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ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN

by

JOHN DOS PASSOS

 * * * * *

Books by John Dos Passos

_NOVELS:_ _Three Soldiers_ _One Man's Initiation_

_ESSAYS:_ _Rosinante to the Road Again_

_POEMS:_ _A Pushcart at the Curb_ (_In Preparation_)

 * * * * *

ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN

by

JOHN DOS PASSOS

George H. Doran CompanyPublishers New York

Copyright, 1922, By George H. Doran Company

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

 I: _A Gesture and a Quest_, 9 II: _The Donkey Boy_, 24 III: _The Baker of Almorox_, 47 IV: _Talk by the Road_, 71 V: _A Novelist of Revolution_, 80 VI: _Talk by the Road_, 101 VII: _Cordova No Longer of the Caliphs_, 104VIII: _Talk by the Road_, 115 IX: _An Inverted Midas_, 120 X: _Talk by the Road_, 133 XI: _Antonio Machado; Poet of Castile_, 140 XII: _A Catalan Poet_, 159XIII: _Talk by the Road_, 176 XIV: _Benavente's Madrid_, 182 XV: _Talk by the Road_, 196 XVI: _A Funeral in Madrid_, 202XVII: _Toledo_, 230

ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN

_I: A Gesture and a Quest_

Telemachus had wandered so far in search of his father he had quiteforgotten what he was looking for. He sat on a yellow plush bench inthe café El Oro del Rhin, Plaza Santa Ana, Madrid, swabbing up with abit of bread the last smudges of brown sauce off a plate of which theedges were piled with the dismembered skeleton of a pigeon. Oppositehis plate was a similar plate his companion had already polished. Telemachus put the last piece of bread into his mouth, drank down aglass of beer at one spasmodic gulp, sighed, leaned across the tableand said:

"I wonder why I'm here. "

"Why anywhere else than here?" said Lyaeus, a young man with hollowcheeks and slow-moving hands, about whose mouth a faint pained smilewas continually hovering, and he too drank down his beer. 

At the end of a perspective of white marble tables, faces thrustforward over yellow plush cushions under twining veils of tobaccosmoke, four German women on a little dais were playing _Tannhauser_. Smells of beer, sawdust, shrimps, roast pigeon. 

"Do you know Jorge Manrique? That's one reason, Tel, " the other mancontinued slowly. With one hand he gestured to the waiter for morebeer, the other he waved across his face as if to brush away the music;then he recited, pronouncing the words haltingly:

 'Recuerde el alma dormida, Avive el seso y despierte Contemplando Cómo se pasa la vida, Cómo se viene la muerte Tan callando: Cuán presto se va el placer, Cómo después de acordado Da dolor, Cómo a nuestro parecer Cualquier tiempo pasado Fué mejor. '

"It's always death, " said Telemachus, "but we must go on. "

It had been raining. Lights rippled red and orange and yellow and greenon the clean paving-stones. A cold wind off the Sierra shrilled throughclattering streets. As they walked, the other man was telling how thisCastilian nobleman, courtier, man-at-arms, had shut himself up when hisfather, the Master of Santiago, died and had written this poem, createdthis tremendous rhythm of death sweeping like a wind over the world. Hehad never written anything else. They thought of him in the court ofhis great dust-colored mansion at Ocaña, where the broad eaves werefull of a cooing of pigeons and the wide halls had dark rafters paintedwith arabesques in vermilion, in a suit of black velvet, writing at atable under a lemon tree. Down the sun-scarred street, in the cathedralthat was building in those days, full of a smell of scaffolding andstone dust, there must have stood a tremendous catafalque where laywith his arms around him the Master of Santiago; in the carved seats ofthe choirs the stout canons intoned an endless growling litany; at thesacristy door, the flare of the candles flashing occasionally on thejewels of his mitre, the bishop fingered his crosier restlessly, askinghis favorite choir-boy from time to time why Don Jorge had not arrived. And messengers must have come running to Don Jorge, telling him theservice was on the point of beginning, and he must have waved them awaywith a grave gesture of a long white hand, while in his mind thedistant sound of chanting, the jingle of the silver bit of his roanhorse stamping nervously where he was tied to a twined Moorish column, memories of cavalcades filing with braying of trumpets and flutter ofcrimson damask into conquered towns, of court ladies dancing, and thenoise of pigeons in the eaves, drew together like strings plucked insuccession on a guitar into a great wave of rhythm in which his lifewas sucked away into this one poem in praise of death. 

 Nuestras vidas son los ríos Que van a dar en la mar, Que es el morir. . . . 

Telemachus was saying the words over softly to himself as they wentinto the theatre. The orchestra was playing a Sevillana; as they foundtheir seats they caught glimpses beyond people's heads and shoulders ofa huge woman with a comb that pushed the tip of her mantilla a foot anda half above her head, dancing with ponderous dignity. Her dress waspink flounced with lace; under it the bulge of breasts and belly andthree chins quaked with every thump of her tiny heels on the stage. Asthey sat down she retreated bowing like a full-rigged ship in a squall. The curtain fell, the theatre became very still; next was Pastora. 

Strumming of a guitar, whirring fast, dry like locusts in a hedge on asummer day. Pauses that catch your blood and freeze it suddenly stilllike the rustling of a branch in silent woods at night. A gipsy in ared sash is playing, slouched into a cheap cane chair, behind him afaded crimson curtain. Off stage heels beaten on the floor catch up therhythm with tentative interest, drowsily; then suddenly added, sharpclick of fingers snapped in time; the rhythm slows, hovers like a beeover a clover flower. A little taut sound of air sucked in suddenlygoes down the rows of seats. With faintest tapping of heels, faintestsnapping of the fingers of a brown hand held over her head, erect, wrapped tight in yellow shawl where the embroidered flowers make asplotch of maroon over one breast, a flecking of green and purple overshoulders and thighs, Pastora Imperio comes across the stage, quietly, unhurriedly. 

In the mind of Telemachus the words return:

 Cómo se viene la muerte Tan callando. 

Her face is brown, with a pointed chin; her eyebrows that nearly meetover her nose rise in a flattened "A" towards the fervid black gleam ofher hair; her lips are pursed in a half-smile as if she were stifling asecret. She walks round the stage slowly, one hand at her waist, theshawl tight over her elbow, her thighs lithe and restless, a panther ina cage. At the back of the stage she turns suddenly, advances; thesnapping of her fingers gets loud, insistent; a thrill whirrs throughthe guitar like a covey of partridges scared in a field. Red heels tapthreateningly. 

 Decidme: la hermosura, La gentil frescura y tez De la cara El color y la blancura, Cuando viene la viejez Cuál se para?

She is right at the footlights; her face, brows drawn together into afrown, has gone into shadow; the shawl flames, the maroon flower overher breast glows like a coal. The guitar is silent, her fingers go onsnapping at intervals with dreadful foreboding. Then she draws herselfup with a deep breath, the muscles of her belly go taut under the tightsilk wrinkles of the shawl, and she is off again, light, joyful, turning indulgent glances towards the audience, as a nurse might lookin the eyes of a child she has unintentionally frightened with a toodreadful fairy story. 

The rhythm of the guitar has changed again; her shawl is loose abouther, the long fringe flutters; she walks with slow steps, in pomp, aship decked out for a festival, a queen in plumes and brocade. . . . 

 ¿Qué se hicieron las damas, Sus tocados, sus vestidos, Sus olores? ¿Qué se hicieron las llamas De los fuegos encendidos De amadores?

And she has gone, and the gipsy guitar-player is scratching his neckwith a hand the color of tobacco, while the guitar rests against hislegs. He shows all his teeth in a world-engulfing yawn. 

When they came out of the theatre, the streets were dry and the starsblinked in the cold wind above the houses. At the curb old women soldchestnuts and little ragged boys shouted the newspapers. 

"And now do you wonder, Tel, why you are here?"

They went into a café and mechanically ordered beer. The seats were redplush this time and much worn. All about them groups of whiskered menleaning over tables, astride chairs, talking. 

"It's the gesture that's so overpowering; don't you feel it in yourarms? Something sudden and tremendously muscular. "

"When Belmonte turned his back suddenly on the bull and walked awaydragging the red cloak on the ground behind him I felt it, " saidLyaeus. 

"That gesture, a yellow flame against maroon and purple cadences . . . Aninstant swagger of defiance in the midst of a litany to death theall-powerful. That is Spain. . . . Castile at any rate. "

"Is 'swagger' the right word?"

"Find a better. "

"For the gesture a medieval knight made when he threw his mailed gloveat his enemy's feet or a rose in his lady's window, that a mule-drivermakes when he tosses off a glass of aguardiente, that Pastora Imperiomakes dancing. . . . Word! Rubbish!" And Lyaeus burst out laughing. Helaughed deep in his throat with his head thrown back. 

Telemachus was inclined to be offended. 

"Did you notice how extraordinarily near she kept to the rhythm ofJorge Manrique?" he asked coldly. 

"Of course. Of course, " shouted Lyaeus, still laughing. 

The waiter came with two mugs of beer. 

"Take it away, " shouted Lyaeus. "Who ordered beer? Bring somethingstrong, champagne. Drink the beer yourself. "

The waiter was scrawny and yellow, with bilious eyes, but he could notresist the laughter of Lyaeus. He made a pretense of drinking the beer. 

Telemachus was now very angry. Though he had forgotten his quest andthe maxims of Penelope, there hovered in his mind a disquieting thoughtof an eventual accounting for his actions before a dimly imagined groupof women with inquisitive eyes. This Lyaeus, he thought to himself, wastoo free and easy. Then there came suddenly to his mind the dancerstanding tense as a caryatid before the footlights, her face in shadow, her shawl flaming yellow; the strong modulations of her torso seemedburned in his flesh. He drew a deep breath. His body tightened like acatapult. 

"Oh to recapture that gesture, " he muttered. The vague inquisitorialwoman-figures had sunk fathoms deep in his mind. 

Lyaeus handed him a shallow tinkling glass. 

"There are all gestures, " he said. 

Outside the plate-glass window a countryman passed singing. His voicedwelt on a deep trembling note, rose high, faltered, skidded down thescale, then rose suddenly, frighteningly like a skyrocket, into a newburst of singing. 

"There it is again, " Telemachus cried. He jumped up and ran out on thestreet. The broad pavement was empty. A bitter wind shrilled amongarc-lights white like dead eyes. 

"Idiot, " Lyaeus said between gusts of laughter when Telemachus sat downagain. "Idiot Tel. Here you'll find it. " And despite Telemachus'sprotestations he filled up the glasses. A great change had come overLyaeus. His face looked fuller and flushed. His lips were moist andvery red. There was an occasional crisp curl in the black hair abouthis temples. 

And so they sat drinking a long while. 

At last Telemachus got unsteadily to his feet. 

"I can't help it. . . . I must catch that gesture, formulate it, do it. Itis tremendously, inconceivably, unendingly important to me. "

"Now you know why you're here, " said Lyaeus quietly. 

"Why are you here?"

"To drink, " said Lyaeus. 

"Let's go. "

"Why?"

"To catch that gesture, Lyaeus, " said Telemachus in an over-solemnvoice. 

"Like a comedy professor with a butterfly-net, " roared Lyaeus. Hislaughter so filled the café that people at far-away tables smiledwithout knowing it. 

"It's burned into my blood. It must be formulated, made permanent. "

"Killed, " said Lyaeus with sudden seriousness; "better drink it withyour wine. "

Silent they strode down an arcaded street. Cupolas, voluted baroquefaçades, a square tower, the bulge of a market building, tile roofs, chimneypots, ate into the star-dusted sky to the right and left ofthem, until in a great gust of wind they came out on an empty square, where were few gas-lamps; in front of them was a heavy arch full ofstars, and Orion sprawling above it. Under the arch a pile of ragsasked for alms whiningly. The jingle of money was crisp in the coldair. 

"Where does this road go?"

"Toledo, " said the beggar, and got to his feet. He was an old man, bearded, evil-smelling. 

"Thank you. . . . We have just seen Pastora, " said Lyaeus jauntily. 

"Ah, Pastora!. . . The last of the great dancers, " said the beggar, andfor some reason he crossed himself. 

The road was frosty and crunched silkily underfoot. 

Lyaeus walked along shouting lines from the poem of Jorge Manrique. 

 'Cómo se pasa la vida Cómo se viene la muerte Tan callando: Cuán presto se va el placer Cómo después de acordado Da dolor, Cómo a nuestro parecer Cualquier tiempo pasado Fué mejor. '

"I bet you, Tel, they have good wine in Toledo. "

The road hunched over a hill. They turned and saw Madrid cut out ofdarkness against the starlight. Before them sown plains, gulches fullof mist, and the tremulous lights on many carts that jogged along, eachbehind three jingling slow mules. A cock crowed. All at once a voiceburst suddenly in swaggering tremolo out of the darkness of the roadbeneath them, rising, rising, then fading off, then flaring up hotlylike a red scarf waved on a windy day, like the swoop of a hawk, like arocket intruding among the stars. 

"Butterfly net, you old fool!" Lyaeus's laughter volleyed across thefrozen fields. 

Telemachus answered in a low voice:

"Let's walk faster. "

He walked with his eyes on the road. He could see in the darkness, Pastora, wrapped in the yellow shawl with the splotch of maroon-coloredembroidery moulding one breast, stand tremulous with foreboding beforethe footlights, suddenly draw in her breath, and turn with a greatexultant gesture back into the rhythm of her dance. Only the victoriousculminating instant of the gesture was blurred to him. He walked withlong strides along the crackling road, his muscles aching for memory ofit. 

_II: The Donkey Boy_

 _Where the husbandman's toil and strife_ _Little varies to strife and toil:_ _But the milky kernel of life, _ _With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil!_

The path zigzagged down through the olive trees between thin chortlingglitter of irrigation ditches that occasionally widened into greenpools, reed-fringed, froggy, about which bristled scrub oleanders. Through the shimmer of olive leaves all about I could see the greatruddy heave of the mountains streaked with the emerald ofmillet-fields, and above, snowy shoulders against a vault of indigo, patches of wood cut out hard as metal in the streaming noon light. Tinkle of a donkey-bell below me, then at the turn of a path thedonkey's hindquarters, mauve-grey, neatly clipped in a pattern ofdiamonds and lozenges, and a tail meditatively swishing as he pickedhis way among the stones, the head as yet hidden by the osier basketsof the pack. At the next turn I skipped ahead of the donkey and walkedwith the _arriero_, a dark boy in tight blue pants and short grey tuniccut to the waist, who had the strong cheek-bones, hawk nose and slenderhips of an Arab, who spoke an aspirated Andalusian that sounded likeArabic. 

We greeted each other cordially as travellers do in mountainous placeswhere the paths are narrow. We talked about the weather and the windand the sugar mills at Motril and women and travel and the vintage, struggling all the while like drowning men to understand each other'slingo. When it came out that I was an American and had been in the war, he became suddenly interested; of course, I was a deserter, he said, clever to get away. There'd been two deserters in his town a year ago, _Alemanes_; perhaps friends of mine. It was pointed out that I andthe _Alemanes_ had been at different ends of the gunbarrel. Helaughed. What did that matter? Then he said several times, "Qué burrola guerra, qué burro la guerra. " I remonstrated, pointing to the donkeythat was following us with dainty steps, looking at us with a quizzicalair from under his long eyelashes. Could anything be wiser than aburro?

He laughed again, twitching back his full lips to show the brillianceof tightly serried teeth, stopped in his tracks, and turned to look atthe mountains. He swept a long brown hand across them. "Look, " he said, "up there is the Alpujarras, the last refuge of the kings of the Moors;there are bandits up there sometimes. You have come to the right place;here we are free men. "

The donkey scuttled past us with a derisive glance out of the corner ofan eye and started skipping from side to side of the path, croppinghere and there a bit of dry grass. We followed, the _arriero_ tellinghow his brother would have been conscripted if the family had not gottogether a thousand pesetas to buy him out. That was no life for a man. He spat on a red stone. They'd never catch him, he was sure of that. The army was no life for a man. 

In the bottom of the valley was a wide stream, which we forded aftersome dispute as to who should ride the donkey, the donkey all the whilewrinkling his nose with disgust at the coldness of the speeding waterand the sliminess of the stones. When we came out on the broad moraineof pebbles the other side of the stream we met a lean blackish man withyellow horse-teeth, who was much excited when he heard I was anAmerican. 

"America is the world of the future, " he cried and gave me such a slapon the back I nearly tumbled off the donkey on whose rump I was at thatmoment astride. 

"_En América no se divierte_, " muttered the _arriero_, kicking his feetthat were cold from the ford into the burning saffron dust of the road. 

The donkey ran ahead kicking at pebbles, bucking, trying to shake offthe big pear-shaped baskets of osier he had either side of his packsaddle, delighted with smooth dryness after so much water and suchtenuous stony roads. The three of us followed arguing, the sunlightbeating wings of white flame about us. 

"In America there is freedom, " said the blackish man, "there are norural guards; roadmenders work eight hours and wear silk shirts andearn . . . Un dineral. " The blackish man stopped, quite out of breathfrom his grappling with infinity. Then he went on: "Your children areeducated free, no priests, and at forty every man-jack owns anautomobile. "

"_Ca_, " said the _arriero_. 

"_Sí, hombre_, " said the blackish man. 

For a long while the _arriero_ walked along in silence, watching histoes bury themselves in dust at each step. Then he burst out, spacinghis words with conviction: "_Ca, en América no se hase na' a quetrabahar y de'cansar. . . . _ Not on your life, in America they don't doanything except work and rest so's to get ready to work again. That'sno life for a man. People don't enjoy themselves there. An old sailorfrom Malaga who used to fish for sponges told me, and he knew. It's notgold people need, but bread and wine and . . . Life. They don't doanything there except work and rest so they'll be ready to workagain. . . . "

Two thoughts jostled in my mind as he spoke; I seemed to see red-facedgentlemen in knee breeches, dog's-ear wigs askew over broad foreheads, reading out loud with unction the phrases, "inalienable rights . . . Pursuit of happiness, " and to hear the cadence out of Meredith's _TheDay of the Daughter of Hades_:

 Where the husbandman's toil and strife Little varies to strife and toil: But the milky kernel of life, With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil!

The donkey stopped in front of a little wineshop under a trellis wheredusty gourd-leaves shut out the blue and gold dazzle of sun and sky. 

"He wants to say, 'Have a little drink, gentlemen, '" said the blackishman. 

In the greenish shadow of the wineshop a smell of anise and a sound ofwater dripping. When he had smacked his lips over a small cup of thickyellow wine he pointed at the _arriero_. "He says people don't enjoylife in America. "

"But in America people are very rich, " shouted the barkeeper, abeet-faced man whose huge girth was bound in a red cotton sash, and hemade a gesture suggestive of coins, rubbing thumb and forefingertogether. 

Everybody roared derision at the _arriero_. But he persisted and wentout shaking his head and muttering "That's no life for a man. "

As we left the wineshop where the blackish man was painting with broadstrokes the legend of the West, the _arriero_ explained to me almosttearfully that he had not meant to speak ill of my country, but toexplain why he did not want to emigrate. While he was speaking wepassed a cartload of yellow grapes that drenched us in jingle ofmulebells and in dizzying sweetness of bubbling ferment. A sombre manwith beetling brows strode at the mule's head; in the cart, brown feetfirmly planted in the steaming slush of grapes, flushed face tiltedtowards the ferocious white sun, a small child with a black curly paterode in triumph, shouting, teeth flashing as if to bite into the sun. 

"What you mean is, " said I to the _arriero_, "that this is the life fora man. "

He tossed his head back in a laugh of approval. 

"Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work?"

"That's it, " he answered, and cried, "_arrh he_" to the donkey. 

We hastened our steps. My sweaty shirt bellied suddenly in the back asa cool wind frisked about us at the corner of the road. 

"Ah, it smells of the sea, " said the _arriero_. "We'll see the sea fromthe next hill. "

That night as I stumbled out of the inn door in Motril, overfull offood and drink, the full moon bulged through the arches of the cupolaof the pink and saffron church. Everywhere steel-green shadows stripedwith tangible moonlight. As I sat beside my knapsack in the plaza, groping for a thought in the bewildering dazzle of the night, threedisconnected mules, egged on by a hoarse shouting, jingled out of theshadow. When they stopped with a jerk in the full moon-glare beside thefountain, it became evident that they were attached to a coach, aspidery coach tilted forward as if it were perpetually going down hill;from inside smothered voices like the strangled clucking of fowls beingshipped to market in a coop. 

On the driver's seat one's feet were on the shafts and one had a viewof every rag and shoelace the harness was patched with. Creaking, groaning, with wabbling of wheels, grumble of inside passengers, cracking of whip and long strings of oaths from the driver, the coachlurched out of town and across a fat plain full of gurgle of irrigationditches, shrilling of toads, falsetto rustle of broad leaves of thesugar cane. Occasionally the gleam of the soaring moon on banana leavesand a broad silver path on the sea. Landwards the hills like piles ofash in the moonlight, and far away a cloudy inkling of mountains. 

Beside me, mouth open, shouting rich pedigrees at the leading mule, Cordovan hat on the back of his head, from under which sprouted a lockof black hair that hung between his eyes over his nose and made himlook like a goblin, the driver bounced and squirmed and kicked at theflanks of the mules that roamed drunkenly from side to side of theuneven road. Down into a gulch, across a shingle, up over a plankbridge, then down again into the bed of the river I had forded thatmorning with my friend the _arriero_, along a beach with fishing boatsand little huts where the fishermen slept; then barking of dogs, another bridge and we roared and crackled up a steep village street tocome to a stop suddenly, catastrophically, in front of a tavern in themain square. 

"We are late, " said the goblin driver, turning to me suddenly, "I havenot slept for four nights, dancing, every night dancing. "

He sucked the air in through his teeth and stretched out his arms andlegs in the moonlight. "Ah, women . . . Women, " he added philosophically. "Have you a cigarette?"

"_Ah, la juventud_, " said the old man who had brought the mailbag. Helooked up at us scratching his head. "It's to enjoy. A moment, a_momentito_, and it's gone! Old men work in the day time, but young menwork at night. . . . _Ay de mí_, " and he burst into a peal of laughter. 

And as if some one were whispering them, the words of Jorge Manriquesifted out of the night:

 ¿Qué se hizo el Rey Don Juan? Los infantes de Aragón ¿Qué se hicieron? Qué fué de tanto galán, Qué fué de tanta invención, Cómo truxeron?

Everybody went into the tavern, from which came a sound of singing andof clapping in time, and as hearty a tinkle of glasses and banging ontables as might have come out of the _Mermaid_ in the days of theVirgin Queen. Outside the moon soared, soared brilliant, a greenishblotch on it like the time-stain on a chased silver bowl on an altar. The broken lion's head of the fountain dribbled one tinkling stream ofquicksilver. On the seawind came smells of rotting garbage and thymeburning in hearths and jessamine flowers. Down the street geraniums ina window smouldered in the moonlight; in the dark above them the merestcontour of a face, once the gleam of two eyes; opposite against thewhite wall standing very quiet a man looking up with dilatednostrils--_el amor_. 

As the coach jangled its lumbering unsteady way out of town, our earsstill throbbed with the rhythm of the tavern, of hard brown handsclapped in time, of heels thumping on oak floors. From the last houseof the village a man hallooed. With its noise of cupboards of chinaoverturned the coach crashed to stillness. A wiry, white-faced man witha little waxed moustache like the springs of a mousetrap climbed on thefront seat, while burly people heaved quantities of corded trunks onbehind. 

"How late, two hours late, " the man spluttered, jerking his checked capfrom side to side. "Since this morning nothing to eat but two boiledeggs. . . . Think of that. _¡Qué incultura! ¡Qué pueblo indecente!_ Allday only two boiled eggs. "

"I had business in Motril, Don Antonio, " said the goblin drivergrinning. 

"Business!" cried Don Antonio, laughing squeakily, "and after all whata night!"

Something impelled me to tell Don Antonio the story of King Mycerinusof Egypt that Herodotus tells, how hearing from an oracle he would onlylive ten years, the king called for torches and would not sleep, socrammed twenty years' living into ten. The goblin driver listened inintervals between his hoarse investigations of the private life of thegrandmother of the leading mule. 

Don Antonio slapped his thigh and lit a cigarette and cried, "InAndalusia we all do that, don't we, Paco?"

"Yes, sir, " said the goblin driver, nodding his head vigorously. 

"That is _lo flamenco_, " cried Don Antonio. "The life of Andalusia is_lo flamenco_. "

The moon has begun to lose foothold in the black slippery zenith. Weare hurtling along a road at the top of a cliff; below the sea full ofunexpected glitters, lace-edged, swishing like the silk dress of adancer. The goblin driver rolls from side to side asleep. The check capis down over the little man's face so that not even his moustaches areto be seen. All at once the leading mule, taken with suicidal mania, makes a sidewise leap for the cliff-edge. Crumbling of gravel, snap oftraces, shouts, uproar inside. Some one has managed to yank the muleback on her hind quarters. In the sea below the shadow of a coachtotters at the edge of the cliff's shadow. 

"_Hija de puta_, " cries the goblin driver, jumping to the ground. 

Don Antonio awakes with a grunt and begins to explain querulously thathe has had nothing to eat all day but two boiled eggs. The teeth of thegoblin driver flash white flame as he hangs wreath upon wreath ofprofanity about the trembling, tugging mules. With a terrific rattlingjerk the coach sways to the safe side of the road. From inside angryheads are poked out like the heads of hens out of an overturned coop. Don Antonio turns to me and shouts in tones of triumph: "_¿Quéflamenco, eh?_"

When we got to Almuñecar Don Antonio, the goblin driver, and I sat at alittle table outside the empty Casino. A waiter appeared from somewherewith wine and coffee and tough purple ham and stale bread andcigarettes. Over our heads dusty palm-fronds trembled in occasionalfaint gusts off the sea. The rings on Don Antonio's thin fingersglistened in the light of the one tired electric light bulb that shoneamong palpitating mottoes above us as he explained to me thesignificance of _lo flamenco_. 

The tough swaggering gesture, the quavering song well sung, the coupletneatly capped, the back turned to the charging bull, the mantilladraped with exquisite provocativeness; all that was _lo flamenco_. "On this coast, _señor inglés_, we don't work much, we are dirty anduninstructed, but by God we live. Why the poor people of the towns, d'you know what they do in summer? They hire a fig-tree and go and liveunder it with their dogs and their cats and their babies, and they eatthe figs as they ripen and drink the cold water from the mountains, and man-alive they are happy. They fear no one and they are dependenton no one; when they are young they make love and sing to the guitar, and when they are old they tell stories and bring up their children. You have travelled much; I have travelled little--Madrid, neverfurther, --but I swear to you that nowhere in the world are the womenlovelier or is the land richer or the cookery more perfect than in thisvega of Almuñecar. . . . If only the wine weren't quite so heavy. . . . "

"Then you don't want to go to America?"

"_¡Hombre por dios!_ Sing us a song, Paco. . . . He's a Galician, yousee. "

The goblin driver grinned and threw back his head. 

"Go to the end of the world, you'll find a Gallego, " he said. Then hedrank down his wine, rubbed his mouth on the back of his hand, andstarted droningly:

 'Si quieres qu'el carro cante mójale y dejel'en río que después de buen moja'o canta com'un silbi'o. '

 (If you want a cart to sing, wet it and soak it in the river, for when it's well soaked it'll sing like a locust. )

"Hola, " cried Don Antonio, "go on. "

 'A mí me gusta el blanco, ¡viva lo blanco! ¡muera lo negro! porque el negro es muy triste. Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero. '

 (I like white; hooray for white, death to black. Because black is very sad, and I am happy, I don't like it. )

"That's it, " cried Don Antonio excitedly. "You people from the north, English, Americans, Germans, whatnot, you like black. You like to besad. I don't. "

"'Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero. '"

The moon had sunk into the west, flushed and swollen. The east wasbeginning to bleach before the oncoming sun. Birds started chirpingabove our heads. I left them, but as I lay in bed, I could hear thehoarse voice of the goblin driver roaring out:

 'A mí me gusta el blanco, ¡viva lo blanco! ¡muera lo negro!'

At Nerja in an arbor of purple ipomoeas on a red jutting cliff over thebeach where brown children were bathing, there was talk again of _loflamenco_. 

"In Spain, " my friend Don Diego was saying, "we live from the belly andloins, or else from the head and heart: between Don Quixote the mysticand Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground. The lowestPanza is _lo flamenco_. "

"But you do live. "

"In dirt, disease, lack of education, bestiality. . . . Half of us arealways dying of excess of food or the lack of it. "

"What do you want?"

"Education, organization, energy, the modern world. "

I told him what the donkey-boy had said of America on the road downfrom the Alpujarras, that in America they did nothing but work and restso as to be able to work again. And America was the modern world. 

And _lo flamenco_ is neither work nor getting ready to work. 

That evening San Miguel went out to fetch the Virgin of Sorrows from aroadside oratory and brought her back into town in procession withcandles and skyrockets and much chanting, and as the swayingcone-shaped figure carried on the shoulders of six sweating men stoodpoised at the entrance to the plaza where all the girls wore jessamineflowers in the blackness of their hair, all waved their hats and cried, "_¡Viva la Vírgen de las Angustias!_" And the Virgin and San Miguelboth had to bow their heads to get in the church door, and the peoplefollowed them into the church crying "_¡Viva!_" so that the old vaultsshivered in the tremulous candlelight and the shouting. Some peoplecried for water, as rain was about due and everything was very dry, andwhen they came out of the church they saw a thin cloud like a mantillaof white lace over the moon, so they went home happy. 

Wherever they went through the narrow well-swept streets, lit by anoccasional path of orange light from a window, the women left behindthem long trails of fragrance from the jessamine flowers in their hair. 

Don Diego and I walked a long while on the seashore talking of Americaand the Virgin and a certain soup called _ajo blanco_ and Don Quixoteand _lo flamenco_. We were trying to decide what was the peculiarquality of the life of the people in that rich plain (_vega_ theycall it) between the mountains of the sea. Walking about the countryelevated on the small grass-grown levees of irrigation ditches, theowners of the fields we crossed used, simply because we were strangers, to offer us a glass of wine or a slice of watermelon. I had explainedto my friend that in his modern world of America these same peoplewould come out after us with shotguns loaded with rock salt. Heanswered that even so, the old order was changing, and that as therewas nothing else but to follow the procession of industrialism itbehooved Spaniards to see that their country forged ahead instead ofbeing, as heretofore, dragged at the tail of the parade. 

"And do you think it's leading anywhere, this endless complicating oflife?"

"Of course, " he answered. 

"Where?"

"Where does anything lead? At least it leads further than _loflamenco_. "

"But couldn't the point be to make the way significant?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Work, " he said. 

We had come to a little nook in the cliffs where fishing boats weredrawn up with folded wings like ducks asleep. We climbed a winding pathup the cliff. Pebbles scuttled underfoot; our hands were torn by thornyaromatic shrubs. Then we came out in a glen that cut far into themountains, full of the laughter of falling water and the rustle ofsappy foliage. Seven stilted arches of an aqueduct showed white throughthe canebrakes inland. Fragrances thronged about us; the smell of drythyme-grown uplands, of rich wet fields, of goats, and jessamine andheliotrope, and of water cold from the snowfields running fast inditches. Somewhere far off a donkey was braying. Then, as the lastgroan of the donkey faded, a man's voice rose suddenly out of the darkfields, soaring, yearning on taut throat-cords, then slipped downthrough notes, like a small boat sliding sideways down a wave, thenunrolled a great slow scroll of rhythm on the night and ceased suddenlyin an upward cadence as a guttering candle flares to extinction. 

"Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work, " and Ithought of the _arriero_ on whose donkey I had forded the stream on theway down from the Alpujarras, and his saying: "_Ca, en América no sehose na'a que trabahar y dé'cansar. _"

I had left him at his home village, a little cluster of red and yellowroofs about a fat tower the Moors had built and a gaunt church thathunched by itself in a square of trampled dust. We had rested awhilebefore going into town, under a fig tree, while he had put white canvasshoes on his lean brown feet. The broad leaves had rustled in the wind, and the smell of the fruit that hung purple bursting to crimson againstthe intense sky had been like warm stroking velvet all about us. Andthe _arriero_ had discoursed on the merits of his donkey and the joysof going from town to town with merchandise, up into the mountains forchestnuts and firewood, down to the sea for fish, to Malaga fortinware, to Motril for sugar from the refineries. Nights of dancing andguitar-playing at vintage-time, _fiestas_ of the Virgin, where older, realer gods were worshipped than Jehovah and the dolorous Mother of thepale Christ, the _toros_, blood and embroidered silks aflame in thesunlight, words whispered through barred windows at night, long days oftravel on stony roads in the mountains. . . . And I had lain back with myeyes closed and the hum of little fig-bees in my ears, and wished thatmy life were his life. After a while we had jumped to our feet and Ihad shouldered my knapsack with its books and pencils and silly pads ofpaper and trudged off up an unshaded road, and had thought with a sortof bitter merriment of that prig Christian and his damned burden. 

"Something that is neither work nor getting ready to work, to make theroad so significant that one needs no destination, that is _loflamenco_, " said I to Don Diego, as we stood in the glen looking at theseven white arches of the aqueduct. 

He nodded unconvinced. 

_III: The Baker of Almorox_

I

The _señores_ were from Madrid? Indeed! The man's voice was full of anawe of great distances. He was the village baker of Almorox, where wehad gone on a Sunday excursion from Madrid; and we were standing on thescrubbed tile floor of his house, ceremoniously receiving wine and figsfrom his wife. The father of the friend who accompanied me had oncelived in the same village as the baker's father, and bought bread ofhim; hence the entertainment. This baker of Almorox was a tall man, with a soft moustache very black against his ash-pale face, who stoodwith his large head thrust far forward. He was smiling with pleasure atthe presence of strangers in his house, while in a tone of shydeprecating courtesy he asked after my friend's family. Don Fernandoand Doña Ana and the Señorita were well? And little Carlos? Carlos wasno longer little, answered my friend, and Doña Ana was dead. 

The baker's wife had stood in the shadow looking from one face toanother with a sort of wondering pleasure as we talked, but at this shecame forward suddenly into the pale greenish-gold light that streamedthrough the door, holding a dark wine-bottle before her. There weretears in her eyes. No; she had never known any of them, she explainedhastily--she had never been away from Almorox--but she had heard somuch of their kindness and was sorry. . . . It was terrible to lose afather or a mother. The tall baker shifted his feet uneasily, embarrassed by the sadness that seemed slipping over his guests, andsuggested that we walk up the hill to the Hermitage; he would show theway. 

"But your work?" we asked. Ah, it did not matter. Strangers did notcome every day to Almorox. He strode out of the door, wrapping a woolenmuffler about his bare strongly moulded throat, and we followed him upthe devious street of whitewashed houses that gave us glimpses throughwide doors of dark tiled rooms with great black rafters overhead andcourtyards where chickens pecked at the manure lodged between smoothworn flagstones. Still between white-washed walls we struck out of thevillage into the deep black mud of the high road, and at last burstsuddenly into the open country, where patches of sprouting grass shonevivid green against the gray and russet of broad rolling lands. At thetop of the first hill stood the Hermitage--a small whitewashed chapelwith a square three-storied tower; over the door was a relief of theVirgin, crowned, in worn lichened stone. The interior was very plainwith a single heavily gilt altar, over which was a painted statue, stiff but full of a certain erect disdainful grace--again of theVirgin. The figure was dressed in a long lace gown, full of frills andruffles, grey with dust and age. 

"_La Vírgen de la Cima_, " said the baker, pointing reverently with histhumb, after he had bent his knee before the altar. And as I glanced atthe image a sudden resemblance struck me: the gown gave the Virgin acuriously conical look that somehow made me think of that conical blackstone, the Bona Dea, that the Romans brought from Asia Minor. Hereagain was a good goddess, a bountiful one, more mother than virgin, despite her prudish frills. . . . But the man was ushering us out. 

"And there is no finer view than this in all Spain. " With a broad sweepof his arm he took in the village below, with its waves of roofs thatmerged from green to maroon and deep crimson, broken suddenly by theopen square in front of the church; and the gray towering church, scowling with strong lights and shadows on buttresses and pointedwindows; and the brown fields faintly sheened with green, which gaveplace to the deep maroon of the turned earth of vineyards, and theshining silver where the wind ruffled the olive-orchards; and beyond, the rolling hills that grew gradually flatter until they sank into theyellowish plain of Castile. As he made the gesture his fingers werestretched wide as if to grasp all this land he was showing. His flaccidcheeks were flushed as he turned to us; but we should see it in May, hewas saying, in May when the wheat was thick in the fields, and therewere flowers on the hills. Then the lands were beautiful and rich, inMay. And he went on to tell us of the local feast, and the greatprocessions of the Virgin. This year there were to be four days of the_toros_. So many bullfights were unusual in such a small village, heassured us. But they were rich in Almorox; the wine was the best inCastile. Four days of _toros_, he said again; and all the people of thecountry around would come to the _fiestas_, and there would be a greatpilgrimage to this Hermitage of the Virgin. . . . As he talked in his slowdeferential way, a little conscious of his volubility before strangers, there began to grow in my mind a picture of his view of the world. 

First came his family, the wife whose body lay beside his at night, whobore him children, the old withered parents who sat in the sun at hisdoor, his memories of them when they had had strong rounded limbs likehis, and of their parents sitting old and withered in the sun. Then hiswork, the heat of his ovens, the smell of bread cooking, the faces ofneighbors who came to buy; and, outside, in the dim penumbra of thingshalf real, of travellers' tales, lay Madrid, where the king lived andwhere politicians wrote in the newspapers, --and _Francia_--and all thatwas not Almorox. . . . In him I seemed to see the generations wax andwane, like the years, strung on the thread of labor, of unending sweatand strain of muscles against the earth. It was all so mellow, sostrangely aloof from the modern world of feverish change, this life ofthe peasants of Almorox. Everywhere roots striking into the infinitepast. For before the Revolution, before the Moors, before the Romans, before the dark furtive traders, the Phoenicians, they were much thesame, these Iberian village communities. Far away things changed, cities were founded, hard roads built, armies marched and fought andpassed away; but in Almorox the foundations of life remained unchangedup to the present. New names and new languages had come. The Virgin hadtaken over the festivals and rituals of the old earth goddesses, andthe deep mystical fervor of devotion. But always remained the love forthe place, the strong anarchistic reliance on the individual man, thewalking, consciously or not, of the way beaten by generations of menwho had tilled and loved and lain in the cherishing sun with no feelingof a reality outside of themselves, outside of the bare encompassinghills of their commune, except the God which was the synthesis of theirsouls and of their lives. 

Here lies the strength and the weakness of Spain. This intenseindividualism, born of a history whose fundamentals lie in isolatedvillage communities--_pueblos_, as the Spaniards call them--over thechangeless face of which, like grass over a field, events spring andmature and die, is the basic fact of Spanish life. No revolution hasbeen strong enough to shake it. Invasion after invasion, of Goths, ofMoors, of Christian ideas, of the fads and convictions of theRenaissance, have swept over the country, changing surface customs andmodes of thought and speech, only to be metamorphosed into keeping withthe changeless Iberian mind. 

And predominant in the Iberian mind is the thought _La vida es sueño_:"Life is a dream. " Only the individual, or that part of life which isin the firm grasp of the individual, is real. The supreme expression ofthis lies in the two great figures that typify Spain for all time: DonQuixote and Sancho Panza; Don Quixote, the individualist who believedin the power of man's soul over all things, whose desire included thewhole world in himself; Sancho, the individualist to whom all the worldwas food for his belly. On the one hand we have the ecstatic figuresfor whom the power of the individual soul has no limits, in whose mindsthe universe is but one man standing before his reflection, God. Theseare the Loyolas, the Philip Seconds, the fervid ascetics like Juan dela Cruz, the originals of the glowing tortured faces in the portraitsof El Greco. On the other hand are the jovial materialists like theArchpriest of Hita, culminating in the frantic, mystical sensuality ofsuch an epic figure as Don Juan Tenorio. Through all Spanish historyand art the threads of these two complementary characters can betraced, changing, combining, branching out, but ever in substance thesame. Of this warp and woof have all the strange patterns of Spanishlife been woven. 

II

In trying to hammer some sort of unified impression out of thescattered pictures of Spain in my mind, one of the first things Irealize is that there are many Spains. Indeed, every village hidden inthe folds of the great barren hills, or shadowed by its massive churchin the middle of one of the upland plains, every fertile _huerta_ ofthe seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberiancharacteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is anillusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, thedesolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well bedue in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralizedgovernment on a land essentially centrifugal. 

In the first place, there is the matter of language. Roughly, fourdistinct languages are at present spoken in Spain: Castilian, thelanguage of Madrid and the central uplands, the official language, spoken in the south in its Andalusian form; Gallego-Portuguese, spokenon the west coast; Basque, which does not even share the Latin descentof the others; and Catalan, a form of Provençal which, with itsdialect, Valencian, is spoken on the upper Mediterranean coast and inthe Balearic Isles. Of course, under the influence of railcommunication and a conscious effort to spread Castilian, the otherlanguages, with the exception of Portuguese and Catalan, have lostvitality and died out in the larger towns; but the problem remains fardifferent from that of the Italian dialects, since the Spanishlanguages have all, except Basque, a strong literary tradition. 

Added to the variety of language, there is an immense variety oftopography in the different parts of Spain. The central plateaux, dominant in modern history (history being taken to mean the births andbreedings of kings and queens and the doings of generals in armor)probably approximate the warmer Russian steppes in climate andvegetation. The west coast is in most respects a warmer and morefertile Wales. The southern _huertas_ (arable river valleys) haverather the aspect of Egypt. The east coast from Valencia up is acontinuation of the Mediterranean coast of France. It follows that, inthis country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberiansnow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected. 

Here is probably the root of the tendency in Spanish art and thought toemphasize the differences between things. In painting, where the mindof a people is often more tangibly represented than anywhere else, wefind one supreme example. El Greco, almost the caricature in his art ofthe Don Quixote type of mind, who, though a Greek by birth and aVenetian by training, became more Spanish than the Spaniards during hislong life at Toledo, strove constantly to express the differencebetween the world of flesh and the world of spirit, between the bodyand the soul of man. More recently, the extreme characterization ofGoya's sketches and portraits, the intensifying of national types foundin Zuloaga and the other painters who have been exploiting with suchsuccess the peculiarities--the picturesqueness--of Spanish faces andlandscapes, seem to spring from this powerful sense of the separatenessof things. 

In another way you can express this constant attempt to differentiateone individual from another as caricature. Spanish art is constantlyon the edge of caricature. Given the ebullient fertility of theSpanish mind and its intense individualism, a constant slipping overinto the grotesque is inevitable. And so it comes to be that theconscious or unconscious aim of their art is rather self-expressionthan beauty. Their image of reality is sharp and clear, but distorted. Burlesque and satire are never far away in their most serious moments. Not even the calmest and best ordered of Spanish minds can resist atendency to excess of all sorts, to over-elaboration, to grotesquerie, to deadening mannerism. All that is greatest in their art, indeed, lies on the borderland of the extravagant, where sublime things skimthe thin ice of absurdity. The great epic, _Don Quixote_, such playsas Calderon's _La Vida es Sueño_, such paintings as El Greco's_Resurrección_ and Velasquez's dwarfs, such buildings as the Escorialand the Alhambra--all among the universal masterpieces--are far indeedfrom the middle term of reasonable beauty. Hence their supremestrength. And for our generation, to which excess is a synonym forbeauty, is added argumentative significance to the long tradition ofSpanish art. 

Another characteristic, springing from the same fervid abundance, thatlinks the Spanish tradition to ours of the present day is the strangelyimpromptu character of much Spanish art production. The slightlyridiculous proverb that genius consists of an infinite capacity fortaking pains is well controverted. The creative flow of Spanish artistshas always been so strong, so full of vitality, that there has been notime for taking pains. Lope de Vega, with his two thousand-oddplays--or was it twelve thousand?--is by no means an isolated instance. Perhaps the strong sense of individual validity, which makes Spain themost democratic country in Europe, sanctions the constantimprovisation, and accounts for the confident planlessness as common inSpanish architecture as in Spanish political thought. 

Here we meet the old stock characteristic, Spanish pride. This is avery real thing, and is merely the external shell of the fundamentaltrust in the individual and in nothing outside of him. Again El Grecois an example. As his painting progressed, grew more and more personal, he drew away from tangible reality, and, with all the dogmaticconviction of one whose faith in his own reality can sweep away themountains of the visible world, expressed his own restless, almostsensual, spirituality in forms that flickered like white flames towardGod. For the Spaniard, moreover, God is always, in essence, theproudest sublimation of man's soul. The same spirit runs through thepreachers of the early church and the works of Santa Teresa, a disguiseof the frantic desire to express the self, the self, changeless andeternal, at all costs. From this comes the hard cruelty that flaresforth luridly at times. A recent book by Miguel de Unamuno, _DelSentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, expresses this fierce clinging toseparateness from the universe by the phrase _el hambre deinmortalidad_, the hunger of immortality. This is the core of theindividualism that lurks in all Spanish ideas, the conviction that onlythe individual soul is real. 

III

In the Spain of to-day these things are seen as through a glass, darkly. Since the famous and much gloated-over entrance of Ferdinandand Isabella into Granada, the history of Spain has been that of anattempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. In the great flare of thegolden age, the age of ingots of Peru and of men of even greater worth, the disease worked beneath the surface. Since then the conflict hascorroded into futility all the buoyant energies of the country. I meanthe persistent attempt to centralize in thought, in art, in government, in religion, a nation whose every energy lies in the other direction. The result has been a deadlock, and the ensuing rust and numbing of alllife and thought, so that a century of revolution seems to have broughtSpain no nearer a solution of its problems. At the present day, whenall is ripe for a new attempt to throw off the atrophy, a sort ofdespairing inaction causes the Spaniards to remain under a governmentof unbelievably corrupt and inefficient politicians. There seems nosolution to the problem of a nation in which the centralized power andthe separate communities work only to nullify each other. 

Spaniards in face of their traditions are rather in the position of thearchæologists before the problem of Iberian sculpture. For near theCerro de los Santos, bare hill where from the ruins of a sanctuary hasbeen dug an endless series of native sculptures of men and women, goddesses and gods, there lived a little watchmaker. The first statuesto be dug up were thought by the pious country people to be saints, andsaints they were, according to an earlier dispensation than that ofRome; with the result that much Kudos accompanied the discovery ofthose draped women with high head-dresses and fixed solemn eyes andthose fragmentary bull-necked men hewn roughly out of grey stone; theywere freed from the caked clay of two thousand years and reverently setup in the churches. So probably the motives that started the watchmakeron his career of sculpturing and falsifying were pious and reverential. 

However it began, when it was discovered that the saints were merehorrid heathen he-gods and she-gods and that the foreign gentlemen withspectacles who appeared from all the ends of Europe to investigate, would pay money for them, the watchmaker began to thrive as a mightyman in his village and generation. He began to study archaeology andthe style of his cumbersome forged divinities improved. For a number ofyears the statues from the Cerro de los Santos were swallowed whole byall learned Europe. But the watchmaker's imagination began to get thebetter of him; forms became more and more fantastic, Egyptian, Assyrian, _art-nouveau_ influences began to be noted by the discerning, until at last someone whispered forgery and all the scientists scuttledto cover shouting that there had never been any native Iberiansculpture after all. 

The little watchmaker succumbed before his imagining of heathen godsand died in a madhouse. To this day when you stand in the middle of theroom devoted to the Cerro de los Santos in the Madrid, and see thestatues of Iberian goddesses clustered about you in their highhead-dresses like those of dancers, you cannot tell which were made bythe watchmaker in 1880, and which by the image-maker of thehill-sanctuary at a time when the first red-eyed ships of thePhoenician traders were founding trading posts among the barbarians ofthe coast of Valencia. And there they stand on their shelves, the realand the false inextricably muddled, and stare at the enigma with stoneeyes. 

So with the traditions: the tradition of Catholic Spain, the traditionof military grandeur, the tradition of fighting the Moors, ofsuspecting the foreigner, of hospitality, of truculence, of sobriety, of chivalry, of Don Quixote and Tenorio. 

The Spanish-American war, to the United States merely an opportunityfor a patriotic-capitalist demonstration of sanitary engineering, heroism and canned-meat scandals, was to Spain the first whispered wordthat many among the traditions were false. The young men of that timecalled themselves the generation of ninety-eight. According totemperament they rejected all or part of the museum of traditions theyhad been taught to believe was the real Spain; each took up a separateroad in search of a Spain which should suit his yearnings for beauty, gentleness, humaneness, or else vigor, force, modernity. 

The problem of our day is whether Spaniards evolving locally, anarchically, without centralization in anything but repression, willwork out new ways of life for themselves, or whether they will be drawninto the festering tumult of a Europe where the system that is dying isonly strong enough to kill in its death-throes all new growth in whichthere was hope for the future. The Pyrenees are high. 

IV

It was after a lecture at an exhibition of Basque painters in Madrid, where we had heard Valle-Melan, with eyes that burned out from undershaggy grizzled eyebrows, denounce in bitter stinging irony what hecalled the Europeanization of Spain. What they called progress, he hadsaid, was merely an aping of the stupid commercialism of modern Europe. Better no education for the masses than education that would turnhealthy peasants into crafty putty-skinned merchants; better a Spainswooning in her age-old apathy than a Spain awakened to the brutalsoulless trade-war of modern life. . . . I was walking with a youngstudent of philosophy I had met by chance across the noisy board of aSpanish _pensión_, discussing the exhibition we had just seen as astrangely meek setting for the fiery reactionary speech. I had remarkedon the very "primitive" look much of the work of these young Basquepainters had, shown by some in the almost affectionate technique, inthe dainty caressing brush-work, in others by that inadequacy of themeans at the painter's disposal to express his idea, which made of somany of the pictures rather gloriously impressive failures. My friendwas insisting, however, that the primitiveness, rather than thebirth-pangs of a new view of the world, was nothing but "the lastaffectation of an over-civilized tradition. "

"Spain, " he said, "is the most civilized country in Europe. The growthof our civilization has never been interrupted by outside influence. The Phoenicians, the Romans--Spain's influence on Rome was, I imagine, fully as great as Rome's on Spain; think of the five Spanishemperors;--the Goths, the Moors;--all incidents, absorbed by thechangeless Iberian spirit. . . . Even Spanish Christianity, " he continued, smiling, "is far more Spanish than it is Christian. Our life is onevast ritual. Our religion is part of it, that is all. And so are thebull-fights that so shock the English and Americans, --are they any morebrutal, though, than fox-hunting and prize-fights? And how full oftradition are they, our _fiestas de toros_; their ceremony reachesback to the hecatombs of the Homeric heroes, to the bull-worship of theCretans and of so many of the Mediterranean cults, to the Roman games. Can civilization go farther than to ritualize death as we have done?But our culture is too perfect, too stable. Life is choked by it. "

We stood still a moment in the shade of a yellowed lime tree. My friendhad stopped talking and was looking with his usual bitter smile at agroup of little boys with brown, bare dusty legs who were intentlyplaying bull-fight with sticks for swords and a piece of newspaper forthe toreador's scarlet cape. 

"It is you in America, " he went on suddenly, "to whom the futurebelongs; you are so vigorous and vulgar and uncultured. Life has becomeonce more the primal fight for bread. Of course the dollar is acomplicated form of the food the cave man killed for and slunk after, and the means of combat are different, but it is as brutal. From thatcrude animal brutality comes all the vigor of life. We have none of it;we are too tired to have any thoughts; we have lived so much so longago that now we are content with the very simple things, --the warmth ofthe sun and the colors of the hills and the flavor of bread and wine. All the rest is automatic, ritual. "

"But what about the strike?" I asked, referring to the one-day'sgeneral strike that had just been carried out with fair successthroughout Spain, as a protest against the government's apathyregarding the dangerous rise in the prices of food and fuel. 

He shrugged his shoulders. 

"That, and more, " he said, "is new Spain, a prophecy, rather than afact. Old Spain is still all-powerful. "

Later in the day I was walking through the main street of one of theclustered adobe villages that lie in the folds of the Castilian plainnot far from Madrid. The lamps were just being lit in the little shopswhere the people lived and worked and sold their goods, and women withbeautifully shaped pottery jars on their heads were coming home withwater from the well. Suddenly I came out on an open _plaza_ withtrees from which the last leaves were falling through the greenishsunset light. The place was filled with the lilting music of agrind-organ and with a crunch of steps on the gravel as people danced. There were soldiers and servant-girls, and red-cheeked apprentice-boyswith their sweethearts, and respectable shop-keepers, and their wiveswith mantillas over their gleaming black hair. All were dancing in andout among the slim tree-trunks, and the air was noisy with laughter andlittle cries of childlike unfeigned enjoyment. Here was the gospel ofSancho Panza, I thought, the easy acceptance of life, the unashamed joyin food and color and the softness of women's hair. But as I walked outof the village across the harsh plain of Castile, grey-green and violetunder the deepening night, the memory came to me of the knight of thesorrowful countenance, Don Quixote, blunderingly trying to remould theworld, pitifully sure of the power of his own ideal. And in these twoSpain seemed to be manifest. Far indeed were they from the restlessindustrial world of joyless enforced labor and incessant goading war. And I wondered to what purpose it would be, should Don Quixote againsaddle Rosinante, and what the good baker of Almorox would say to hiswife when he looked up from his kneading trough, holding out handswhite with dough, to see the knight errant ride by on his lean steedupon a new quest. 

_IV: Talk by the Road_

Telemachus and Lyaeus had walked all night. The sky to the east of themwas rosy when they came out of a village at the crest of a hill. Cockscrowed behind stucco walls. The road dropped from their feet through anavenue of pollarded poplars ghostly with frost. Far away into the brownwest stretched reach upon reach of lake-like glimmer; here and there afew trees pushed jagged arms out of drowned lands. They stood stillbreathing hard. 

"It's the Tagus overflowed its banks, " said Telemachus. 

Lyaeus shook his head. 

"It's mist. "

They stood with thumping hearts on the hilltop looking overinexplicable shimmering plains of mist hemmed by mountains jagged likecoals that as they looked began to smoulder with dawn. The light allabout was lemon yellow. The walls of the village behind them werefervid primrose color splotched with shadows of sheer cobalt. Above thehouses uncurled green spirals of wood-smoke. 

Lyaeus raised his hands above his head and shouted and ran like maddown the hill. A little voice was whispering in Telemachus's ear thathe must save his strength, so he followed sedately. 

When he caught up to Lyaeus they were walking among twining wraiths ofmist rose-shot from a rim of the sun that poked up behind hills ofbright madder purple. A sudden cold wind-gust whined across the plain, making the mist writhe in a delirium of crumbling shapes. Ahead of themcasting gigantic blue shadows over the furrowed fields rode a man on adonkey and a man on a horse. It was a grey sway-backed horse thatjoggled in a little trot with much switching of a ragged tail; itsrider wore a curious peaked cap and sat straight and lean in thesaddle. Over one shoulder rested a long bamboo pole that in theexaggerating sunlight cast a shadow like the shadow of a lance. The manon the donkey was shaped like a dumpling and rode with his toes turnedout. 

Telemachus and Lyaeus walked behind them a long while without catchingup, staring curiously after these two silent riders. 

Eventually getting as far as the tails of the horse and the donkey, they called out: "_Buenos días_. "

There turned to greet them a red, round face, full of little lines likean over-ripe tomato and a long bloodless face drawn into a point at thechin by a grizzled beard. 

"How early you are, gentlemen, " said the tall man on the grey horse. His voice was deep and sepulchral, with an occasional flutter oftenderness like a glint of light in a black river. 

"Late, " said Lyaeus. "We come from Madrid on foot. "

The dumpling man crossed himself. 

"They are mad, " he said to his companion. 

"That, " said the man on the grey horse, "is always the answer ofignorance when confronted with the unusual. These gentlemen undoubtedlyhave very good reason for doing as they do; and besides the night isthe time for long strides and deep thoughts, is it not, gentlemen? Thehabit of vigil is one we sorely need in this distracted modern world. If more men walked and thought the night through there would be lessmiseries under the sun. "

"But, such a cold night!" exclaimed the dumpling man. 

"On colder nights than this I have seen children asleep in doorways inthe streets of Madrid. "

"Is there much poverty in these parts? asked Telemachus stiffly, wanting to show that he too had the social consciousness. 

"There are people--thousands--who from the day they are born till theday they die never have enough to eat. "

"They have wine, " said Lyaeus. 

"One little cup on Sundays, and they are so starved that it makes themas drunk as if it were a hogshead. "

"I have heard, " said Lyaeus, "that the sensations of starving are veryinteresting--people have visions more vivid than life. "

"One needs very few sensations to lead life humbly and beautifully, "said the man on the grey horse in a gentle tone of reproof. 

Lyaeus frowned. 

"Perhaps, " said the man on the grey horse turning towards Telemachushis lean face, where under scraggly eyebrows glowered eyes of soft darkgreen, "it is that I have brooded too much on the injustice done in theworld--all society one great wrong. Many years ago I should have setout to right wrong--for no one but a man, an individual alone, canright a wrong; organization merely substitutes one wrong foranother--but now . . . I am too old. You see, I go fishing instead. "

"Why, it's a fishing pole, " cried Lyaeus. "When I first saw it Ithought it was a lance. " And he let out his roaring laugh. 

"And such trout, " cried the dumpling man. "The trout there are in thatlittle stream above Illescas! That's why we got up so early, to fishfor trout. "

"I like to see the dawn, " said the man on the grey horse. 

"Is that Illescas?" asked Telemachus, and pointed to a dun brown towertopped by a cap of blue slate that stood guard over a cluster of roofsahead of them. Telemachus had a map torn from Baedecker in his pocketthat he had been peeping at secretly. 

"That, gentlemen, is Illescas, " said the man on the grey horse. "And ifyou will allow me to offer you a cup of coffee, I shall be mostpleased. You must excuse me, for I never take anything before midday. Iam a recluse, have been for many years and rarely stir abroad. I do notintend to return to the world unless I can bring something with meworth having. " A wistful smile twisted a little the corners of hismouth. 

"I could guzzle a hogshead of coffee accompanied by vast processions oftoasted rolls in columns of four, " shouted Lyaeus. 

"We are on our way to Toledo, " Telemachus broke in, not wanting to givethe impression that food was their only thought. 

"You will see the paintings of Dominico Theotocopoulos, the only onewho ever depicted the soul of Castile. "

"This man, " said Lyaeus, with a slap at Telemachus's shoulder, "islooking for a gesture. "

"The gesture of Castile. "

The man on the grey horse rode along silently for some time. The sunhad already burnt up the hoar-frost along the sides of the road; onlyan occasional streak remained glistening in the shadow of a ditch. Afew larks sang in the sky. Two men in brown corduroy with hoes on theirshoulders passed on their way to the fields. 

"Who shall say what is the gesture of Castile?. . . I am from La Manchamyself. " The man on the grey horse started speaking gravely while witha bony hand, very white, he stroked his beard. "Something cold andhaughty and aloof . . . Men concentrated, converging breathlessly on thesingle flame of their spirit. . . . Torquemada, Loyola, Jorge Manrique, Cortés, Santa Teresa. . . . Rapacity, cruelty, straightforwardness. . . . Every man's life a lonely ruthless quest. "

Lyaeus broke in:

"Remember the infinite gentleness of the saints lowering the Conde deOrgaz into the grave in the picture in San Tomás. . . . "

"Ah, that is what I was trying to think of. . . . These generations, mygeneration, my son's generation, are working to bury with infinitetenderness the gorgeously dressed corpse of the old Spain. . . . Gentlemen, it is a little ridiculous to say so, but we have set outonce more with lance and helmet of knight-errantry to free theenslaved, to right the wrongs of the oppressed. "

They had come into town. In the high square tower church-bells wereringing for morning mass. Down the broad main street scampered a flockof goats herded by a lean man with fangs like a dog who strode along ina snuff-colored cloak with a broad black felt hat on his head. 

"How do you do, Don Alonso?" he cried; "Good luck to you, gentlemen. "And he swept the hat off his head in a wide curving gesture as might acourtier of the Rey Don Juan. 

The hot smell of the goats was all about them as they sat before thecafé in the sun under a bare acacia tree, looking at the tightlyproportioned brick arcades of the mudéjar apse of the church opposite. Don Alonso was in the café ordering; the dumpling-man had disappeared. Telemachus got up on his numbed feet and stretched his legs. "Ouf, " hesaid, "I'm tired. " Then he walked over to the grey horse that stoodwith hanging head and drooping knees hitched to one of the acacias. 

"I wonder what his name is. " He stroked the horse's scrawny face. "Isit Rosinante?"

The horse twitched his ears, straightened his back and legs and pulledback black lips to show yellow teeth. 

"Of course it's Rosinante!"

The horse's sides heaved. He threw back his head and whinnied shrilly, exultantly. 

_V: A Novelist of Revolution_

I

Much as G. B. S. Refuses to be called an Englishman, Pío Baroja refusesto be called a Spaniard. He is a Basque. Reluctantly he admits havingbeen born in San Sebastián, outpost of Cosmopolis on the mountainouscoast of Guipuzcoa, where a stern-featured race of mountaineers andfishermen, whose prominent noses, high ruddy cheek-bones and squarejowls are gradually becoming known to the world through the paintingsof the Zubiaurre, clings to its ancient un-Aryan language and itsancient song and customs with the hard-headedness of hill people theworld over. 

From the first Spanish discoveries in America till the time of our ownNew England clipper ships, the Basque coast was the backbone of Spanishtrade. The three provinces were the only ones which kept theirprivileges and their municipal liberties all through the process of thecentralizing of the Spanish monarchy with cross and faggot, whichhistorians call the great period of Spain. The rocky inlets in themountains were full of shipyards that turned out privateers andmerchantmen manned by lanky broad-shouldered men with hard red-beakedfaces and huge hands coarsened by generations of straining on heavyoars and halyards, --men who feared only God and the sea-spirits oftheir strange mythology and were a law unto themselves, adventurers andbigots. 

It was not till the Nineteenth century that the Carlist wars and thepassing of sailing ships broke the prosperous independence of theBasque provinces and threw them once for all into the main current ofSpanish life. Now papermills take the place of shipyards, and insteadof the great fleet that went off every year to fish the Newfoundlandand Iceland banks, a few steam trawlers harry the sardines in the Bayof Biscay. The world war, too, did much to make Bilboa one of theindustrial centers of Spain, even restoring in some measure the ancientprosperity of its shipping. 

Pío Baroja spent his childhood on this rainy coast between greenmountains and green sea. There were old aunts who filled his ears upwith legends of former mercantile glory, with talk of sea captains andslavers and shipwrecks. Born in the late seventies, Baroja left themist-filled inlets of Guipuzcoa to study medicine in Madrid, febrilecapital full of the artificial scurry of government, on the dry uplandplateau of New Castile. He even practiced, reluctantly enough, in atown near Valencia, where he must have acquired his distaste for theMediterranean and the Latin genius, and, later, in his own province atCestons, where he boarded with the woman who baked the sacramentalwafers for the parish church, and, so he claims, felt the spirit ofracial solidarity glow within him for the first time. But he was tootimid in the face of pain and too sceptical of science as of everythingelse to acquire the cocksure brutality of a country doctor. He gave upmedicine and returned to Madrid, where he became a baker. In_Juventud-Egolatria_ ("Youth-Selfworship") a book of delightfullyshameless self-revelations, he says that he ran a bakery for six yearsbefore starting to write. And he still runs a bakery. 

You can see it any day, walking towards the Royal Theatre from thegreat focus of Madrid life, the Puerta del Sol. It has a most enticingwindow. On one side are hams and red sausages and purple sausages andwhite sausages, some plump to the bursting like Rubens's "Graces, "others as weazened and smoked as saints by Ribera. In the middle areoblong plates with patés and sliced bologna and things in jelly; thencome ranks of cakes, creamcakes and fruitcakes, everything from obscenejam-rolls to celestial cornucopias of white cream. Through the door yousee a counter with round loaves of bread on it, and a basketful ofbrown rolls. If someone comes out a dense sweet smell of fresh breadand pastry swirls about the sidewalk. 

So, by meeting commerce squarely in its own field, he has freed himselffrom any compromise with Mammon. While his bread remains sweet, hisnovels may be as bitter as he likes. 

II

The moon shines coldly out of an intense blue sky where a few starsglisten faint as mica. Shadow fills half the street, etching asilhouette of roofs and chimneypots and cornices on the cobblestones, leaving the rest very white with moonlight. The façades of the houses, with their blank windows, might be carved out of ice. In the dark of adoorway a woman sits hunched under a brown shawl. Her head nods, butstill she jerks a tune that sways and dances through the silent streetout of the accordion on her lap. A little saucer for pennies is on thestep beside her. In the next doorway two guttersnipes are huddledtogether asleep. The moonlight points out with mocking interest theirskinny dirt-crusted feet and legs stretched out over the icy pavement, and the filthy rags that barely cover their bodies. Two men stumble outof a wineshop arm in arm, poor men in corduroy, who walk alongunsteadily in their worn canvas shoes, making grandiloquent gestures ofpity, tearing down the cold hard façades with drunken generous phrases, buoyed up by the warmth of the wine in their veins. 

That is Baroja's world: dismal, ironic, the streets of towns whereindustrial life sits heavy on the neck of a race as little adapted toit as any in Europe. No one has ever described better the shaggybadlands and cabbage-patches round the edges of a city, where thedebris of civilization piles up ramshackle suburbs in which starve andscheme all manner of human detritus. Back lots where men and women livefantastically in shelters patched out of rotten boards, of old tin cansand bits of chairs and tables that have stood for years in brightpleasant rooms. Grassy patches behind crumbling walls where on sunnydays starving children spread their fleshless limbs and run about inthe sun. Miserable wineshops where the wind whines through broken panesto chill men with ever-empty stomachs who sit about gambling andfinding furious drunkenness in a sip of _aguardiente_. Courtyardsof barracks where painters who have not a cent in the world mix withbeggars and guttersnipes to cajole a little hot food out ofsoft-hearted soldiers at mess-time. Convent doors where ragged linesshiver for hours in the shrill wind that blows across the bareCastilian plain waiting for the nuns to throw out bread for them tofight over like dogs. And through it all moves the great crowd of theoutcast, sneak-thieves, burglars, beggars of every description, --richbeggars and poor devils who have given up the struggle toexist, --homeless children, prostitutes, people who live a half-honestexistence selling knicknacks, penniless students, inventors who whileaway the time they are dying of starvation telling all they meet of theriches they might have had; all who have failed on the daily treadmillof bread-making, or who have never had a chance even to enjoy theprivilege of industrial slavery. Outside of Russia there has never beena novelist so taken up with all that society and respectability reject. 

Not that the interest in outcasts is anything new in Spanishliterature. Spain is the home of that type of novel which thepigeonhole-makers have named picaresque. These loafers and wanderers ofBaroja's, like his artists and grotesque dreamers and fanatics, all arethe descendants of the people in the _Quijote_ and the _NovelasEjemplares_, of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo de Tormes, whothrough _Gil Blas_ invaded France and England, where they rollickedthrough the novel until Mrs. Grundy and George Eliot packed them off tothe reform school. But the rogues of the seventeenth century were jollyrogues. They always had their tongues in their cheeks, and successrewarded their ingenious audacities. The moulds of society had nothardened as they have now; there was less pressure of hungrygenerations. Or, more probably, pity had not come in to undermine thefoundations. 

The corrosive of pity, which had attacked the steel girders of ourcivilization even before the work of building was completed, hasbrought about what Gilbert Murray in speaking of Greek thought callsthe failure of nerve. In the seventeenth century men still had thecourage of their egoism. The world was a bad job to be made the bestof, all hope lay in driving a good bargain with the conductors of lifeeverlasting. By the end of the nineteenth century the life everlastinghad grown cobwebby, the French Revolution had filled men up withextravagant hopes of the perfectibility of this world, humanitarianismhad instilled an abnormal sensitiveness to pain, --to one's own pain, and to the pain of one's neighbors. Baroja's outcasts are no longerjolly knaves who will murder a man for a nickel and go on their roadsinging "Over the hills and far away"; they are men who have not hadthe willpower to continue in the fight for bread, they are men whosenerve has failed, who live furtively on the outskirts, snatching alittle joy here and there, drugging their hunger with gorgeous mirages. 

One often thinks of Gorki in reading Baroja, mainly because of thecontrast. Instead of the tumultuous spring freshet of a new race thatdrones behind every page of the Russian, there is the cold despair ofan old race, of a race that lived long under a formula of life to whichit has sacrificed much, only to discover in the end that the formuladoes not hold. 

These are the last paragraphs of _Mala Hierba_ ("Wild Grass"), themiddle volume of Baroja's trilogy on the life of the very poor inMadrid. 

"They talked. Manuel felt irritation against the whole world, hatred, up to that moment pent up within him against society, against man. . . . 

"'Honestly, ' he ended by saying, 'I wish it would rain dynamite for aweek, and that the Eternal Father would come tumbling down in cinders. '

"He invoked crazily all the destructive powers to reduce to ashes thismiserable society. 

"Jesús listened with attention. 

"'You are an anarchist, ' he told him. 

"'I?'

"'Yes. So am I. '

"'Since when?'

"'Since I have seen the infamies committed in the world; since I haveseen how coldly they give to death a bit of human flesh; since I haveseen how men die abandoned in the streets and hospitals, ' answeredJesús with a certain solemnity. 

"Manuel was silent. The friends walked without speaking round the Rondade Segovia, and sat down on a bench in the little gardens of the Vírgendel Puerto. 

"The sky was superb, crowded with stars; the Milky Way crossed itsimmense blue concavity. The geometric figure of the Great Bearglittered very high. Arcturus and Vega shone softly in that ocean ofstars. 

"In the distance the dark fields, scratched with lines of lights, seemed the sea in a harbor and the strings of lights the illuminationof a wharf. 

"The damp warm air came laden with odors of woodland plants wilted bythe heat. 

"'How many stars, ' said Manuel. 'What can they be?'

"'They are worlds, endless worlds. '

"'I don't know why it doesn't make me feel better to see this sky sobeautiful, Jesús. Do you think there are men in those worlds?' askedManuel. 

"'Perhaps; why not?'

"'And are there prisons too, and judges and gambling dens andpolice?. . . Do you think so?'

"Jesús did not answer. After a while he began talking with a calm voiceof his dream of an idyllic humanity, a sweet pitiful dream, noble andchildish. 

"In his dream, man, led by a new idea, reached a higher state. 

"No more hatreds, no more rancours. Neither judges, nor police, norsoldiers, nor authority. In the wide fields of the earth free menworked in the sunlight. The law of love had taken the place of the lawof duty, and the horizons of humanity grew every moment wider, widerand more azure. 

"And Jesús continued talking of a vague ideal of love and justice, ofenergy and pity; and those words of his, chaotic, incoherent, fell likebalm on Manuel's ulcerated spirit. Then they were both silent, lost intheir thoughts, looking at the night. 

"An august joy shone in the sky, and the vague sensation of space, ofthe infinity of those imponderable worlds, filled their spirits with adelicious calm. "

III

Spain is the classic home of the anarchist. A bleak upland countrymostly, with a climate giving all varieties of temperature, from moistAfrican heat to dry Siberian cold, where people have lived until veryrecently, --and do still, --in villages hidden away among the bare ribsof the mountains, or in the indented coast plains, where every regionis cut off from every other by high passes and defiles of themountains, flaming hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, where theIberian race has grown up centerless. The pueblo, the villagecommunity, is the only form of social cohesion that really has roots inthe past. On these free towns empires have time and again been imposedby force. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Catholicmonarchy wielded the sword of the faith to such good effect thatcommunal feeling was killed and the Spanish genius forced to ingrowinto the mystical realm where every ego expanded itself into thesolitude of God. The eighteenth century reduced God to an abstraction, and the nineteenth brought pity and the mad hope of righting the wrongsof society. The Spaniard, like his own Don Quixote, mounted thewarhorse of his idealism and set out to free the oppressed, alone. As alogical conclusion we have the anarchist who threw a bomb into theLyceum Theatre in Barcelona during a performance, wanting to make theultimate heroic gesture and only succeeding in a senseless mangling ofhuman lives. 

But that was the reduction to an absurdity of an immensely valuablemental position. The anarchism of Pío Baroja is of another sort. Hesays in one of his books that the only part a man of the middle classescan play in the reorganization of society is destructive. He has notundergone the discipline, which can only come from common slavery inthe industrial machine, necessary for a builder. His slavery has beenan isolated slavery which has unfitted him forever from becoming trulypart of a community. He can use the vast power of knowledge whichtraining has given him only in one way. His great mission is to put theacid test to existing institutions, and to strip the veils off them. Idon't want to imply that Baroja writes with his social conscience. Heis too much of a novelist for that, too deeply interested in people assuch. But it is certain that a profound sense of the evil of existinginstitutions lies behind every page he has written, and thatoccasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to hope thatsomething better may come out of the turmoil of our age of transition. 

Only a man who had felt all this very deeply could be so sensitive tothe new spirit--if the word were not threadbare one would call itreligious--which is shaking the foundations of the world's socialpyramid, perhaps only another example of the failure of nerve, perhapsthe triumphant expression of a new will among mankind. 

In _Aurora Roja_ ("Red Dawn"), the last of the Madrid trilogy, aboutthe same Manuel who is the central figure of _Mala Hierba_, he writes:

"At first it bored him, but later, little by little, he felt himselfcarried away by what he was reading. First he was enthusiastic aboutMirabeau; then about the Girondins; Vergniau Petion, Condorcet; thenabout Danton; then he began to think that Robespierre was the truerevolutionary; afterwards Saint Just, but in the end it was thegigantic figure of Danton that thrilled him most. . . . 

"Manuel felt great satisfaction at having read that history. Often hesaid to himself:

"'What does it matter now if I am a loafer, and good-for-nothing? I'veread the history of the French Revolution; I believe I shall know howto be worthy. . . . '

"After Michelet, he read a book about '48; then another on the Commune, by Louise Michel, and all this produced in him a great admiration forFrench Revolutionists. What men! After the colossal figures of theConvention: Babeuf, Proudhon, Blanqui, Bandin, Deleschize, Rochefort, Félix Pyat, Vallu. . . . What people!

"'What does it matter now if I am a loafer?. . . I believe I shall knowhow to be worthy. '"

In those two phrases lies all the power of revolutionary faith. And howlike phrases out of the gospels, those older expressions of the hopeand misery of another society in decay. That is the spirit that, forgood or evil, is stirring throughout Europe to-day, among the poor andthe hungry and the oppressed and the outcast, a new affirmation of therights and duties of men. Baroja has felt this profoundly, and haspresented it, but without abandoning the function of the novelist, which is to tell stories about people. He is never a propagandist. 

IV

"I have never hidden my admirations in literature. They have been andare Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoievski and, now, Stendhal. . . . " writesBaroja in the preface to the Nelson edition of _La Dama Errante_("The Wandering Lady"). He follows particularly in the footprints ofBalzac in that he is primarily a historian of morals, who has made afairly consistent attempt to cover the world he lived in. WithDostoievski there is a kinship in the passionate hatred of cruelty andstupidity that crops out everywhere in his work. I have never found anytrace of influence of the other three. To be sure there are a few earlysketches in the manner of Poe, but in respect to form he is much morein the purely chaotic tradition of the picaresque novel he despisesthan in that of the American theorist. 

Baroja's most important work lies in the four series of novels of theSpanish life he lived, in Madrid, in the provincial towns where hepracticed medicine, and in the Basque country where he had been broughtup. The foundation of these was laid by _El Arbol de la Ciencia_ ("TheTree of Knowledge"), a novel half autobiographical describing the lifeand death of a doctor, giving a picture of existence in Madrid and thenin two Spanish provincial towns. Its tremendously vivid painting ofinertia and the deadening under its weight of intellectual effort madea very profound impression in Spain. Two novels about the anarchistmovement followed it, _La Dama Errante_, which describes the state ofmind of forward-looking Spaniards at the time of the famous anarchistattempt on the lives of the king and queen the day of their marriage, and _La Ciudad de la Niebla_, about the Spanish colony in London. Thencame the series called _La Busca_ ("The Search"), which to me isBaroja's best work, and one of the most interesting things published inEurope in the last decade. It deals with the lowest and most miserablelife in Madrid and is written with a cold acidity which Maupassantwould have envied and is permeated by a human vividness that I do notthink Maupassant could have achieved. All three novels, _La Busca_, _Mala Hierba_, and _Aurora Roja_, deal with the drifting of a typicaluneducated Spanish boy, son of a maid of all work in a boarding house, through different strata of Madrid life. They give a sense of unadornedreality very rare in any literature, and besides their power as novelsare immensely interesting as sheer natural history. The type of the_golfo_ is a literary discovery comparable with that of Sancho Panza byCervántes. 

Nothing that Baroja has written since is quite on the same level. Theseries _El Pasado_ ("The Past") gives interesting pictures ofprovincial life. _Las Inquietudes de Shanti Andia_ ("The Anxieties ofShanti Andia"), a story of Basque seamen which contains a charmingpicture of a childhood in a seaside village in Guipuzcoa, delightful asit is to read, is too muddled in romantic claptrap to add much to hisfame. _El Mundo es Así_ ("The World is Like That") expresses, ratherlamely it seems to me, the meditations of a disenchanted revolutionist. The latest series, _Memorias de un Hombre de Acción_, a series of yarnsabout the revolutionary period in Spain at the beginning of thenineteenth century, though entertaining, is more an attempt to escapein a jolly romantic past the realities of the morose present thananything else. _César o Nada_, translated into English under the titleof "Aut Cæsar aut Nullus" is also less acid and less effective than hisearlier novels. That is probably why it was chosen for translation intoEnglish. We know how anxious our publishers are to furnish food easilydigestible by weak American stomachs. 

It is silly to judge any Spanish novelist from the point of view ofform. Improvisation is the very soul of Spanish writing. In thinkingback over books of Baroja's one has read, one remembers moredescriptions of places and people than anything else. In the end it israther natural history than dramatic creation. But a natural historythat gives you the pictures etched with vitriol of Spanish life in theend of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century whichyou get in these novels of Baroja's is very near the highest sort ofcreation. If we could inject some of the virus of his intense sense ofreality into American writers it would be worth giving up all thesestale conquests of form we inherited from Poe and O. Henry. Thefollowing, again from the preface of _La Dama Errante_, is Baroja's ownstatement of his aims. And certainly he has realized them. 

"Probably a book like _la Dama Errante_ is not of the sort that livesvery long; it is not a painting with aspirations towards the museum butan impressionist canvas; perhaps as a work it has too much asperity, istoo hard, not serene enough. 

"This ephemeral character of my work does not displease me. We are menof the day, people in love with the passing moment, with all that isfugitive and transitory and the lasting quality of our work preoccupiesus little, so little that it can hardly be said to preoccupy us atall. "

_VI: Talk by the Road_

"Spain, " said Don Alonso, as he and Telemachus walked out of Illescas, followed at a little distance by Lyaeus and the dumpling-man, "hasnever been swept clean. There have been the Romans and the Visigothsand the Moors and the French--armed men jingling over mountain roads. Conquest has warped and sterilised our Iberian mind without changing anatom of it. An example: we missed the Revolution and suffered fromNapoleon. We virtually had no Reformation, yet the Inquisition wasstronger with us than anywhere. "

"Do you think it will have to be swept clean?" asked Telemachus. 

"He does. " Don Alonso pointed with a sweep of an arm towards a manworking in the field beside the road. It was a short man in a blouse;he broke the clods the plow had left with a heavy triangular hoe. Sometimes he raised it only a foot above the ground to poise for ablow, sometimes he swung it from over his shoulder. Face, clothes, hands, hoe were brown against the brown hillside where a purple shadowmocked each heavy gesture with lank gesticulations. In the morningsilence the blows of the hoe beat upon the air with muffled insistence. 

"And he is the man who will do the building, " went on Don Alonso; "Itis only fair that we should clear the road. "

"But you are the thinkers, " said Telemachus; his mother Penelope'smaxims on the subject of constructive criticism popped up suddenly inhis mind like tickets from a cash register. 

"Thought is the acid that destroys, " answered Don Alonso. 

Telemachus turned to look once more at the man working in the field. The hoe rose and fell, rose and fell. At a moment on each stroke aflash of sunlight came from it. Telemachus saw all at once the wholeearth, plowed fields full of earth-colored men, shoulders thrown back, bent forward, muscles of arms swelling and slackening, hoes flashing atthe same moment against the sky, at the same moment buried with a thudin clods. And he felt reassured as a traveller feels, hearing thecontinuous hiss and squudge of well oiled engines out at sea. 

_VII: Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs_

When we stepped out of the bookshop the narrow street steamed with thedust of many carriages. Above the swiftly whirling wheels gaudilydressed men and women sat motionless in attitudes. Over the backs ofthe carriages brilliant shawls trailed, triangles of red and purple andyellow. 

"Bread and circuses, " muttered the man who was with me, "but not enoughbread. "

It was fair-time in Cordova; the carriages were coming back from the_toros_. We turned into a narrow lane, where the dust was yellowbetween high green and lavender-washed walls. From the street we hadleft came a sound of cheers and hand-clapping. My friend stopped stilland put his hand on my arm. 

"There goes Belmonte, " he said; "half the men who are cheering him havenever had enough to eat in their lives. The old Romans knew better; tokeep people quiet they filled their bellies. Those fools--" he jerkedhis head backwards with disgust; I thought, of the shawls and the highcombs and the hair gleaming black under lace and the wasp-waists of theyoung men and the insolence of black eyes above the flashing wheels ofthe carriages, "--those fools give only circuses. Do you people in theoutside world realize that we in Andalusia starve, that we have starvedfor generations, that those black bulls for the circuses may graze overgood wheatland . . . To make Spain picturesque! The only time we see meatis in the bullring. Those people who argue all the time as to whySpain's backward and write books about it, I could tell them in oneword: malnutrition. " He laughed despairingly and started walking fastagain. "We have solved the problem of the cost of living. We live onair and dust and bad smells. "

I had gone into his bookshop a few minutes before to ask an address, and had been taken into the back room with the wonderful enthusiasticcourtesy one finds so often in Spain. There the bookseller, a carpenterand the bookseller's errand-boy had all talked at once, explaining thelast strike of farm-laborers, when the region had been for months undermartial law, and they, and every one else of socialist or republicansympathies, had been packed for weeks into overcrowded prisons. Theyall regretted they could not take me to the Casa del Pueblo, but, theyexplained laughing, the Civil Guard was occupying it at that moment. Itended by the bookseller's coming out with me to show me the way toAzorín's. 

Azorín was an architect who had supported the strikers; he had justcome back to Cordova from the obscure village where he had beenimprisoned through the care of the military governor who had paid himthe compliment of thinking that even in prison he would be dangerous inCordova. He had recently been elected municipal councillor, and when wereached his office was busy designing a schoolhouse. On the stairs thebookseller had whispered to me that every workman in Cordova would diefor Azorín. He was a sallow little man with a vaguely sarcastic voiceand an amused air as if he would burst out laughing at any moment. Heput aside his plans and we all went on to see the editor of_Andalusia_, a regionalist pro-labor weekly. 

In that dark little office, over three cups of coffee that appearedmiraculously from somewhere with the pungent smell of ink and freshpaper in our nostrils, we talked about the past and future of Cordova, and of all the wide region of northern Andalusia, fertile irrigatedplains, dry olive-land stretching up to the rocky waterless mountainswhere the mines are. In Azorín's crisp phrases and in the long ornateperiods of the editor, the serfdom and the squalor and the heroic hopeof these peasants and miners and artisans became vivid to me for thefirst time. Occasionally the compositor, a boy of about fifteen with abrown ink-smudged face, would poke his head in the door and shout:"It's true what they say, but they don't say enough, they don't sayenough. "

The problem in the south of Spain is almost wholly agrarian. From theTagus to the Mediterranean stretches a mountainous region of lowrainfall, intersected by several series of broad river-valleys which, under irrigation, are enormously productive of rice, oranges, and, inthe higher altitudes, of wheat. In the dry hills grow grapes, olivesand almonds. A country on the whole much like southern California. Under the Moors this region was the richest and most civilised inEurope. 

When the Christian nobles from the north reconquered it, theecclesiastics laid hold of the towns and extinguished industry throughthe Inquisition, while the land was distributed in huge estates to themagnates of the court of the Catholic Kings. The agricultural workersbecame virtually serfs, and the communal village system of working theland gradually gave way, Now the province of Jaen, certainly as largeas the State of Rhode Island, is virtually owned by six families. Thisprocess was helped by the fact that all through the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries the liveliest people in all Spain swarmedoverseas to explore and plunder America or went into the church, sothat the tilling of the land was left to the humblest and leastvigorous. And immigration to America has continued the safety valve ofthe social order. 

It is only comparatively recently that the consciousness has begun toform among the workers of the soil that it is possible for them tochange their lot. As everywhere else, Russia has been the beacon-flare. Since 1918 an extraordinary tenseness has come over the lives of thefrugal sinewy peasants who, through centuries of oppression andstarvation, have kept, in spite of almost complete illiteracy, acuriously vivid sense of personal independence. In the backs of tavernsrevolutionary tracts are spelled out by some boy who has had a coupleof years of school to a crowd of men who listen or repeat the wordsafter him with the fervor of people going through a religious mystery. Unspeakable faith possesses them in what they call "_la nuevaley_" ("the new law"), by which the good things a man wrings by hissweat from the earth shall be his and not the property of a distantseñor in Madrid. 

It is this hopefulness that marks the difference between the presentagrarian agitation and the violent and desperate peasant risings of thepast. As early as October, 1918, a congress of agricultural workers washeld to decide on strike methods and, more important, to formulate ademand for the expropriation of the land. In two months the unions, ("_sociedades de resistencia_") had been welded--at least in theprovince of Cordova--into a unified system with more or less centralleadership. The strike which followed was so complete that in manycases even domestic servants went out. After savage repression and themilitary occupation of the whole province, the strike petered out intocompromises which resulted in considerable betterment of workingconditions but left the important issues untouched. 

The rise in the cost of living and the growing unrest brought mattersto a head again in the summer of 1919. The military was used with evenmore brutality than the previous year. Attempts at compromise, atparcelling out uncultivated land have proved as unavailing as theMausers of the Civil Guard to quell the tumult. The peasants have kepttheir organizations and their demands intact. They are even willing towait; but they are determined that the land upon which they have wornout generations and generations shall be theirs without question. 

All this time the landlords brandish a redoubtable weapon: starvation. Already thousands of acres that might be richly fertile lie idle or arepasture for herds of wild bulls for the arena. The great land-owningfamilies hold estates all over Spain; if in a given region the workersbecome too exigent, they decide to leave the land in fallow for a yearor two. In the villages it becomes a question of starve or emigrate. Toemigrate many certificates are needed. Many officials have to beplacated. For all that money is needed. Men taking to the roads insearch of work are persecuted as vagrants by the civil guards. Arsonbecomes the last retort of despair. At night the standing grain burnsmysteriously or the country house of an absent landlord, and from theparched hills where gnarled almond-trees grow, groups of half starvedmen watch the flames with grim exultation. 

Meanwhile the press in Madrid laments the _incultura_ of the Andalusianpeasants. The problem of civilization, after all, is often one of foodcalories. Fernando de los Ríos, socialist deputy for Granada, recentlypublished the result of an investigation of the food of theagricultural populations of Spain in which he showed that only in theBalkans--out of all Europe--was the working man so under-nourished. Thecalories which the diet of the average Cordova workman represented wassomething like a fourth of those of the British workman's diet. Even sothe foremen of the big estates complain that as a result of all thissocial agitation their workmen have taken to eating more than they didin the good old times. 

How long it will be before the final explosion comes no one canconjecture. The spring of 1920, when great things were expected, wascompletely calm. On the other hand, in the last municipal electionswhen six hundred socialist councillors were elected in all Spain--incontrast to sixty-two in 1915--the vote polled in Andalusia wasunprecedented. Up to this election many of the peasants had never daredvote, and those that had had been completely under the thumb of the_caciques_, the bosses that control Spanish local politics. However, inspite of socialist and syndicalist propaganda, the agrarian problemwill always remain separate from anything else in the minds of thepeasants. This does not mean that they are opposed to communism orcling as violently as most of the European peasantry to the habit ofprivate property. 

All over Spain one comes upon traces of the old communist villageinstitutions, by which flocks and mills and bakeries and often landwere held in common. As in all arid countries, where everything dependsupon irrigation, ditches are everywhere built and repaired in common. And the idea of private property is of necessity feeble where there isno rain; for what good is land to a man without water? Still, untilthere grows up a much stronger community of interest than now existsbetween the peasants and the industrial workers, the struggle for theland and the struggle for the control of industry will be, in Spain, asI think everywhere, parallel rather than unified. One thing is certain, however long the fire smoulders before it flares high to make a cleansweep of Spanish capitalism and Spanish feudalism together, Cordova, hoary city of the caliphs, where ghosts of old grandeurs flit about thezigzag ochre-colored lanes, will, when the moment comes, be the centerof organization of the agrarian revolution. When I was leaving Spain Irode with some young men who were emigrating to America, to make theirfortunes, they said. When I told them I had been to Cordova, theirfaces became suddenly bright with admiration. 

"Ah, Cordova, " one of them cried; "they've got the guts in Cordova. "

_VIII: Talk by the Road_

At the first crossroads beyond Illescas the dumpling-man and Don Alonsoturned off in quest of the trout stream. Don Alonso waved solemnly toLyaeus and Telemachus. 

"Perhaps we shall meet in Toledo, " he said. 

"Catch a lot of fish, " shouted Lyaeus. 

"And perhaps a thought, " was the last word they heard from Don Alonso. 

The sun already high in the sky poured tingling heat on their heads andshoulders. There was sand in their shoes, an occasional sharp pain intheir shins, in their bellies bitter emptiness. 

"At the next village, Tel, I'm going to bed. You can do what you like, "said Lyaeus in a tearful voice. 

"I'll like that all right. "

"_Buenos días, señores viajeros_, " came a cheerful voice. They foundthey were walking in the company of a man who wore a tight-waistedovercoat of a light blue color, a cream-colored felt hat from underwhich protruded long black moustaches with gimlet points, and shoeswith lemon-yellow uppers. They passed the time of day with whatcheerfulness they could muster. 

"Ah, Toledo, " said the man. "You are going to Toledo, my birthplace. There I was born in the shadow of the cathedral, there I shall die. Iam a traveller of commerce. " He produced two cards as large aspostcards on which was written:

 ANTONIO SILVA Y YEPES UNIVERSAL AGENT IMPORT EXPORT NATIONAL PRODUCTS

"At your service, gentlemen, " he said and handed each of them a card. "I deal in tinware, ironware, pottery, lead pipes, enameled ware, kitchen utensils, American toilet articles, French perfumery, cutlery, linen, sewing machines, saddles, bridles, seeds, fancy poultry, fighting bantams and objects _de vertu_. . . . You are foreigners, are younot? How barbarous Spain, what people, what dirt, what lack of culture, what impoliteness, what lack of energy!"

The universal agent choked, coughed, spat, produced a handkerchief ofcrimson silk with which he wiped his eyes and mouth, twirled hismoustaches and plunged again into a torrent of words, turning onTelemachus from time to time little red-rimmed eyes full of moistpathos like a dog's. 

"Oh there are times, gentlemen, when it is too much to bear, when Irejoice to think that it's all up with my lungs and that I shan't livelong anyway. . . . In America I should have been a Rockefeller, aCarnegie, a Morgan. I know it, for I am a man of genius. It is true. Iam a man of genius. . . . And look at me here walking from one of thesecursed tumbledown villages to another because I have not money enoughto hire a cab. . . . And ill too, dying of consumption! O Spain, Spain, how do you crush your great men! What you must think of us, you whocome from civilized countries, where life is organized, where commerceis a gentlemanly, even a noble occupation. . . . "

"But you savor life more. . . . "

"_Ca, ca_, " interrupted the universal agent with a downward gesture ofthe hand. "To think that they call by the same name living here in apen like a pig and living in Paris, London, New York, Biarritz, Trouville . . . Luxurious beds, coiffures, toilettes, theatricalfunctions, sumptuous automobiles, elegant ladies glittering withdiamonds . . . The world of light and enchantment! Oh to think of it! AndSpain could be the richest country in Europe, if we had energy, organization, culture! Think of the exports: iron, coal, copper, silver, oranges, hides, mules, olives, food products, woolens, cottoncloth, sugarcane, raw cotton . . . Couplets, dancers, gipsy girls. . . . "

The universal agent had quite lost his breath. He coughed for a longtime into his crimson handkerchief, then looked about him over therolling dun slopes to which the young grain sprouting gave a sheen ofvivid green like the patina on a Pompeian bronze vase, and shrugged hisshoulders. 

"_¡Qué vida!_ What a life!"

For some time a spire had been poking up into the sky at the road'send; now yellow-tiled roofs were just visible humped out of thewheatland, with the church standing guard over them, it's buttresses asbowed as the legs of a bulldog. At the sight of the village a certainspring came back to Telemachus's fatigue-sodden legs. He noticed withenvy that Lyaeus took little skips as he walked. 

"If we properly exploited our exports we should be the richest peoplein Europe, " the universal agent kept shouting with far-flung gesturesof despair. And the last they heard from him as they left him to turninto the manure-littered, chicken-noisy courtyard of the Posada de laLuna was, "_¡Qué pueblo indecente!_. . . What a beastly town . . . Yet ifthey exploited with energy, with modern energy, their exports. . . . "

_IX: An Inverted Midas_

Every age must have had choice spirits whose golden fingers turnedeverything they touched to commonplace. Since we know our ownliterature best it seems unreasonably well equipped with these invertedMidases--though the fact that all Anglo-American writing during thelast century has been so exclusively of the middle classes, by themiddle classes and for the middle classes must count for something. Still Rome had her Marcus Aurelius, and we may be sure that platitudeswould have obscured the slanting sides of the pyramids hadstone-cutting in the reign of Cheops been as disastrously easy as isprinting to-day. The addition of the typewriter to the printing-presshas given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-bakedthought. The labor of graving on stone or of baking tablets of brick oreven of scrawling letters on paper with a pen is no longer a curb onthe dangerous fluency of the inverted Midas. He now lolls in a Morrischair, sipping iced tea, dictating to four blonde and two dark-hairedstenographers; three novels, a couple of books of travel and a shortstory written at once are nothing to a really enterprising universalgenius. Poor Julius Caesar with his letters!

We complain that we have no supermen nowadays, that we can't live asmuch or as widely or as fervently or get through so much work as couldPico della Mirandola or Erasmus or Politian, that the race driftstowards mental and physical anæmia. I deny it. With the typewriter allthese things shall be added unto us. This age too has its greatuniversal geniuses. They overrun the seven continents and theirrespective seas. Accompanied by mænadic bands of stenographers, and amusic of typewriters deliriously clicking, they go about the world, catching all the butterflies, rubbing the bloom off all the plums, tunneling mountains, bridging seas, smoothing the facets off ideas sothat they may be swallowed harmlessly like pills. With true Anglo-Saxonconceit we had thought that our own Mr. Wells was the most universal ofthese universal geniuses. He has so diligently brought science, ethics, sex, marriage, sociology, God, and everything else--properlydeodorized, of course--to the desk of the ordinary man, that he maylean back in his swivel-chair and receive faint susuration from thesense of progress and the complexity of life, without even having to goto the window to look at the sparrows sitting in rows on thetelephone-wires, so that really it seemed inconceivable that anyoneshould be more universal. It was rumored that there lay the ultimateproof of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy. What other race had produced a greatuniversal genius?

But all that was before the discovery of Blasco Ibáñez. 

On the backs of certain of Blasco Ibáñez's novels published by the CasaPrometeo in Valencia is this significant advertisement: _Obras deVulgarización Popular_ ("Works of Popular Vulgarization"). Under it isan astounding list of volumes, all either translated or edited orarranged, if not written from cover to cover, by one tireless pen, --Imean typewriter. Ten volumes of universal history, three volumes of theFrench Revolution translated from Michelet, a universal geography, asocial history, works on science, cookery and house-cleaning, ninevolumes of Blasco Ibáñez's own history of the European war, and atranslation of the Arabian Nights, a thousand and one of them withoutan hour missing. "Works of Popular Vulgarization. " I admit that inSpanish the word _vulgarización_ has not yet sunk to its inevitablemeaning, but can it long stand such a strain? Add to that list a roundtwo dozen novels and some books of travel, and who can deny that BlascoIbáñez is a great universal genius? Read his novels and you will findthat he has looked at the stars and knows Lord Kelvin's theory ofvortices and the nebular hypothesis and the direction of ocean currentsand the qualities of kelp and the direction the codfish go in Icelandwaters when the northeast wind blows; that he knows about Gothicarchitecture and Byzantine painting, the social movement in Jerez andthe exports of Patagonia, the wall-paper of Paris apartment houses andthe red paste with which countesses polish their fingernails in MonteCarlo. 

The very pattern of a modern major-general. And, like the greatuniversal geniuses of the Renaissance, he has lived as well as thoughtand written. He is said to have been thirty times in prison, six timesdeputy; he has been a cowboy in the pampas of Argentina; he has foundeda city in Patagonia with a bullring and a bust of Cervantes in themiddle of it; he has rounded the Horn on a sailing-ship in a hurricane, and it is whispered that like Victor Hugo he eats lobsters with theshells on. He hobnobs with the universe. 

One must admit, too, that Blasco Ibáñez's universe is a bulkier, burlier universe than Mr. Wells's. One is strangely certain that theaxle of Mr. Wells's universe is fixed in some suburb of London, sayPutney, where each house has a bit of garden where waddles an asthmaticpet dog, where people drink tea weak, with milk in it, before agas-log, where every bookcase makes a futile effort to impinge oninfinity through the encyclopedia, where life is a monotonous going andcoming, swathed in clothes that must above all be respectable, tobusiness and from business. But who can say where Blasco Ibáñez'suniverse centers? It is in constant progression. 

Starting, as Walt Whitman from fish-shaped Paumonauk, from the fiercegreen fertility of Valencia, city of another great Spanish conqueror, the Cid, he had marched on the world in battle array. The whole historycomes out in the series of novels at this moment being translated insuch feverish haste for the edification of the American public. Thebeginnings are stories of the peasants of the fertile plain round aboutValencia, of the fishermen and sailors of El Grao, the port, a sturdyviolent people living amid a snappy fury of vegetation unexampled inEurope. His method is inspired to a certain extent by Zola, taking fromhim a little of the newspaper-horror mode of realism, with inevitablemurder and sudden death in the last chapters. Yet he expresses thatlife vividly, although even then more given to grand vague ideas thanto a careful scrutiny of men and things. He is at home in the strongcommunal feeling, in the individual anarchism, in the passionateworship of the water that runs through the fields to give life and ofthe blades of wheat that give bread and of the wine that gives joy, which is the moral make-up of the Valencian peasant. He is sincerelyindignant about the agrarian system, about social inequality, and isfull of the revolutionary bravado of his race. 

A typical novel of this period is _La Barraca_, a story of a peasantfamily that takes up land which has lain vacant for years under thecurse of the community, since the eviction of the tenants, who had heldit for generations, by a landlord who was murdered as a result, on alonely road by the father of the family he had turned out. The struggleof these peasants against their neighbours is told with a good deal offeeling, and the culmination in a rifle fight in an irrigation ditch isa splendid bit of blood and thunder. There are many descriptions oflocal customs, such as the Tribunal of Water that sits once a weekunder one of the portals of Valencia cathedral to settle conflicts ofirrigation rights, a little dragged in by the heels, to be sure, butstill worth reading. Yet even in these early novels one feels over andover again the force of that phrase "popular vulgarization. " Valenciais being vulgarized for the benefit of the universe. The proletariat isbeing vulgarized for the benefit of the people who buy novels. 

From Valencia raids seem to have been made on other parts of Spain. _Sonnica la Cortesana_ gives you antique Saguntum and the usual "Aves, "wreaths, flute-players and other claptrap of costume novels. In _LaCatedral_ you have Toledo, the church, socialism and the modern worldin the shadow of Gothic spires. _La Bodega_ takes you into the genialair of the wine vaults of Jerez-de-la-Frontera, with smugglers, processions blessing the vineyards and agrarian revolt in thebackground. Up to now they have been Spanish novels written forSpaniards; it is only with _Sangre y Arena_ that the virus of aEuropean reputation shows results. 

In _Sangre y Arena_, to be sure, you learn that _toreros_ use scent, have a home life, and are seduced by passionate Baudelairian ladies ofthe smart set who plant white teeth in their brown sinewy arms andteach them to smoke opium cigarettes. You see _toreros_ taking thesacraments before going into the ring and you see them tossed by thebull while the crowd, which a moment before had been crying "hola" asif it didn't know that something was going wrong, gets very pale andchilly and begins to think what dreadful things _corridas_ are anyway, until the arrival of the next bull makes them forget it. All of whichis good fun when not obscured by grand, vague ideas, and incidentallysells like hot cakes. Thenceforward the Casa Prometeo becomes anexporting house dealing in the good Spanish products of violence andsunshine, blood, voluptuousness and death, as another vulgarizer putit. 

Next comes the expedition to South America and _The Argonauts_ appears. The Atlantic is bridged, --there open up rich veins of picturesquenessand new grand vague ideas, all in full swing when the war breaks out. Blasco Ibáñez meets the challenge nobly, and very soon, with _The FourHorsemen of the Apocalypse_, which captures the Allied world andproves again the mot about prophets. So without honor in its owncountry is the _Four Horsemen_ that the English translation rightsare sold for a paltry three thousand pesetas. But the great success inEngland and America soon shows that we can appreciate the acumen of aneutral who came in and rooted for our side; so early in the race too!While the iron is still hot another four hundred pages of well-sugaredpro-Ally propaganda appears, _Mare Nostrum_, which mingles Ulyssesand scientific information about ocean currents, Amphitrite andsubmarines, Circe and a vamping Theda Bara who was really a German Spy, in one grand chant of praise before the Mumbo-Jumbo of nationalism. 

_Los Enemigos de la Mujer_, the latest production, abandons Spainentirely and plants itself in the midst of princes and countesses, allelaborately pro-Ally, at Monte Carlo. Forgotten the proletarian tastesof his youth, the local color he loved to lay on so thickly, theHabañera atmosphere; only the grand vague ideas subsist in thecosmopolite, and the fluency, that fatal Latin fluency. 

And now the United States, the home of the blonde stenographer and thetypewriter and the press agent. What are we to expect from thecombination of Blasco Ibáñez and Broadway?

At any rate the movies will profit. 

Yet one can't help wishing that Blasco Ibáñez had not learnt thetypewriter trick so early. Print so easily spins a web of thecommonplace over the fine outlines of life. And Blasco Ibáñez need nothave been an inverted Midas. His is a superbly Mediterranean type, withsomething of Arretino, something of Garibaldi, something of Tartarin ofTarascon. Blustering, sensual, enthusiastic, living at bottom in a realworld--which can hardly be said of Anglo-Saxon vulgarizers--even if itis a real world obscured by grand vague ideas, Blasco Ibáñez's mereenergy would have produced interesting things if it had not found sucheasy and immediate vent in the typewriter. Bottle up a man like thatfor a lifetime without means of expression and he'll produce memoirsequal to Marco Polo and Casanova, but let his energies flow out evenlywithout resistance through a corps of clicking typewriters and all youhave is one more popular novelist. 

It is unfortunate too that Blasco Ibáñez and the United States shouldhave discovered each other at this moment. They will do each other nogood. We have an abundance both of vague grand ideas and of popularnovelists, and we are the favorite breeding place of the invertedMidas. We need writing that shall be acid, with sharp edges on it, yeasty to leaven the lump of glucose that the combination of the idealsof the man in the swivel-chair with decayed puritanism has made of ournational consciousness. Of course Blasco Ibáñez in America will only bea seven days' marvel. Nothing is ever more than that. But why need wepretend each time that our seven days' marvels are the great eternalthings?

Then, too, if the American public is bound to take up Spain it might aswell take up the worth-while things instead of the works of popularvulgarization. They have enough of those in their bookcases as it is. And in Spain there is a novelist like Baroja, essayists like Unamunoand Azorín, poets like Valle Inclán and Antonio Machado, . . . But Isuppose they will shine with the reflected glory of the author of the_Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_. 

_X: Talk by the Road_

When they woke up it was dark. They were cold. Their legs were stiff. They lay each along one edge of a tremendously wide bed, between them atangle of narrow sheets and blankets. Telemachus raised himself to asitting position and put his feet, that were still swollen, gingerly tothe floor. He drew them up again with a jerk and sat with his teethchattering hunched on the edge of the bed. Lyaeus burrowed into theblankets and went back to sleep. For a long while Telemachus could notthaw his frozen wits enough to discover what noise had waked him up. Then it came upon him suddenly that huge rhythms were pounding abouthim, sounds of shaken tambourines and castanettes and beaten dish-pansand roaring voices. Someone was singing in shrill tremolo above the dina song of which each verse seemed to end with the phrase, "_y mañanaCarnaval_. "

"To-morrow's Carnival. Wake up, " he cried out to Lyaeus, and pulled onhis trousers. 

Lyaeus sat up and rubbed his eyes. 

"I smell wine, " he said. 

Telemachus, through hunger and stiffness and aching feet and thethought of what his mother Penelope would say about these goings on, ifthey ever came to her ears, felt a tremendous elation flare throughhim. 

"Come on, they're dancing, " he cried dragging Lyaeus out on the gallerythat overhung the end of the court. 

"Don't forget the butterfly net, Tel. "

"What for?"

"To catch your gesture, what do you think?"

Telemachus caught Lyaeus by the shoulders and shook him. As theywrestled they caught glimpses of the courtyard full of couples bobbingup and down in a _jota_. In the doorway stood two guitar players andbeside them a table with pitchers and glasses and a glint of spiltwine. Feeble light came from an occasional little constellation ofolive-oil lamps. When the two of them pitched down stairs together andshot out reeling among the dancers everybody cried out: "_Hola_, " andshouted that the foreigners must sing a song. 

"After dinner, " cried Lyaeus as he straightened his necktie. "Wehaven't eaten for a year and a half!"

The _padrón_, a red thick-necked individual with a week's whitebristle on his face, came up to them holding out hands as big as hams. 

"You are going to Toledo for Carnival? O how lucky the young are, travelling all over the world. " He turned to the company with agesture; "I was like that when I was young. "

They followed him into the kitchen, where they ensconced themselves oneither side of a cave of a fireplace in which burned a fire all toosmall. The hunchbacked woman with a face like tanned leather who wastending the numerous steaming pots that stood about the hearth, noticing that they were shivering, heaped dry twigs on it that crackledand burst into flame and gave out a warm spicy tang. 

"To-morrow's Carnival, " she said. "We mustn't stint ourselves. " Thenshe handed them each a plate of soup full of bread in which poachedeggs floated, and the _padrón_ drew the table near the fire and satdown opposite them, peering with interest into their faces while theyate. 

After a while he began talking. From outside the hand-clapping and thesound of castanettes continued interrupted by intervals of shouting andlaughter and an occasional snatch from the song that ended every versewith "_y mañana Carnaval_. "

"I travelled when I was your age, " he said. "I have been to America . . . Nueva York, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Chicago, San Francisco. . . . Sellingthose little nuts. . . . Yes, peanuts. What a country! How many laws thereare there, how many policemen. When I was young I did not like it, butnow that I am old and own an inn and daughters and all that, _vamos_, Iunderstand. You see in Spain we all do just as we like; then, if we arethe sort that goes to church we repent afterwards and fix it up withGod. In European, civilized, modern countries everybody learns whathe's got to do and what he must not do. . . . That's why they have so manylaws. . . . Here the police are just to help the government plunder andsteal all it wants. . . . But that's not so in America. . . . "

"The difference is, " broke in Telemachus, "as Butler put it, betweenliving under the law and living under grace. I should rather live undergra. . . . " But he thought of the maxims of Penelope and was silent. 

"But after all we know how to sing, " said the _Padrón_. "Will you havecoffee with cognac?. . . And poets, man alive, what poets!"

The _padrón_ stuck out his chest, put one hand in the black sash thatheld up his trousers and recited, emphasizing the rhythm with thecognac bottle:

 'Aquí está Don Juan Tenorio; no hay hombre para él . . . Búsquenle los reñidores, cérquenle los jugadores, quien se précie que le ataje, a ver si hay quien le aventaje en juego, en lid o en amores. '

He finished with a flourish and poured more cognac into the coffeecups. 

"_¡Que bonito!_ How pretty!" cried the old hunchbacked woman who sat onher heels in the fireplace. 

"That's what we do, " said the _padrón_. "We brawl and gamble andseduce women, and we sing and we dance, and then we repent and thepriest fixes it up with God. In America they live according to law. "

Feeling well-toasted by the fire and well-warmed with food and drink, Lyaeus and Telemachus went to the inn door and looked out on the broadmain street of the village where everything was snowy white under thecold stare of the moon. The dancing had stopped in the courtyard. Agroup of men and boys was moving slowly up the street, each one with amusical instrument. There were the two guitars, frying pans, castanettes, cymbals, and a goatskin bottle of wine that kept beingpassed from hand to hand. Each time the bottle made a round a new songstarted. And so they moved slowly up the street in the moonlight. 

"Let's join them, " said Lyaeus. 

"No, I want to get up early so as. . . . "

"To see the gesture by daylight!" cried Lyaeus jeeringly. Then he wenton: "Tel, you live under the law. Under the law there can be nogestures, only machine movements. "

Then he ran off and joined the group of men and boys who were singingand drinking. Telemachus went back to bed. On his way upstairs hecursed the maxims of his mother Penelope. But at any rate to-morrow, inCarnival-time, he would feel the gesture. 

_XI: Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile_

"I spent fifty thousand pesetas in a year at the military school. . . . _J'aime le chic_, " said the young artillery officer of whom I had askedthe way. He was leading me up the steep cobbled hill that led to theirregular main street of Segovia. A moment before we had passed underthe aqueduct that had soared above us arch upon arch into the crimsonsky. He had snapped tightly gloved fingers and said: "And what's thatgood for, I'd like to know. I'd give it all for a puff of gasoline froma Hispano-Suizo. . . . D'you know the Hispano-Suizo? And look at thisrotten town! There's not a street in it I can speed on in a motorcyclewithout running down some fool old woman or a squallingbrat or other. . . . Who's this gentleman you are going to see?"

"He's a poet, " I said. 

"I like poetry too. I write it . . . Light, elegant, about light elegantwomen. " He laughed and twirled the tiny waxed spike that stuck out fromeach side of his moustache. 

He left me at the end of the street I was looking for, and after anelaborate salute walked off saying:

"To think that you should come here from New York to look for anaddress in such a shabby street, and I so want to go to New York. If Iwas a poet I wouldn't live here. "

The name on the street corner was _Calle de los Desemparados_. . . . "Street of Abandoned Children. "

 * * * * *

We sat a long while in the casino, twiddling spoons in coffee-glasseswhile a wax-pink fat man played billiards in front of us, beingponderously beaten by a lean brownish swallow-tail with yellow face andwalrus whiskers that emitted a rasping _Bueno_ after every play. Therewas talk of Paris and possible new volumes of verse, homage to WaltWhitman, Maragall, questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us was asmell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz of the poignant musty ennui of oldtowns left centuries ago high and dry on the beach of history. Thegroup grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not come yet, the Zubiaurrebrothers had abandoned their Basque coast towns, seduced by thebronze-colored people and the saffron hills of the province of Segovia. Sorolla was dying, another had gone mad. At last someone said, "It'sstifling here, let's walk. There is full moon to-night. "

There was no sound in the streets but the irregular clatter of ourfootsteps. The slanting moonlight cut the street into two triangularsections, one enormously black, the other bright, engraved like asilver plate with the lines of doors, roofs, windows, ornaments. Overhead the sky was white and blue like buttermilk. Blackness cutacross our path, then there was dazzling light through an arch beyond. Outside the gate we sat in a ring on square fresh-cut stones in whichyou could still feel a trace of the warmth of the sun. To one side wasthe lime-washed wall of a house, white fire, cut by a wide oaken doorwhere the moon gave a restless glitter to the spiked nails and theknocker, and above the door red geraniums hanging out of a pot, theircolor insanely bright in the silver-white glare. The other side a deepglen, the shimmering tops of poplar trees and the sound of a stream. Inthe dark above the arch of the gate a trembling oil flame showed up thegreen feet of a painted Virgin. Everybody was talking about _ElBuscón_, a story of Quevedo's that takes place mostly in Segovia, awandering story of thieves and escapes by night through the back doorsof brothels, of rope ladders dangling from the windows of great ladies, of secrets overheard in confessionals, and trysts under bridges, andfingers touching significantly in the holy-water fonts of tallcathedrals. A ghostlike wraith of dust blew through the gate. The mannext me shivered. 

"The dead are stronger than the living, " he said. "How little we have;and they. . . . "

In the quaver of his voice was a remembering of long muletrainsjingling through the gate, queens in litters hung with patchworkcurtains from Samarcand, gold brocades splashed with the clay of deeproads, stained with the blood of ambuscades, bales of silks fromValencia, travelling gangs of Moorish artisans, heavy armed Templars ontheir way to the Sepulchre, wandering minstrels, sneakthieves, bawds, rowdy strings of knights and foot-soldiers setting out with wine-skinsat their saddlebows to cross the passes towards the debatable lands ofExtremadura, where there were infidels to kill and cattle to drive offand village girls to rape, all when the gate was as new and crisply cutout of clean stone as the blocks we were sitting on. Down in the valleya donkey brayed long and dismally. 

"They too have their nostalgias, " said someone sentimentally. 

"What they of the old time did not have, " came a deep voice from undera bowler hat, "was the leisure to be sad. The sweetness ofputrefaction, the long remembering of palely colored moods; they hadthe sun, we have the colors of its setting. Who shall say which isworth more?"

The man next to me had got to his feet. "A night like this with a moonlike this, " he said, "we should go to the ancient quarter of thewitches. "

Gravel crunched under our feet down the road that led out of moonlightinto the darkness of the glen--to _San Millán de las brujas_. 

 * * * * *

You cannot read any Spanish poet of to-day without thinking now andthen of Rubén Darío, that prodigious Nicaraguan who collected into hisverse all the tendencies of poetry in France and America and the Orientand poured them in a turgid cataract, full of mud and gold-dust, intothe thought of the new generation in Spain. Overflowing with beauty andbanality, patched out with images and ornaments from Greece and Egyptand France and Japan and his own Central America, symbolist andromantic and Parnassian all at once, Rubén Darío's verse is like thosedoorways of the Spanish Renaissance where French and Moorish andItalian motives jostle in headlong arabesques, where the vulgarestroutine stone-chipping is interlocked with designs and forms of rarebeauty and significance. Here and there among the turgid muddle, out ofthe impact of unassimilated things, comes a spark of real poetry. Andthat spark can be said--as truly as anything of the sort can besaid--to be the motive force of the whole movement of renovation inSpanish poetry. Of course the poets have not been content to beinfluenced by the outside world only through Darío. Baudelaire andVerlaine had a very large direct influence, once the way was opened, and their influence succeeded in curbing the lush impromptu manner ofromantic Spanish verse. In Antonio Machado's work--and he is beginningto be generally considered the central figure--there is a restraint andterseness of phrase rare in any poetry. 

I do not mean to imply that Machado can be called in any real sense apupil of either Darío or Verlaine; rather one would say that in ageneration occupied largely in more or less unsuccessful imitation ofthese poets, Machado's poetry stands out as particularly original andpersonal. In fact, except for the verse of Juan Ramón Jiménez, it wouldbe in America and England rather than in Spain, in Aldington and AmyLowell, that one would find analogous aims and methods. The influenceof the symbolists and the turbulent experimenting of the Nicaraguanbroke down the bombastic romantic style current in Spain, as it wasbroken down everywhere else in the middle nineteenth century. InMachado's work a new method is being built up, that harks back more toearly ballads and the verse of the first moments of the Renaissancethan to anything foreign, but which shows the same enthusiasm for therhythms of ordinary speech and for the simple pictorial expression ofundoctored emotion that we find in the renovators of poetry the worldover. _Campos de Castilla_, his first volume to be widely read, marksan epoch in Spanish poetry. 

Antonio Machado's verse is taken up with places. It is obsessed withthe old Spanish towns where he has lived, with the mellow sadness oftortuous streets and of old houses that have soaked up the lives ofgenerations upon generations of men, crumbling in the flaming silenceof summer noons or in the icy blast off the mountains in winter. Thoughborn in Andalusia, the bitter strength of the Castilian plain, wherehalf-deserted cities stand aloof from the world, shrunken into theirwalls, still dreaming of the ages of faith and conquest, has subjectedhis imagination, and the purity of Castilian speech has dominated hiswriting, until his poems seem as Castilian as Don Quixote. 

 "My childhood: memories of a courtyard in Seville, and of a bright garden where lemons hung ripening. My youth: twenty years in the land of Castile. My history: a few events I do not care to remember. "

So Machado writes of himself. He was born in the eighties, has been ateacher of French in government schools in Soria and Baeza and atpresent in Segovia--all old Spanish cities very mellow and verystately--and has made the migration to Paris customary with Spanishwriters and artists. He says in the _Poema de un Día_:

 Here I am, already a teacher of modern languages, who yesterday was a master of the gai scavoir and the nightingale's apprentice. 

He has published three volumes of verse, _Soledades_ ("Solitudes"), _Campos de Castilla_ ("Fields of Castile"), and _Soledades y Galerías_("Solitudes and Galleries"), and recently a government institution, theResidencia de Estudiantes, has published his complete works up to date. 

The following translations are necessarily inadequate, as the poemsdepend very much on modulations of rhythm and on the expressive fittingtogether of words impossible to render in a foreign language. He usesrhyme comparatively little, often substituting assonance in accordancewith the peculiar traditions of Spanish prosody. I have made no attemptto imitate his form exactly. 

I

 Yes, come away with me--fields of Soria, quiet evenings, violet mountains, aspens of the river, green dreams of the grey earth, bitter melancholy of the crumbling city-- perhaps it is that you have become the background of my life. 

 Men of the high Numantine plain, who keep God like old--Christians, may the sun of Spain fill you with joy and light and abundance!

II

 A frail sound of a tunic trailing across the infertile earth, and the sonorous weeping of the old bells. The dying embers of the horizon smoke. White ancestral ghosts go lighting the stars. 

 --Open the balcony-window. The hour of illusion draws near. . . The afternoon has gone to sleep and the bells dream. 

III

 Figures in the fields against the sky! Two slow oxen plough on a hillside early in autumn, and between the black heads bent down under the weight of the yoke, hangs and sways a basket of reeds, a child's cradle; And behind the yoke stride a man who leans towards the earth and a woman who, into the open furrows, throws the seed. Under a cloud of carmine and flame, in the liquid green gold of the setting, their shadows grow monstrous. 

IV

 Naked is the earth and the soul howls to the wan horizon like a hungry she-wolf. What do you seek, poet, in the sunset? Bitter going, for the path weighs one down, the frozen wind, and the coming night and the bitterness of distance. . . . On the white path the trunks of frustrate trees show black, on the distant mountains there is gold and blood. The sun dies. . . . 

 What do you seek, poet, in the sunset?

V

 Silver hills and grey ploughed lands, violet outcroppings of rock through which the Duero traces its curve like a cross-bow about Soria, dark oak-wood, wild cliffs, bald peaks, and the white roads and the aspens of the river. 

 Afternoons of Soria, mystic and warlike, to-day I am very sad for you, sadness of love, Fields of Soria, where it seems that the rocks dream, come with me! Violet rocky outcroppings, silver hills and grey ploughed lands. 

VI

 We think to create festivals of love out of our love, to burn new incense on untrodden mountains; and to keep the secret of our pale faces, and why in the bacchanals of life we carry empty glasses, while with tinkling echoes and laughing foams the gold must of the grape. . . . 

 A hidden bird among the branches of the solitary park whistles mockery. . . . We feel the shadow of a dream in our wine-glass, and something that is earth in our flesh feels the dampness of the garden like a caress. 

VII

 I have been back to see the golden aspens, aspens of the road along the Duero between San Polo and San Saturio, beyond the old stiff walls of Soria, barbican towards Aragon of the Castilian lands. 

 These poplars of the river, that chime when the wind blows their dry leaves to the sound of the water, have in their bark the names of lovers, initials and dates. Aspens of love where yesterday the branches were full of nightingales, aspens that to-morrow will sing under the scented wind of the springtime, aspens of love by the water that speeds and goes by dreaming, aspens of the bank of the Duero, come away with me. 

VIII

 Cold Soria, clear Soria, key of the outlands, with the warrior castle in ruins beside the Duero, and the stiff old walls, and the blackened houses. 

 Dead city of barons and soldiers and huntsmen, whose portals bear the shields of a hundred hidalgos; city of hungry greyhounds, of lean greyhounds that swarm among the dirty lanes and howl at midnight when the crows caw. 

 Cold Soria! The clock of the Lawcourts has struck one. Soria, city of Castile, so beautiful under the moon. 

IX

AT A FRIEND'S BURIAL

 They put him away in the earth a horrible July afternoon under a sun of fire. 

 A step from the open grave grew roses with rotting petals among geraniums of bitter fragrance, red-flowered. The sky a pale blue. A wind hard and dry. 

 Hanging on the thick ropes, the two gravediggers let the coffin heavily down into the grave. 

 It struck the bottom with a sharp sound, solemnly, in the silence. 

 The sound of a coffin striking the earth is something unutterably solemn. 

 The heavy clods broke into dust over the black coffin. 

 A white mist of dust rose in the air out of the deep grave. 

 And you, without a shadow now, sleep. Long peace to your bones. For all time you sleep a tranquil and a real sleep. 

X

THE IBERIAN GOD

 Like the cross-bowman, the gambler in the song, the Iberian had an arrow for his god when he shattered the grain with hail and ruined the fruits of autumn; and a gloria when he fattened the barley and the oats that were to make bread to-morrow. "God of ruin, I worship because I wait and because I fear. I bend in prayer to the earth a blasphemous heart. 

 "Lord, through whom I snatch my bread with pain, I know your strength, I know my slavery. Lord of the clouds in the east that trample the country-side, of dry autumns and late frosts and of the blasts of heat that scorch the harvests!

 "Lord of the iris in the green meadows where the sheep graze, Lord of the fruit the worms gnaw and of the hut the whirlwind shatters, your breath gives life to the fire in the hearth, your warmth ripens the tawny grain, and your holy hand, St. John's eve, hardens the stone of the green olive. 

 "Lord of riches and poverty, Of fortune and mishap, who gives to the rich luck and idleness, and pain and hope to the poor!

 "Lord, Lord, in the inconstant wheel of the year I have sown my sowing that has an equal chance with the coins of a gambler sown on the gambling-table!

 "Lord, a father to-day, though stained with yesterday's blood, two-faced of love and vengeance, to you, dice cast into the wind, goes my prayer, blasphemy and praise!"

 This man who insults God in his altars, without more care of the frown of fate, also dreamed of paths across the seas and said: "It is God who walks upon the waters. "

 Is it not he who put God above war, beyond fate, beyond the earth, beyond the sea and death?

 Did he not give the greenest bough of the dark-green Iberian oak for God's holy bonfire, and for love flame one with God?

 But to-day . . . What does a day matter? for the new household gods there are plains in forest shade and green boughs in the old oak-woods. 

 Though long the land waits for the curved plough to open the first furrow, there is sowing for God's grain under thistles and burdocks and nettles. 

 What does a day matter? Yesterday waits for to-morrow, to-morrow for infinity; men of Spain, neither is the past dead, nor is to-morrow, nor yesterday, written. 

 Who has seen the face of the Iberian God? I wait for the Iberian man who with strong hands will carve out of Castilian oak The parched God of the grey land. 

_XII: A Catalan Poet_

 _It is time for sailing; the swallow has come chattering and the mellow west wind; the meadows are already in bloom; the sea is silent and the waves the rough winds pummeled. Up anchors and loose the hawsers, sailor, set every stitch of canvas. This I, Priapos the harbor god, command you, man, that you may sail for all manner of ladings. _ (_Leonidas in the Greek Anthology. _)

Catalonia like Greece is a country of mountains and harbors, where thefarmers and herdsmen of the hills can hear in the morning the creak ofoars and the crackling of cordage as the great booms of the wing-shapedsails are hoisted to the tops of the stumpy masts of the fishermen'sboats. Barcelona with its fine harbor nestling under the toweringslopes of Montjuic has been a trading city since most ancient times. Inthe middle ages the fleets of its stocky merchants were the economicscaffolding which underlay the pomp and heraldry of the great seakingdom of the Aragonese. To this day you can find on old buildings thearms of the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in Mallorca andManorca and Ibiza and Sardinia and Sicily and Naples. It follows thatwhen Catalonia begins to reëmerge as a nucleus of nationalconsciousness after nearly four centuries of subjection to Castile, poets speaking Catalan, writing Catalan, shall be poets of themountains and of the sea. 

Yet this time the motor force is not the sailing of white argosiestowards the east. It is textile mills, stable, motionless, drawingabout them muddled populations, raw towns, fattening to new arrogancethe descendants of those stubborn burghers who gave the kings of Aragonand of Castile such vexing moments. (There's a story of one king whowas so chagrined by the tight-pursed contrariness of the Cortes ofBarcelona that he died of a broken heart in full parliament assembled. )This growth of industry during the last century, coupled with thereawakening of the whole Mediterranean, took form politically in theCatalan movement for secession from Spain, and in literature in theresurrection of Catalan thought and Catalan language. 

Naturally the first generation was not interested in the manufacturesthat were the dynamo that generated the ferment of their lives. Theyhad first to state the emotions of the mountains and the sea and ofancient heroic stories that had been bottled up in their race duringcenturies of inexpressiveness. For another generation perhaps thesymbols will be the cluck of oiled cogs, the whirring of looms, thedragon forms of smoke spewed out of tall chimneys, and the substancewill be the painful struggle for freedom, for sunnier, richer life ofthe huddled mobs of the slaves of the machines. For the first menconscious of their status as Catalans the striving was to makepermanent their individual lives in terms of political liberty, of themist-capped mountains and the changing sea. 

Of this first generation was Juan Maragall who died in 1912, five yearsafter the shooting of Ferrer, after a life spent almost entirely inBarcelona writing for newspapers, --as far as one can gather, acompletely peaceful well-married existence, punctuated by a certainamount of political agitation in the cause of the independence ofCatalonia, the life of a placid and recognized literary figure; "_unmaître_" the French would have called him. 

Perhaps six centuries before, in Palma de Mallorca, a young nobleman, apoet, a skilled player on the lute had stood tiptoe for attainmentbefore the high-born and very stately lady he had courted through manymoonlight nights, when her eye had chilled his quivering love suddenlyand she had pulled open her bodice with both hands and shown him herbreasts, one white and firm and the other swollen black and purple withcancer. The horror of the sight of such beauty rotting away before hiseyes had turned all his passion inward and would have made him a sainthad his ideas been more orthodox; as it was the Blessed Ramón Lulllived to write many mystical works in Catalan and Latin, in which hesought the love of God in the love of Earth after the manner of thesufi of Persia. Eventually he attained bloody martyrdom arguing withthe sages in some North African town. Somehow the spirit of thetortured thirteenth-century mystic was born again in the calm Barcelonajournalist, whose life was untroubled by the impact of events as couldonly be a life comprising the last half of the nineteenth century. InMaragall's writings modulated in the lovely homely language of thepeasants and fishermen of Catalonia, there flames again the passionatemetaphor of Lull. 

Here is a rough translation of one of his best known poems:

 At sunset time drinking at the spring's edge I drank down the secrets of mysterious earth. 

 Deep in the runnel I saw the stainless water born out of darkness for the delight of my mouth, and it poured into my throat and with its clear spurting there filled me entirely mellowness of wisdom. 

 When I stood straight and looked, mountains and woods and meadows seemed to me otherwise, everything altered. 

 Above the great sunset there already shone through the glowing carmine contours of the clouds the white sliver of the new moon. 

 It was a world in flower and the soul of it was I. 

 I the fragrant soul of the meadows that expands at flower-time and reaping-time. 

 I the peaceful soul of the herds that tinkle half-hidden by the tall grass. 

 I the soul of the forest that sways in waves like the sea, and has as far horizons. 

 And also I was the soul of the willow tree that gives every spring its shade. 

 I the sheer soul of the cliffs where the mist creeps up and scatters. 

 And the unquiet soul of the stream that shrieks in shining waterfalls. 

 I was the blue soul of the pond that looks with strange eyes on the wanderer. 

 I the soul of the all-moving wind and the humble soul of opening flowers. 

 I was the height of the high peaks. . . 

 The clouds caressed me with great gestures and the wide love of misty spaces clove to me, placid. 

 I felt the delightfulness of springs born in my flanks, gifts of the glaciers; and in the ample quietude of horizons I felt the reposeful sleep of storms. 

 And when the sky opened about me and the sun laughed on my green planes people, far off, stood still all day staring at my sovereign beauty. 

 But I, full of the lust that makes furious the sea and mountains lifted myself up strongly through the sky lifted the diversity of my flanks and entrails. . . 

 At sunset time drinking at the spring's edge I drank down the secrets of mysterious earth. 

The sea and mountains, mist and cattle and yellow broom-flowers, andfishing boats with lateen sails like dark wings against the sunrisetowards Mallorca: delight of the nose and the eyes and the ears in allliving perceptions until the poison of other-worldliness wells upsuddenly in him and he is a Christian and a mystic full of echoes ofold soul-torturing. In Maragall's most expressive work, a sequence ofpoems called _El Comte Arnau_, all this is synthesized. These are fromthe climax. 

 All the voices of the earth acclaim count Arnold because from the dark trial he has come back triumphant. 

 "Son of the earth, son of the earth, count Arnold, now ask, now ask what cannot you do?"

 "Live, live, live forever, I would never die: to be like a wheel revolving; to live with wine and a sword. "

 "Wheels roll, roll, but they count the years. "

 "Then I would be a rock immobile to suns or storms. "

 "Rock lives without life forever impenetrable. "

 "Then the ever-moving sea that opens a path for all things. "

 "The sea is alone, alone, you go accompanied. "

 "Then be the air when it flames in the light of the deathless sun. "

 "But air and sun are loveless, ignorant of eternity. "

 "Then to be man more than man to be earth palpitant. "

 "You shall be wheel and rock, you shall be the mist-veiled sea you shall be the air in flame, you shall be the whirling stars, you shall be man more than man for you have the will for it. You shall run the plains and hills, all the earth that is so wide, mounted on a horse of flame you shall be tireless, terrible as the tramp of the storms All the voices of earth will cry out whirling about you. They will call you spirit in torment call you forever damned. "

 Night. All the beauty of Adalaisa asleep at the feet of naked Christ. Arnold goes pacing a dark path; there is silence among the mountains; in front of him the rustling lisp of a river, a pool. . . . Then it is lost and soundless. Arnold stands under the sheer portal. 

 He goes searching the cells for Adalaisa and sees her sleeping, beautiful, prone at the feet of the naked Christ, without veil without kerchief, without cloak, gestureless, without any defense, there, sleeping. . . . 

 She had a great head of turbulent hair. 

 "How like fine silk your hair, Adalaisa, " thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently. She sleeps, she sleeps and little by little a flush spreads over all her face as if a dream had crept through her gently until she laughs aloud very softly with a tremulous flutter of the lips. 

 "What amorous lips, Adalaisa, " thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently. 

 A great sigh swells through her, sleeping, like a seawave, and fades to stillness. 

 "What sighs swell in your breast, Adalaisa, " thinks Arnold. But he stares at her silently. 

 But when she opens her eyes he, awake, tingling, carries her off in his arms. 

 When they burst out into the open fields it is day. 

But the fear of life gushes suddenly to muddy the dear wellspring ofsensation, and the poet, beaten to his knees, writes:

 And when the terror-haunted moment comes to close these earthly eyes of mine, open for me, Lord, other greater eyes to look upon the immensity of your face. 

But before that moment comes, through the medium of an extraordinarilyterse and unspoiled language, a language that has not lost its earthyfreshness by mauling and softening at the hands of literarygenerations, what a lilting crystal-bright vision of things. It is asif the air of the Mediterranean itself, thin, brilliant, had beenhammered into cadences. The verse is leaping and free, full of echoesand refrains. The images are sudden and unlabored like the images inthe Greek anthology: a hermit released from Nebuchadnezzar's spell getsto his feet "like a bear standing upright"; fishing boats being shovedoff the beach slide into the sea one by one "like village girls joininga dance"; on a rough day the smacks with reefed sails "skip like goatsat the harbor entrance. " There are phrases like "the great asleepnessof the mountains"; "a long sigh like a seawave through her sleep"; "myspeech of her is like a flight of birds that lead your glance intointense blue sky"; "the disquieting unquiet sea. " Perhaps it is thatthe eyes are sharpened by the yearning to stare through the brilliantchanging forms of things into some intenser beyond. Perhaps it takes ahot intoxicating draught of divinity to melt into such white fire thevarious colors of the senses. Perhaps earthly joy is intenser for thebeckoning flames of hell. 

The daily life, too, to which Maragall aspires seems strangely out ofanother age. That came home to me most strongly once, talking to aCatalan after a mountain scramble in the eastern end of Mallorca. Wesat looking at the sea that was violet with sunset, where the sails ofthe homecoming fishing boats were the wan yellow of primroses. Behindus the hills were sharp pyrites blue. From a window in the adobe hut atone side of us came a smell of sizzling olive oil and tomatoes andpeppers and the muffled sound of eggs being beaten. We were footsore, hungry, and we talked about women and love. And after all it wasmarriage that counted, he told me at last, women's bodies and souls andthe love of them were all very well, but it was the ordered life of afamily, children, that counted; the family was the immortal chain onwhich lives were strung; and he recited this quatrain, saying, in thatproud awefilled tone with which Latins speak of creative achievement, "By our greatest poet, Juan Maragall":

 Canta esposa, fila i canta que el patí em faras suau Quan l'esposa canta i fila el casal s'adorm en pau. 

It was hard explaining how all our desires lay towards the completerand completer affirming of the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxoncountries felt that the family was dead as a social unit, that newcohesions were in the making. 

"I want my liberty, " he broke in, "as much as--as Byron did, liberty ofthought and action. " He was silent a moment; then he said simply, "ButI want a wife and children and a family, mine, mine. "

Then the girl who was cooking leaned out of the window to tell us insoft Mallorquin that supper was ready. She had a full brown faceflushed on the cheek-bones and given triangular shape like an El Grecomadonna's face by the bright blue handkerchief knotted under the chin. Her breasts hung out from her body, solid like a Victory's under thesleek grey shawl as she leaned from the window. In her eyes that weresea-grey there was an unimaginable calm. I thought of Penelope sittingbeside her loom in a smoky-raftered hall, grey eyes looking out on asailless sea. And for a moment I understood the Catalan's phrase: thefamily was the chain on which lives were strung, and all of Maragall'slyricizing of wifehood, When the wife sits singing as she spins all the house can sleep in peace. 

From the fishermen's huts down the beach came an intense blue smoke offires; above the soft rustle of the swell among the boats came thechatter of many sleepy voices, like the sound of sparrows in a citypark at dusk. The day dissolved slowly in utter timelessness. And whenthe last fishing boat came out of the dark sea, the tall slanting sailfolding suddenly as the wings of a sea-gull alighting, the red-brownface of the man in the bow was the face of returning Odysseus. It wasnot the continuity of men's lives I felt, but their oneness. On thatbeach, beside that sea, there was no time. 

When we were eating in the whitewashed room by the light of three brassolive oil lamps, I found that my argument had suddenly crumbled. Whatcould I, who had come out of ragged and barbarous outlands, tell of theart of living to a man who had taught me both system and revolt? So amI, to whom the connubial lyrics of Patmore and Ella Wheeler Wilcox havealways seemed inexpressible soiling of possible loveliness, forced tobow before the rich cadences with which Juan Maragall, Catalan, poet ofthe Mediterranean, celebrates the _familia_. 

And in Maragall's work it is always the Mediterranean that one feels, the Mediterranean and the men who sailed on it in black ships withbright pointed sails. Just as in Homer and Euripides and Pindar andTheocritus and in that tantalizing kaleidoscope, the Anthology, beyondthe grammar and the footnotes and the desolation of German texts thereis always the rhythm of sea waves and the smell of well-caulked shipsdrawn up on dazzling beaches, so in Maragall, beyond the gracefulwell-kept literary existence, beyond wife and children and pompousdemonstrations in the cause of abstract freedom, there is the sealashing the rocky shins of the Pyrenees, --actual, dangerous, wet. 

In this day when we Americans are plundering the earth far and near forflowers and seeds and ferments of literature in the hope, perhaps vain, of fallowing our thin soil with manure rich and diverse and promiscuousso that the somewhat sickly plants of our own culture may burst sappyand green through the steel and cement and inhibitions of our lives, weshould not forget that northwest corner of the Mediterranean where theLangue d'Oc is as terse and salty as it was in the days of PierreVidal, whose rhythms of life, intrinsically Mediterranean, are findingnew permanence--poetry richly ordered and lucid. 

To the Catalans of the last fifty years has fallen the heritage of theoar which the cunning sailor Odysseus dedicated to the Sea, theearth-shaker, on his last voyage. And the first of them is Maragall. 

_XIII: Talk by the Road_

On the top step Telemachus found a man sitting with his head in hishands moaning "_¡Ay de mí!_" over and over again. 

"I beg pardon, " he said stiffly, trying to slip by. 

"Did you see the function this evening, sir?" asked the man looking upat Telemachus with tears streaming from his eyes. He had a yellow facewith lean blue chin and jowls shaven close and a little waxed moustachethat had lost all its swagger for the moment as he had the ends of itin his mouth. 

"What function?"

"In the theatre. . . . I am an artist, an actor. " He got to his feet andtried to twirl his ragged moustaches back into shape. Then he stuck outhis chest, straightened his waistcoat so that the large watchchainclinked, and invited Telemachus to have a cup of coffee with him. 

They sat at the black oak table in front of the fire. The actor toldhow there had been only twelve people at his show. How was he to beexpected to make his living if only twelve people came to see him? Andthe night before Carnival, too, when they usually got such a crowd. He'd learned a new song especially for the occasion, too good, tooartistic for these pigs of provincials. 

"Here in Spain the stage is ruined, ruined!" he cried out finally. 

"How ruined?" asked Telemachus. 

"The _Zarzuela_ is dead. The days of the great writers of _zarzuela_have gone never to return. O the music, the lightness, the jollity ofthe _zarzuelas_ of my father's time! My father was a great singer, atenor whose voice was an enchantment. . . . I know the princely life of agreat singer of _zarzuela_. . . . When a small boy I lived it. . . . And nowlook at me!"

Telemachus thought how strangely out of place was the actor's anæmicwasplike figure in this huge kitchen where everything was dark, strong-smelling, massive. Black beams with here and there a trace ofred daub on them held up the ceiling and bristled with square ironspikes from which hung hams and sausages and white strands of garlic. The table at which they sat was an oak slab, black from smoke andgenerations of spillings, firmly straddled on thick trestles. Over thefire hung a copper pot, sooty, with a glitter of grease on it where thesoup had boiled over. When one leaned to put a bundle of sticks on thefire one could see up the chimney an oblong patch of blackness spangledwith stars. On the edge of the hearth was the great hunched figure ofthe _padrón_, half asleep, a silk handkerchief round his head, watchingthe coffee-pot. 

"It was an elegant life, full of voyages, " went on the actor. "SouthAmerica, Naples, Sicily, and all over Spain. There were formal dinners, receptions, ceremonial dress. . . . Ladies of high society came tocongratulate us. . . . I played all the child rôles. . . . When I wasfourteen a duchess fell in love with me. And now, look at me, ragged, dying of hunger--not even able to fill a theatre in this hog of avillage. In Spain they have lost all love of the art. All they want isforeign importations, Viennese musical comedies, smutty farces fromParis. . . . "

"With cognac or rum?" the _padrón_ roared out suddenly in his deepvoice, swinging the coffee pot up out of the fire. 

"Cognac, " said the actor. "What rotten coffee!" He gave little petulantsniffs as he poured sugar into his glass. 

The wail of a baby rose up suddenly out of the dark end of the kitchen. 

The actor took two handfuls of his hair and yanked at them. 

"_Ay_ my nerves!" he shrieked. The baby wailed louder in spasm afterspasm of yelling. The actor jumped to his feet, "¡Dolóres, Dolóres, _ven acá_!"

After he had called several times a girl came into the room paddingsoftly on bare feet and stood before him tottering sleepily in thefirelight. Her heavy lids hung over her eyes. A strand of black haircurled round her full throat and spread raggedly over her breasts. Shehad pulled a blanket over her shoulders but through a rent in hercoarse nightgown the fire threw a patch of red glow curved like a rosepetal about one brown thigh. 

"_¡Qué desvergonza'a!_. . . How shameless!" muttered the _padrón_. 

The actor was scolding her in a shrill endless whine. The girl stoodstill without answering, her teeth clenched to keep them fromchattering. Then she turned without a word and brought the baby fromthe packing box in which he lay at the end of the room, and drawing theblanket about both her and the child crouched on her heels very closeto the flame with her bare feet in the ashes. When the crying hadceased she turned to the actor with a full-lipped smile and said, "There's nothing the matter with him, Paco. He's not even hungry. Youwoke him up, the poor little angel, talking so loud. "

She got to her feet again, and with slow unspeakable dignity walkedback and forth across the end of the room with the child at her breast. Each time she turned she swung the trailing blanket round with a suddentwist of her body from the hips. 

Telemachus watched her furtively, sniffing the hot aroma of coffee andcognac from his glass, and whenever she turned the muscles of his bodydrew into tight knots from joy. 

"_Es buena chica. . . . _ She's a nice kid, from Malaga. I picked her upthere. A little stupid. . . . But these days. . . . " the actor was sayingwith much shrugging of the shoulders. "She dances well, but the publicdoesn't like her. _No tiene cara de parisiana. _ She hasn't the Parisianair. . . . But these days, _vamos_, one can't be too fastidious. Thistaste for French plays, French women, French cuisine, it's ruined theSpanish theatre. "

The fire flared crackling. Telemachus sat sipping his coffee waitingfor the unbearable delight of the swing of the girl's body as sheturned to pace back towards him across the room. 

_XIV: Benavente's Madrid_

All the gravel paths of the Plaza Santa Ana were encumbered with wickerchairs. At one corner seven blind musicians all in a row, with violins, a cello, guitars and a mournful cornet, toodled and wheezed andtwiddled through the "Blue Danube. " At another a crumpled old man, witha monkey dressed in red silk drawers on his shoulder, ground out "_laPaloma_" from a hurdygurdy. In the middle of the green plot a fountainsparkled in the yellow light that streamed horizontally from the cafésfuming with tobacco smoke on two sides of the square, and raggedguttersnipes dipped their legs in the slimy basin round about it, splashing one another, rolling like little colts in the grass. From thecafés and the wicker chairs and tables, clink of glasses and dominoes, patter of voices, scuttle of waiters with laden trays, shouts of menselling shrimps, prawns, fried potatoes, watermelon, nuts in littlecornucopias of red, green, or yellow paper. Light gleamed on thebuff-colored disk of a table in front of me, on the rims of twobeer-mugs, in the eyes of a bearded man with an aquiline nose veryslender at the bridge who leaned towards me talking in a deep evenvoice, telling me in swift lisping Castilian stories of Madrid. Firstof the Madrid of Felipe Cuarto: _corridas_ in the Plaza Mayor, _auto dafé_, pictures by Velasquez on view under the arcade where now there isa doughnut and coffee shop, pompous coaches painted vermilion, cobalt, gilded, stuffed with ladies in vast bulge of damask and brocade, plumedcavaliers, pert ogling pages, lurching and swaying through thefoot-deep stinking mud of the streets; plays of Calderon and Lopepresented in gardens tinkling with jewels and sword-chains where ladiesof the court flirted behind ostrich fans with stiff lean-faced lovers. Then Goya's Madrid: riots in the Puerta del Sol, _majas_ leaning frombalconies, the fair of San Isidro by the river, scuttling of raggedguerrilla bands, brigands and patriots; tramp of the stiffneckedgrenadiers of Napoleon; pompous little men in short-tailed wigs dyingthe _dos de Mayo_ with phrases from Mirabeau on their lips under thebrick arch of the arsenal; frantic carnivals of the Burial of theSardine; naked backs of flagellants dripping blood, lovers hiding underthe hoop skirts of the queen. Then the romantic Madrid of the thirties, Larra, Becquer, Espronceda, Byronic gestures, vigils in graveyards, duels, struttings among the box-alleys of the Retiro, pale young men inwhite stocks shooting themselves in attics along the Calle Mayor. "Andnow, " the voice became suddenly gruff with anger, "look at Madrid. Theyclosed the Café Suizo, they are building a subway, the Castellana looksmore like the Champs Elysées every day. . . . It's only on the stage thatyou get any remnant of the real Madrid. Benavente is the last_madrileño_. _Tiene el sentido de lo castizo. _ He has the sense of the. . . " all the end of the evening went to the discussion of the meaningof the famous word "_castizo_. "

The very existence of such a word in a language argues an acute senseof style, of the manner of doing things. Like all words of real importits meaning is a gamut, a section of a spectrum rather than somethingfixed and irrevocable. The first implication seems to be "according toHoyle, " following tradition: a neatly turned phrase, an essentiallyCastilian cadence, is _castizo_; a piece of pastry or a poem in the oldtradition are _castizo_, or a compliment daintily turned, or a cloak ofthe proper fullness with the proper red velvet-bordered lininggracefully flung about the ears outside of a café. _Lo castizo_ is theessence of the local, of the regional, the last stronghold of Castilianarrogance, refers not to the empty shell of traditional observances butto the very core and gesture of them. Ultimately _lo castizo_ means allthat is salty, savourous of the red and yellow hills and the bareplains and the deep _arroyos_ and the dust-colored towns full ofpalaces and belfries, and the beggars in snuff-colored cloaks and themule-drivers with blankets over their shoulders, and the discursivelean-faced gentlemen grouped about tables at cafés and casinos, and thestout dowagers with mantillas over their gleaming black hair walking tochurch in the morning with missals clasped in fat hands, all that isacutely indigenous, Iberian, in the life of Castile. 

In the flood of industrialism that for the last twenty years hasswelled to obliterate landmarks, to bring all the world to the samelevel of nickel-plated dullness, the theatre in Madrid has been therefuge of _lo castizo_. It has been a theatre of manners and localtypes and customs, of observation and natural history, where a ratherspecialized well-trained audience accustomed to satire as the tone ofdaily conversation was tickled by any portrayal of its quips andcranks. A tradition of character-acting grew up nearer that of theYiddish theatre than of any other stage we know in America. Benaventeand the brothers Quintero have been the playwrights who most typifiedthe school that has been in vogue since the going out of the _dramepassionel_ style of Echegaray. At present Benavente as director of the_Teatro Nacional_ is unquestionably the leading figure. Therefore it isvery fitting that Benavente should be in life and works of all_madrileños_ the most _castizo_. 

Later, as we sat drinking milk in la Granja after a couple of hours ofa shabby third-generation Viennese musical show at the Apollo, myfriend discoursed to me of the manner of life of the _madrileño_ ingeneral and of Don Jacinto Benavente in particular. Round eleven ortwelve one got up, took a cup of thick chocolate, strolled on theCastellana under the chestnut trees or looked in at one's office in thetheatre. At two one lunched. At three or so one sat a while drinkingcoffee or anis in the Gato Negro, where the waiters have the air ofcabinet ministers and listen to every word of the rather languiddiscussions on art and letters that while away the afternoon hours. Then as it got towards five one drifted to a matinee, if there chancedto be a new play opening, or to tea somewhere out in the newFrenchified Barrio de Salamanca. Dinner came along round nine; fromthere one went straight to the theatre to see that all went well withthe evening performance. At one the day culminated in a famous_tertulia_ at the Café de Lisboa, where all the world met and arguedand quarreled and listened to disquisitions and epigrams at tablesstacked with coffee glasses amid spiral reek of cigarette smoke. 

"But when were the plays written?" I asked. 

My friend laughed. "Oh between semicolons, " he said, "and _en route_, and in bed, and while being shaved. Here in Madrid you write a comedybetween biscuits at breakfast. . . . And now that the Metro's open, it's agreat help. I know a young poet who tossed off a five-act tragedy, sex-psychology and all, between the Puerta del Sol and Cuatro Caminos!"

"But Madrid's being spoiled, " he went on sadly, "at least from thepoint of view of _lo castizo_. In the last generation all one saw ofdaylight were sunset and dawn, people used to go out to fight duelswhere the Residencia de Estudiantes is now, and they had real_tertulias_, _tertulias_ where conversation swaggered and parried andlunged, sparing nothing, laughing at everything, for all the world likeour unique Spanish hero, Don Juan Tenorio. 

 'Yo a las cabañas baje, yo a los palacios subí, y los claustros escalé, y en todas partes dejé memorias amargas de mí. '

"Talk ranged from peasant huts to the palaces of Carlist duchesses, andGod knows the crows and the cloisters weren't let off scot free. Andlike good old absurd Tenorio they didn't care if laughter did leavebitter memories, and were willing to wait till their deathbeds toreconcile themselves with heaven and solemnity. But our generation, they all went solemn in their cradles. . . . Except for the theatrepeople, always except for the theatre people! We of the theatres willbe _castizo_ to the death. "

As we left the café, I to go home to bed, my friend to go on to another_tertulia_, he stood for a moment looking back among the tables andglasses. 

"What the Agora was to the Athenians, " he said, and finished thesentence with an expressive wave of the hand. 

It's hard for Anglo-Saxons, ante-social, as suspicious of neighbors asif they still lived in the boggy forests of Finland, city-dwellers fora paltry thirty generations, to understand the publicity, the communalquality of life in the region of the Mediterranean. The first thoughtwhen one gets up is to go out of doors to see what people are talkingof, the last thing before going to bed is to chat with the neighborsabout the events of the day. The home, cloistered off, exclusive, canhardly be said to exist. Instead of the nordic hearth there is thecourtyard about which the women sit while the men are away at themarketplace. In Spain this social life centers in the café and thecasino. The modern theatre is as directly the offshoot of the café asthe old theatre was of the marketplace where people gathered in frontof the church porch to see an interlude or mystery acted by travellingplayers in a wagon. The people who write the plays, the people who actthem and the people who see them spend their spare time smoking aboutmarbletop tables, drinking coffee, discussing. Those too poor to buy adrink stand outside in groups the sunny side of squares. Constant talkabout everything that may happen or had happened or will happen managesto butter the bread of life pretty evenly with passion and thought andsignificance, but one loses the chunks of intensity. There is littlechance for the burst dams that suddenly flood the dry watercourse ofemotion among more inhibited, less civilized people. Generations upongenerations of townsmen have made of life a well-dredged canal, easy-flowing, somewhat shallow. 

It follows that the theatre under such conditions shall be talkative, witty, full of neat swift caricaturing, improvised, unselfconscious; atits worst, glib. Boisterous action often, passionate strain almostnever. In Echegaray there are hecatombs, half the characters habituallygo insane in the last act; tremendous barking but no bite of realintensity. Benavente has recaptured some of Lope de Vega's marvellousquality of adventurous progression. The Quinteros write domesticcomedies full of whim and sparkle and tenderness. But expression alwaysseems too easy; there is never the unbearable tension, the utterself-forgetfulness of the greatest drama. The Spanish theatre plays onthe nerves and intellect rather than on the great harpstrings ofemotion in which all of life is drawn taut. 

At present in Madrid even café life is receding before the exigenciesof business and the hardly excusable mania for imitating English andAmerican manners. Spain is undergoing great changes in its relation tothe rest of Europe, to Latin America, in its own internal structure. Notwithstanding Madrid's wartime growth and prosperity, the city isfast losing ground as the nucleus of the life and thought ofSpanish-speaking people. The _madrileño_, lean, cynical, unscrupulous, nocturnal, explosive with a curious sort of febrile wit is becomingextinct. His theatre is beginning to pander to foreign tastes, to beashamed of itself, to take on respectability and stodginess. Prices ofseats, up to 1918 very low, rise continually; the artisans, apprenticeboys, loafers, clerks, porters, who formed the backbone of theaudiences can no longer afford the theatre and have taken to the moviesinstead. Managers spend money on scenery and costumes as a way ofattracting fashionables. It has become quite proper for women to go tothe theatre. Benavente's plays thus acquire double significance as thesumming up and the chief expression of a movement that has reached itshey-day, from which the sap has already been cut off. It is, indeed, the thing to disparage them for their very finest quality, thevividness with which they express the texture of Madrid, the animatedhumorous mordant conversation about café tables: _lo castizo_. 

The first play of his I ever saw, "_Gente Conocida_, " impressed me, Iremember, at a time when I understood about one word in ten and had tocontent myself with following the general modulation of things, ascarrying on to the stage, the moment the curtain rose, the very people, intonations, phrases, that were stirring in the seats about me. Afterthe first act a broad-bosomed lady in black silk leaned back in theseat beside me sighing comfortably "_Qué castizo es este Benavente_, "and then went into a volley of approving chirpings. The full import ofher enthusiasm did not come to me until much later when I read the playin the comparative light of a surer knowledge of Castilian, and foundthat it was a most vitriolic dissecting of the manner of life of thatvery dowager's own circle, a showing up of the predatory spite of"people of consequence. " Here was this society woman, who in any othercountry would have been indignant, enjoying the annihilation of herkind. On such willingness to play the game of wit, even of abuse, without too much rancor, which is the unction to ease of socialintercourse, is founded all the popularity of Benavente's writing. Somewhere in Hugo's Spanish grammar (God save the mark!) is a proverbto the effect that the wind of Madrid is so subtle that it will kill aman without putting out a candle. The same, at their best, can be saidof Benavente's satiric comedies:

 El viento de Madrid es tan sutil que mata a un hombre y no apaga un candil. 

From the opposite bank of the Manzanares, a slimy shrunken streamusually that flows almost hidden under clothes lines where billow theundergarments of all Madrid, in certain lights you can recapture almostentire the silhouette of the city as Goya has drawn it again and again;clots of peeling stucco houses huddling up a flattened hill towards thedome of San Francisco El Grande, then an undulating skyline withcupolas and baroque belfries jutting among the sudden lights and darksof the clouds. Then perhaps the sun will light up with a spreadingshaft of light the electric-light factory, the sign on a biscuitmanufacturer's warehouse, a row of white blocks of apartments along theedge of town to the north, and instead of odd grimy aboriginal Madrid, it will be a type city in Europe in the industrial era that shines inthe sun beyond the blue shadows and creamy flashes of the clothes onthe lines. So will it be in a few years with modernized Madrid, withthe life of cafés and _paseos_ and theatres. There will be moments whenin American automats, elegant smokeless tearooms, shiny restaurantsbuilt in copy of those of Buenos Aires, someone who has read hisBenavente will be able to catch momentary glimpses of old intonations, of witty parries, of noisy bombastic harangues and feel for onepentecostal moment the full and by that time forgotten import of _locastizo_. 

_XV: Talk by the Road_

The sun next morning was tingling warm. Telemachus strode along with ataste of a milky bowl of coffee and crisp _churros_ in his mouth and afresh wind in his hair; his feet rasped pleasantly on the gravel of theroad. Behind him the town sank into the dun emerald-striped plain, roofs clustering, huddling more and more under the shadow of thebeetling church, and the tower becoming leaner and darker against thesteamy clouds that oozed in billowing tiers over the mountains to thenorth. Crows flapped about the fields where here and there the darkfigures of a man and a pair of mules moved up a long slope. On thetelegraph wires at a bend in the road two magpies sat, the sunlightglinting, when they stirred, on the white patches on their wings. Telemachus felt well-rested and content with himself. 

"After all mother knows best, " he was thinking. "That foolish Lyaeuswill come dragging himself into Toledo a week from now. "

Before noon he came on the same Don Alonso he had seen the day beforein Illescas. Don Alonso was stretched out under an olive tree, a longred sausage in his hand, a loaf of bread and a small leather bottle ofwine on the sward in front of him. Hitched to the tree, at the bark ofwhich he nibbled with long teeth, was the grey horse. 

"_Hola_, my friend, " cried Don Alonso, "still bent on Toledo?"

"How soon can I get there?"

"Soon enough to see the castle of San Servando against the sunset. Wewill go together. You travel as fast as my old nag. But do me the honorof eating something, you must be hungry. " Thereupon Don Alonso handedTelemachus the sausage and a knife to peel and slice it with. 

"How early you must have started. "

They sat together munching bread and sausage to which the sweet peppermashed into it gave a bright red color, and occasionally, head thrownback, let a little wine squirt into their mouths from the bottle. 

Don Alonso waved discursively a bit of sausage held between bread bytips of long grey fingers. 

"You are now, my friend, in the heart of Castile. Look, nothing butlive-oaks along the gulches and wheat-lands rolling up under atremendous sky. Have you ever seen more sky? In Madrid there is not somuch sky, is there? In your country there is not so much sky? Look atthe huge volutes of those clouds. This is a setting for thoughts asmighty in contour as the white cumulus over the Sierra, such as comeinto the minds of men lean, wind-tanned, long-striding. . . . " Don Alonsoput a finger to his high yellow forehead. "There is in Castile apotential beauty, my friend, something humane, tolerant, vivid, robust. . . . I don't say it is in me. My only merit lies in recognizingit, formulating it, for I am no more than a thinker. . . . But the daywill come when in this gruff land we shall have flower and fruit. "

Don Alonso was smiling with thin lips, head thrown back against thetwisted trunk of the olive tree. Then all at once he got to his feet, and after rummaging a moment in the little knapsack that hung over hisshoulder, produced absent-mindedly a handful of small white candies theshape of millstones which he stared at in a puzzled way for someseconds. 

"After all, " he went on, "they make famous sweets in these oldCastilian towns. These are _melindres_. Have one. . . . When people, d'youknow, are kind to children, there are things to be expected. "

"Certainly children are indulgently treated in Spain, " said Telemachus, his mouth full of almond paste. "They actually seem to like children!"

A cart drawn by four mules tandem led by a very minute donkey withthree strings of blue beads round his neck was jingling past along theroad. As the canvas curtains of the cover were closed the only evidenceof the driver was a sleepy song in monotone that trailed with the dustcloud after the cart. While they stood by the roadside watching thejoggle of it away from them down the road, a flushed face was poked outfrom between the curtains and a voice cried "Hello, Tel!"

"It's Lyaeus, " cried Telemachus and ran after the cart bubbling withcuriosity to hear his companion's adventures. 

With a angle of mulebells and a hoarse shout from the driver the cartstopped, and Lyaeus tumbled out. His hair was mussed and there werewisps of hay on his clothes. He immediately stuck his head back inthrough the curtains. By the time Telemachus reached him the cart wastinkling its way down the road again and Lyaeus stood grinning, blinking sleepy eyes in the middle of the road, in one hand a skin ofwine, in the other a canvas bag. 

"What ho!" cried Telemachus. 

"Figs and wine, " said Lyaeus. Then, as Don Alonso came up leading hisgrey horse, he added in an explanatory tone, "I was asleep in thecart. "

"Well?" said Telemachus. 

"O it's such a long story, " said Lyaeus. 

Walking beside them, Don Alonso was reciting into his horse's ear:

 'Sigue la vana sombra, el bien fingido. El hombre está entregado al sueño, de su suerte no cuidando, y con paso callado el cielo vueltas dando las horas del vivir le va hurtando. '

"Whose is that?" said Lyaeus. 

"The revolving sky goes stealing his hours of life. . . . But I don'tknow, " said Don Alonso, "perhaps like you, this Spain of ours makesground sleeping as well as awake. What does a day matter? The driversnores but the good mules jog on down the appointed road. "

Then without another word he jumped on his horse and with a smile and awave of the hand trotted off ahead of them. 

_XVI: A Funeral in Madrid_

 _Doce días son pasados después que el Cid acabára aderézanse las gentes para salir a batalla con Búcar ese rey moro y contra la su canalla. Cuando fuera media noche el cuerpo así coma estaba le ponen sobre Babieca y al caballo lo ataban. _

I

And when the army sailed out of Valencia the Moors of King Bucar fledbefore the dead body of the Cid and ten thousand of them were drownedtrying to scramble into their ships, among them twenty kings, and theChristians got so much booty of gold and silver among the tents thatthe poorest of them became a rich man. Then the army continued, thedead Cid riding each day's journey on his horse, across the drymountains to Sant Pedro de Cardeña in Castile where the king DonAlfonso had come from Toledo, and he seeing the Cid's face still sobeautiful and his beard so long and his eyes so flaming ordered thatinstead of closing the body in a coffin with gold nails they should setit upright in a chair beside the altar, with the sword Tizona in itshand. And there the Cid stayed more than ten years. 

 Mandó que no se enterrase sino que el cuerpo arreado se ponga junto al altar y a Tizona en la su mano; así estuvo mucho tiempo que fueron más de diez años. 

In the pass above people were skiing. On the hard snow of the roadthere were orange-skins. A victoria had just driven by in which sat abored inflated couple much swathed in furs. 

"Where on earth are they going?"

"To the Puerta de Navecerrada, " my friend answered. 

"But they look as if they'd be happier having tea at Molinero's thanpaddling about up there in the snow. "

"They would be, but it's the style . . . Winter sports . . . And allbecause a lithe little brown man who died two years ago liked themountains. Before him no _madrileño_ ever knew the Sierra existed. "

"Who was that?"

"Don Francisco Giner. "

That afternoon when it was already getting dark we were scrambling wet, chilled, our faces lashed by the snow, down through drifts from ashoulder of Siete Picos with the mist all about us and nothing but thetrack of a flock of sheep for a guide. The light from a hut pushed along gleaming orange finger up the mountainside. Once inside we pulledoff our shoes and stockings and toasted our feet at a great fireplaceround which were flushed faces, glint of teeth in laughter, schoolboysand people from the university shouting and declaiming, a smell of teaand wet woolens. Everybody was noisy with the rather hystericalexcitement that warmth brings after exertion in cold mountain air. Cheeks were purple and tingling. A young man with fuzzy yellow hairtold me a story in French about the Emperor of Morocco, and produced atin of potted blackbirds which it came out were from the saidpersonage's private stores. Unending fountains of tea seethed in twosmoke-blackened pots on the hearth. In the back of the hut amongleaping shadows were piles of skis and the door, which occasionallyopened to let in a new wet snowy figure and shut again on skimmingsnow-gusts. Everyone was rocked with enormous jollity. Train time camesuddenly and we ran and stumbled and slid the miles to the stationthrough the dark, down the rocky path. 

In the third-class carriage people sang songs as the train jounced itsway towards the plain and Madrid. The man who sat next to me asked meif I knew it was Don Francisco who had had that hut built for thechildren of the Institución Libre de Inseñanza. Little by little hetold me the history of the Krausistas and Francisco Giner de los Ríosand the revolution of 1873, a story like enough to many others in theannals of the nineteenth century movement for education, but in itsovertones so intimately Spanish and individual that it came as theexplanation of many things I had been wondering about and gave me aninkling of some of the origins of a rather special mentality I hadnoticed in people I knew about Madrid. 

Somewhere in the forties a professor of the Universidad Central, Sanzdel Río, was sent to Germany to study philosophy on a governmentscholarship. Spain was still in the intellectual coma that had followedthe failure of the Cortes of Cadiz and the restoration of FernandoSeptimo. A decade or more before, Larra, the last flame of romanticrevolt, had shot himself for love in Madrid. In Germany, at Heidelberg, Sanz del Río found dying Krause, the first archpriest who stoodinterpreting between Kant and the world. When he returned to Spain herefused to take up his chair at the university saying he must have timeto think out his problems, and retired to a tiny room--a room so darkthat they say that to read he had to sit on a stepladder under thewindow in the town of Illescas, where was another student, Greco's SanIldefonso. There he lived several years in seclusion. When he didreturn to the university it was to refuse to make the profession ofpolitical and religious faith required by a certain prime ministernamed Orovio. He was dismissed and several of his disciples. At thesame time Francisco Giner de los Ríos, then a young man who had justgained an appointment with great difficulty because of his liberalideas, resigned out of solidarity with the rest. In 1868 came theliberal revolution which was the political expression of this wholemovement, and all these professors were reinstated. Until therestoration of the Bourbons in '75 Spain was a hive of modernization, Europeanization. 

Returned to power Orovio lost no time in republishing his decrees of aprofession of faith. Giner, Ascárate, Salmerón and several others werearrested and exiled to distant fortresses when they protested; theirfriends declared themselves in sympathy and lost their jobs, and manyother professors resigned, so that the university was at one blowdenuded of its best men. From this came the idea of founding a freeuniversity which should be supported entirely by private subscription. From that moment the life of Giner de los Ríos was completely entwinedwith the growth of the Institución Libre de Inseñanza, which developedin the course of a few years into a coeducational primary school. Anddirectly or indirectly there is not a single outstanding figure inSpanish life to-day whose development was not largely influenced bythis dark slender baldheaded old man with a white beard whose pictureone finds on people's writing desks. 

 . . . Oh, sí, llevad, amigos, su cuerpo a la montaña a los azules montes del ancho Guadarrama, wrote his pupil, Antonio Machado--and I rather think Machado is thepupil whose name will live the longest--after Don Francisco's death in1915. 

 . . . Yes, carry, friends his body to the hills to the blue peaks of the wide Guadarrama. There are deep gulches of green pines where the wind sings. There is rest for his spirit under a cold live oak in loam full of thyme, where play golden butterflies. . . . There the master one day dreamed new flowerings for Spain. 

These are fragments from an elegy by Juan Ramon Jiménez, anotherpoet-pupil of Don Francisco:

 "Don Francisco. . . . It seemed that he summed up all that is tender and keen in life: flowers, flames, birds, peaks, children. . . . Now, stretched on his bed, like a frozen river that perhaps still flows under the ice, he is the clear path for endless recurrence. . . . He was like a living statue of himself, a statue of earth, of wind, of water, of fire. He had so freed himself from the husk of every day that talking to him we might have thought we were talking to his image. Yes. One would have said he wasn't going to die: that he had already passed, without anybody's knowing it, beyond death; that he was with us forever, like a spirit. 

 * * * * *

 "In the little door of the bedroom one already feels well-being. A trail of the smell of thyme and violets that comes and goes with the breeze from the open window leads like a delicate hand towards where he lies. . . . Peace. All death has done has been to infuse the color of his skin with a deep violet veiling of ashes. 

 "What a suave smell, and how excellent death is here! No rasping essences, none of the exterior of blackness and crêpe. All this is white and uncluttered, like a hut in the fields in Andalusia, like the whitewashed portal of some garden in the south. All just as it was. Only he who was there has gone. 

 * * * * *

 "The day is fading, with a little wind that has a premonition of spring. In the window panes is a confused mirroring of rosy clouds. The blackbird, the blackbird that he must have heard for thirty years, that he'd have liked to have gone on hearing dead, has come to see if he's listening. Peace. The bedroom and the garden strive quietly light against light: the brightness of the bedroom is stronger and glows out into the afternoon. A sparrow flutters up into the sudden stain with which the sun splashes the top of a tree and sits there twittering. In the shadow below the blackbird whistles once more. Now and then one seems to hear the voice that is silenced forever. 

 "How pleasant to be here! It's like sitting beside a spring, reading under a tree, like letting the stream of a lyric river carry one away. . . . And one feels like never moving: like plucking to infinity, as one might tear roses to pieces, these white full hours; like clinging forever to this clear teacher in the eternal twilight of this last lesson of austerity and beauty. 

 * * * * *

 "'Municipal Cemetery' it says on the gate, so that one may know, opposite that other sign 'Catholic Cemetery, ' so that one may also know. 

 "He didn't want to be buried in that cemetery, so opposed to the smiling savourous poetry of his spirit. But it had to be. He'll still hear the blackbirds of the familiar garden. 'After all, ' says Cossio, 'I don't think he'll be sorry to spend a little while with Don Julián. . . . '

 "Careful hands have taken the dampness out of the earth with thyme; on the coffin they have thrown roses, narcissus, violets. There comes, lost, an aroma of last evening, a bit of the bedroom from which they took so much away. . . . 

 "Silence. Faint sunlight. Great piles of cloud full of wind drag frozen shadows across us, and through them flying low, black grackles. In the distance Guadarrama, chaste beyond belief, lifts crystals of cubed white light. Some tiny bird trills for a second in the sown fields nearby that are already vaguely greenish, then lights on the creamy top of a tomb, then flies away. . . . 

 "Neither impatience nor cares; slowness and forgetfulness. . . . Silence. In the silence, the voice of a child walking through the fields, the sound of a sob hidden among the tombstones, the wind, the broad wind of these days. . . . 

 "I've seen occasionally a fire put out with earth. Innumerable little tongues spurted from every side. A pupil of his who was a mason made for this extinguished fire its palace of mud on a piece of earth two friends kept free. He has at the head a euonymus, young and strong, and at the foot, already full of sprouts with coming spring, an acacia. . . . "

Round El Pardo the evergreen oaks, encinas, are scattered sparsely, tight round heads of blue green, over hills that in summer are yellowlike the haunches of lions. From Madrid to El Pardo was one of DonFrancisco's favorite walks, out past the jail, where over the gate iswritten an echo of his teaching: "Abhor the crime but pity thecriminal, " past the palace of Moncloa with its stately abandonedgardens, and out along the Manzanares by a road through the royaldomain where are gamekeepers with shotguns and signs of "Beware themantraps, " then up a low hill from which one sees the Sierra Guadarramapiled up against the sky to the north, greenish snow-peaks above longblue foothills and all the foreground rolling land full of clumps ofencinas, and at last into the little village with its barracks and itsdilapidated convent and its planetrees in front of the mansion CharlesV built. It was under an encina that I sat all one long morning readingup in reviews and textbooks on the theory of law, the life and opinionsof Don Francisco. In the moments when the sun shone the heat made thesticky cistus bushes with the glistening white flowers all about mereek with pungence. Then a cool whisp of wind would bring a chill ofsnow-slopes from the mountains and a passionless indefinite fragranceof distances. At intervals a church bell would toll in a peevishimportunate manner from the boxlike convent on the hill opposite. I wasreading an account of the philosophical concept of monism, cudgellingmy brain with phrases. And his fervent love of nature made the masterevoke occasionally in class this beautiful image of the great poet andphilosopher Schelling: "Man is the eye with which the spirit of naturecontemplates itself"; and then having qualified with a phraseSchelling's expression, he would turn on those who see in naturemanifestation of the rough, the gross, the instinctive, and offer formeditation this saying of Michelet: "Cloth woven by a weaver is just asnatural as that a spider weaves. All is in one Being, all is in theIdea and for the Idea, the latter being understood in the way Platonicsubstantialism has been interpreted. . . . "

In the grass under my book were bright fronds of moss, among which verysmall red ants performed prodigies of mountaineering, while alongtramped tunnels long black ants scuttled darkly, glinting when thelight struck them. The smell of cistus was intense, hot, full of spicesas the narrow streets of an oriental town at night. In the distance themountains piled up in zones olive green, Prussian blue, ultra-marine, white. A cold wind-gust turned the pages of the book. Thought andpassion, reflection and instinct, affections, emotions, impulsescollaborate in the rule of custom, which is revealed not in wordsdeclared and promulgated in view of future conduct, but in the actitself, tacit, taken for granted, or, according to the energeticexpression of the Digest: _rebus et factis_. Over "factis, " sat alittle green and purple fly with the body curved under at the table. Iwondered vaguely if it was a Mayfly. And then all of a sudden it wasclear to me that these books, these dusty philosophical phrases, thesemortuary articles by official personages were dimming the legend in mymind, taking the brilliance out of the indirect but extraordinarilypersonal impact of the man himself. They embalmed the Cid and set himup in the church with his sword in his hand, for all men to see. Whatsort of legend would a technical disquisition by the archbishop on histheory of the angle of machicolations have generated in men's minds?And what can a saint or a soldier or a founder of institutions leavebehind him but a legend? Certainly it is not for the Franciscans thatone remembers Francis of Assisi. 

And the curious thing about the legend of a personality is that it mayreach the highest fervor without being formulated. It is something byitself that stands behind anecdotes, death-notices, elegies. 

In Madrid at the funeral of another of the great figures of nineteenthcentury Spain, Pérez Galdós, I stood on the curb beside a large-mouthedyouth with a flattened toadlike face, who was balancing a greatwhite-metal jar of milk on his shoulder. The plumed hearse and thecarriages full of flowers had just passed. The street in front of uswas a slow stream of people very silent, their feet shuffling, shuffling, feet in patent-leather shoes and spats, feet in square-toedshoes, pointed-toed shoes, _alpargatas_, canvas sandals; people alongthe sides seemed unable to resist the suction of it, joined inunostentatiously to follow if only a few moments the procession of thelegend of Don Benito. The boy with the milk turned to me and said howlucky it was they were burying Galdós, he'd have an excuse for beinglate for the milk. Then suddenly he pulled his cap off and becameenormously excited and began offering cigarettes to everyone roundabout. He scratched his head and said in the voice of a Saul strickenon the road to Damascus: "How many books he must have written, thatgentleman! _¡Cáspita!_. . . It makes a fellow sorry when a gentleman likethat dies, " and shouldering his pail, his blue tunic fluttering in thewind, he joined the procession. 

Like the milk boy I found myself joining the procession of the legendof Giner de los Ríos. That morning under the encina I closed up thevolumes on the theory of law and the bulletins with their death-noticesand got to my feet and looked over the tawny hills of El Bardo andthought of the little lithe baldheaded man with a white beard like thebeard in El Greco's portrait of Covarrubias, who had taught ageneration to love the tremendous contours of their country, to climbmountains and bathe in cold torrents, who was the first, it almostseems, to feel the tragic beauty of Toledo, who in a lifetime ofcourageous unobtrusive work managed to stamp all the men and womenwhose lives remotely touched his with the seal of his personality. Bornin Ronda in the wildest part of Andalusia of a family that came fromVélez-Málaga, a white town near the sea in the rich fringes of theSierra Nevada, he had the mental agility and the sceptical toleranceand the uproarious good nature of the people of that region, thesobriety and sinewiness of a mountaineer. His puritanism became adefinite part of the creed of the hopeful discontented generations thatare gradually, for better or for worse, remoulding Spain. His nostalgiaof the north, of fjords where fir trees hang over black tidal waters, of blonde people cheerfully orderly in rectangular blue-tiled towns, became the gospel of Europeanization, of wholesale destruction of allthat was individual, savage, African in the Spanish tradition. _Rebuset factis. _ And yet none of the things and acts do much to explain thepeculiar radiance of his memory, the jovial tenderness with whichpeople tell one about him. The immanence of the man is such that evenan outsider, one who like the milk boy at the funeral of Galdós meetsthe procession accidentally with another errand in his head, is drawnin almost without knowing it. It's impossible to think of him buried ina box in unconsecrated ground in the Cementerio Civil. In Madrid, inthe little garden of the Institución where he used to teach thechildren, in front of a certain open fire in a certain house at ElPardo where they say he loved to sit and talk, I used to half expect tomeet him, that some friend would take me to see him as they took peopleto see Cid in San Pedro de Cardeña. 

 Cara tiene de hermosura muy hermosa y colorada; los ojos igual abiertos muy apuesta la su barba Non parece que está muerto antes vivo semejaba. 

II

Although Miguel de Unamuno was recently condemned to fifteen years'imprisonment for _lèse majesté_ for some remark made in an articlepublished in a Valencia paper, no attempt has been made either to makehim serve the term or to remove him from the chair of Greek at theUniversity of Salamanca. Which proves something about the efficiency ofthe stand Giner de los Ríos and his friends made fifty years before. Furthermore, at the time of the revolutionary attempt of August, 1917, the removal of Bestiero from his chair caused so many of the faculty toresign and such universal protest that he was reinstated although anactual member of the revolutionary committee and at that time undersentence for life. In 1875 after the fall of the republic it had beenin the face of universal popular reaction that the Krausistas foundedtheir free university. The lump is leavened. 

But Unamuno. A Basque from the country of Loyola, living in Salamancain the highest coldest part of the plateau of old Castile, in manysenses the opposite of Giner de los Ríos, who was austere as a man on along pleasant walk doesn't overeat or overdrink so that the walk may belonger and pleasanter, while Unamuno is austere religiously, mystically. Giner de los Ríos was the champion of life, Unamuno is the champion ofdeath. Here is his creed, one of his creeds, from the preface of the_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_:

 "There is no future: there is never a future. This thing they call the future is one of the greatest lies. To-day is the real future. What will we be to-morrow? There is no to-morrow. What about us to-day, now; that is the only question. 

 "And as for to-day, all these nincompoops are thoroughly satisfied because they exist to-day, mere existence is enough for them. Existence, ordinary naked existence fills their whole soul. They feel nothing beyond existence. 

 "But do they exist? Really exist? I think not, because if they did exist, if they really existed, existence would be suffering for them and they wouldn't content themselves with it. If they really and truly existed in time and space they would suffer not being of eternity and infinity. And this suffering, this passion, what is it but the passion of God in us? God who suffers in us from our temporariness and finitude, that divine suffering will burst all the puny bonds of logic with which they try to tie down their puny memories and their puny hopes, the illusion of their past and the illusion of their future. 

 * * * * *

 "Your Quixotic madness has made you more than once speak to me of Quixotism as the new religion. And I tell you that this new religion you propose to me, if it hatched, would have two singular merits. One that its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote--not Cervantes--probably wasn't a real man of flesh and blood at all, indeed we suspect that he was pure fiction. And the other merit would be that this prophet was a ridiculous prophet, people's butt and laughing stock. 

 "What we need most is the valor to face ridicule. Ridicule is the arm of all the miserable barbers, bachelors, parish priests, canons and dukes who keep hidden the sepulchre of the Knight of Madness, Knight who made all the world laugh but never cracked a joke. He had too great a soul to bring forth jokes. They laughed at his seriousness. 

 "Begin then, friend, to do the Peter the Hermit and call people to join you, to join us, and let us all go win back the sepulchre even if we don't know where it is. The crusade itself will reveal to us the sacred place. 

 * * * * *

 "Start marching! Where are you going? The star will tell you: to the sepulchre! What shall we do on the road while we march? What? Fight! Fight, and how?

 "How? If you find a man lying? Shout in his face: 'lie!' and forward! If you find a man stealing, shout: 'thief!' and forward! If you find a man babbling asininities, to whom the crowd listens open-mouthed, shout at them all: 'idiots!' and forward, always forward!

 * * * * *

 "To the march then! And throw out of the sacred squadron all those who begin to study the step and its length and its rhythm. Above everything, throw out all those who fuss about this business of rhythm. They'll turn the squadron into a quadrille and the march into a dance. Away with them! Let them go off somewhere else to sing the flesh. 

 "Those who try to turn the squadron on the march into a dancing quadrille call themselves and each other poets. But they're not. They're something else. They only go to the sepulchre out of curiosity, to see what it's like, looking for a new sensation, and to amuse themselves along the road. Away with them!

 "It's these that with their indulgence of Bohemians contribute to maintain cowardice and lies and all the weaknesses that flood us. When they preach liberty they only think of one: that of disposing of their neighbor's wife. All is sensuality with them. They even fall in love sensually with ideas, with great ideas. They are incapable of marrying a great and pure idea and breeding a family with it; they only flirt with ideas. They want them as mistresses, sometimes just for the night. Away with them!

 "If a man wants to pluck some flower or other along the path that smiles from the fringe of grass, let him pluck it, but without breaking ranks, without dropping out of the squadron of which the leader must always keep his eyes on the flaming sonorous star. But if he put the little flower in the strap above his cuirass, not to look at it himself, but for others to look at, away with him! Let him go with his flower in his buttonhole and dance somewhere else. 

 "Look, friend, if you want to accomplish your mission and serve your country you must make yourself unpleasant to the sensitive boys who only see the world through the eyes of their sweethearts. Or through something worse. Let your words be strident and rasping in their ears. 

 "The squadron must only stop at night, near a wood or under the lee of a mountain. There they will pitch their tents and the crusaders will wash their feet, and sup off what their women have prepared, then they will beget a son on them and kiss them and go to sleep to begin the march again the following day. And when someone dies they will leave him on the edge of the road with his armor on him, at the mercy of the crows. Let the dead take the trouble to bury the dead. "

Instead of the rationalists and humanists of the North, Unamuno's idolsare the mystics and saints and sensualists of Castile, hard stalwartmen who walked with God, Loyola, Torquemada, Pizarro, Narváez, whogoverned with whips and thumbscrews and drank death down greedily likeheady wine. He is excited by the amorous madness of the mysticism ofSanta Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. His religion is paradoxical, unreasonable, of faith alone, full of furious yearning other-worldliness. His style, it follows perforce, is headlong, gruff, redundant, full oftremendous pounding phrases. There is a vigorous angry insistence abouthis dogmas that makes his essays unforgettable, even if one objects asviolently as I do to his asceticism and death-worship. There is ananarchic fury about his crying in the wilderness that will win many aman from the fleshpots and chain gangs. 

In the apse of the old cathedral of Salamanca is a fresco of the LastJudgment, perhaps by the Castilian painter Gallegos. Over the retabloon a black ground a tremendous figure of the avenging angel brandishesa sword while behind him unrolls the scroll of the _Dies Irae_ andhuddled clusters of plump little naked people fall away into space fromunder his feet. There are moments in "_Del Sentimiento Trágico de laVida_" and in the "_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_" when in therolling earthy Castilian phrases one can feel the brandishing of thesword of that very angel. Not for nothing does Unamuno live in the rustand saffron-colored town of Salamanca in the midst of bare red hillsthat bulge against an enormous flat sky in which the clouds look likepiles of granite, like floating cathedrals, they are so solid, heavy, ominous. A country where barrenness and the sweep of cold wind and thelash of strong wine have made people's minds ingrow into the hereafter, where the clouds have been tramped by the angry feet of the destroyingangel. A Patmos for a new Apocalypse. Unamuno is constantly attackingsturdily those who clamor for the modernization, Europeanization ofSpanish life and Spanish thought: he is the counterpoise to thenorthward-yearning apostles of Giner de los Ríos. 

In an essay in one of the volumes published by the _Residencia deEstudiantes_ he wrote:

 "As can be seen I proceed by what they call arbitrary affirmations, without documentation, without proof, outside of a modern European logic, disdainful of its methods. 

 "Perhaps. I want no other method than that of passion, and when my breast swells with disgust, repugnance, sympathy or disdain, I let the mouth speak the bitterness of the heart, and let the words come as they come. 

 "We Spaniards are, they say, arbitrary charlatans, who fill up with rhetoric the gaps in logic, who subtilize with more or less ingenuity, but uselessly, who lack the sense of coherence, with scholastic souls, casuists and all that. 

 "I've heard similar things said of Augustine, the great African, soul of fire that spilt itself in leaping waves of rhetoric, twistings of the phrase, antithesis, paradoxes and ingenuities. Saint Augustine was a Gongorine and a conceptualist at the same time, which makes me think that Gongorism and conceptualism are the most natural forms of passion and vehemence. 

 "The great African, the great ancient African! Here is an expression--ancient African--that one can oppose to modern European, and that's worth as much at least. African and ancient were Saint Augustine and Tertullian. And why shouldn't we say: 'We must make ourselves ancient African-style' or else 'We must make ourselves African ancient-style. '"

The typical tree of Castile is the encina, a kind of live-oak thatgrows low with dense bluish foliage and a ribbed, knotted and contortedtrunk; it always grows singly and on dry hills. On the roads one meetslean men with knotted hands and brown sun-wizened faces that seembrothers to the encinas of their country. The thought of Unamuno, emphatic, lonely, contorted, hammered into homely violent phrases, oak-tough, oak-twisted, is brother to the men on the roads and to theencinas on the hills of Castile. 

This from the end of "_Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_":

 "And in this critical century, Don Quixote has also contaminated himself with criticism, and he must charge against himself, victim of intellectualism and sentimentalism, who when he is most sincere appears most affected. The poor man wants to rationalize the irrational, and irrationalize the rational. And he falls victim of the inevitable despair of a rationalism century, of which the greatest victims were Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Out of despair he enters into the heroic fury of that Quixote of thought who broke out of the cloister, Giordano Bruno, and makes himself awakener of sleeping souls, '_dormitantium animorum excubitor_, ' as the ex-Dominican says of himself, he who wrote: 'Heroic love is proper to superior natures called insane--_insane_, not because they do not know--_non sanno_--but because they know too much--_soprasanno_--. '

 "But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines, or at least at the foot of his statue on the Campo dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, they have put that it is offered by the century he had divined--'_il secolo da lui divinato_. ' But our Don Quixote, the resurrected, internal Don Quixote, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in the world, because they are not his. And it is better that they should not triumph. If they wanted to make Don Quixote king he would retire alone to the hilltop, fleeing the crowds of king-makers and king-killers, as did Christ when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they wanted to proclaim him king. He left the title of king to be put above the cross. 

 "What is, then, the new mission of Don Quixote in this world? To cry, to cry in the wilderness. For the wilderness hears although men do not hear, and one day will turn into a sonorous wood, and that solitary voice that spreads in the desert like seed will sprout into a gigantic cedar that will sing with a hundred thousand tongues an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and death. "

_XVII: Toledo_

"Lyaeus, you've found it. "

"Her, you mean. "

"No, the essence, the gesture. "

"I carry no butterfly net. "

The sun blazed in a halo of heat about their heads. Both sides of thestraight road olive trees contorted gouty trunks as they walked past. On a bank beside a quietly grazing donkey a man was asleep wrapped in abrown blanket. Occasionally a little grey bird twittered encouraginglyfrom the telegraph wires. When the wind came there was a chill ofwinter and wisps of cloud drifted across the sun and a shiver of silverran along the olive groves. 

"Tel, " cried Lyaeus after a pause, "maybe I have found it. Maybe youare right. You should have been with me last night. "

"What happened last night?" As a wave of bitter envy swept over himTelemachus saw for a moment the face of his mother Penelope, browscontracted with warning, white hand raised in admonition. For afleeting second the memory of his quest brushed through the back of hismind. But Lyaeus was talking. 

"Nothing much happened. There were a few things. . . . O this iswonderful. " He waved a clenched fist about his head. "The finestpeople, Tel! You never saw such people, Tel. They gave me a tambourine. Here it is; wait a minute. " He placed the bag he carried on hisshoulder on top of a milestone and untied its mouth. When he pulled thetambourine out it was full of figs. "Look, pocket these. I taught herto write her name on the back; see, 'Pilar, ' She didn't know how towrite. "

Telemachus involuntarily cleared his throat. 

"It was the finest dive . . . Part house, part cave. We all roared in andthere was the funniest little girl . . . Lot of other people, fat women, but my eyes were in a highly selective state. She was very skinny withenormous black eyes, doe's eyes, timid as a dog's. She had a fat pinkpuppy in her lap. "

"But I meant something in line, movement, eternal, not that. "

"There are very few gestures, " said Lyaeus. 

They walked along in silence. 

"I am tired, " said Lyaeus; "at least let's stop in here. I see a bushover the door. "

"Why stop? We are nearly there. "

"Why go on?"

"We want to get to Toledo, don't we?"

"Why?"

"Because we started for there. "

"No reason at all, " said Lyaeus with a laugh as he went in the door ofthe wineshop. 

When they came out they found Don Alonso waiting for them, holding hishorse by the bridle. 

"The Spartans, " he said with a smile, "never drank wine on the march. "

"How far are we from Toledo?" asked Telemachus. "It was nice of you towait for us. "

"About a league, five kilometers, nothing. . . . I wanted to see yourfaces when you first saw the town. I think you will appreciate it. "

"Let's walk fast, " said Telemachus. "There are some things one doesn'twant to wait for. "

"It will be sunset and the whole town will be on the _paseo_ in frontof the hospital of San Juan Bautista. . . . This is Sunday of Carnival;people will be dressed up in masks and very noisy. It's a day on whichthey play tricks on strangers. "

"Here's the trick they played me at the last town, " said Lyaeusagitating his bag of figs. "Let's eat some. I'm sure the Spartans atefigs on the road. Will Rosinante, --I mean will your horse eat them?" Heput his hand with some figs on it under the horse's mouth. The horsesniffed noisily out of black nostrils dappled with pink and thenreached for the figs. Lyaeus wiped his hand on the seat of his pantsand they proceeded. 

"Toledo is symbolically the soul of Spain, " began Don Alonso after afew moments of silent walking. "By that I mean that through the manySpains you have seen and will see is everywhere an undercurrent offantastic tragedy, Greco on the one hand, Goya on the other, Moráles, Gallegos, a great flame of despair amid dust, rags, ulcers, human liferising in a sudden pæan out of desolate abandoned dun-colored spaces. To me, Toledo expresses the supreme beauty of that tragic farce. . . . Andthe apex, the victory, the deathlessness of it is in El Greco. . . . Howstrange it is that it should be that Cypriote who lived in suchVenetian state in a great house near the abandoned synagogue, scandalizing us austere Spaniards by the sounds of revelry andunabashed music that came from it at meal-times, making pert sayingsunder the nose of humorless visitors like Pacheco, living solitary in acountry where he remained to his death misunderstood and alien andwhere two centuries thought of him along with Don Quixote as amadman, --how strange that it should be he who should express mostflamingly all that was imperturbable in Toledo. . . . I have oftenwondered whether that fiery vitality of spirit that we feel in ElGreco, that we felt in my generation when I was young, that I seeoccasionally in the young men of your time, has become conscious onlybecause it is about to be smothered in the great advancing waves ofEuropean banality. I was thinking the other day that perhaps states oflife only became conscious once their intensity was waning. "

"But most of the intellectuals I met in Madrid, " put in Telemachus, "seemed enormously anxious for subways and mechanical progress, seemedto think that existence could be made perfect by slot-machines. "

"They are anxious to hold stock in the subway and slot-machineenterprises that they may have more money to unSpanish themselves inParis . . . But let us not talk of that. From the next turn in the road, round that little hill, we shall see Toledo. "

Don Alonso jumped on his horse, and Lyaeus and Telemachus doubled thespeed of their stride. 

First above the bulge of reddish saffron striped with dark of a plowedfield they saw a weathercock, then under it the slate cap of a tower. "The Alcázar, " said Don Alonso. The road turned away and olive treeshid the weathercock. At the next bend the towers were four, stronglybuttressing a square building where on the western windows glintedreflections of sunset. As they walked more towers, dust colored, anddomes and the spire of a cathedral, greenish, spiky like the tail of apickerel, jutted to the right of the citadel. The road dipped again, passed some white houses where children sat in the doorways; from theinner rooms came a sound of frying oil and a pungence of cistus-twigsburning. Starting up the next rise that skirted a slope planted withalmond trees they caught sight of a castle, rounded towers, built ofrough grey stone, joined by crenellated walls that appearedoccasionally behind the erratic lacework of angular twigs on which hereand there a cluster of pink flowers had already come into bloom. At thesummit was a wineshop with mules tethered against the walls, and belowthe Tagus and the great bridge, and Toledo. 

Against the grey and ochre-streaked theatre of the Cigarrales werepiled masses of buttressed wall that caught the orange sunset light onmany tall plane surfaces rising into crenellations and square towersand domes and slate-capped spires above a litter of yellowish tileroofs that fell away in terraces from the highest points and slopedoutside the walls towards the river and the piers from which sprang theenormous arch of the bridge. The shadows were blue-green and violet. Apale cobalt haze of supperfires hung over the quarters near the river. As they started down the hill towards the heavy pile of San JuanBautista, that stood under its broad tiled dome outside the nearestgate, a great volley of bell-ringing swung about their ears. A donkeybrayed; there was a sound of shouting from the town. 

"Here we are, gentlemen, I'll look for you to-morrow at the _fonda_, "shouted Don Alonso. He took off his hat and galloped towards the gate, leaving Telemachus and Lyaeus standing by the roadside looking out overthe city. 

 * * * * *

Beyond the zinc bar was an irregular room with Nile-green walls intowhich light still filtered through three little round arches high up onone side. In a corner were some hogsheads of wine, in another smalltables with three-legged stools. From outside came the distant brayingof a brass band and racket of a street full of people, laughter, andthe occasional shivering jangle of a tambourine. Lyaeus had droppedonto a stool and spread his feet out before him on the tiled floor. 

"Never walked so far in my life, " he said, "my toes are pulverized, pulverized!" He leaned over and pulled off his shoes. There were holesin his socks. He pulled them off in turn, and started wiggling his toesmeditatively. His ankles were grimed with dust. 

"Well. . . . " began Telemachus. 

The _padrón_, a lean man with moustaches and a fancy yellow vest whichhe wore unbuttoned over a lavender shirt, brought two glasses of denseblack wine. 

"You have walked a long way?" he asked, looking with interest atLyaeus' feet. 

"From Madrid. "

"_¡Carai!_"

"Not all in one day. "

"You are sailors going to rejoin your ship in Sevilla. " The _padrón_looked from one to another with a knowing expression, twisting hismouth so that one of the points of his moustache slanted towards theceiling and the other towards the floor. 

"Not exactly. . . . "

Another man drew up his chair to their table, first taking off his widecap and saying gravely: "_Con permiso de ustedes. _" His broad, slightlyflabby face was very pale; the eyes under his sparse blonde eyelasheswere large and grey. He put his two hands on their shoulders so as todraw their heads together and said in a whisper:

"You aren't deserters, are you?"

"No. "

"I hoped you were. I might have helped you. I escaped from prison inBarcelona a week ago. I am a syndicalist. "

"Have a drink, " cried Lyaeus. "Another glass. . . . And we can let youhave some money if you need it, too, if you want to get out of thecountry. "

The _padrón_ brought the wine and retired discreetly to a chair besidethe bar from which he beamed at them with almost religious approbation. 

"You are comrades?"

"Of those who break out, " said Lyaeus flushing. "What about theprogress of events? When do you think the pot will boil over?"

"Soon or never, " said the syndicalist. . . . "That is never in ourlifetime. We are being buried under industrialism like the rest ofEurope. Our people, our comrades even, are fast getting the bourgeoismentality. There is danger that we shall lose everything we have foughtfor. . . . You see, if we could only have captured the means of productionwhen the system was young and weak, we could have developed it slowlyfor our benefit, made the machine the slave of man. Every day we waitmakes it more difficult. It is a race as to whether this peninsula willbe captured by communism or capitalism. It is still neither one nor theother, in its soul. " He thumped his clenched fist against his chest. 

"How long were you in prison?"

"Only a month this time, but if they catch me it will be bad. Theywon't catch me. "

He spoke quietly without gestures, occasionally rolling an unlitcigarette between his brown fingers. 

"Hadn't we better go out before it gets quite dark?" said Telemachus. 

"When shall I see you again?" said Lyaeus to the syndicalist. 

"Oh, we'll meet if you stay in Toledo a few days. . . . "

Lyaeus got to his feet and took the man by the arm. 

"Look, let me give you some money; won't you be wanting to go toPortugal?"

The man flushed and shook his head. 

"If our opinions coincided. . . . "

"I agree with all those who break out, " said Lyaeus. 

"That's not the same, my friend. "

They shook hands and Telemachus and Lyaeus went out of the tavern. 

Two carriages hung with gaudily embroidered shawls, full of dominos andpierrots and harlequins who threw handfuls of confetti at people alongthe sidewalks, clattered into town through the dark arches of the gate. Telemachus got some confetti in his mouth. A crowd of little childrendanced about him jeering as he stood spluttering on the curbstone. Lyaeus took him by the arm and drew him along the street after thecarriages, bent double with laughter. This irritated Telemachus whotore his arm away suddenly and made off with long strides up a darkstreet. 

 * * * * *

A half-waned moon shone through the perforations in a round terra-cottachimney into the street's angular greenish shadow. From somewhere camethe seethe of water over a dam. Telemachus was leaning against a dampwall, tired and exultant, looking vaguely at the oval of a woman's facehalf surmised behind the bars of an upper window, when he heard aclatter of unsteady feet on the cobbles and Lyaeus appeared, reeling alittle, his lips moist, his eyebrows raised in an expression of drunkenjollity. 

"Lyaeus, I am very happy, " cried Telemachus stepping forward to meethis friend. "Walking about here in these empty zigzag streets I havesuddenly felt familiar with it all, as if it were a part of me, as if Ihad soaked up some essence out of it. "

"Silly that about essences, gestures, Tel, silly. . . . Awake all youneed. " Lyaeus stood on a little worn stone that kept wheels off thecorner of the house where the street turned and waved his arms. "Awake!_Dormitant animorum excubitor. _. . . That's not right. Latin's no good. Means a fellow who says: 'wake up, you son of a gun. '"

"Oh, you're drunk. It's much more important than that. It's likelearning to swim. For a long time you flounder about, it's unpleasantand gets up your nose and you choke. Then all at once you are swimminglike a duck. That's how I feel about all this. . . . The challenge wasthat woman in Madrid, dancing, dancing. . . . "

"Tel, there are things too good to talk about. . . . Look, I'm like St. Simeon Stylites. " Lyaeus lifted one leg, then the other, waving hisarms like a tight-rope walker. 

"When I left you I walked out over the other bridge, the bridge of St. Martin and climbed. . . . "

"Shut up, I think I hear a girl giggling up in the window there. "

Lyaeus stood up very straight on his column and threw a kiss up intothe darkness. The giggling turned to a shrill laughter; a head cranedout from a window opposite. Lyaeus beckoned with both hands. 

"Never mind about them. . . . Look out, somebody threw something. . . . Oh, it's an orange. . . . I want to tell you how I felt the gesture. I hadclimbed up on one of the hills of the Cigarrales and was looking at thesilhouette of the town so black against the stormy marbled sky. Themoon hadn't risen yet. . . . Let's move away from here. "

"_Ven, flor de mi corazón_, " shouted Lyaeus towards the upper window. 

"A flock of goats was passing on the road below, and from somewherecame the tremendous lilt of. . . . "

"Heads!" cried Lyaeus throwing himself round an angle in the wall. 

Telemachus looked up, his mind full of his mother Penelope's voicesaying reproachfully:

"You might have been murdered in that dark alley. " A girl was leaningfrom the window, shaken with laughter, taking aim with a bucket sheswung with both hands. 

"Stop, " cried Telemachus, "it's the other. . . . "

As he spoke a column of cold water struck his head, knocked his breathout, drenched him. 

"Speaking of gestures. . . . " whispered Lyaeus breathlessly from thedoorway where he was crouching, and the street was filled withuncontrollable shrieking laughter.