Review and The Virginia (University) Quarterly, my acknowledgments, also.

¶ Finally, a word by way of explanation. What I have attempted might be called a Symphonic History. Spain is a complex integer: some of the elements which compose it are known commonly under such terms as climate, geography, historical events, literature, manners, custom, laws and art. Since I felt the Personality of Spain to hold all of these immediately, as a body holds all its organs, I have essayed, not to discuss them severally, not to relate their passage and chronological order, not primarily to picture or to dissect them. But I have let them come, each in its measure and its turn, upon the scene: and like actors in a play, like themes in a symphony, they have spoken their parts. If I could have my way, the pages of my book would come unto my reader as a drama he sees acted in an evening, or as a work of music he hears performed in an hour. I cannot command this proper and impossible hearing. I can but pray my reader, in some such spirit and attention, to take the book which lies now in his hand. Let him do this for me, and I shall gladly leave to him the judgment of my failure or success.

W. F.

New York, December, 1925.

CONTENTS

PRELUDE
THE SKY OF SPAIN

The sky of Spain is high. It is above earth very high. It is above Spain very high. It is separate from Spain.... It is a clear white sky. Sunlight is white in it. And the clouds are white.... It is a still sky. The clouds stand still in a great height and fixed as in a crystal.... The light of the sun becomes the light of the sky, becomes the light of the clouds, far from the dark red earth of Spain. Spain is her earth and her sky.... I am within the pasture plains of Extremadura. Behind me lies Badajoz....

. . . . . .

I have walked at dawn upon an ancient bridge of granite across the summer-shrunken river. The water curls and swerves through gold sand. In little steel-blue pools it lies deep; then it runs off in thinning saffron ribbons. Soldiers sit on black horses who drink the water silkening at their knees. The bridge swings in yellow arches. There is a bastioned gate cut with the conquering arms of Leon and Castile.

In the east, a low sun. Its horizontal hand touches my face. It is hot, striking across cool dawn. Badajoz is houses gray and gold over shut streets around a Gothic church. The sun is outside the cool city. On the Cathedral porch sit two old women. Their day has begun: it is to sit with open claw and to close on coin and to bless the giver of coin.

In my pocket is naught but the moldy paper of Portugal and the silver duros of Spain. I shake my head at the two aged women. “No tengo suelto. Lo siento.” I smile. She to my left smiles back. The other frowns and mutters. They are one, save for the difference between a frown and a smile.

Hairy goats clatter, swinging creamy udders. Burros pass with men and women, stolid, on their haunches. Through the crevice of leaning walls the sun lays a hot finger on my brow. My body is chill.

The bread in the fonda tastes coarse. It is sour and hurts my mouth. The coffee is tasteless ... a sort of gray heat ... good. Now I have a pocket full of coppers. I cross to the Cathedral porch. The two old women ... one, split by a frown and a smile. To the frown, I give five coppers, to the smile I give one. The smile and the frown do not change. I am in Spain!

The shut town is expanding. The sun is still outside; streets twist to avoid it. But the sun works. The city expands. Men and women are a melting on the street. Men and women are motes of life within the melting city....

. . . . . .

Badajoz is behind. The sun is high, and here the pasture plains. The Guadiana treeless wanders to the south. It is a thirsty river. It is a river homesick for the hills of its youth; moved by a dream of coolness southward, languidly stirred to win this dream in the south. Cities have no sky. Beyond the walls of Pax Augusta which centuries have mellowed from the Roman Camp holding harsh soldiers to this Badajoz ... now the sky of Spain....

I have never seen a sky so far from my head: I have never seen a world so sharp in my eye. The sky lifts me to a realm of visions. And as I pass into its moveless search, still I stand fixed within this graphic world.... Sheep bleat in a wave of dust.... The dust is dense. Curling, swirling, puffing, streaking down, the dust is clear as glass. The sheep are solid masses of tempestuous wool; each sheep is a writhe about four feet, about stalks of sinewed bone jerking it on. Here’s a man. A solid body. Hands crustaceous; face crisp skin drawn on a gaping skull: and over the skin porous as soapstone, bristles of separate hair, sweat, huddles of dust. The smoke from the cigarette cuts rising through the air. Over his shoulder, miles and miles away, a ruined village rests on the hump of a hill. Barbary figs stand at the walls of a splintered chapel. Solid Spain! The earth is clotted, corrugation, furrow. In a red gulch a blackish water drips. And there are flowers, purple like shreds of morning.

Everywhere sky. So far away, and everywhere. Its apartness is a force lifting the broken things of Spain as in a great dance Godward. Dust and sheep-hoof, ash of cigarette, pound of the shepherd’s staff on the earth, swish of his chaps, the dog’s soft pads against stone ... rise all in this various clarity, as in a dance, to the sky.

. . . . . .

I have a vision which has not left me. I shall love this people and this world. For in my vision I have been born as they.... There is a Funnel. Its walls are the round, white sky. It is thewed together by the rays of the sun. And at the Funnel’s mouth is the mouth of God, speaking the words which are the things of earth. Down this Funnel as in birth, we fall. Until we strike upon the land of Spain.

PART ONE
Spain

CHAPTER I
HINTERLAND IN AFRICA

a. Oasis
b. Moghreb
c. Ishmael and Israel

a. Oasis

In the desert, night is reason; the day is magic and madness. This is a law of the desert, and of the desert dwellers.

The light of the sun turns air into an incantation; it is dangerous to man as the sharpest steel or the fire. And the air possessed makes marvels of the land. The sky is opaque like a baking stone. The sterile hills are in perennial motion. They are not hills docile and quiet for the feet of man. They are enactments of geologic drama. By æons they displace not man alone, but the first life that crawled. Each rim of the hills is an age; they gyre in cosmic emotion.

Under a cloudless sky that is too still, earth veers; and under the hills, sand by some magic teems with forms of flesh. The light on a dune turns it into a thigh. Far off the waste becomes a sea, a snow-field. But this exquisite flesh and snow and sea are aloof. Man is contemporary only with the birth and with the death of worlds. And the hushed counterpoise of life, which is his mortal span, is desert.

But with the night the world becomes a world that he can dwell in. The evening star, sending its ray through opalescent dusk, is a sun he can dwell with. The sky grows soft. The hills are shrouded like his body; they are compounded like his soul of silences; they behold a sky that does not sear and an earth he can walk. The moon strides like a master, subduing the caravans of stars. The moon is male, and human.

The world of the day is a world of violence. It has no water and it has no sweetness. It is the world of this life: best spent in marching, passionate-shrewdly, toward dusk. Night is man’s kingdom, his dear reality: it is a place of gardens under which flow waters: it is a place of measurable fires: a place of shadows and of meditation: a place of dew and of love.

Wonder therefore not at the triumph of Mohammed, master of lands of desolation, who leads his peoples still across a day of flame to the revealing sleep of his dusk paradise.

. . . . . .

This magic of the desert day is ironic; at odd places the irony turns smile. Just enough welcoming the smile to tempt man to live on within the toils of the desert. The name of the smile is Oued—whence our word Oasis. The Oued is a spill of water from the breast of a mountain. Hidden springs converge and burst the rusty slope; and there is a tiny river till the sands have drunk it. Where it flows, the desert smiles: smiles date-palms, fig trees, thickets of oleander. So the desert keeps its perennial victims living.

At the bottom of the Oued is the town.

The mountains raise their convolutions in a great struggle, ere they break and die under these southern sands. The heights grow steep. Water falls through rock, pours through curtains of brush that hang upon the gorges. There is verdure: cataracts of stone with silver veins of water, flats of sand where the palms rise seeking the sun above a precipitous gulch, water mills hid in orange-groves, terraced houses with many roofs and every roof a place for looms, for women. The water broadens, is caught into a hundred irrigating ditches. The date-palms thicken and camp like an army; the town huddles with its white walls windowless.

The morning sun comes late to the Oasis, for it must rise above the hills. But dawn dwells already on the desert. It is a subtle radiance of decaying night. Infinitesimal browns and blacks fleck the dim waste: these are the camps of nomads who use the Oasis as a trading center. Their tents are of undyed camel wool, strung low so that they look like camels crouching. The great slow beasts are at anchor by the tent. Dry grass is piled for them; they turn their delicate heads on the arched neck that fronts the body like the prow of a ship. Camel grass burns within. The Arab, swathed in his white burnouse, squats at the mouth of the tent and strikes his brow to the dust, saying his dawn-prayer. Unveiled behind him is his wife over the flame of twisted grass, and cooks and watches her children. On the horizon stand two caravans of twenty camels, bulging with dates. Now the thread of their approach writes upon the desert. It is market day in the Saharan center. There will be many caravans. And the wide scatter of nomads will close in like fragments of iron magnetized; making an irradiant design from the town to the horizons.

The market place is a low square, on the edge of the town away from the Oasis. One side of it is a mosque, a Koran school, a string of Moorish cafés where already merchants huddle with their coffee. The corner breaks into a labyrinth of streets strident with tiny shops. Upon a third side, the desert road cuts into the breast of sand-dunes; far away is the white solitary shell of a Marabout’s tomb.

The crowd is the town and the desert: an Arab world, drawn by hunger from far gold slopes, to make this thick and hardy organism. Most of the men wear burnouses of unbleached wool; their heads are covered by the ample hood and the skirt falls low over the inner jacket, over the naked legs, to the feet which are either bare or shod with sandal soles of grass thonged to the ankle. Time has dyed the virgin wool and use has torn it; the shreds and rents are fantasies in dirt. Within the hoods, sun-baked faces stare. The hands are talonous; the legs are like the tendoned legs of some great bird. And yet the dirtiest garment falls to the dust with grace; and the most squalid head is high.

The merchants sit on straw mats: they bake round acorn cakes on brasiers; they sell dates gold-dry, bronze-rich; they measure thimblefuls of palm oil dripped from reeking goatskins; they cobble sandals; they sell liver of camel and couss-couss, a staple dish of wheat, flaked with vegetables or with meat. (Donkeys stand mournful, charged with juniper from the distant Atlas.) They sell dust and fragments of silver, potsherds, amulets against devils, halters, tea; they sell the dry leaf of the favorite henna. The crowd sways, bartering, laughing. The Arabic is vowelless and the burnouse is proud. The Arab is shrewd; his eyes glint, his fingers snap, his voice pelts. He is the survivor of countless children who have died.

Children not yet dead weave through the intricate clamor. The boys wear a burnouse over a naked body; the girls are bound in a thick wool garment that will announce to the men when the breasts bud. They beg, they snatch a date, they nibble. Half of them are blind in an eye. For Islam makes no answer to the Ophthalmia of Egypt: is not Allah good to the blind son, giving him fortune as a beggar, as a ballad singer, as a muedzin to call the prayer from the mosque tower? Blind eyes, ravaged flesh, hard voices—most of the children will die. And their survivors are these hooded men at barter.

Therefore, the men are strong: it is the law that they eat first and what remains may go to the women and the brood. Women are here, too. Ancients with foul rags to bind their bulging udders and their bony legs; ancients almost bald with hands and faces splotched in the henna. They sell wool or weave mats from the coarse camel grass that bunches in the sand dunes like the hair on a mole. Younger women hold the veil so that a single eye peers at the ominous world. They buy wood, slices of liver, oranges from the East. In the weave of laughter, guttural and fleshless, of bray of donkey, of rumble of camels like the ebbed roar of a furnace, twines the call of children ... the call of begging, the life-call. A hand plashes a drum, a strain of song rises and binds this chaos.

He sits between a cobbler and a nomad ebon-black with the drooped tender lip of the Semite. He is the blind singer. He wears a clean tunic of white and his head is swathed in the turbash. His bare legs gleam like metal. His hands are delicate as prayer within the market clamor. He clasps the shallow drum; and his fingers fall like rain.

He sings the deeds of the warriors of Allah. From Mecca they came, and Al-Medinah; they spread from Araby to Egypt and down to Sudan and east to India. They brought the sword of the Prophet to the hand of the world. Like the sun, they went west; like Gabriel they rose into the Spanish north, bridging the sea with minaret and prayer....

Metal he sings: his song is sparse like shreds of grass on a sand hump. Five notes, naked, timbreless, make this intricate weave. They start like arrows, like catapulted stones, like horse-hoofs on the desert. This music is stripped like war; and like war single-willed.

The blind bard’s face is gray beneath the sumptuous swathes of his turbash. His lips twist like cord; his face like an engine discharges the song of Islam—single of key, terrible in singleness.

. . . . . .

The sun stands beside the minaret that forms part of the west wall of the town. The eastern mountain is gold and over it lies a pallid crescent moon. There will be moon tonight upon the desert! From the fondoukhs, camels are beaten forth. They are prodded to their knees which are then bound so that they cannot rise. And the fragile humps are heaped with the exchange of the mart. Great bags, here, oozed sugar of the date: now there is wheat and wool. Fifteen camels, lashed and hobbled, groan: then sway into the air like an armada moved by the wind of guttural call and staff-blow. Fifteen camels swerve through a narrow gate into the desert.

The town stands behind, low mosqued: the minarets rise from the flat roofs like acrobats. Palms make a misty coronal to the east: thousands of palms, mazed like a camel’s hair: and over all the sterile mountain, a chart of ages, working to the sky. Now, from the minarets comes a voice.

Alláh acbar.... Echhed en la ila ella Alláh.
Echhed en Mohammed Rasou Alláh.
Haï ala Elsalat. Haë ala Elfaláh.
Alláh Acbar.... La ila ella Alláh.

It is the call of the muedzin. Invariable his word, his key: invariable the five points of the day ... dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and dark ... when from all the minarets of town, in all the towns of the land, in all the lands of Islam, the muedzin calls to prayer. The voice is of iron. Myriad muedzin voices, like strokes of some intricate machine, weave together, and bind Islam holy.

Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God save only Allah.
I affirm Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah.
Come ye to prayer. Come ye to adore him.
Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God, save only Allah.

Belal, first muedzin, crier for Mohammed, spoke these words. They are a redolent poem: ecstasy was in them, and resolve. They have not changed in syllable since Belal received them from his master, a year after the Hegira, the year of our era 623. But they have hardened. They are a terrible horizontal stroke upon a prostrate people. Harder than bells of Christendom they are; harder than the Jewish plaint which Mohammed hated, which Mohammed strove to wipe from the ears of the earth.

The caravan has halted. The camels stand docile, pathetic, shifting their great loads; for it hurts the soft pads of their feet to stand laden, it is easier to walk. The men scatter and squat, each by himself, but each turned from the setting sun toward Mecca. The water of the desert is the sand; and with the sand the men make their ablutions. They place their sandals beside them; all that is unclean in the folds of the burnouse they lay aside. Their mouths mutter fast; their hands perform intricate gestures. To swerve from the immemorial forms, even by a finger twitch, is to be in heresy and to be damned. Their brows touch the sand....

... For man is earth. The brow is his highest and his noblest part. Let his brow therefore, five times with each day, be lowered to earth. This is ISLAM....

The camels fall into the rhythmic swing which will not swerve while the moon swings over the sand and the sand swings under the night, and the silent men round the ocean of the desert.

. . . . . .

From the town, as from a smoldering fire, smoke. There are no chimneys; Allah takes care of the smoke. After the bright street, the house is a cavern. The eyes, refocused to the dark, observe a long, high chamber, its walls black with ages of grime, its ceiling stanchioned by wooden posts that shine like ebony. There is no table, there is no chair, there is no bed. Dry grass is piled in corners, and serves for sleeping. Four families live in this lower half of the house. Four women squat in its several quarters; about them nurslings, before them a little brasier to which the children feed chips of wood, shreds of rush. The women cut turnips, bake wheat for the couss-couss. There is a stair that is scarce a stair: ages of feet have worn it to an incline. The upper story has more light; there is a hole in the center of the ceiling which leads to the roof. If it rains, the water falls through the heart of the house; but light comes in, smoke rises out. Here, too, there is no furniture. A chicken pecks in the crumbled floor; an old woman weaves at a loom. Her hands know an immemorial process of weaving, like the mouth of her husband praying.

The roof is the domain of the women. The street is for the men and all that the street leads to. But the housetop is the street and the playground of women. On sunny afternoons of the cool season, here is their escape from the drudge and dark of their homes. This house is high among the houses whose flat roofs move away in waving whiteness. A minaret thrusts up ... there is a gap, a square ... then the packed counterpoint of roof and turning wall and wall again to the green dense at last of palms, to the gorge of the Oued, to the sand-stretch southward where the sun lies in a mist as in a sea of opal.

The white roofs are gay with the color of women. Veils are put aside. Babes suck at ruddy breasts. Red shawls and red babouches touch the color of laughter. Women are carefree. Even the onus of prayer that sits on Islam is not for them. Let them but bear children and hold the good will of their men.[1] One woman, the rich blood clear beneath the bronze of her cheek, presses to her bosom a child who will soon die. Children come and often children go. The way of the child, to manhood or the grave, is in the hand of Allah. A girl, candid and great-eyed with a flinty note upon her luscious flesh, like steel on velvet, holds to her lovely breast which motherhood has not distorted from its apple-rondure, a babe whose eyes are already shut with pus. She will have a blind son—perhaps a muedzin, perhaps a poet: certainly a Seer.

. . . . . .

When the sun is good, many women follow up the Oued, with their brood, for a day’s washing. The river is gracious within its precipitous banks. The winter sun, sweet like our sun of June, has yet the reverberant Saharan weight. It strikes the top of the hills, it rolls down over the clay-maze; it strikes the level sand, down once more it bounds into the gorge, over drenched bushes, over hanging rock and fills the Oued. Here, knee-deep, with their thin gowns lashed to the thigh and the rondures of their bodies speaking, stand women: and the sun comes to them. Other women lay the washed clothes on rocks and with bare feet dance on them, mangling and rinsing in song. The sun and the vigil of the hills, and the town distant, release the spirit of this flesh. Allah is far away, and the pure violence of Mohammed. Women are pagans again, and the Oued has gods. Children peal. Girls let fall their tunics and their breasts dance with their feet. Old women have eyes hot with memories, as they watch the crisp bodies of their daughters.

But beyond the Oued, beyond its walled mouth where the water disappears in sand, and beyond the date-palms, lies another town. It is more drear than its graveyard. So far, doubtless, in old days the river ran ere it had clotted and shortened its way with silt. The town is almost a ruin. A few children play, but the houses are silent. No windows break the seared patched blocks of clay. The graveyard is higher, and it has a wall. Here one can sit and watch the ruined town and the maze of gardens by the Oued and the palms, and the present town and the desert sea. The muedzin has thrust his call to sunset prayer. The muedzin is gone. The sun is gone. The mountains are sapphires in a cornelian heaven. The Sahara moves in copper from the town: grows argent: its dunes are swathed in mist like women’s bodies in irradiant shawls. The desert fades into a fume of opal under a bronze horizon.

Intricate designs stir in the graveyard chaos. Between the head stones and the foot stones the thin earth is raised so that the body may lightly rise to Heaven. (Jackals and dogs, as well as souls, find the shallow graves to their taste.) And now, to meet this subtle stir of dust, comes music. Common notes, sordid notes, between the sand and the sky. Drone of men in prayer, sudden motley of boys who sit in a black room and shout the Koran, girl laughter, donkey bray, banter—a music secret as this world. It comes with the night, swift, like any revelation. It fuses with the graveyard stones, with the world. The labyrinth of walls, enclosing gardens down to the Oued, is one with it. Fig tree, palm, volute Barbary cactus, winding path to the river, muddy river stretch, litter of refuse, excrement, manure, fuse with the music and the graveyard stones, rhyme in the oneness of Allah.

A late worker jogs past on a burro. A Caïd—Judge—swings with his basket-saddle on a mule. Another worker sticks his rod into the open sore on his burro’s haunch. On one side of the glimmering Oued is the town—a wall with many breaks, cobbles on mud, that lead into alleys and that grow into streets. The walls, within, flank out into a square from which turn several streets. The houses here are open to the night, and on the doorsteps before brasiers red with coal, sit women. Allah is one. They wear gay shawls, striped skirts. They wear massive barbarous bracelets, anklets, necklaces. Their faces, in the gloom, are heavy with designs: brow, cheek, chin painted with henna or with kohl. From eye to temple run delicate starry lines. And the hands are henna-splashed. When man approaches they sing the song of invitation. Behind them crouching on their brasiers, freshening their faces, gleams a room with a samovar and a couch. Now, the classic song of lust from their still lips. The crystal and the song of Islam! One note for all prayer, one note for all begging, one note for lust. Allah is one.

The whole town has caught the day’s fair fever. A man sits with a metal pipe whose saccade cadence flies ... splinters of steel ... into the night. And women dance. They move in strange reply to the music. For it is violent, swift and lean; it is the clang and charge of martial hoofs. But the women are slow, almost imperceptible their feet; almost moveless their thick bodies. The arms wave languid like branches of the willow. The whole town in the dead day’s fever. Dance and laughter and flame blossom in the shadows of the street. A ballad singer sits among the girls: he sings of the chieftain whose head was left upon the field and how the Prophet came and joined it to his body, for the Resurrection. But girls dance in a rising tide of Spring. His hands upon the drum make running of swift steeds, his voice is a javelin: the girls move like their breathing breasts.

Here is a large blank house. The court is high, and all about ring little doors of oak. Below is a hall. Its walls are muffled in rugs, its floor is far under carpets. Before the divans are tables, and the tea is spiced. Men in white squat and play upon pipes, and their black eyes gleam. The music’s shrillness shrieks. Now come women. They are four. Unminding loveliness moves within thick brocades and clashing gems. The faces are exquisitely painted. Verdant and nervelessly, they dance. The body is quiet as a tree, the hands are pliant and susurrous like leaves. The male music works.... A stomach wrench, violent as childbirth, shatters upon the mellifluous woman’s body. Above the music comes a cry from her mouth; it is a piercing call made pulsant with the hand clapped periodically to the open lips. It dies; the elemental bodies stir again within the dress and a sleep. But the male music works. The women pause. The musicians turn about, so that they cannot see. With unfeeling hands, the dancers loose the bonds of their thick robes. They step from the splendor fallen to their feet; they are naked. Only the jewels flash and bite upon their musing flesh. They dance. The muscles of their thighs flow upward toward their breasts; the arms twine sleepy. The male music works. The stomach, sudden, as if in unseen violation, wrenches, cascades, in passional response. The shrilling pipes are visited whole upon the naked women. They shriek: their cry, overtoned, fluted, pulsant, marries flesh and iron: blots out the music, and the music falls.

The town is asleep. Swarming reeking streets of the town are gray and are shells. The walls stand white under the sky, and over the depths of brooding human darkness. The crescent moon, with the dark sphere visible within its horns, sends scimitar rays into the sleep of Islam.

b. Moghreb

A semi-desert land holds well the squalors and the splendors of its past. This edge of Africa is the western end of the world whence the sun slides down to the sea. The bleak steppes, studded with sage and cactus, rise to sudden mountains; snow fields balance palm groves. It was a harsh place for a great world to grow in. But glories long since dust in Bagdad and Damascus have still their form in the cities of Morocco.

The prehistoric source lives in the prehistoric mountains. The Moor here is Berber. No one knows who is the Berber save that his speech is kin to the speech of Abyssinia and Egypt. His villages are perched on the slopes of the Atlas and in the stony fastness of the Rif, much as the Roman found them—and the Phœnician. Squat rectangular houses with thatch roof form a semicircle on the crest of a divide. Below is a thousand feet of air and a torrent; above are the clouds. The houses are of mud and grapple like goats to the earth. In the low, flat lands between the tiers of mountain, the houses are round. Closer to them than the houses of Europe are the huts of the Congo. They form a full circle within which dwell the cattle at night and sleeps safety.

The archaic world lies whole in the stratified history that is the Moghreb. Ages before Christ the Semite scattered markets on the coast and Carthage grew great. Rome became a mere machine for periodic taxes. Roman order and Vandal havoc left the Berber untouched. He is a hard, dark, leathery man. His head is close-cropped. He is prone to silence. Despite the myth of the Moroccan Sultanate—that feeble creature of the French and Spaniard—he is still unconquered.

Between the coast and the valley of Meknes and Fez he has lived, sullen and declining. The spark in his eye, the curl of his black lip tells that as he has outlived a long parade of empires, he will outlive this French one. In such mood, he dons his woolen tunic broidered red or blue, loads his olives on his donkey’s back and goes down to effete Fez or Marrakech for barter. Yesterday he bartered with the Arab, with the Vandal, with the Roman. Earlier, he knew the men of Carthage, the silver lords of Tartessos. He is a Berber.

Islam alone has won him. But not until Islam had passed him many times, conquering half the Mediterranean world. The first Arabs converted some Berbers and took them along, not loitering in these mountains. Berber horsemen were soldiers and captains in Spain. But the Berber at home did not stir from his stone somnolence. Córdoba and Toledo kindled fires that warmed the monastic cells of Italy and England. Egypt awoke once more. Mecca and Bagdad grew great. Morocco, halfway between the east and the west, was invaded by new waves of Arabs. Hillalians and Idrissides built fine towns in Algeria and Tunis. Morocco was surrounded by splendors. The mountains remained mountains.

Three hundred years the streams of culture flowed through this frustrate land, from Spain to the east and from the east to Europe. Now came a Berber tribe from the southern desert: the Almoravides with their great chieftain Yusuf. Twenty-two hundred years since the Phœnician had builded in the Moghreb, and now the Moghreb in its own name grew great. Fez, Marrakech, Rbat bloomed and their power spread to Tunis and to Spain. Many ages did this stubborn world take to blossom; many ages has it taken to die. The greatness of the Almoravides, of the Almohades, of the Merinides lives still in Morocco.

. . . . . .

Fez is the metropolis of a world that is gone: the head of a missing body. A hundred thousand Moors in Fez-el-Bali live in an age synchronous with the Crusades and with the Gothic. The modern world is here like a mirage—or like a curse of Allah.

A river, plenteous in water for Morocco, makes of the hills a single grove for olive, fig and eucalyptus. The town lies solid, within them. Most cities are a crust of houses split into streets and squares. Old Fez is a solid carapace of roofs, its rise and fall like the articulations of a body.

Underneath the roofs are the soukhs, intricate like the wrinkles on an old man’s face. These are streets of myriad and tiny shops. In one section there will be only goldsmiths—hundreds of men squatting before their little bellows and their little gems. In another congregate the sellers of fish, the vendors of soap and grease, the ironmongers, the makers of leathern ware. The typical soukh is not more than three paces wide; and each shop is an open box, slightly above the level of the walk, and large enough for a single squatting man. Overhead, is a roof of grapevine or of rush, joining the two sides of the street together and letting in mere crevices of light.

Back and forth in this myriad-textured warren move the Fasi. The rich swathe through on mules; asses laden with produce are led by uncouth Berbers from the mountains or by black slaves from the south of the Sahara. The human pigment is bewildering. The city Arab is pale as a dweller of the northern towns of Europe: the Kabyl is dark-skinned, blue-eyed: the Ethiop is black as the shadows in the tiny shops. Burnouse and turbans are pied. Vendors shout for the passers-by to stop. And from time to time there is a break in the ceaseless lineage of bazaars: the carved, closed shutter of a Koran school shields the incessant coil of adolescent voices, strident, wild, unmeditative—shouting the words of their Prophet. Along the bare walls of the mosques and the medersas, beggars are posted. Their stintless catch-word weaves with the beat of ass-hoof, with the thresh of human feet, with the shop-calls, with the chanting of students.

Each beggar has his phrase. It invokes alms with the patronage and to the glory of a particular saint. It guarantees to the almsgiver a saint’s word in Heaven. He sits in the shadow of the holy buildings. The carven door leads through a passage of mosaic to a court, gorgeous with tile and woodwork laid perhaps with mother-of-pearl. The holy students of the medersa live in cells, mounting in honey-comb mass to the minaret.

From the crowded soukhs, streets toweringly high and sinisterly narrow twist in all directions. A band of Moorish minstrels moves from dark door to dark door. The voices of drum and pipe give forth a ghost of music. The voices are shrill like the calls of mountain life. Arab music was lean and violent, a gray fusion of thrusts. This song of the true Moor is almost disembodied. It has accent, but no texture. It stands against the intricate mellow noise of the city, enfolded in the liquid sconce of hills, like a savage summons. A door opens, a copper falls in a drum. The leader of the band gives his toned blessing; the slender men move on, weaving with their song a pall on Islam.

On a hill stands the mosque of Bab-Guissa (one of the 785 mosques built in Fez by the Almohades, exclusive of monasteries and medersas). By this mosque is the north gate through which the Berber from the Rif passes with donkey-charge of olive or of grain. Each donkey-load pays duty to the Sultan; and each appraisal calls for threats from the custom officer—degenerate Moors who are truly slaves of France. The Riffian pays his pence in sullen silence. And his non-resistance maddens the Fasi. Nearby is an olive market, Fondouk el lhoudi. The olives ripen in winter. Vast rush troughs and baskets hold the black fruit in the open Square, under the sun and the flies, and the sweating men and donkeys. With the barter come blows. A negro catches a bargainer with his teeth and is flung off with a ripped cheek. The crowd buzzes, deeply unmoved. The open baskets of olives, black-gemmed in the air, give an intenser note....

On the heights above Bab-Guissa are the ruined tombs—the koubbas—of the Merinides. Their crumbled arabesques look down on the long valley of Oued Fez. A spirit of those ancient rulers could still find his Fez-el-Bali: know this shut and terracing carapace of stone, blue tile, gold ceramic, fumy beneath the sun. The old walls are there, too, although time and cactus have splintered them. And the mosques rise like a thousand claws toward Allah—the hold of the pious town on the One God.[2]

The sun is sinking on the Almohadian wall that forms a corner with the mosque Bab-Guissa. Soon will come from myriad minarets, the call for evening prayer. The mountain donkeys no longer lurch through the Gate; and the slaves of the imprisoned Sultan are gone. This rocky height studded with moldering tombs, this wall and this tower form a natural amphitheater. It is crowded with Moors. They squat on the ground, swathed in burnouses. Water-boys thread silently. All indeed is silent, facing down to a central point within the wall where sits a man.

His beard is white and his voice is gentle: he is a man with exquisite hands and manners of the Court. And he is speaking so quietly, that the massed crowd must hold silent indeed, if it would hear him. He is the Chronicler of Fez—poet, historian, journalist: one of the great sons of the Moghreb. Each day at nightfall, for an hour, he bespeaks in his own verse the glory of Islam. Each of his tales lasts three months: there are four of them to the year. His unemphatic words give to the men of Fez two realities of Islam: the splendor which was, and the splendor which is eternal. He speaks, not without humor; his immobile body radiates peace. He tells of the gardens underneath which flows water—the Garden whither Islam somnolently moves through this demonic hour of wireless, guns and rail-ways....

. . . . . .

The capital of the Sultanate is Rbat. From here, the Almohadian troops set sail for Spain; and after the triumph of Alarcos in 1195, Rbat-el-Fath—“Camp of Victory”—received its name. Fez, in hills, is gold: Rbat is a dazzling white over the sea. The bou Regreg slopes down within its sands, between two gentle promontories. On one of them Rbat, on the other Sla—ancient cities, equally white above the sea, equally proud, equally hostile. You can row from the soukhs of Rbat to the palaces of Sla in a minute. But these are worlds kept separate in an ageless confrontation. Time was when the two cities were independent; blood stained the sands of the Regreg. Each town slants to the sea upon a mighty dune; and this dune is a divided graveyard.

The ocean has opened Rbat. Its bright streets run with the breeze. Its masonry is less delicate and more resolute than that of Fez. In its soukhs is a tang of salt. The Moors themselves are less shut up. Though their burnouses swathe them and the women walk as hidden in their veils, an Atlantic rhythm has crept within these folds; the somnambulance is brighter.

“We have lived fair days
In Granada, house of delight.
Among its roses and its roses budding
We have sped many a silver night.
Alas! no more for our enraptured use
The dwellings of Andalús.....
Hush! do not make me suffer more.”

We are the guests of a Cherif.[3] Two slave girls crouched on the carpet sing for us. The house is modern. But in each detail it is a copy of the classic Moorish style whose glory is Al-Hambra. These might be the days when Al-Ahmar, king of Granada, was friend of the Catholic Fernando; and when Christians were entertained in the Andalús even as we in the Moghreb.

It is a long and narrow chamber, run round by a divan yielding with silk cushions. To a man’s height, the wall is mosaic. Above, it is white plaster exquisitely laced in arabesque. The ceiling is carved wood, textured and painted like a maze of flowers, with mother-of-pearl and gold within the toolings. Outside the door we see the court, and hear the song of the fountain. The mansion rises to four stories: upon each floor the balcony goes round and all the windows open in upon it. A girl brings subtly painted goblets; tea fused with mint is poured. Another slave places brasiers of sandalwood. The monotonous wail and rending song has ceased. The singers go in silence, as if they had left with us all that they had. We hear the pulse of the sea: an indeterminate murmur of voice and feet. Two little slaves, with eyes too far to be either friendly or hostile, linger and change our glasses, ere we have half drained them.

“It is because we have disobeyed the Prophet.”

A young man speaks. He is the eldest son and his burnouse is white, undecorated wool. He has laid aside his babouches and his feet are bare. He reclines on the divan, resting his languorous head upon a hand more exquisite than the lacework on the wall. The features are subtly virile. There is fire in them, and cruelty. He is a man fine-drawn—but altogether metal. He is twenty: not yet married. His life is the study of Lore at his zaouïa and the writing of verse.

“In Al-Koran it is written that we should work—we have not worked. It is written that all Islam should live in peace—we have fought each other. It is written that we should shun luxuriance and vice, that we should cultivate our soil and our minds. We neglect them. It is written that we should raise up our women—we keep them down. Therefore our life is disaster. Therefore the French are upon us. We have been the highest of peoples. Islam and Culture were one. In the old days, among a thousand men, there was not one who did not read. Within a thousand homes, there was not one but had delicate rugs, handsomely carved walls. Now, our houses are dark with smoke; our minds are dark with ignorance. Like the pest unto the unclean body, the French have come.”

My host smiled, fearful lest the words of his too serious son should bring discomfort.

“It is an evil hour: and it will pass.”

“Are you acting,” I asked, “to make it pass the quicker?”

“When we are ready, we shall act. Even as a child when it is ready to walk.” The son spoke. And his friend, a philosopher from Tunis, nodded.

“Islam has been cursed with a new childhood. We are not decadent. I know that your historians call us decadent. It is a lie. Measure us by the Law of the Prophet. If it was ever good and great, it is still so today. Perhaps you would find that it was never good. It has been studied by intelligent men—the Jews—and found wanting. We can understand that. But it is not changed: it is not decadent.”

I thought of the world fringing the Power of Rome, before Mohammed: a chaos of repellent parts, giving no light. The Arab kindled this anarchy and made it one. I thought of the reeking Kasbah of Algiers; of the swarming, inert Marrakech and Fez. I thought of the Monastery city in the Sahara and of the holy Marabout whose Word Arabs came weeks on camel-back to hear. I had felt everywhere a Body, flaccidly receding from its accumulate splendors.

“You are a poet,” I said. “Tell me about the forms and the spirit of your verse.”

“We have sixteen forms,” answered the son. “We have but one Spirit.”

“Poetry,” said my host, “is more plentiful than trees, in Islam. It is our water-bearer. It is our forest.”

“And your greatest poet?”

All three spoke as one: “The Prophet.”

The Tunisian explained:

“Amrolkéïs, Antsar, El Bassiri, the poets of El Hariri and El Hamadaín were great. How could there be poetry like that which the Prophet dictated unto his disciples? In those days, Zoheïr was the greatest poet of Mecca. The Prophet had escaped to Al-Medinah. At the annual contest, when all the poets posted their work on the outer wall of El Kaabah, there was none to vie with Zoheïr. And Zoheïr was an idolater, a man of the tribe of the Koreishites—deep haters of the Prophet. But a Sura of the Koran came to the eyes of this man who had been crowned. And he read it, and he tore his victorious poem. And he said: The crown belongs to Mohammed, son of Abd-Allah, son of Abd-El-Motalleb.”

“Who are the great poets, now?”

“How, in a low age, can there be high poets? We follow the great humbly. The best of today—whatever it is—in poetry and in philosophy—is found in Egypt.”

Mine host led us to the roof of his palace.

“It is night,” he explained. “We are not indiscreet.” He referred to the custom of Islam which gives the roof as the inviolate playground of the women.

There was no moon. The stars were a swarm of golden bees within the deep blue meadow of the sky. From a hundred open courts, hid lights of houses were thrown up. Each house was a muffled lantern; Rbat was a cluster of hidden lamps peering into the turbulence of stars. The sea slept. Beyond the city walls, the ancient tower of Hassan mused, a gray ghost.

The man from Tunis spoke:

“It is said, O my friends, that Morocco is the tail of Islam. Let it then be known that Islam is a peacock.”

Outside the inner city, in the direction of Hassan, there was a small, low group of open lights. Here the houses were not dark lanterns; the houses had windows out upon the street. A trill of horizontal fires came against the upright monotone of Islam.

“It is the Mellah,” said mine host, “the Mellah of the Jews.”

We went into another chamber. Slave girls brought fresh glasses, candied fruits, dainties from Arabia Felix. Through the open door, the wide night air was a discord from this polyphony of silks and gems, of cedar and spice and ceramic. And there arose the voices of distant women in song. It was the women of the house, locked from the rooms where men of the profane world might come and drink tea with the masters.

The song drifted palpitant and humble. My thought went out to the Mellah—to the place where windows faced outward, where women showed their faces....

c. Ishmael and Israel

Forty men, women, children fill the room with a voice. They are Jews, Jews of the Moorish Mellah. The unveiled faces of the women are fertile, less metallic, harder than the faces of their sisters. The eyes are deeper, their consistency more solid. Gaunt determination holds the warmth of these women like an armor. The men are more variant and less harmonious. A burnouse or red fez in place of the black would pass most of them as Arabs. In their eyes the same cunning, the same swift hardness. Yet underneath dwells a distinction: an enduring spiritual source—a quiet water—of which the agitation of their external lives is tributary.

After the song of the Arab minstrels; after the singers of Fez beneath the Merinidean tombs shouting to the twang of a string; after the fakirs of the Socco in Tangiers who bounce and prance their monkey shines to the lilt of an apish cry, to the crash of a scissors; after the mystic monotone of the Darwish whirling his soul into the Absolute; after the service of the Ouled-Naïl who sway like trees deep-rooted and who shriek like Liliths—now, this Jewish music. Ten women step to the center of the room and squat in a circle around a copper cauldron. They sing, and as they sing they beat with open palms upon the upturned cauldron. Their song is in Arabic; it has similitudes with Moorish songs: there are the ceaseless verses, the narrative design with rhythm and note recurring. But the women are ample-breasted, leoninely gay. The beat of palms upon the copper drum rises like a copper wall about the women and the women’s song.

As a mountain torrent carries the rigor of grim heights through a low tropic zone, so this music moves through the Moorish Mellah with its prophetic past. For all its tides of blood and wandering, it is still. The music of Arab races like stripped steeds; that of the Moor jangles like bone, snaps like sinew. Here is a song that dwells wide over fields, tops the cedars of Lebanon, swings with the sun—and yet is but a prayer. Its immobility has voyaged. The prophets are here; and Ruth with her eyes fertile as the wheat; and Judith scabbarded in beauty. And Babylon to which, as Tangiers now, the scum of peoples rose; where magic parded with penury, coins glinted in blood. Spain is here, a perpendicular starkness rising from the low tide of the music—Spain, with her singing seers. And Araby has dropped her gold into a humble song. As in the streets where the street women sing, here is the cry—shrill, lithic: dangling but a moment on the plaint like a barbarous dart upon a mother’s breast.

. . . . . .

Like the Jews, the Moslems are the People of a Book. The Bible is the compiled and edited remnant of a literature ranging from epigram to epic, into whose making went a thousand years. The Koran is the work of a generation, and of a man. Whatever divergence from the prophetic mouth is due to the disciples, Omar and Ali,[4] it is sure that before Mohammed there was no Koran and after him his text has changed only through processes of natural error. Before the Koran, the Arabs possessed an anthology of verse, lapidic, utterly objective: poems singing the loves and tribulations of the desert. These did not go, like the ancestral heritage of the Hebrews, into their holy book. After the Koran, this strain, celebrating passion, thirst, hospitality and war, went on. The heightened activity of the Arabs enlarged their letters. But the Koran, unlike what came after as before, is subjective. Pictures of Paradise, explicit laws, ways of the wrath of Allah, pleadings and campaigns, float in the swim of an inchoate exhortation. There is no reason to doubt that the Prophet did dictate the Koran—and revised it little. The book’s substance is an anarchic potpourri of what Mohammed must have thought out for himself, together with what he heard in synagogue and church. There is a canny set of laws: there is an endless repetition of the delights of heaven “where are the gardens under which flow waters” and of the miraculous nature of the virgins there, who are never unclean, being perpetual lovers and perpetual virgins. There is great harping on the unpleasantness of Hell. There are periodic outbursts against the Jews and much gentle reproval of the Christians whom Mohammed wooed with worshipful references to Jesus and to Mary. There is, above all, ceaseless plagiary from the Old Testament tales, whose beauty and significance are usually scrapped in Mohammed’s zest to get to his main point. And the point, as a rule, is that Abraham, Moses and Jesus were all true Moslems, that the Hebrews knew full well the ultimate prophecy of Mohammed, that their Book tells them so, and that only their wickedness keeps them from avowal. Finally, the book holds to a running comment on contemporary events and neighboring peoples; and the effect of this, within the holy Script, must have been vast since here was virtually God himself dictating an editorial page on headline stories.

Such matters lay in a great jumble in Mohammed’s head; for the Prophet was too great and too busy a man to keep a clear literary mind. And in such jumble they poured forth to make the verbose, extraordinarily rhythmed mosaic of the 114 Suras of the Koran. The book is above all an impressionistic portrait of Mohammed; in Mohammed, of the greatest figure and of the greatest era of the Arabs. Even in translation, it reveals the intense afflatus of a man who, from the age of forty till his death at sixty-three, conquered a world, prepared successors to conquer others, ruled savagely and wisely over a race as unruly as it was naturally keen, won the love even of his foes and the submission of almost countless maidens.

Mohammed was a great statesman, a great captain, a great lawmaker, a great poet: he was not the creator of a great religion. Innumerable mystic and religious men have worshiped Allah and performed the ceremonials of the Prophet. But the Mohammedanism of Mohammed, of the Koran, of the source is not essentially a religion at all. A religion is a revealed experience of the relation between a man and his cosmos. If it is not experience, it may be philosophy but it is less than a religion. If it is not revealed, it may be an ecstatic or poetic state, but it is less than a religion. Its conclusion may be suicide for the human spirit, as in some religions of India; its field of consciousness may be narrowly naturalistic or animistic as in the religions of the savage. But no plan for life on earth, however exalted, is of itself a religion; no scheme for reaching heaven. Nor is a system which exploits an already existing sense of God as a means toward a determined human goal a system of religion. This, moreover, is the system of Mohammed. It employs the latent religiosity of the Arab world to a pragmatic end. It exploits the idea of God as modern pragmatism the idea of progress.

Mohammed uplifted a race. Where, in this, is his equal? At his hand an anarchy of tribes filling the desert with internecine blood: and from this anarchy he prepared the force which mastered half Africa, half Asia, Spain—which bound with great houses and great culture Bagdad to Toledo. The religious energy of the Arabs had for ages straggled and fumed in loss; creating but a variety of impotence. The religious energy of the Jews had thrown forth light in the world, and left the Jewish body desolate. Rome? The immense creature, camped about the Latin Sea, accepted Christ in its senility. Its principle of growth had not been Christ; Christ was to help to rot and to transform it. Mohammed studied Rome. He observed this one live element in that immense decay. The religious element. He took it, as the modern pragmatist takes the idea of progress and of science, to express himself and to advance his people.

He lived in a religious age. God for seven hundred years had made a wrangling and a shambles of the marts of the east. God alone, in all Rome, seemed alive. God served to energize Mohammed’s act. In the Koran, Allah is a voice bearing no fresh body of eternity or love, bearing no experience of Nature or of a spirit that transcends it: Allah is at best the charged echo of past holy voices, here applied to spur the Arab on. The quantity that gave Islam weight was the force of its leader and the latent might of his race: God was the n by which the Prophet raised this quantity to the pitch of action.

And Mohammed is the full rich presence in the Koran. Though God speaks, Mohammed has the eye, the answer, the blessing and the curse for all the ambient world. Mohammed tells the Arab about God chiefly that God is telling the Arab about Mohammed. What else he says is not the crux of the matter. Mohammed is Prophet, to obey him is good, to disobey him is hell, the Jews are a bad lot, Allah is ruthless but to the believer kind—such degradations from the old rationales of faith are not dissonant from religion. Mohammed proceeds, after Moses, to instruct the faithful in diet, in justice, in commerce, marriage, war. His plan of success generates its power shrewdly from the normal appetites: man’s dream of heaven, his fear of hell, his love of woman, his thirst for water, his need of forgiveness whenever he has burned his fingers. Here, too, there is no divergence from the usual theocratic Code. But the Koran is distinguished by the relative place of God and of man’s experience of God within the system.

Go back not to the Mishna, and the Prophets; but to the barbarous Torah. Science and method are as demoded here as ethics. Blood and corporal anguish are obsessive symbols. Justice is a matter of plagues and trumpetings. Yet is God present. These old fathers would be abstract save for the dwelling in them of a universal principle, called Jehovah. It is He who moves these semi-savage tales. Hunger for a common experience which, being both true and beautiful, is divine, informs the acts of these men, directs their faltering passage. In the suicidal will of the Buddhist, in the Dionysian dance of the Greek, in the metaphysic of Paul or of Plotinus, dwells ever variant this single purpose: the will to fuse (though it be to fuse with loss) man’s personal act and his experience of the universal. This is religion. It is not in the religious mechanics of Mohammed.

The Prophet invites Heraclius, emperor of Rome, to join or to acknowledge him. He is denied, of course. But Islam is a “carry-all.” It assimilates Mary and Jesus quite as it has garbled the Talmud. It places Mohammed at the top of an agglomeration unified by him from the whirling chaos of the east. Energy, thus drawn from a hundred confusions, thrusts in a hundred directions.

. . . . . .

If classic Islam is not essentially a religion, it is an Idea. An Idea in motion. Its motion is horizontal; and its premiss of departure is success. The follower of the Prophet cannot lose. At the worst comes death: death in holy warfare means beatitude and houris. But Mohammed does not lean too heavily on so dim a guerdon. He has genius in the arts of diplomacy and war. He fights innumerable battles, and nearly always he wins. When he does lose, he turns defeat into a strategic triumph. In his first lean years as a Prophet, he has garnered a rare capital for a religious leader: that capital is material success. He loans out his prestige at a usurer’s rates. It is clear, soon enough, that to follow Mohammed means victory in arms, means booty, means fresh women.

Health in Islam became a state of profitable war. From the mobile chaos of the desert was created this intent mobility of advance. Islam was a perpetual raid. Its health meant war: and war meant expedition, conquest, ultimate death. The contrary of war, of health, of Islam—was then the dwelling in the present life, and was Peace.

What contrast to the Jew in these brother Semites! Their mobility of steel to the chemic mobility of Judah! The Idea of Islam has indeed for matrix the unrest, physical and spiritual, of the Roman world. Peoples stirred, because the great People were broken. The interior displacement acted like suction on the peripheries of Rome. Dreams of power, opiate creeds went through the windy world, creating new currents, creating and moving new masses. Araby was drawn, so: and awoke. But this Idea of the Arab could not have lived so well within the womb of the world had it been alien to the Arab soul. In the Arab, as in all desert people, worked the impulse of expansion.

Here Arab and Jew are one. Who has seen the desert understands: this indomitable urge born of the sand-sea, to be moving, to pass horizons, to be moving forever. The desert impulse in the Hebrew was sublimated. Not his body, but his god should pass horizons! When the Jews’ body migrated, Jehovah became static. Only when the body took deep roots—in Palestine, in Spain, in the Talmud at worst (in America perhaps tomorrow)—could the transfigured Jewish God pass the horizons. But the balance held: as the Jews’ spirit spread, their body remained an atom. With the Arabs, it was the body that expanded. Before the Prophet, it had expanded impotently in civil conflict. Mohammed brought this energy to order. But even he knew of no principle of expansion higher than the raid and the empire.

Arabia expanded. Persia, Abyssinia, India, Egypt, the Sahara, Spain became parts of Islam that was Araby in motion. The Jew discovered that to spread in the spirit was to be immobile in the life. Not so the Arab. The Jew learned that only an unmoving and an unmoved God could pass horizons. But in Islam, to expand still meant to move. The law of balance between inner and outer energy was not transcended. The Idea of Islam became all body: all moving, conquering body. Here went the Moslem energy. The energy that dwelt in that hid precinct of creative thought was sapped to a low ebb. In the person of Mohammed, there was energy both for conquest and for the subtler dominance of law and wisdom. He elected that the ideas, the forms, the rituals, the experience, and truth which he created should suffice for all time for his peoples. All their powers might hence be transformed into the stupendous business of outward conquest.

Of course, this was not strictly to be. Many ideas of Islam were born after the Prophet’s death. Even the Koran may have been amended. The Moslem architectures, the Moslem philosophies both mystical and materialistic, much of the Moslem ritual, would have been strange to Mohammed. But independent growths of the spirit could not become organic within Islam. For in the Idea, there was the law that only Body of Islam could expand: its thought and vision were create, forever. In consequence, the few new crystallizations called forth by the new needs of Islamic empire became endowed at once with the old principle of fixity, with the sanctity of intransigent stagnation. The body moved. The forms of the body did not move. Wherefore, as soon as the body ceased to add unto itself by outward conquest, it began to rot.

This is the tragedy of Islam. It is writ large in symbols of the present. Fez and Rbat and Bagdad are fetid relics of gone loveliness. Their life has no virtue of rejuvenation; there was in Islam no autonomy of method for the creating of ideas whereby life is recreated. The Arab literary language is identical with the Koran’s. Dogma declares that the hodge-podge splendor of Mohammed’s script is perfection: who shall dare change perfection? So Arabic literature today is an archaic grimace: a spirit muffled by the masque of thirteen hundred years. And the spoken language, as divergent from the classic as French from Latin, is noisy and yet mute. Moslem architecture has not evolved. The mosque of today is a faithful imitation of some antique model. Prayer has not changed. Science has not changed. The Idea of Islam has forbidden its own growth.

But if this death from inanition is patent in modern Islam, it is implicit in the source. The fruit, only, of the religious impulse lives, for it alone holds the rounding of life’s circle. The religious act—be it art or be it ethics—cannot exhaust itself, because each forward step is an approach to the beginning. The man possessed of religion is possessed of a universal principle; and what he does cannot die. The forms and words of his activity may grow archaic—like the sculpture of Egypt, like the gods of the Rig-Veda. But the activity itself is forever an approach to the Source. The farther the religious man goes afield, the closer he will come to the Primordial Fountain, since all his life is plotted to a circle. And if he lose his life, then will he win it. But with the unreligious will, each act is a severance from source. The unreligious is the incomplete. And its symbol is the unreal straight line which moves away from its beginning.[5]

Even in its classic mosque, Islam betrays its unreligious essence. The mosque is a patchwork of details, a mosaic of finery for the senses. The very character of the mosaic is unreligious. For it represents the analytic, not the One. The minaret has no relation with the aspirant Phallus, or with the sublimated Phallus of the Christian church. The minaret is a down-tending structure upon which the muedzin stands, not to send prayer to Allah, but orders to the people.

The religion of the Koran is a caricature of God drawn in the lying lines of time and space.

CHAPTER II
HINTERLAND IN SPAIN

The sun is hidden from this dawn. The snow range is a crest to the south and east. Air, pouring over, cold and hard like pearls, is the dawn upon Spain. Tidy huertas are green crystals in the dawn. Villages, orange-marged, make a pied flash in it. Fig and olive march in armies up the slopes of the Sierra, toward snow, toward dawn. When the sun stands at last in the ridge, the day is hot.

This is the south. After Guadix, toward the eastern sea, the human world grows dim. The carretera, at the entrance of a town, slides in a slough of mud. Rain is rare and violent; it becomes a torrent from the impervious mountain. Dark men in black grimed capes walk beside laden donkeys. Women herd goats; the tuberous udders sticking on the mud. Children are rhythms in a maze of rags. The eyes of humans are like the eyes of burros.

The Sierras have disappeared behind the depopulous hills. The verdant valleys of Granada are folded back. Villages here are hard like the parched clay. The carretera is a swathe of dust, glittering in the sun. The land is sere as if a flame dwelt on it. The eyes of humans are velvet dark, like the eyes of a dream.

Murcia, now. Even the sparse irrigated huertas disappear. The barbarous abruptness of the soil turns to desert. Villages are a single eyeless street of houses, abject under the eye of the sun. The world is a turmoil of yellow waste. The villages are splinters of the waste. Only, to break the yellow, walls of cactus—a Maya-like green sculpture matching its lush planes with the harsh planes of the clay. Goats, dusty and crabbed, crop an invisible herb. The Barbary fig is the olive and the grape of this land. Villages grow lower, sparser—merge with the desert. Villages disappear.

Under the sky huge mounds of sterile hill rise now; and on their slopes, red and advancing with the mirrored sun, are serried shadows. Caves. Villages of caves. This is below Phœnicia in time. This is Iberia. A Spanish folk still dwells here.

The hills are steep. There is a row of caves, horizontally curved. Above each cave is a tiny aperture for smoke. Then comes another row. In the foreground, the cactus is cultivated for its fruit. There is a hooded well.

It is not yet noon. But the summer sun has turned the heaven into irradiant steel. Light and heat strike like solids on the solid soil, on the intricate levels of the hills. In their rebound, light and heat become polyphonous, weaving the world into their image.

The sun, rising, faints into its own immensity of heat. And the cave villages grow larger. Between them, the sterile hills leap in a monotone against the day’s pressure. A cave town flings sheer to the ridge of a pyramidal mountain. A hundred threads of smoke thresh the air like filaments of wire. Caves are dark eyes that hide from the steel heaven. The eyes of the dwellers are caves.

Shadow is cold. Here is a town with houses. Where the sun strikes the street, horses, donkeys, moving forms of people gyre and funnel and become a fume in the sun. Signs on shops, blue shutters, yellow parasols of women tremble and swerve as if they were in flame. But shadow is cold.

Outside, there is desert and the sky has melted. All the steel strokes of the sun, beating down, beating up, are melted: heaven has fallen into waves. Villages live in this fierce element. Men and women, donkeys and goats live in this radiant sea.

Over the brow of a despoblado, the sun goes. The desert flattens, like a sea after storm. The sterile hills are farther away, and on the even plain there is grass. The desert becomes a moor. Salt wort suggests the ocean. The road circles, catching the sun again. The sun splinters and breaks on the moor. Huge masses of dried dung, the fuel of these people, catch a last ray. There is a hill, dark-mottled. The hill is a city. At the height, there are caves and dwellings cut in clay. At the base, there is dust: and in the dust are streets.

Sordid wineshops, stores, squat in the dust. All is dust save the people who are clay; clay black-baked in the sun.

CHAPTER III
ANDALUSIA

a. El Andalús
b. The Eye
c. The Bowels
d. A Goddess and Don Juan
e. The Gypsies Dance
f. Spain Dances

a. El Andalús

In the year of Islam 89 and of Christ 711, an Arab host recruited with proselytes from the pagan Berbers and the Christian Copts, and captained by Târik whose name is a fossil in the rock Gibraltar (Jebel Târik) crossed the strait from Africa to Europe. After seven summers, all Spain, even to the Galician mountains, was in the sway of the Prophet. To their new conquest the Arabs gave the name Andalús, which means the land of the west.

Their first pause was in a smiling world. Southern Spain, roughly the part which is Andalusia now, for many ages had drawn the wandering hungers of the nations. Here had been Tartessos, the Tarshish of the thunder of Isaiah, a realm near the present sites of Seville and Cadiz, known as the Land of Silver and whose greatness was synchronous with Crete. Here had been Phœnician Malaca and Gades, cities famous for their gay vice. Here had been Bætican Rome, birthplace of Seneca and of the Stoic mind which in reality was Spanish. Here, from Babylon, came the urgent Jews among the indolent Visigoths. A smiling world. On the breasts of the Sierras, groves of olive and of cork. In the valleys rivers that were veins of wealth. Luxuriant crops, fat kine, orchards and vineyards: shade: and by the alternance of sun and cool a natural culture. Now within this mellowness, the harsh Idea born of the desert dearth.

Historians will give you the facts: how Andalusia did not hold the Arab: how he swarmed the mesas of Castile: how he fanned east to the Ebro and west to the Asturias: how only stubborn knots of Basques withheld him: how he scaled the abrupt wall of Spain and poured down the suaver Pyrenees of France; and how at last, near Poictiers, he was stopped by Charles Martel and driven back forever. The truth is otherwise. Not the Franks, but the smiling south of Spain stopped Islam. When the Arabs faced the French at “Tours,” they were turned back already. The desert, the mountains, the incessant war could not weaken Islam. These were its food and its health. But Andalusia was poison. A luxuriant land worked on the spirit of the Arab, causing in the rear a flinching and dissension. This, several years after the “defeat of Tours,” caused the return from France.

Often is the question asked: what Islam did to Spain? The first response must be another question: what did Spain make of Islam? Spain was there when the Arab came. She was far older than Islam, far more populous. This Celtiberian base which it is simple and safe to call the Spaniard is a strange people. It is warlike,[6] yet submits to conquest: it is indolent yet dwells in a harsh land: it is inarticulate and savage yet transforms its masters. Carthage has come and gone. Rome has faded, after creating in Spain a spirit that is not found in other parts of Rome. The Visigoths make their easy conquest. They are touched by urban Rome already ere they come; they are no longer the rude Germans of the Rhine. Rome has annulled their savagery. Their nature is rural but their will is urban. Their nature is the foray, but their will is Pax Romana. They have no metaphysical hunger, yet they spend their might defending Arianism against the cross-fires of North Africa and Europe. Their history in Spain is their dissolution; their complete absorption in the mute, indefeasible mass of Spain which they are supposed to rule. When Târik defeats Roderick, last Visigothic king, the business is done. But henceforth, German blood suffuses like a golden glow the flesh of Iberia which has already drunk the Celt, the Semite, the Greek, the Latin.

There has been no drama. This process is instinctive. Spain lives like a tree with her roots close and her branches harboring the seasons. She has taken to herself the nourishment of wind and rain, the steadfastness of sun. All Spain takes in is Spain. In her own vague life, an Idea has been born, expressive of her chaos. Now, she takes in an alien Idea to work upon her.

The Arabs found their kingdom. In 755, but a generation after their arrival, Abd-er-Rahman I who sits at Córdoba breaks with the Moslem east. Almost at once, the Islam that came to Spain assumes a separate being, grows into a body independent of Bagdad and Damascus. This separation means a transformation. And the cause of it is Spain.

The nature of Islam, we have seen, is like the nature of the pioneer. Pioneer values—motion, violence, acquisition, conquest—bear the Idea of the desert race, moving toward horizons. The Idea is not the horizon nor the water beyond it: it is the moving forever toward the unmastered goal. Earth, in such psychology, takes on the delusive aspect of a flying road. And mortal life is synonymous with earth. It is a passing stretch. And it is close to death; for it is unreal and it is dark. The true life, the life of the Idea is that forever unattained, is that toward which our mortal days are an incessant moving. True life, then, is beyond that death which this life truly is. And to attain it, this life should be trampled like a road.

The Idea has its adornments: as in pioneering, they will be simplicity of living and of thought; violence, cruelty, intolerance for all that bars the goal; and the equally violent reflex from these—the narcotics of sleep and sensual relaxation.

Islam’s Idea now comes in the land of Spain. And the Moslem hosts who bear it and live to nourish it, settle in the south where settling is easy. And having settled down, they build a culture whose like the world sees seldom and whose causal spirit is essentially opposed to the Idea of Islam. For the Idea of Islam cannot settle down.

Mohammed and his captains knew no such world as this that sends its radiance from Córdoba. Nor would they have found it good. The Prophet would have thundered: “This is blasphemy and failure. This is turning from the commands of Allah. Rather than invent new forms of splendor for your mosques, ye would do well to push on. What? Ye consort with the Jew? Ye are tolerant with the Christian? suffering his monasteries to abide in Islam? Ye turn a peaceful back on the Frank and leave to the Christian Basques the holy labor of driving Charlemagne and Roland from Roncesvalles? And ye study Aristotle? when the Koran holds all wisdom? Ye tolerate schools who explain the creation of the world by natural laws? when I have taught ye of the Hand of Allah.” Mohammed was wise. He knew that the nature of the Arab, the Idea of Islam, the conduct of the people must be one, else the Idea would fall. But if Mohammed was wise, this kingdom of south Spain was luminous. Jews collaborated in government, science, art. Christians brought their mysteries and their music; and those who chose to pray in convents were not molested. An architecture was developed. Poetry and thought flourished like grass of the fields.

What had happened to Islam? The Idea born of the desert had become detached from the life of the desert people, when it lay down in this smiling southland. Life relaxed from the stern rigor of the Faith and took unto itself new forms, consonant with its relaxation: Islam whose health was war desired peace.

Meantime, Spain’s absorption of invading bloods went on. Christian, Arab, Berber, Copt—each with a past mingling—mingled. There lived soon again in southern Spain, one people: but there lived now three Ideas. The Christian was the least self-conscious, the least active; the Jewish was an insidious minority; the Moslem was dominant. These three Ideas were fleshed in human beings; and the human beings were virtually one. There were Moslem lords, whose ancestry counted Visigoths and Jews; there were Christian bishops in whose veins flowed Yemen and Berber blood; there were Jewish poets whose mothers had been reared in a Harem. Under all, there was the immemorial base outnumbering the rest. It had been pagan, Catholic, Arian, Catholic again. Now for a while, it was Moslem. Within a hundred years of the African invasion, Spain was once more inhabited by Spaniards.

Yet a new element had arisen, which was destined to grow tragic. The Idea of Islam touched into new intensity the Ideas of Jew and Christian. Jew, Christian, Arab, settled down and married. But the three Ideas, grown virulent, did not marry. They made war.

. . . . . .

Islam, meantime, moves from Andalusia north. And as it conquers Spain, the Catholic Reconquest which for near eight centuries holds Spain in blood is cradled in the tiny mountain kingdoms of Asturias and Aragon. Where the Moslem settles, the land becomes Moslem. Often it changes hands in the long war’s tides. But the people, like a tree, stays with its roots. Fresh Moslems may perhaps come to live in a province soon reconquered by the Christian. They will become Christian, too. It is one people. The struggle is between a Cross and a Crescent. And the hands which bear them are of a single body.

Islam, battling in the desert north, has settled to peace in the south and fallen from the Idea of Islam. But battling in the desert north it takes its Idea along—its temper and its nature. And these, it gives unto the Christian foe! Rigorous desert traits flourish in Christian Aragon and Castile. For here is desert again, and violence as the matrix of the world. So the Christians of the north, facing Islam in battle, live ever closer to the Idea of Islam. War is an embrace fertile like love. Traits of Christian and Moslem pass in osmosis. And there comes the day when warlike Catholics from the north press on the gentled Mussulmans of the south with true Islamic rigor. And the Moslem south must look to Africa for Moslems close enough to the Idea of Islam to be able to withstand these northern Christians. And the war has no cease, being a war not of bloods but of souls.

We are still in the first scenes of the play whose tragedy begins only when the clash of arms is over. Let us dwell awhile in Andalusia, first home of the Moslem and his last in Spain.

b. The Eye

There are places of earth like eyes. They have more than a proportionate share of the light and the fire. They hold, within a fragile cup of space, measures infinitely deep. Córdoba is an eye within the face of Spain.

But Córdoba is dead? This whirl of houses is a husk of splendor, a strew of ancient ash here and there speaking still in remnant eloquence of arch or Square? Córdoba is not dead. Its life is impalpable like that within an eye. Something has lived on in Córdoba. There was vision here: that quickening of the nerves to the spheres of life which we call vision. Here was an eye that saw; and it still sees despite the catalepsy of the ages. Perhaps no eye that truly sees is ever blind. Perhaps if within this cup of the Sierras there was today no Mosque, no subtle nerve of house and street, Córdoba still would be an eye; and if our sense were sharp enough to meet it, there would rise to us yet the Word of its incarnate knowledge.

. . . . . .

The Mosque is open to a patio with orange trees, palms, fountains whose pallid water runs in counterpoint with the fervor of mosaic and tile. Women with their children stand about, filling their huge earth water-jars, setting them down in the shade of a palm to talk. A girl sings quiet and incessant: like the cool water over the stones her notes diverge from the hard hot day. On the medieval Puerta del Perdón the Christian saints and regal arms set up their theme against the Moslem mass of the Mosque. To the sides are colonnaded cloisters. But to the south under the blare of sun in the white sky is the Mosque itself. Nineteen arched gates make way into its open forest.

Hundreds of columns various like trees. They are all low: from their smooth shafts the arches of red and white rise agilely to the ceiling which once was a maze of lace-like wood, inlaid. The movement of the columns becomes horizontal. Pillars of many marbles, of jasper, of porphyry, merge in the sweeping spread. There is no Gothic aspiration. There is a maze of delicate shafts with their heads arched and arabesqued, prancing in cohorts between a dull floor and a dull roof. In the heart of this battalioned whirl, stands the Catholic Capilla Mayor which the Cathedral Chapter placed there in the sixteenth century. It is a formless embryon of gilt and marble. It replaces sixty Arabic columns and its heavy flesh rises far higher than the legion of shafts about it. It is perhaps the greatest monument in Spain of the inæsthesia of Spanish consciousness. But with the worst intentions, it has not broken the spirit of the Mosque. The dance of the pillars moves toward this obtrusion, swirls before it to the right and left, sweeps graciously beyond into the shadows. Svelte and exquisite columns with their double-arched head-dress, with their fleet ankles and shoulders—marshaled like an army—move with the undulance of earth to the Mihrab of Abd-er-Rahman and Al-Hakim. The Mihrab is the cynosure of prayer. Before it sits the Master to direct discourse with Allah. The Mihrabs of Córdoba are gems so bright that they make a ghostly swirl of the columns. Individual vibrancies of gem, of mosaic, of marbles frail as sea-shells, fuse into fixity. The Mihrab is the goal of the columns.

So, within Córdoba, stands and lives today the Idea of Islam. Though the Spaniards call it a Cathedral, it is still the Mesjid al-Jâmi, open to the fountains and the naranjeros, open to the skies. It is a place whose spirit in racing columns bespeaks the horizontal swarm of Islam to the ends of Spain. Islam speaks; and Córdoba, which is far more than Islam, answers. The Córdoban streets press and swerve to the north of the Mosque. They are a compact of stresses doubly held together: the Guadalquivir turning back upon itself and the rim of mountains in whose heights still live the fertile prayers of hermits, hold the streets.

Córdoban streets are not like those of Fez, of the Kasbah of Algiers, of Lisbon. Fez, within its translucent hills and vales, swarms like the entrails of a body. Algiers mounts sinister from the gleaming sea, its streets a blackened coil within the white sepulcher that strikes the sun. Old Lisbon is explosive, gyrant, tragically repressed in its march upward, losing the sky as it comes closer to it. Córdoba is proud. Its pride is intricate as the Talmud; hard and abstruse as the mystic creed of the Sufi; open as a page of Aristotle. This eye that is Córdoba is neither secret nor flinching. And its pride is not willful. Córdoba is unassertive. Its light speaks for it: Seneca the Stoic, Averroës the Commentator, Moses ben Maimun first rationalist of the Jews, Lucan, and Spain’s greatest lyric poet, Luis de Góngora ... such are the light of Córdoba. It is the home of the most perfect Arab Knight, the quiet Al-Mansor who, ruling Spain, decreed Sunday to be a day of rest in deference to the Christians.

Córdoba lies within tumultuous mountains and a lazy river. It is a poise of mountains and river. It is a kingly city within chaos; it is masculine in a feminine land. The Christian Copts brought their woman worship to Seville; the gypsies found haven in Granada for their Black Sea spells. Córdoba forbids such fascinations. It is quiet as its river, dense as its mountains, open as its mosque. The streets turn just enough to throw shade to the patios. Ox-teams survive, yet splash no mud on the immaculate walls. Here a miracle of life has overtaken the lunge and death of Islam: here grew a kingdom of balance and of peace.

For Córdoba is not the rock of Seneca, not the intellectual play of Averroës and Maimonides, not the deep current underneath of mystical devotion. Córdoba is the balance, and the contemplation, of all its parts.

. . . . . .

The summer night is cool as wisdom; it is a poise against day like that of Seneca the Stoic against the fever of life. When the sun falls behind the roofs, the town opens as northern towns with the dawn. Day indeed is often fiery night on Córdoba. The good folk have gone to bed; houses have been swathed to keep this white night out. Now, houses are opened wide. Air from the world is permitted to come in to the shut courts where geese patter and women seat themselves at looms.

The people are dark and silent like the dusk. The sky is pale with a glow of convalescence. The houses, serried in the curving streets, are hot. The evening has a magic, it throbs and swells with tacit fervors. The whole of Córdoba is quick under the glow of night. The stone streets are flesh, willfully rigid, of a spirit possessed with the desire to dance. And in the dance are darker intimations: cries, ravage, conquest. But the slow streams of men and women are the sole expression. Are they puritans, then, these Andalusians? They wear easeful masks for faces. The women are clad in black, and their soft flesh within the shrouds seems not the flesh of lovers but of matrons. Even the girls, sinuous walking lilies, promise a snare of momentary passion: their will of men is not to be initiates of love, but to be mothers. All is easeful—the masks on the faces, the dark women’s weeds. They have been worn so long! They are like the streets whose stones are mellow and whose curves and windings have the fatality of forest paths. If these be puritans, these men and women, with their heritage of war, privation, pioneering—they whose ancestry is Islam, the Cross, the promised Zion—long since has the hard fruit ripened. They are firm and condignly whole within their city whose maze of streets is whole within the mountains....

This evening, Córdoba, released from day, is going to the Bull-Ring. There is no moon; the bowl of the arena holds a winey night in which the stars are bubbles of effervescence. The seat tiers are deep. Men and women clamber noisily from perch to perch. But the thousand voices and footbeats are segregate and aloof within the Ring holding this wine of the night. Upon one side, the seats have been roped off and are empty. Below hang two electric lamps and cast their naked glare upon a stage improvised with unpainted planks. The stage is a little tongue thrust into the arena.

The crowd has come and paid for a good time. But it is self-sufficient—the strong willed, resourceful crowd of Spain. Myriad calls and shreds of laughter, play of hand and foot twine about the Ring: agglutinate: the groups of clamor thicken and grow wider: the entire Ring is joined in the enterprise of shouting, shuffling, clapping. No Spaniards blackening the tiers, but this one sudden Spain! It has many means of making itself live. Boys scurry over the laps of matrons: men sing falling cadences to girls: babies shout. The aguero with an earth-jar large as himself, the vendor of pastas and of Arabic sweetmeats, weave through the mass. But still the Bowl holds its uncanny silence. The night bubbles at its brim.

On the stage step forth two figures: the lamp-glare sharpens and deforms them. A man, stout and short, clad in black broadcloth with a wide purple sash and linen that is green in the electric glare: he carries a guitar. A woman, slender and tall: her black mantón is like a subtle fur over the angular brightness of her shoulders. She wears a large sombrero ancho, black as the two black eyes in her white face.

They stand within the night, within the crowd. The man takes a chair: the woman remains isolate beside him. The man’s hands brush the strings of his guitar. The woman’s mouth opens, and her breast rises. Under the laced clamor of the crowd she sings unheard—under the silent night....

A note, hard like silver, high and sharp as an arrow, rises above the clamor and is heard. Far up, it soars, surrounded by the stars. It falls. And as it falls, reaching the crowd, it links itself within the vast confusion. This rough-hewn Spain falls along with the note: is drawn by it down to the naked stage, down to the red mouth of the singing woman. The crowd is transfigured. The woman’s voice fades into rest, within an utter silence.

The hand of the guitarist is not lean: yet his fingers make a murmur like a breeze: clear in the silence is the music’s breathing. The music has conquered: it is the night’s silence, speaking; the night’s quiet, moving. The woman’s body stands rigid, her heels beat a tattoo of subtle restraining: her voice is confident and exultant.

Burden heavy with ages of flesh, bright with ages of dream. Plaint of spirit, rush of blood miraculously woven. A body in dance, rigid as a column; a voice in song, light and swift as a bird. Many Orients are here. In the form, a slender mystic draughtsmanship—Byzantine; a clamor of soul, a submissiveness of body with all its sweetness and its joys merged in the ecstasy of an ideal—Jewish; an intensive thrust, lean, fierce, hunting—Arab. Rising like revelation from the Córdoban Plaza, this Andalusian song of many wills becomes the drama of Spain.

The woman’s body scarcely moves. Even as she circles the stage, her arms slowly rising and falling, her heels in periodic showers of sharp strokes, it is as if she did not move: rather the stage, rather the Ring and the crowd move than this plastic fixity of dance. Torment, passion, vision, ruthlessly compress in a thin body.

The music cadence is vertebral. There is a time counterpoint of two adverse factors: a rising lilt, a falling plaint. And they become the skeletal arabesque which is the backbone of the Spanish music. All the voices of Spain’s world are laced. The Jew’s sensual mysticism, conflict between his homely passions and his cosmic fate, rises in a line more Arabic than Jewish. And the tendency of the music to transcend its scale is Byzantine; it bespeaks the North African shores of Porphyry and Plotinus, of Origen and Augustine. But the stress is more barbarous than platonic. And the form is forever Spain. Its elements do not suffice to make this music great. It is greatly moving, because its moving parts become articulate, not in moments, not progressively, but all at once: in restraint, in defeat—in the triumph of the artist’s will upon them.

The passion does not depart; a woman’s body holds it and we are moved not by the passion but by the unmoved victory over passion. This cadence is a plaint of agony. It does not bend her. This peal is pathos. The high head, the arms crushing the breast, the torrent of heel-notes rivet a triumph over pathos. The mouth sings languorous desire; but the body is hard. Sudden the song flares like a vision from that mouth. But the body circles the stage in a crisp gayety, the eyes smile, the knees dip in courteous bestowal.

At the other end of Córdoba, the night lives among the columns of the Mosque. With arched head and heel of arabesque, they dance their mystery—a forest of willful movement under the will-less stars. This woman is a column too; rigid, and stone-like and adance. But the dance of the Arab columns is horizontal; it is an easeful running with the earth. The dance of this woman which is a dance of Spain, is deep and is high. It is not horizontal. So calm, it touches hell. So still, it reaches God.

c. The Bowels

The Spanish is the fusion of the warring elements of Spain into dramatic wholes. As the proportions of these elements change, the wholes change: and yet are Spanish. Granada, then, is the least Spanish of the towns of Spain; for, with all the elements there, they have remained disparate. Even physically, Granada does not resolve its discords. It is cast in confusion. Two steep spurs come down from the Sierra Nevada. They are divided by the gorge of the río Darro. Smaller, arid gorges break them, they expire in a plain. And within this broken sea of rock and ridge and wood, Granada sits uneasily. One height is Al-Hambra, palace of kings. From its towers the precipice cuts to the river; and in the west rises Al-Baicín, a populous suburb. North, beside the river straggles a gypsy village. And eastward, on another height, is the cascaded, terraced, tawdry splendor of the Generalife. Physically chaos; culturally, spiritually chaos.

For near five hundred years, Granada was the capital of a Moslem state. After the fall of Córdoba, it was independent. And in 1492, when Boabdil fled from Ferdinand and Isabel, there died the last political body of Spanish Islam. For close three hundred years, Granada was the richest and most populous state of Spain. Castile, Aragon, Catalonia were rustics beside it. But the barbarous states spread; and Granada had energy neither to spread nor to glow. The barbarous states had fused their differences in the terrific lust of religious conquest. Castile and León were closer then to the spirit of Mohammed than the Andalusian Town in which the muedzins called his name and the people spoke his tongue. Toledo, Valencia, Badajoz, Seville, Córdoba fell: Granada came to be the last resort in Spain of the driven Moslems. A veritable city state it was, going north to Baza, west to Málaga, east to Almería. Meantime, Spain had converged into an austere camp. Her forests became deserts, her towns were empty of men, her women suckled warriors, her churches were the centers of recruiting. And Granada shone with ease. In Granada, the wide lands were gardens; husbandry was an art. The cities sang with ceramic and jewels. The mosques were models for the mosques of Africa.

Córdoba had been the seat of Arab Spain. Granada was the heart of the Moor. When the Arabs were too wasted by peace and thought and quarrel to withstand the pressing Christians, they turned to the south whence four hundred years before they too had come, clad only in the harsh will of the Prophet. In the Moroccan mountains and the deserts, dwelt still virgin tribes in whom the Idea of Islam worked with the virulence of birth. This was the need of Spanish Islam. So the Moors came to Spain to do what the Arabs had done and could do no longer. The Moors drove back the Christians. Then they turned and subdued the Arabs. Arab Andalusia was Moorish.

(And here we must digress for definitions.... The greatness of Granada came with the Nazrite dynasty whose founder, Al-Ahmar, captured the town in 1238 from the Moorish Almohades. And Al-Ahmar, born in Córdoba, claimed descent from the pure Yemen Arabs of Kharzrej and Ansár. Which is important, since it displays the dangers of speaking, biometrically, of a race. The family that reigned in Moorish Granada was perhaps as Arab as the dynasties of Córdoba and Seville! And of course, the very first Arabs in Spain brought with them Berbers, negroes, Copts. Why then was Córdoba Arab, and Granada Moorish?... We require the names, and for them there are reasons. The first Moslem invasion was Arab: for its impulse, its energy, its leadership came straight from the Arabs. And that first Moslem culture which from Córdoba held all Spain north to Toledo, south, west, east to the seas was also Arab for the identical reason. Now come fresh leaders to defend Moslem Spain; and when they have driven back Castile they disperse the Arab masters who bade them in. These hosts come in two waves: the Almoravides—men of religion—are Berbers from the Senegal, and the Almohades—men of the Unity—are Berbers from the Atlas. It is right to call them Moors since they rose to power in Morocco. And it is right to call their dominance in Spain the Moorish epoch since, after their coming, the culture of all Moslem Spain not only differed from that of Córdoba but was deeply homogeneous within itself despite political chaos.) ...

In the towns of Spain lived still the Spaniard with his absorption of Semite, African, Latin, German. But the difference of the Moor from the Arab was a change in his Idea and in the ways of life begotten by it. The Christian forces were vastly stronger than they had been. Their own Idea had been enhanced by Moslem contact. They were come a long ways from the invertebrate Christianity of the Visigoths. The first Moslem sweep to Biscay and the Pyrenees had planted a germ of resistance which with the ages grew to be this vital Christian body, a body stripped and ruthless as ever had been Islam. So the Moor could not, like the Arab, dismount from his saddle to invite his soul. The Moor did not become tolerant under pleasant skies. He welcomed no Jewish thinkers and statesmen, he housed no Christian convents. Under the benignity of peace he made no introverted, rational culture. When the Moor rested, it meant that he was weary; and then he invited his body. Arab refinement became voluptuousness; Arab ease became prostration. The energy of the Idea of Islam had by the Arab been transformed into a contrasting culture. Under the Moor it became at best a reposing culture. And indeed, the Idea did not change. Christian armies saw to that. But the need of Islam—to expand—could not be fulfilled. The Christian armies saw to that, as well. Here then was a warlike energy that could not spread and yet could not transform. It turned against itself. Moor fought Moor. Granada alone held long to the appearance of a dignified state. And the appearance was false. Moorish Granada helped the Christian San Fernando to march against Moorish Seville, as a century before Moorish troops had helped the Cid win Moorish Valencia. A hundred years ere its fall, dynastic quarrels had split Granada into a chaos of tiny states; the Catholic Kings needed to take it piecemeal in a series of raids on petty princes.

. . . . . .

The Idea of Islam is no more within this lovely world. But high and low, strewn through the summits and the troughs of the Sierra, lives the wreckage of the Moorish body. Across a gorge, Al-Baicín and Al-Hambra face each other. Al-Hambra! all that may be said of the skill of the goldsmith may be said of this Palace, with its scores of patios and halls. It brings to mind, not other architectures but the triumphs of the Cellinis of the Renaissance, the delicate perfections in Pompeii and in Egyptian tombs. In minute and marvelous grace, it transcends them all: and yet it is a building!

Within the patio de los arrayanes there is a pool enclosed in myrtle as a sapphire within emerald. Overhead is the soft pale sky. Beyond the sala de la barca, arched like a ship, is the Ambassadors’ Hall, its dome an incessancy of carven woods, columns and walls so tooled that they seem lace threaded with gems. Myriad patios on either side are myriad surprises of wood, plaster, stone that flows with arabesques and softens to the creaminess of linens.

Some architectures make one think of man; some make one think of God; some, of the tragic struggle in men’s flesh between the man and the god. Al-Hambra exiles both the earth and heaven. That a palace lacks high poetry, movement of aspirance, is not amiss. But Al-Hambra lacks as well the sense of being made for men to dwell in. It is cold as a jewel and as a jewel hard. Yet unlike other jewels, it adorns no breast and no altar. It is faëry. Yet unlike other visions of surprise, it does not entice the mind. It is no outward form of the old dreams. Nor is it strong, save as some stellar gem, fallen in the mud of our world, has its impregnable strength. It is immaculate of men. It is too far from man, too far from God. It is not strong, yet it is not poetic. Poetry must pay its tribute. If it sing a blade of grass, a kingdom, a divinity—yet it must make its tribute to the world: man in giving music gives himself. Al-Hambra, for all its matchless grace, is incarnate of no warmth, no joy, no agony, no love.... It is a jeweled monster; a sort of dissociate birth of human will. Although its tints are magic, its curves delicate as a woman’s mouth, its forms courteous, and its stuffs transfigurations of the elements into the radiance of silk and the sweetness of wool, yet it is but a fragment. Its rapture parts not from itself. It is Narcissus. It is a Golem of the Moors.

. . . . . .

The rock of Al-Hambra falls into the river and on the farther side rises Al-Baicín, antiphony of Al-Hambra.

In the days of the first Nazrites, here was a place of noble mansions. But when the Moslems, exiled from conquered towns, poured into Granada, Al-Baicín became what it is now—a swarming city. This is as near to the Kasbah of Algiers, to the dense Attarine of Fez as you may come in Spain. The town is a lay of alleys maggoting up the breast of the Sierra. The throngs are dark, aburst with energy. Eyes are gentle and give forth no light. Faces are locked as if in obscure struggle of themselves. This folk is neither gay nor sad, savage nor kind. It partakes of the ineffable nature of the houses. What it is, what it has to say—as with the houses—is detached from the hour, is a minglement of nostalgia and obsession. An incommunicable town, knowing no tongue save an archaic one: its houses speak not to us but to their own old shadows.

A patio stable with its mangy mules, a gigantic oven where bread in memorial Moorish shapes is thrust at the end of a pole ... such are the words of the streets. Beneath the language which the people speak, this rhythmic word of the streets.

Al-Baicín has a soul. What Al-Baicín lacks is body! Groveling life within an ancient molder of walls, patios, wine shops black as warts—this life so halted, so disgraced, so blind is life that lacks a body. And there, polished clean of the clamors of the spirit, shines the body on the opposite hill—soulless Al-Hambra.

d. A Goddess and Don Juan

The air is spiced with murmur, throat call, peal, with stirring of feet, clink of earth-jar; it is a weave through which the horse’s hoof, flick of whip, ar-r-ra and shuh of driver make a swathe. Singing cry of a girl, crying song of a girl cascade to church bells.... Silence.... A little square (Castilians say patio, Andalusians say compás) holds an alicatado fountain: thin water within a sapphire bowl wavers, splinters, fades like stars at a dawn. All about, the wings of a vast Church. Fortress-like they rise, rise in terrace, in forest of sculpture, in buttresses that sweep out of sight. And straight above, a tower. It is the old prayer tower of a mosque—al-minar: the muedzin post which the Christians call Giralda.

In the compas, it is cool; high overhead within the well of the walls, the heat of afternoon is writhing. Heat cannot pierce the eight foot walls of the tower. A pavement, so gradual and wide that a coach could follow it, climbs to the peak. There are windows to tell how you climb. The Cathedral, resonant with statues; the stucco palace of the Bishop beside a compas sleepy and cool like a virgin at dawn; a slant of street with houses dodging sun.... Cathedral roof, a groined and columned symphony with transepts trilling in overtones away; a knot of buttresses that scale a higher wall you could not guess was there; a grove of turrets against the town, green trees; a line of river; town itself keen in the gyrant air ... guitar-like music under the voice of the sun. A scarf of hill, treeless and red. A court within the sapphire day like rubies and emeralds—the patio de los naranjos—a frame of creamy walls holding the rows of orange trees. The top of Giralda.

Seville: No, this body is Isbilíya. Town of the Visigoths, the Yemen Arabs and the Copts, alcázar of the Moorish Yusuf who built Giralda, town whence Ferdinand of Castile with the aid of his friend the Moslem of Granada drove countless Moslems in 1248, bringing in other men who said Christ, not Allah—said it in the same Mosque rechristened, in the same town, under the same sun, from the same Giralda.

The repeopling, the christening could not avail against the might of this past. Christ dimmed again; Our Lady grew. Our Lady who was Isis ere she was Mary: consort of Osiris, Horus, Khem, ere she sat with Jesus. And in her hand, through Seville, through Andalusia, a lily that does not grow in Spain but grows indeed on the Nile ... lily or lotus or more simply still la flor in all heraldry, all holy craft of the land. For Islam had passed to Egypt and won the Christian Copts who were in heresy for that they adored a living Trinity and had no Christ on the Cross, a trinity older than the Pyramids with the new Christian names. And now, for an age, their trinity disappeared. But Our Lady became Fatima, daughter of the Prophet and virgin although she bore miraculous sons. And Arab and Copt march on to Spain. And the Christian saint comes south. And the mosque of Seville is again the church of Our Lady. And from Seville to Rome goes the first urgency to make a dogma of the Immaculate Conception....

The town is so very thick with houses, where are the streets? Those sharp cracks weaving through the roofs are streets? The roofs are live, bewildering planes. White flat roofs under dominant chimneys. Roofs that run with their walls. Roofs that are clusters of rush. Roofs that are little gardens for goats and chickens. Roofs that are vineyards. Roofs that are nurseries. Roofs that are streets on which stand huts of turf. In a court, is a palm; its round head sends green star-rays to the sky.

The town is so very wide; solid it rings you. The breaks are breathings for a palm, or a wide wall with crenellated top or a tiled dome like a jewel in the breast of Seville. Thick town ... intricate, turning roofs. Until the sudden stop! Seville does not linger. There is thick town, then huerta. Country gardens are perfumed brasiers. A wandering ribbon of low trees marks the sleepy river creeping down to the copper wall of sunset....

It is cool now. They have drawn to the roof tops the canopies that shield the streets. Now let you go down into Seville.

. . . . . .

Varying weathers fall upon Seville. In summer days, she smiles resilient and cool within a fire that shrivels the river. In winter, under a slatey sky with her streets drenched, she is smiling still. Weather and invasions come upon Seville; she masters them all.

She is an Eastern goddess unknown of the Greeks, whose cult is sung with cymbals and in blood. She is no Semite; she is the antistrophe in this, as in all things, of her great brother of the north: Toledo. Within the huddle of her streets, lives clarity; within her sudden and esconded curves, glows coolness. She is immeasurably far from the hot Jew and Arab. Seville is Pagan. But her pagan spirit is uniquely hers. It is not dark and carnal like the Sumerian; not analytic, open-eyed like the Greek; it lacks the Italic will. Nor is it Berber. This spirit has a spirit; the Giralda. To see Giralda from the town is to see both the tower and Seville. Everywhere al-minar follows. It is cool in the sun; in the damp of winter it is gleam. On the river’s margin where vessels coal, it is a yesterday when ships had sails. Its simple face is strength above the prone complexity of life. Variant, it is constant, sovereignly self-contained. It mirrors men’s perceptions, who can see of it at each moment but a flash of time. It stands for Seville whose traits and deeds are facets of a Crystal.

This fixity, this intricate appearance within fixity is the deep trait of Seville. Her genius, her emotions, her religion are in fixity for they are held unwavering to herself. She looks not at Spain nor the world. Not like Venus does this goddess walk and give herself to men. Not like Astarte, thirst for the blood of others. Not like Isis is she concerned with the cycles of sun and planet. Seville loves only herself; and the moon and stars are brilliants for her hair.

. . . . . .

The narcism of Seville is fecund. The gorgeous litany of the Semana Santa is but the most famous of her arts. Religion is but the most obvious pretext of her self-worship. Seville abounds in dramas and in altars of her self-delight. Wander through her streets, commune with her churches and cafés, watch her ample daughters dance to the splendor of their own high breasts; read the legends—Don Juan, La Macarena. An hour will come, perhaps at dusk in the park along the river, when she will tell her secret:

“The Guadalquivir is my scarf of saffron; the orange blossoms sing the chant of my flesh; the sky is a mantón of rose and purple on my white shoulders. Church and God, love, blood and death are castanets! I am Real. I am the dancer. I am Isbilíya.”

. . . . . .

Sierpes, chief street of the town, is a bit of a way with a crick in its middle: too narrow for horses and mules: the lines of shops and clubs face each other across a slender sidewalk. When the good weather comes the doors open; the clubs and cafés pile chairs pell-mell upon the street. And Seville sits down and looks at herself. Drinks coffee, Manzanilla wine, and looks at herself. Eats mariscos and looks some more at herself. Athwart the Sierpes, other streets are a maze of tiny shops: shops small and delicate like toys, shops secret and uncommercial like the good Majas[7] who keep them, shops with too deep modesty to display their wares and too little will to have much wares to display. Reticent, charming shops like the hearts of simple folk, so full they are of warm darkness. In such a passage, crammed with stores (for these central streets are merely passages), in the very heart of a world of dolls, lottery tickets, pastries, newspapers, umbrellas, fans and pipes, is a Chapel. It is open to the street and it reveals within a long recess its garish bower of candles. The throng crowds by. Dark clad, the women; drab, the men with wide stiff hats and a clank to their high heels. They talk of little things; eyes hold to the unconscious rhythm of the throng. And as they pass, they shift their talk an instant into prayer; or they make the sign of the cross; or they kneel. So Seville prays to herself.

In the Parish church of San Gil, there is the figure of a woman. Is it some crude artisan’s idea of a prosperous Maja? The dress is modern on La Macarena—idol of Our Lady. And La Macarena is the most vaunted, the most puissant goddess in Seville. At Semana Santa, in her garish dress, she parades the town. The Majas of Seville throw themselves before her; and sing; and pray. And as the Doll, who is both Mary and Maja, moves through Seville, the streets are paved with the breasts of the Sevillanas, loving their own image.

The Gardens of Alcázar are a geometric maze of tiny verdant patios. Each stands at its own level, a gradual step lowering with the flow of water. Each is a little bower with tiled floor, an intimate garden holding to its charm in the great sum of gardens. The patios make a mosaic. The design is severe; it is a heritage of the analytic Moslems. But in Seville, the mathematic form is snared into an idyll.

Hundreds of churches in Seville. Many of them are bleak rococo monsters and their interiors gross piles of gilt and scarlet. They are not bad taste in Seville. Murillo is not bad taste in Seville. They are parts of a ceremonial. Seville’s love is great enough to hold and to transform them. So, in the compas of the Convento de Santa Paula, a noble Gothic portal stands with a palm tree; so the rococo dome of Santa Catalina blazes to ceramic; so the Plaza Santa Cruz becomes a faëry quarter, its rows of ancient houses painted like the flowers and the birds that hang from the low casements; so, even the Casa de las Dueñas, home of the bloody Dukes of Alba, winds behind its iron gates into quaint patios and palms and archways.

Each street has its garland of self-praise. A color of façade, a jewel of ceramic, a tiny unsuspected court elbowed between the blank backs of two houses, from which oak doors lead into other courts—communities of painters, artisans, teachers of the dance. And each season has its pretext for self-song. The Semana Santa and the Feria are the most famous rites: in Holy Week, the spirit of Seville meets Seville’s body in orgasmic climax. But other seasons have not less typical embraces. The Velada de San Pedro comes in summer. There are no foreigners and the rich townsfolk are north in the Basque country. Night follows a day’s fever. And now the people open their doors, throw wide their canopies and go into Seville. The servants carry great hampers of fiambres: cold sea food, mostly, with jars of Jérez and Manzanilla. They proceed to the popular squares, Alameda de Hiércules, Plaza de León, Plaza Encarnación, near the Mercado where with cool night comes the stir of odors ... greens, fruits, cheeses. They spread themselves, the good folk: they eat and play.

La Plaza de San Juan Bautista de la Palma is not as large as it sounds. A dozen families fill it: it is a pretty stage for the Sevillan drama. Overhead are the crisp stars. The houses, painted cream, blue, pink, fade in unlighted shadow. In the center is a pavilion cut into tiny booths for churros, pasteles, bombones, patas, mariscos, bocadillos, fiambres, vinos, cervezas, gaseosas—myriad tidbits de media noche. Nearby sit three men and a woman. They play the guitar, the mandolin, the fiddle; and the woman sings. She wears a buff shawl that is caught tight over one shoulder and tighter still under the other armpit. Rondures of breast and stomach press the lashed silk. She is a gitana: she comes of an immodest race, but ere she goes among the crowd for coppers she will place a black shawl over the revealing buff one. Each of a dozen groups has its place in the Square. They eat, drink, dance and court within their private precinct. They are as unconcerned as if they were in their own private compas. But their gayety is richer; this open sharing of a public place is the sharing of a rite.

You have seen a young girl in some peasant road step endimanchée from her house to the sun. The velvet bosom of her bodice rises. A jewel at her neck, a ring on a finger, an eye gleam brighter than the jewel make of her a song that runs with the Spring sun and the grass. You know that the peasant girl loves and is loved. Love has wrought this miracle on her flesh. And so, in Seville: the miracle of her streets is the same alchemy. She is adance with the magic of fondness; she is gay in a perpetual Spring of self-delight.

. . . . . .

Near the Guadalquivir and not far from the Torre de Oro, a dodecagonal relic of the Moors who built their castle on the waterfront, there is a baroque structure. It is the Hospital de la Caridad. In the seventeenth century Don Miguel de Mañara was a caballero in Seville; a knight so dissolute that legend makes him the Burlador, the true Don Juan. This the nuns of the Caridad deny. But the day came when the Lord miraculously spared his life from the assault of a noble seeking to avenge the honor of his sister. Don Miguel avowed the will of God and his sins; and caused to be built this Charity as witness, through perpetual good works, of his atonement.

Above the chapel there is a chaste stone hall; a stair, spreading from above like the train of a regal robe, leads to the carved door of the Consistory. Here hangs the portrait of Don Miguel de Mañara. The face is darkly sensual and brooding. The chin is obtrusive, the eyes have the rigidity of a madman’s. He sits at a table, and behind him in the room there opens a fantastic landscape. It is radiant and nubilous, a landscape of vapors rather than of earth. And on the floor beside the table and at Don Miguel’s feet, squats a boy and looks at him and smiles. Pedro Salinas, the poet, has a theory about this portrait. Don Miguel is mad, says he: the landscape, so amazingly like the “spirit paintings” of our day, is his vision of madness. The boy is the sane boy—the Sancho Panza—laughing at the madman.

Whatever the painter meant, whatever the historical connection of Don Miguel with the legended Don Juan, here at least is his true interpretation. Don Juan is the most conspicuous symbol of Seville. Since Tirso de Molina in the seventeenth century made a play from the old ballad and folklore sources of Don Juan, poets and playwrights of many lands have retold his story.[8] The modern mood has freshened him again with new psychology into a modish legend. But it is futile to approach Don Juan save through the spirit of his town. The Don Juan of Tirso, the first, remains the greatest. For Tirso placed his hero in the proper setting. Tirso was no analyst, but he was a poet ... a great dramatic poet. And his plastic presentation needs no analysis to reach the truth.

Seville—auto-erotic, self-rapt goddess—has a god. Her streets, her churches, her festivals bring you her lord. Don Juan is not the full-grown lover. The true lover dwells within the spirit and body of his woman as within a world holding heaven but earth too and hell: and he enfeoffed to them all for that they all are the true world which he loves. The true lover is constant; he has seen his woman so deep that he has found infinitude within her; and how could he desire to transcend it? What holds him to her is not pleasure: pleasure is but a moment in this eternity of love. Anguish, anger, the black shades of disappointment are also in his woman and he accepts them also. The true lover is rare, rarer than genius. But Don Juan is one who loves in woman his own senses, his own victory, and seeking ever these fleet constants of himself moves ever on from breast to breast. The true lover is rare because the full-grown man is rare. Don Juan is common because infancy is common: the state of seeking only oneself, of taking life as a flowered highway along which appetite and ease run gayly in pursuit of their own image.

Like his mother Seville, Don Juan is restlessly pagan, hunting in countless dramatic scenes a tribute to self-adoration. Each woman is a mirror to himself; love of each woman is a pageant in which he enacts his triumph. When the glance has been enjoyed, what is the mirror for? When the pageant is past, what are its faded garlands? The real is Don Juan! That he may be forever fresh, that his triumph may be forever clear, undulled by custom, there must be new mirrors, new pageants—new women.

Under Don Juan’s lyric words, there is coldness; under his exploits, there is abstraction. His passion is but the spark, ere it has kindled life and made life passion. And his deeds are fantasies, for only he is real and the women whom he meets he never knows, knowing only his desire. Therefore, his deeds like the landscape in the portrait of Mañara are abstract.

All the elements of Don Juan are in Seville. But Seville is greater than her son. His worship of himself in the white bodies of women is true Seville. The constant shift of his deeds, like facets in the crystal of desire, is true Seville. His orgiastic use of blood, of mysticisms, his encounters with statues, necrophiles and ghosts—are Seville of the Semana Santa. His ultimate sinking into the peace of self-absorption is Seville. But the town is ampler, deeper. Don Juan conquers only women. Seville conquers Spain.

This is her ultimate secret. She too—like Córdoba, Toledo, Greco, Cervantes—is a living whole fused from the hostile elements of Spain. But the peculiar chemic proportion of Seville makes all these worlds and wealths the single gesture and the rite of her self-adoration.

She is the pagan goddess, ample limbed, with hair in which brood darkness and the laugh of the sun. She leans over her Giralda. She stirs her head and her arms in a half somnolent, half ecstasied dance, seeking her own image in the water....

e. The Gypsies Dance

Below Al-Baicín the bodiless soul and Al-Hambra the soulless body, there is a gypsy town. The sparse waters of the Darro run at the level of the road. And on its other side the land mounts like a wall. Here, under the hill are caves, the dwellings of gitanos.

Heavy women, their bare arms clinking with metal and stone ornaments, their breasts slung in crass colors, call out for gain. The eyes are shallow and sly; the mouth that smiles is like the straining of an unsmiling substance; the oily hair throws off the glance of the sun. Men are rigid and yet slender; they lack the easy harshness of the women. Their bodies have melancholy and fatigue; as if an endless joust of appetite and song had worn them.

The cave becomes, inside, an ample room, narrow, cool, long. Walls are white plaster. Floors are fine-beaten clay. Chairs, tables, lamps, make this modern ease fantastic against the crude stone mouth of a cave within a hill. Men take tambours and sing; women dance.

It is a cave of storms. The blasts of many roads, the seas and forests of untempered passions shriek in this music. Tambour, castanet, foot stamp, hand-clap, raise the world in a maelstrom. And the Spanish cadence gleams like a strip of sun upon the barbarous clouds.

The gitano music is impure, and heavy. It has crude curves and broken surfaces. Its timbre is inexact, its form aimless. “Time” is the best of it as if this race had its true ritual in the beat of feet upon the endless highway. Time becomes a hurrying crescendo that splits, turns back, gallops against itself so that it never really moves. The women have an easy grace upon the easy floor. Full bodies swing and swerve in a sensuous complacence. They step to the singing men. And the song of the men swirls like a colored smoke about their hair, about the eyes of the women.

Foot-beat under song ribs it, volumes it, controls its wild delight: holds the gitanos together: is their soul. But this softness and spirit of the music is within; it speaks soothing to the gitanos, making their faces good. The outside of the music is coarse and motley. We ... all the world ... know but the wrong side of the weave.

f. Spain Dances

Andalusia is the youngest part of Spain. Its land came last from the receding waters; its Christian culture came last from the receding Islam. Its tongue is the youngest of the many forms of Spanish. Galician, Valencian, Catalan, were sister languages of the Castilian: like the dominant form, they sprang from the medieval Latin and for long were rivals. Andalusian stems, not from the mother tongue, but from the Castilian. It is of a later generation. Immigrants from the north gave birth to the fluid, fresh speech which is still heard from Almería to Cádiz. For in the days when writers like Rojas were consecrating Castilian prose, much of Andalusia still spoke Arabic.

There is a reason therefore for the vigor of this land. The cells that make the newborn body are old as the world. Youth inheres in the fresh fusing. In new environment and combination, they are renewed. So Andalusia, ancient of parts, has this organic youth. In this birth, the great factor is Castile. Castile came down with its fanatic will to make Spain one—to make Spain a theodicy in Christ. Castile turned Moor and Jew into the sea: and replenished the fields with farmers from the north. Coming down to make this youngest Spain, Castile caught the rejuvenation.

The body of Andalusia is bright with morning. The ancient capitals reflect this dawn. But the small town is its best image. Villages in Andalusia are gems of white and orange on the green breast of the huerta. Men and women live in a mirage of which their houses are the crystal setting. They seem to know that any day their Saint (or Our Lady) will lift them into heaven. (These villages would fit well into heaven.) They live—and their stone world lives—in an expectant mood. Life becomes a symbol and a pageant. Passion is the breath of a prayer; blood is the paint of a picture. The pueblo entire is platform for the Dance.

. . . . . .

Far worlds bespeak us, before the dancer herself. The music plays; and in the distance, the click of castanets. These castanets are gypsy; they came to Spain from regions of the Black Sea. The dancer walks quietly forward, playing an obbligato with her castanets, not to the music (she has not been married to the music), but to the march of her feet, to the swing of her hips. She wears a yellow silk mantón: a mantón de Manilla that went from China to the Philippines and thence to Spain to become the Andalusian shawl. The bailarina bows and listens to the music. In her hair, like the crest of a mythic bird, stands a peina of tortoise shell. Most Andalusian—this arrogant Gothic comb. She hears a cadence—Andalusian too—whose strain is of the Jews and Arabs. Her body is still; the torso faintly turns and the arms wind upward to her head. There is no mistaking this rigorous control. She has answered Semitic song with a gesture of Castile!

Her dance begins as this response, almost this opposition to the music. Sinew of the north confronts the fluid south. Two dominant forms embrace in warfare: a music, limned like prayer, rhythmed like heartbeat, and this fierce coldness on a woman’s body, which is the Word of Castile. The dancer is a column, articulate of spirit: a live plasticity: with the moods of eye and waving hand flung like a largess to our sense.

There is a pause. The two dominants of the dance (the north and the south) fall momently apart and reveal a third. It is the personality of the dancer herself. She is woman: very woman. She is large, almost heavy. Her arms are full rounded; her head is poised; her bare shoulders are a magnificent molding of firm flesh. From the waist, the skirt thrusts almost at right angles. It is a cascade of gold down to the ankles; and as the dancer whirls it flares out wide, revealing the gray stockinged legs which are a minor almost girlish note within the sumptuous dress. Her feet stamp; the skirt flows; the torso, lashed in purple, stands heroically still, its silence an articulation not alone of the tempest within but of the will to subdue it. The arms float languidly to the head. The castanets click their dry commentary. Purring, shrilling, silent, they are a gloss subtle as Talmud page, as Arabesque, upon this whirl of sculpted fire which is the dance of Spain.

The castanet came, probably, with the gypsy from the ruined culture of Byzance. It was known to the Greeks and Romans. In the hands of the gitana, it is—as perhaps it was in the Dionysian rites—a heightened bloodbeat to the music: simple, single dimensioned, metronomic. Here it is an instrument subtle as a voice. It is a running, rhyming prose. Like the arabesque—a decoration evolved from the written language—it retains an intellectual power. The line and music of the castanets are apart from the dance. While the arms flow like birds wheeling, while the body becomes a throat of song, here is analysis forever present.

The action in the dance is drama. The bailarina moves in a tiny square. She draws intensity from subtle signals of torso, shoulder, limb, hand: this intensity she transposes to an undulous swing carrying her now far about the platform. She is horizontal and relaxed. She turns her naked shoulders forward; the castanets click almost silently beside her hips that roll in a slow ruminance. She faces about; her caress comes full and forward. The music tears with its down cadence against this mellow mother. Plaint and passion weave a subtle net that draws her forward (the castanets are still). Suddenly, she is held in rigor. The fertile mother of the south is sacrificed to the harsh north. The gorgeous breast, the hips, the arms like songs of love, are tortured in a vise of passionate control. She is the drama of women giving up their sons to the Reconquest, giving the man of their marriage bed to battle with the Moor.... But the mood does not last. Castanets trip lightly. She dances fluidly, widely; her heels strike high; her golden skirt rises and frees her legs. The castanets are become as the chatter of children. From the new relaxation of delight wells more energy, and comes again the tragic transformation. With the emotion, rises the ruthless will locking at last this pleasaunce in its hostile grip. The music is now a battle. Song, body, castanets fuse in the war of passion and will, of nature and of reason breaking on each other. And above this symphony, the dancer’s face is silence.

So do all the motions of this drama converge into a plastic movelessness. The dance itself is not drama; is less kin to the dances of Europe than to the sculpture of Egypt. One thinks of the stones of the Nile in whose unsubtle substance live flame and intricate vision. One thinks of the Maya reliefs of Yucatan whose myriad planes twine to harmonious flatness.

. . . . . .

Since the dance is a true classic art, the need of personal genius to express it is reduced. The true genius here is the tradition. Spain dances. Unlike the other dances of modern Europe, the dance of Andalusia is a norm: and the true dancer is a normal woman.

The good bailarina conforms strictly to the type of the good andaluza. She is handsomely stout, with broad pelvis, full-developed breast, strong, regular features. She lacks sensual erethism. She is indeed the matron, rather than the prostitute. And the matron is fitted for the classic dance, precisely because of its normality, because it has been purged of the romantic, the brilliant, the superficially sensual—the accidental. A “romantic” Andalusian dance is nonsense.[9]

The classic bailarina is, then, a quiet woman. Her body is splendid without obvious incitements. Her costume is lovely in form and color, but it is too heavy and too complete to be sexually arousing. She conforms to an ideal of plastic motion in which all the romantic elements of the dance—lust, madness, nakedness—are sublimated into social symbols: love, prayer, vision, sacrifice. And all her movements (again unlike the dances of Europe) merge into an almost static mold that has the ultimate finality of sculpture.

The true Andalusian dance is solitary; and except in the special case of the cuadro flamenco it is an æsthetic error for more than a single dancer to occupy the stage. The true Andalusian dancer (with the same exception) is a woman. The true Andalusian audience is a man. The relation, however, is not sexual, save perhaps in a remote Freudian sense: it is matriarchal. And this too is normal, since psychologically, Spain is matriarchal. The dancer is mother, teacher, priestess. She holds the stage alone, and smiles on the men who sit beyond the music. This smile is a physical caress, reticent, unconsciously restrained like the caress of a mother. It must win her men, else her ultimate word as teacher and as priestess of Spain’s mystery will go for naught. The men, with the brutal candor of the Spaniard (and of the child) will turn from her and make a clamor of talk to drown her out. But the true andaluza wins her men; and gives her message which is the message of all Spain and Spain herself: this quickened fusion of many hostile worlds into a single Beauty.