The European Caravan/Spain/The New Generation
THE NEW GENERATION
Ramón Pérez de Ayala
Ramón Pérez de Ayala, poet, essayist, journalist and novelist, was born in 1880. He began by writing verse not wholly unlike that of Francis Jammes. His mordant genius has been described by M. Cassou in the Introduction to this section. Ayala has been compared to the French Abel Hermant. With an indubitable native gift for writing, he evidences wide linguistic resources and a seemingly inexbaustible vocabulary. His style is rich and amazingly facile, and is marked by a certain Jesuitical touch of baroque academicism. Ayala is familiar with British culture and with the English humorists, but he remains nothing if not a Spanish humorist; his humor has the distinguishing Spanish air of subdued and jocular pedantry.
Ayala's A.M.D.G., published in 1910, is a masterpiece of black irony, directed against Jesuit education. Nevertheless, there is something of the priest in Ayala,-something of the priest and something of the torero; and this writer, who, on one side, displays certain preoccupations with sexual psychology, and who has enunciated a highly interesting, original and by no means superficial theory of Don-Juanism, excels in the painting of just such mournful celibate types as curates and bull-fighters.
Belarmino y Apolonio, from which the following chapter is taken, is, according to M. Cassou, "assuredly one of the greatest Spanish books since Don Quixote." It is by way of being a Spanish Bouvard et Pecuchet, and M. Cassou inquires as to whether this is not, possibly, the book that Flaubert dreamed of writing. (Flaubert, it is known, was greatly under the spell of Cervantes.) In this book, we get a whiff of that "oily flavor of the kitchen and the sacristy" of which M. Cassou has already spoken. Ayala is at his best in this boarding-house atmosphere, the atmosphere of the casas de huespedes.
Under Ayala's fantasy, there lies a great and devastating pessimism, a caricatural conception of life and the world. His writing is, in a manner, a species of danse macabre, although the author has, also, a gentler, humanistic side.
Ayala has won considerable attention as an essayist. See the collections Las Mascaras and Politica y Toros. His article against the dramatist Benevente aroused particular controversy.
The Tres Novelas poematicas de la vida española includes the Prometeo the Luz de Domingo and the Caida de los Limones.
See Cassou's Panorama de la littérature espagnole contemporaine, pp. 128ff.
DON GUILLÉN AND LA PINTA
(From "BELARMINO Y APOLONIO")
One Tuesday in Holy Week, at luncheon, there appeared at our table a new boarder: a prebendal cleric. Had I met him in the street, had I sat opposite him in the tram or beside him in a railway-station buffet, I should barely have given him an absent-minded glance. But here we were gathered about a casa de huespedes table. The worthy Don Amaranto was right. All the other boarders and myself at once began brazenly staring at this grand clergyman, as if it was a duty we had to perform. But he was quite indifferent to our curiosity. Bull-fighters, priests and comedians are not annoyed by being stared at, accustomed as they are to the limelight, in the ring, on the stage, or in the pulpit.
The "grand clergyman," I remarked above, and no adjective could have been better chosen. He looked like a brand-new, shiny cardboard saint. His glistening merino cassock might have been varnished, and his neckband was a splash of red, almost of crimson. His face, where his mustache and beard had been shaved away, was a pale-blue-to-purple color, and the rest of his countenance was extremely ruddy, while his eyes were dark and deep-set. He was forty at the most; and once one got over one's first impression of being in the presence of a little artificial saint, one discovered in the priest's physiognomy something or other that was distincty personal and suggestive. The ruddiness of his cheeks was pathologic; he must suffer from heart-trouble. But he made a fine appearance; and after all, he was quite young for the ecclesiastical dignity that his costume proclaimed. A malicious person might have deduced that he had attained his rank with the omnipotent aid of petticoats; but on the other hand, there was nothing about him that suggested the "ladies' man,"—nothing, even, to indicate that he was especially popular with the sex. His was not the assurance of the conquering curate, nor the hypocritical humility and sweetness of the little skirtclinging clergyman. If he owed his rise in the world to the women, it probably had been without any solicitation on his part. Such, at least, were my meditations between the soup and the roast.
Doña Emerenciana, an eldering widow who, from lack of better-born gallants, spent the greater part of her life in running after Fidel, our waiter,—Doña Emerenciana was visibly on pins and needles, and she was the first to address the new boarder.
"Don't you find it fearfully warm in Madrid? And here it is, only April! I suppose you come from a cooler province, Don——— May I inquire your name?"
"My name is Pedro, Lope, Francisco, Guillén, Euripides, take your choice," replied the clergyman, in a deep, musical voice and with a frank and winning smile.
We all smiled in turn, except the old lady, who had not yet made up her mind whether this reply was a serious or an ironical one.
"You are very funny!" she exclaimed at length, trusting that it was irony.
"No, Madam," the priest informed her, "I didn't say that to be funny."
"But Euripides, that's no Christian name, is it? If it is, it must come from the province of Palencia, for they do have the oddest names down there."
"No, Madam, it is not a Christian name, but it seems that didn't make any difference to the curate who christened me. And if they canonize me, there'll be a St. Euripides, the first of the name."
"How funny you are! But thank heaven, you have plenty of first names."
"It was a whim of my father's. He was a playwright and a shoemaker, or a shoemaker and a playwright, according to the order of precedence that you prefer. My baptismal names are those of the most famous dramatists of old: Pedro Calderén de la Barca; Lope de Vega; Francisco de Rojas Zorilla———"
"I've heard of that Zorilla; he was the author of Tenorio;[1] I heard of him when I was a girl," broke in Doña Emerenciana.
"Guillén de Castro," continued the priest with a smile, "Euripides———"
As he paused for a second. Dona Emerenciana gave a start:
"Euripides who?"
"Euripides López y Rodriguez," replied the priest, as solemn as an owl.
"He must have been from the lower classes," was Dona Emerenciana's comment. "And now, what are we going to call you?"
"Some call me by one name and some by another. Pick the one you like."
"I prefer Guillén."
"The ladies always do," observed Don Guillén, with a satirical inflection.
"So far as I'm concerned, if you don't mind. I'm going to call you Mr. Euripides; it has more of a republican flavor," put in Don Celedonio de Obeso, an avowed atheist and an aggressive republican, a paltry chap at bottom, as plain as mud. For of course, we had to have one recognized republican at our boardinghouse-table. This Don Celedonio had become the leader of the republican party of Tarazona. He had the gift of gab and a nanny-goat beard.
"As you like," said Don Guillén, on the spur of the moment.
Before the meal was over, Don Guillén had won everyone's confidence and good will,—to such an extent that Don Celedonio had the nerve to ask him, point-blank:
"Do you believe in God?"
"Do you believe in the Republic?" countered Don Guillén, unperturbed.
"Yes, like the good republican that I am."
"And I, as a priest, am a believer."
"No intelligent person believes in God."
"I have heard intelligent persons say: 'No intelligent person believes in the Republic.'"
"But the primitive Christians," and our Don Obeso hastily lowered his voice, "the primitive Christians were republicans."
"Worse than that, they were anarchists. But seeing that the Christians, starting with the idea of God, achieved that of the Republic, so you, starting with the Republic, might very well attain to the idea of God."
"I'm not putting down any money on it," said Don Celedonio; and Don Guillén laughed in friendly fashion at this witticism.
It is a remarkable fact that, during the whole of this conversation, Don Guillén had not exhibited the least acrimoniousness; he had not been the least bit belligerent or contemptuous. Our good-will toward him grew. As we left the dining-room, Don Celedonio whispered to me: "He's a good scout! Those curates are all right!"
After lunch, I learned that Don Guillén was connected with the Cathedral of Castrofuerte, and that he was the Holy Week preacher in the chapel of the Royal Palace. He must surely be a "spell-binder."
Doña Trina's house harbored so many boarders and transient guests that the huge apartment in the calle de Hortaleza, the mother country so to speak, was not big enough to hold them, and Doña Trina had had to send out colonies into the adjoining streets and about the neighborhood. One of these colonies, the one where I had set up my household gods, was in the calle de la Reina. I mention this by way of emphasizing the fact that the colonials enjoyed more freedom, especially at night, than did the residents of the mother country. During the night hours, these streets and side-streets were a rendezvous and a constant market-place for frightful prostitutes and their unprepossessing male attendants. To get to my room, I was forced to make my way through this endless army of occupation; and as I did so, I was subject to a constant fire from the courtezans, and was harassed by verbal and more imperious invitations, for occasionally one of them would slip her arm through my own. To get rid of them, and also for the sake of a little rest, I would sometimes look in at the little cafe where all the girls hung out. I would make myself agreeable to the fiercest of the lot, and would leave them well fed, satisfied and in a much better humor. They aroused my sympathy, and I was always considerate with them. I admit that prostitution is a terrible disgrace and one that stinks to heaven. But is one to blame the ulcer if it finds lodging in a rotten body, where it quite naturally has a chance to spread out? In a society in which everything is prostituted, feminine prostitution is almost praiseworthy, for the reason that it is a warning symptom. Often, after having put them into a better frame of mind, I would stay in the little cafe for a while to talk to these unfortunate creatures. I drew a great deal of spiritual profit from their conversation, for pity such as they inspired is a purge for the soul. I also observed the characters, amazing, most of them, which were to be met with here in this dive. From the very first, my curiosity was aroused by one particular woman. She was a nice, quiet blonde, and her face was not all plastered up and rouged like the others. She was always alone, and always sat without stirring, over in a corner, a glass of coffee in front of her, which she never touched. She looked like a Raphael virgin, a trifle faded. One evening, after I had stood looking at this girl for a long time, the "Piernavieja" or "Old Peg-Leg," so called because she dragged one leg a little,—"Old Peg-Leg," who was the most tattered and aggressive unit in the army of occupation, said to me:
"What are you looking at? That shrimp over there? That's Angustias, la Pinta. She lives with the 'Gallowsbird.' He's a good-for-nothing bum; he makes her stay here till he comes past to pick her up in the morning."
"Ask her to come over and have something," I said to the Piernavieja.
"Hey, there!" cried my limping friend. "Come over here, la Pinta. This gentleman's asking you to have something."
La Pinta blushed and excused herself. It was in vain that the Piernavieja insisted.
"La Pinta," I said, "is that a nickname?"
"Not at all; it's her right name. Her name is Angustias Pinto. What an idea, to keep your family name in a trade like ours! She's just a stick, no good for anything."
Little by little after a number of evenings, I became friends with la Pinta. She was a meek little thing, sad and not at all talkative, or, as the Piernavieja had put it, a stick, no good for anything. One night, she told me that she was a little over thirty; she didn't look it. Another night, she told me where she was born: in the town of Pilates. But that evening—I remember very well—that Tuesday evening of Holy Week, the evening of the day that the ruddy and jovial canon had made his appearance among our "paying-guests," la Pinta had been astonishingly communicative.
"My father was a shoemaker, but he was something more—a bilateral philosopher, as he called himself. I heard those big words so often when I was young that I have never forgotten them. The professors from the university used to come to the shop where we lived. To hear my mother tell it,—she had a very bad temper—my father was the drone of the hive, and those who came to listen to him were simply making a fool of him. But my father was a saint."
Involuntarily, I thought of Don Pedro-Guillén-Euripides, son of a shoemaker and a dramatist. La Pinta went on:
"It was a curate who was my undoing."
"The villain!" I muttered, instinctively.
"No, he was not a villain," la Pinta corrected me, and she turned to me her long-suffering face. "He was not a curate then; he was only a seminary student. He wanted to marry me. We went away together. His father came and got him. My mother refused to take me back. And after that, well, you can see——— But I am sure my sweetheart loves me yet. His father, you know, couldn't stand my family. I wonder what's become of him, Perico———?"
"Was that his name, Perico?"
"Yes, Perico Caramanzana. And how his name suited him. His face was as ripe and rosy and as merry as an apple."
"Is that why they called him Caramanzana (apple-face)?"
"It's his real name. His father's name is Apolonio Caramanzana. You must have heard of him. Ah! he was the best shoemaker in Spain. Even the gentlemen from Bilbao and Barcelona used to come to have their shoes made by him. He also wrote plays."
I had a good deal on my mind as I left the café that evening, I went to bed, but it was a long time before I could sleep. In the room next to mine, I could hear a loud clearing of the throat, followed by a deep sigh. It was Don Guillén. A diabolic idea came to me: "What if, tomorrow, I were to bring la Pinta to Don Guillén's room?" I fell asleep turning this idea over in my mind.
The next day, a fast-day, Don Guillén did not appear at table.
"Where is Señor Caramanzana?" inquired the widow, who had already succeeded in learning the canon's family name.
"He's not eating today," replied Fidel; "his stomach's a little squeamish. Haven't you noticed how flushed he is?"
"It's undoubtedly pyrosis," said Don Celedonio. "All the monks and clergy have pyrosis, from eating too much rich food and from too much alcohol."
"That will be enough from you, you old heretic," scolded Doña Emerenciana, threatening him with her fan.
"By the way, Fidel, I hope you haven't forgotten what I told you. I hope you've told our landlady that all this farce about fast days and other days doesn't mean a thing to me, and that, even on the holy days of Holy Week, I want fish and meat. I mix them or jumble them or whatever you choose to call it."
This from Don Celedonio.
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What a Judas Iscariot! It's a good thing that Don Guillén isn't here; he'd blush to listen to such blasphemy."
But Fidel, the waiter, wore a sly smile.
When I had done eating, I left the mother country and set out for the colonies. Some twenty paces in front of me was Fidel, carrying a large tray covered with a napkin.
"Pst!" And he motioned with his head for me to come up. "Lift up the napkin."
I lifted a corner of it and discovered a plentiful supply of food, including a good healthy slice of roast beef.
"It's Don Guillén's dinner," said the waiter. "He may not mix 'em or jumble 'em or whatever you call it; but one thing's certain, he's not doing without his meat."
At this moment, Don Guillén's door opened, and the dark figure of the priest himself was outlined against a rectangle of grizzled light; he had caught me in the act,—a domestic spy, shameful and ashamed. His tousled hair lighted up like a halo about his head. He wore ted morocco slippers. Those two details struck me like a pair of off-key notes, during that brief moment of surprise and silent suspense: that beaming aureole and the bleeding feet. "Come in," he said; then he added, for my benefit: "Come in. Sir!"
i accepted. I had not yet recovered from the humiliation I felt.
"Sit down," he insisted.
I wanted to make my apologies and go; but I was conscious of a note of entreaty in the canon's voice, as he said to me:
"Won't you give me the honor of your company for a moment, please?"
This request and the tone of voice in which it was uttered made me my normal self once more. I sat down beside a table littered with books, papers, pipes, spectacles and, enthroned amid these intellectual tools and accessories, the photograph of a woman in a silver frame, like a reliquary. I ventured to glance at it, discreetly. It was like one of Raphael's child virgins, those of his Umbrian period.
"Put the tray here, Fidel. You brought some wine? Take it back; I have some that's better."
He turned to me.
"What are you looking at, that frame? It's a sixteenth-century reliquary, a gem."
"No, I was looking at the portrait."
"One of my sisters; she's no more."
"No more?"
"Lost; dropped out of sight."
"Ah, so she's dead," I observed doubtfully, to give him the opening for an explanation.
"It was some years ago." Then, after a pause: "Do have a little glass of cognac."
He brought out a bottle of old cognac and another of mellow wine, taking them from a pig's-skin bag the elegance of which was more befitting a man of the world than a clergyman. He sat down at the table; and the longer I looked at him, the less he seemed to me a priest, and the more he seemed a man of the world. "By the merest accident," he remarked, as he ate leisurely, "you have invaded my personal life. If, a moment ago, when I found you———" "In the act of spying upon you," I broke in; "but it was at the waiter's suggestion, and without knowing what it was all about."
"What difference does it make? What I was going to say was that if, at that moment, I had retired, you would have taken me for an unscrupulous and insincere priest. I couldn't let you go away without a few explanations."
"It is I who should———"
"You? Why? Putting the worst possible construction upon matters, your curiosity got the better of you slightly; while I, in the opinion of the timorous, have been guilty of a grave sin."
"But I am not one of the timorous."
"Nevertheless, I owe you an explanation. Just as, in the State, there are certain artificial crimes, so in the Church there are artificial sins. Artificial crimes and sins are those which, without offending or abating either justice or dogma, the respective pivots of Church and State, are, yet, a contravention of or a disobedience to certain disciplinary regulations which are purely accidental and temporal by nature. Among these temporal regulations is the obligation to fast four days during Holy Week. The idea might very well occur to the present pope or his successor to diminish or even to abolish that obligation. The State is a material community sustained by mutual interests; the Church is a spiritual community sustained by mutual love. And the disciplinary spirit of the Church is quite different from that of the State. In the State, discipline is a matter of the interests involved; for without discipline, the common interest would not be protected. In the Church, discipline is a matter of generous impulses; it is the will to sacrifice. Just as lovers, to make sure of their mutual love, put that love to the test by all sorts of whimsical demands,—for to love is to obey—so the Church imposes upon the faithful certain disciplinary obligations, by way of spurring on the slothful and compelling them to evince their love by putting it into practice. But for those persons, priests or laymen, whose faith is well-grounded and whose minds are wholesome, such disciplinary obligations are of no avail. The essential thing is dogma. The State readily grants the right of free thought,—the mind is never guilty—but do not try to carry that freedom over into action, for discipline would thereby be impaired. The Church is tolerant in the matter of actions and intransigent in the matter of ideas; it is only in thought that we sin. All sins, however monstrous they may be, are given absolution in the confessional; but the slightest doubt or lack of faith on the part of the sinner, and we are forbidden to absolve him. All that I have just said to you is mere common sense, and so, must be kept a secret from all those, priests or laymen, who are not endowed with common sense. Do you understand?
"I understand, I understand," I said approvingly. The truth is, I had understood very well all that he had said; that was not so hard to do. But I did not understand him. What sort of man was this sitting in front of me, philosophizing as he ate, masticating and reasoning so nonchalantly, and with such an air of worldly serenity, dressed like a worldling and without any obvious sign of his ecclesiastical state, and who, even as he spoke, would occasionally glance at the portrait of a woman whom he himself had pushed down into the nameless abyss of prostitution? What manner of man was he? A hedonist? An unbeliever? A hypocrite and a sophist, deceiving himself and others? A disillusioned being? A tormented soul? The explanation he had just given me interested me far less than all this. What difference did it make to me whether he fasted or not?
What happened now was like one of those cases of immediate thought-transference which sometimes occur between two persons who are extremely intimate.
"But that," he said, "is the least of your concerns, whether I fast or not. The important thing is that, by the merest accident, you have been led to invade my private life, my life as a man. For all of us, monks, curates and ecclesiastical big-wigs, we all of us, under our merino and our furbelows, are men in disguise. I can say with the pagan poet: Homo sum.
I saw him again, in imagination, with the beaming aureole and the flaming-red feet.
"You have surprised me without my ministerial trappings. When you came upon me, I was no longer God's minister, but one of God's creatures, wretched and imperfect, like all His creatures. In a few hours, I shall be speaking before the King, or rather, over the King; and it will be something more than a few pulpit steps that lift me above the crowned head of the Lord's anointed; the distance will be an infinite one, for the reason that I shall stand for that incorruptible and eternal consciousness which soars over thrones, over sceptres and over empires, at an inaccessible height. But here, in this mean little room, seated opposite you, I am no longer the voice of conscience; I am but a miserable concave object filled with darkness, where the voice of conscience echoes vainly."
This was becoming serious. Not knowing what to say, I sat there with my head dropped, and fixed my gaze upon a certain point, which chanced to be the portrait in the reliquary.
"You like that frame?" inquired Don Guillén.
"I like the portrait. I know that woman," I asserted bluntly.
Don Guillén was not taken aback.
"You have made a mistake," he said. "It is undoubtedly another very similar face that you have in mind. You could not know that woman. I have already told you that she is my sister, and that she is no more."
He stressed the words sister and no more.
Following his dinner, Don Guillén took a small glass of cognac, and speeded up the conversation, which took a humorous and a lively turn. He was a man as witty as he was intelligent.
At the moment of leaving, he said to me:
"I shan't be eating at the table these days. What do you say if we dine together, here in my room? How Doña Emerenciana would envy you!"
In the course of these surreptitious dinners, and during the leisurely moments after dinner, my friend, Don Guillén, told me his story by snatches, the story of Angustias Pinto and that of their fathers, Belarmino and Apolonio. And then, later, I made certain discoveries of my own which were so important as to cause the tale of Caramanzana and la Pinta to take a secondary place in my mind.
(Translated by S. P.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset is professor of metaphysics in the University of Madrid and editor of the important Revista de Occidente. He was born in 1883. As a philosopher, he is possessed of a facile and subtle intelligence. An artist by temperament and a resourceful writer, he has no fear of the frivolous, but even seeks it out. In dealing with a question or a problem, he is inclined to situate it in the Nietzschean light of the present, of actuality. He takes the position of spectator, as is indicated by the title, El Espectador, under which he has collected five or six volumes of his essays. The universality and actuality of his interests came, following the Generation of '98, as something new in Spain, and led to a number of new organs being founded. The Revista de Occidente has been noted for its popularization of the latest German philosophy in Spain: Simmel, Keyserling, Spengler, Max Scheier. All this has had a very direct and powerful effect upon the formation of Spanish youth of the day. Ortega, on the whole, is inclined to leave politics alone, but he has had his say on the mal espagnol: Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914; Espana invertenrada. He believes that Spain's normal state is a permanent decadence. His influence had a good deal to do with the abolition of the National Problem.
Ortega has undergone a number of influences; Valéry's rationalistic nihilism; Cocteau's aesthetic lucidity; Cubistic neo-classicism. He is responsible for the doctrine of the "Dehumanization of Art" which has determined the attitude of the young Vanguardia. (La Deshumanización del Arte.)
Ortega's view of the act of knowing is enlightening in connection with the following paper. "Knowing," says M. Cassou, "impresses him as being merely a mode of dominating the object by setting it up, capriciously, where it may be seen from various points of view." Ortega thus becomes the inventor of a relativistic criticism.
The editor of the Revista de Occidente is the type of intellectual European, interested in the larger exchange of ideas; he is an apostle of international civility. But M. Cassou believes that, if one looked closely enough, one might be able to find in Ortega a certain aspect peninsular independence.
It was by the following paper that Señor Ortega y Gasset became widely known to the French literary world. This essay was published in the Hommage à Marcel Proust, 1927.
See Cassou: Panorama de la littérature espagnole contemporaine, pp. 134ff.
TIME, DISTANCE AND FORM IN PROUST
Merely a Contribution to Proustian Studies
This is an occasion when death, in reaping a life, has cut off our gratifications. Many people, in many lands, had built their budget of future pleasures upon the forthcoming volumes of Proust. That the public should thus wait for an author's next work is, undoubtedly, an unusual phenomenon and one that we have not witnessed for a long time. There are, it is true, highly estimable writers to whom we are glad to open the door, when they come knocking at our libraries. But if we receive them with propriety and even with respect, this is not to say that they are welcome visitors. To these gentlemen, writing means assuming a certain attitude. Inspired by a virtuous consistency, they persist in going through, for our benefit, their limited repertory of stereotyped "tableaux vivants." And the inevitable consequence is that, after a few performances, we no longer feel an urgent need to see the show again.
But there is another type of writer. Those who have had the good luck or the genius to discover a vein of "things." Their position is very like that of the scientist who has made a discovery. With an overwhelming simplicity and obviousness, they have become conscious of the fact that their feet were gliding along a new area of aesthetic possibilities. If, to designate the first type of writer, we commonly employ the vague and mystic word, "creators," we must, to designate the second type, employ the word, "inventors," in the most Latin sense of the term. They are, as a matter of fact, discoverers who have found a new fauna concealed in inviolate landscapes, or who at least have come upon a new manner of seeing, a simple Optical law, the formula for an unaccustomed index of refraction. Their position is, accordingly, a good deal surer one, for the reason that their work, while always self-identical, is at the same time a promise of new things and virgin spectacles; and it is not likely that we should be lacking, under such circumstances, in a desire to see the spectacle. When Plato was looking for a substantial body corporate under which to enroll the philosophers, he was able to find no better a classification for them than that of philotheamones, those who like to look. It no doubt occurred to him that man's most enduring virtue is a certain visual enthusiasm.
Marcel Proust is one of these "inventors." Amid a contemporary production that is so freakish and unnecessitated, his work, on the contrary, impresses us as something that had to be. Without it, there would be a big gap in the literary evolution of the nineteenth century, an absence of clearly defined contours. It may even be added, by way of underscoring this trait of necessity, that Proust's work was done a little too late; we have but to analyze it to discover a slight anachronism.
Proust's "inventions" are of the first order, inasmuch as they bear a relation to the simplest components of the literary object. We meet here with nothing less than a new manner of dealing with time and of installing one's self in space.
If, by way of conveying to one who had not read him an idea of what Proust is like, we were to begin by enumerating his subjects—sojourn in a homely village, Swann's love, sentimental disportings of a young lad and a lass against a rustic background, in the Champs-Elysées, a summer on the Normandy coast, in a hôtel de luxe, looking out over a restless sea, over which slide the forms of Nereids, the faces of jeunes filles en fleur, etc.—we would find at once that such an enumeration gets us nowhere, and that these subjects, with which novelists have dealt time and time again, are insufficient when it comes to defining what it is that Proust gives us. Some years ago, there was a poor hunchback who was in the habit of going every day to the St. Isidor Library. He was so short that it was inconvenient for him to read at the desk, and so, he would invariably come up to the librarian on duty and ask for a dictionary. "Which one?" the attendant would graciously inquire, "Latin, French, English?" And the little hunchback would reply; "Oh, that doesn't make any difference; it's to sit on."
One would be committing the same mistake as the librarian, if one were to undertake to place Claude Monet by stating that he had painted Notre Dame and the gare Saint-Lazare, or Degas by remarking that he had portrayed laundresses, danseuses and jockeys. The truth is, in the case of these two painters, the subject is but a pretext; they have painted these things as they might have painted others that are altogether different. The important thing for them, the effective motive of their canvases, is aerial perspective, that contexture of chromatic vibrations with which objects, whatever they may be, are surrounded, and in which they live their own splendid existence.
This is somewhat the case with Proust. The subjects of the novel, which come and go over the surface of his work, possess for him but a contiguous and secondary interest. They are as buoys drifting upon the abysmal stream of memory. Up to the present time, the writer had handled his memories as materials with which to reconstruct the past. But the data of memory are insufficient, and of the former reality retain but an excerpt that is quite arbitrary. The traditional novelist, therefore, rounds out his memories with observation of the present; he adds to them hypotheses and conventional ideas, thus mingling with the authentic stuff of memory other and fraudulent elements. This method has a meaning, when applied, as it commonly is, to the restoration of past things, that is to say, to the simulation for those things of a new present and actuality. But Proust's design is the opposite of this. He does not employ his memories as material for the reconstruction of old realities; on the contrary, what he desires literally to rebuild is his memories themselves, and for this he makes use of all sorts of means—observation of the present, analysis of reflection, psychological explanations. It is not, then, things that are remembered, but the memory of things itself that is Proust's general theme. Here, for the first time, memories are no longer treated as the medium with which one describes a thing; they have become, for the present, the thing described itself. It is for this reason that the author, as a rule, does not add to memory those other aspects of reality which the memory has not retained; he leaves his memory intact, as it is, objectively incomplete, mutilated it may be; and moving those wretched stumps that are left it in a spectral detachment. There is one very suggestive page where Proust is speaking of trees upon a knoll, behind which there was something very important, but a something which time had swept away, abolished from the memory. The author struggles in vain to retrieve that which eludes him, by way of giving us in its integrity this fragment of decimated landscape, those three trees, the solitary survivors of a mental catastrophe, of a stormy oblivion.
The subjects of the novel are, thus, with Proust, mere pretexts, a species of spiracula, airholes, doors to the hive, from which the buzzing swarms of reminiscence fly away. It is not for nothing that Proust has given to his work the general title of: A la recherche du temps perdu. He thereby scrupulously renounces any intention of imposing upon the past the anatomy of the present; he rigorously abstains from all intervention, being guided as he is by the firm resolve to avoid all construction. From the depths of the soul there surges upward and arises a memory, even as, at night, a constellation stands out, movingly, against the horizon-line. Proust represses all desire for restoration, and limits himself to describing what he sees emerging from his memory. In place of restoring le temps perdu, he takes a pleasure in building up the ruin. It might be said that, with him, the genre mémoires achieves the dignity of a pure literary method.
So much for the time-relation. But still more amazing and still more dumfounding is his inventiveness in the order of space.
The number of pages have been counted which Proust has written to tell us that his grandmother was taking her temperature. And indeed, it is impossible to speak of Proust without observing how prolix and minute he is, his tiny details. But prolixness and minuteness here, far from being defects, become two powerful sources of inspiration, two new muses to be added to the community of nine. Proust has need of being prolix and minute, for the very simple reason that he comes a good deal closer up to objects than is usual. He is the discoverer of a new distance between us and things. This simple reformation has had results—as I have already said—so dumfounding that nearly the whole of the preceding literary output takes on the appearance of a bird's-eye-view literature, grossly panoramic if one compares it to this deliciously myopic talent.
Our vital conventions impose upon each object a certain distance, which impresses us as affording the best possible view of that object. When we wish to have a perfect view of a stone, we bring it up to our eyes until we can see the porosity. But if we wish to contemplate a cathedral, we must give up all idea of inspecting the pores in its stones, and must fall back in order to enlarge the bounds of the field of vision. The organic utilitarianism that governs life is charged with regulating the norms of these varying distances. But the poets, perhaps, have been guilty of an error in assuming that this system of distances, excellent for the ordinary purposes of life, is likewise good for art. Marcel Proust, tired, possibly, of always seeing a hand drawn as if it were a monument, brings it up close to his eyes and, with the horizon in behind, is surprised to behold the appearance in the foreground of a suggestive landscape, with porous valleys following Lilliputian forests of hair. This, naturally, is but a way of putting the thing; for what interests Proust is not the hands, nor, in general, the things pertaining to the body, but rather the inner fauna and flora. He rectifies the distance between us and human feelings, and breaks with that tradition which would describe them as monuments.
It would not, I think, be a wholly uninteresting proceeding to go further into this question, and to endeavor to establish how it is this radical transformation of the literary perspective takes place in Proust.
When a primitive artist depicts a vase or a tree, he begins by supposing that everything really possesses a profile, that is, an indubitable contour, an external form which, like a well defined frontier, separates it, isolates it from all the rest. To fix exactly, carefully, this profile of objects, is the primitive's most keenly sensed design. The impressionist, on the other hand, would remark that this profile is illusory and is something that we do not find in actual vision. If one relies upon what one sees of a tree, in the strictest sense of the word, one will discover that its contour is not clean-cut, that its silhouette is diffuse and imprecise, and that it is distinguished from its environment not by its non-existent profile, but by the massing of interior color-tones. This is why the impressionist does not draw the object; he achieves it by mixing little dabs of color, each of which is formless in itself, but which, all together, through their combination, are capable of engendering for the half-shut eyes the vibrant presence of the object. The impressionist paints a vase or a tree, without anything in his canvas that possesses the outlines of a tree or a vase. Impressionism, then, as a style of painting, consists in denying the external form of things in order to reproduce the internal form, the interior chromatic mass.
European sensitivity was under the sway of this sort of art at the end of the last century. And it is curious to observe how this art harmonizes with the philosophy and the psychology of that date. The philosophers of 1890 maintained that reality is made up simply of sensorial and emotive states. Whereas the naive individual, as well as the painting primitive, interprets what is called the world as something immovable, located outside of us and endowed with a magnificent and immutable architecture, the impressionist philosopher believes that the universe is the simple projection of our sensations and our affections, a flux of odors, tastes, lights, sufferings and desires, an incessant procession of restless interior reflections. Similarly, primitive philosophy supposes that our personality consists in an invariable kernel, a sort of spiritual statue that accepts environmental changes with a gesture of permanency. It is the philosophy of Plutarch's man, whom we see plunged into the ocean of enduring life, like the crag, the surge, or the statue of inclemency. But the impressionist psychologist denies what is commonly known as character, which is by way of being the individual's sculptural profile; he beholds in the individual a perpetual mutation, a procession of diffused states, an ever-differing conjunction of emotions, ideas, griefs and hopes.
These considerations serve to date Proust's inner tendencies. The monograph upon one of Swann's amours is an example of psychologic pointillisme. For the medieval author of Tristant and Iseult, love is a sentiment possessed of a clean-cut profile; for him, a primitive in the psychologic novel, love is love and only love. Proust, on the contrary, describes an amour of Swann's that is absolutely lacking in the outlines of love. There is everything in it: points of glowing sensuality; violet pigments of contempt; the browns of habit; the grays of vital lassitude. One thing alone is lacking: love. Love is here a resultant, as in a tapestry the figure is a result of the intersection of the threads, no one of which has the shape of the figure. Without Proust, we should not have had a literature that asks to be read as one looks at Monet's pictures.
And this is why it is, when one goes to compare him with Stendhal, it is good to take certain precautions. In many ways, the two are antagonistic. Stendhal, above all, is an imaginative: he imagines plots, situations and characters. He never copies: everything with him results in fantasy, a nervous, concentrated fantasy. His beings are, at the same time, "pensées" which might be the line of a madonna in Raphael's pictures. Stendhal believes firmly in the reality of his characters, and consequently endeavors to draw their profiles without any ambiguity. The characters in Proust, on the other hand, are lacking in outline; they are, rather, varying atmospheric condensations, spiritual images which are constantly being transformed by breeze and light. Unquestionably, Proust is in the Stendhal tradition, "investigator of the human heart." But where for Stendhal the human heart is a solid, with plastic but rigid lines, for Proust it is a diffuse and gaseous volume, varying from one moment to another with the meteorologic pressure. Stendhal's drawings and Proust's paintings are separated by a distance analogous to that which separates Ingres from Renoir. Ingres has given us, without equivocation, beautiful women with whom we could fall in love. But Renoir, no; his process excludes that. The living plasm of luminous points which in Renoir is a woman gives us, possibly to a supreme degree, the sensation of the fleshly pulp; but a woman, to be beautiful, has need of imposing upon the expansion of her flesh the correcting limits of a profile. In the same manner, Proust's literary and psychologic method prevents his modeling attractive feminine figures. The Duchess of Guermantes, notwithstanding the predilection that is shown her, impresses us as being ugly and impertinent, and that is all there is to it; where, if we were to live over again the torrid years of our youth, it is certain that we should fall in love with Sanseverina, woman with a face so calm but with a heart so quivering.
In short, Proust brings to literature what might be termed a general atmospheric intention. Landscape and human beings, the external world and the world within, all with him become volatilized in a diffuse and airy fluttering. One might say that Proust's universe is made to be apprehended under the form of respiration, for everything in it is atmosphere. In these volumes, no one does anything, nothing ever happens; what we have is a passive procession of static situations. And it could not be otherwise, since in order to do something, there would first have to be something fixed and determined. The action of the animal develops always as a line that sets out from its will, which breaks in stumbling upon obstacles, to be unceasingly renewed, revealing thus the fact that it is subject to unlooked-for resistances. This broken line, which represents the line of action of the animal, man or beast, is for that reason charged with a latent dynamism which leads to the evolvement of dramatic shocks. But the existence of Proust's characters is of a vegetable nature. For the plant, to live is to be and not to act. Immersed in the atmosphere, the plant is incapable of opposing it; its passivity eliminates all drama. In a similar fashion, Proust's characters, like vegetables, display an inertness amid their atmospheric destiny; and, botanically submissive, their lives appear to have been reduced to a chlorophyllic function, a chemical dialogue that is always the same and, in a manner, an anonymous one, the plant docilely receiving the mandates of the atmospheric environment.
In Proust's books, the true provokers of vital variations are, rather than the characters, the winds, the psychic and moral climes that successively surround those characters. And the biography of each is dominated by certain spiritual trade-winds which, alternately blowing, paralyze the sensitivity. All depends upon which side the squall comes from; and just as there are northwinds and southwinds, so do Proust's character vary, according as the breath of life comes from the Meseglise or the Guermantes side. And one is not to be astonished at the insistence with which this writer speaks of "sides" (côtés), seeing that the universe for him is a meterological reality, the indubitable essential being the quarter of the wind.
An ingenious abandonment of the external and conventional form of things thus obliges Proust to define things by means of their internal forms, through the structure of their interior tissues. But this structure is of microscopic character, and this accounts for Proust's abnormal approach and for his poetic histology. His work reminds one of German anatomical treatises, such as; Über feinere Bau der Retina des Ranninchens, "on the microscopic structure of the rabbit's retina."
The microscope, whence the minutiae. Minutiae, whence the prolixity. The atmospheric interpretation of human life, and as a consequence, the minuteness with which human life is described, give Proust's books an obvious flaw that is not to be remedied. I refer to a special fatigue which the reading of these volumes induces, even in the most devoted of the author's admirers. If we were dealing with the ordinary weariness which stupid books produce, there would be nothing more to be said. But the fatigue which the Proustian reader encounters has its own very special characteristics, and has nothing whatsoever to do with boredom. It is very rarely that one of his pages is lacking in the necessary intensity. Nevertheless, we are ready, at any moment, to lay the book down. Moreover, throughout the work, we are conscious of being constantly brought up, as if we were not to be permitted to go our own gait, as if the author's rhythm were less agile than our own and were perpetually putting a ritardando on our haste.
This is the inconvenience and the advantage of impressionism; in Proust's volumes, as I have said, nothing happens, there is no theatricality, no action. It is a series of views extremely rich in content, but static. But we mortals are by nature dynamic, and only movement interests us.
When Proust tells us that the bell of the garden-gate at Combray jingles, and that, in the darkness, the voice of Swann, who has just arrived, is to be heard, our attention fastens upon this fact and, recoiling upon itself, prepares to leap forward to another fact which must be going to follow, and for which this is the preparation. We do not inertly ensconce ourselves in the first fact; but once we have been summarily informed of it, we expect to be propelled onward toward another to come; for the reason that, in life, as we believe, each fact is the herald of and the transition to another, and so on, until a trajectory has been formed, in the same way that each mathematical point is followed by another point to form a line. But Proust puts this dynamic impulse of ours to the torture, by obliging us, relentlessly, to stay in the first fact, sometimes for a hundred pages and more. Following Swann's arrival, nothing happens; one point does not follow another; but Swann's coming into the garden, this simple momentary incident, this point of reality, is unprogressively dilated and enlarged, without changing into another, grows in volume, and there are then pages and pages in the course of which we do not stir; we merely see the incident growing elastically, taking on new details and new meanings, growing like a soap-bubble, and, like a soap-bubble, shot with irisations and reflections.
We are thereupon aware of a sort of punishment in the reading of Proust. His art acts upon our dynamism, upon our appetite for action, for movement, for progress, in the manner of a bit that is constantly holding us back; we suffer like the quail which, in leaping about its cage, flounders against the iron wire that marks the confines of its prison. The fact is, Proust's muse might be termed "Moroseness," for his style consists in the literary exploitation of that "delectatio morosa" which the Councils so severely punished.
We now perceive, with an excess of clarity, how Proust's cycle of elementary "inventions" is formed. We now see how his modification of customary form and distance is the perfectly natural consequence of his primary attitude toward memory. When we make use of memory as one medium among others for the intellectual reconstruction of reality, we take but the reminiscent fragment that suits our purpose and, without permitting it to grow in accordance with the law of its own being, we go on. In reasoning and in the mere association of ideas, our soul describes a trajectory, goes on from one thing to another, and the attention progresses by means of a series of successive displacements. But if, turning our back upon reality, we dive into the contemplation of memory, we see that memory proceeds by means of a simple dilatation, without our stirring, so to speak, from the starting-point. To remember is not, like to reason, to travel through mental space; it is the growth of space itself.
I am ignorant of Proust's habits of writing; but his phrases, so sinuous and so complex, would appear, once written, to have undergone internal vicissitudes. One perceives that they have in the beginning, perhaps, been well proportioned; but the memory locked in them has later given rise to new and spontaneous impulsions, to excrescences, as it were, which have led to strange and—to my taste—delightful grammatical nodosities, like those bumps which form on the feet of Chinese women, under the pressure of narrow shoes.
Following these remarks upon the most elementary and abstract dimensions of Proust's work, one should now go on to speak of the work itself and the author's temperament. In doing so, we would discover the most surprising correlations between that a-dynamic tendency, which governs his interpretation of time, distance and of form, and his other peculiarities. For it is curious to ascertain that the same very simple organic principle is sufficient to explain all the facets of Proust's work; for example: his uncommon perspicacity in describing what happens in connection with the circulation of his character's blood; his fine perception of hygrometric changes and of muscular sensations; and finally, his transcendent and allembracing snobism. But this would call for too many pages, and I have not the right to flood the Nouvelle Revue Française with a species of literary criticism which may be of interest only to myself.
(Translated by S. P.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
Eugenio d'Ors
Eugenio d'Ors, "one of the most civilized minds of our time" as he has been called, was horn in 1882, of Cuban and Catalonian origin. He began as a Catalonian writer, and became the leading literary representative of the province. From 1906 on, under the pseudonym of Xenius, he was the equivalent of the American "column-conductor" on the Veu de Catalunya, the chief newspaper of Barcelona. He played an important part in the intellectual revival of his people, being Superintendent of Public Instruction at the Mancomunitat of Barcelona. It was following the War, about 1920, that d'Ors began to break away from bis Catalonian associations and started writing in Castilian. In this sense, as well as others, he is an after-War Spanish writer. He was recently elected to the Spanish Academy.
Señor d'Ors is an art critic and aesthetician who branches out into the creative field, somewhat in the manner of the late Maurice Barrès. His "La Ben Plantada" given below is an example, at once, of superior journalism and of the trend of d'Ors' aesthetic. In it, he opposes category to anecdote, order and intellectual serenity to Catalonian and Mediterranean romanticism and turbulence. His "Still-Lifes" and his meditations on Correggio's "Noli Me Tangere" likewise stem from his preoccupations with the plastic arts.
Eugenio d'Ors has a plastic mind, an academic mind in the best sense of the term. The art museum, with him, leads to a European universality. He is possessed of an almost fanatic passion for systematization, for the harmony of ideas and the codification of intellectual laws. He proceeds a little in the manner of the most recent German aestheticians. His career has been a struggle against the baroque, and to him is due the coinage of the term Baroquism, to go with Romanticism. Baroquism, to him, is what Belphegorisme is to M. Benda. He is opposed to Goya's "When Reason goes to sleep, monsters are begot." This he would call "the Bill of Rights of Monsters." He prefers to remember Goya's "Divine Reason, spare none!" He prefers, above all, the clarity of Cézanne's apples. (It was he who predicted Picasso's classicism, or rather, Italianism.)
In short, the museum catalogue has, by d'Ors, been carried over to serve as the foundation for an intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual system.
D'Ors has also written ideologic novels, the most charming of which, perhaps, is his Oceanografia del Tedio, or "Oceanography of Boredom." His style exhibits a verbal preciosity and a Cuban musicality.
See Cassou's Panorama de la littérature espagnole contemporaine, pp. 139ff. See also an article, "Eugenio d'Ors," by Jorge Guillén in Hispania (Institut d'Etudes Hispaniques de I'Université de Paris), Janvier-Mars, 1921.
La Ben Plantada was originally written in Catalonian. The translation below is based upon the Castilian version by Marquina.
PROSE
I
Fragment from "LA BEN PLANTADA"
Of the Appearance and External Circumstances of La Ben Plantada
Beware, my admiration, beware, of falling into lyricism, as I come to speak of La Ben Plantada's aspect. Make no attempt, by means of inexact and witching words, at a facile appeal to a facile suggestibility. No hymns, no transports, no confusions. Define, count, measure. Say as did Stendhal, mad with passion for St. Peter's at Rome, as he began his description; "Here are precise details."
Here, then, are precise details. La Ben Plantada is one meter, eighty-five centimeters in height. From the ground to her waist, one meter, twenty-five; and sixty centimeters from waist to head. But this initial and happy lack of proportions is accompanied by the most admirable proportions elsewhere. Thus the foot, not too small, is fine and animated, throughout its length, from heel to tip. The ankles may appear a trifle broad; but for that, there is only the white stocking to blame. When she walks, one is conscious of her rounded, powerful, perfect knees. And the problem of the union of the long ambulatory extremities with the trunk which remains fixed would seem to have been solved by architectural nature, thanks to a secret artifice in the manner of the one which the Renaissance employed in the invention of "duomos."
As for the trunk, generous, absolutely Hellenic, it would have been judged excessive in 1909; but it is in accord with the loose, flowing, classical and altogether harmonious styles of 1911. The arms are long; thick at the shoulder, they gradually diminish; without the defect of those of the Russian dancer, Trouhanowa, which are as wide at the elbow as the hand. As for the Ben Plantada's hands, we shall not, certainly, eulogize their aristocracy; for they are broad and rather strong. The bust is replete with dignity, and not free from an appearance of gentle weariness, which likewise goes with this summer's fashions. While waiting hopefully for a maternal abundance to come, this bust is at present given over to the supreme joy of respiration. One might find the head a little small, if it were not for the sumptuous hair, of a dark blond in color and in nowise too striking, and combed with the most methodical care. From the forehead to the knot at the back, which is very low down, we may estimate a distance of some thirty-five centimeters. But however low that knot may hang, there is still room for a marvelously broad neck, in the center of which there is a slight protuberance, undoubtedly due to the growing girl's bad habit of dropping her head a little.
But here, precise details would fail me, if I were to attempt to describe two things which are impossible of description: her movements and her eyes. And so, for the sake of a strict economy, I shall be content with saying that, if Music presides over la Ben Plantada's movements, then the charm of her eyes must fall under the jurisdiction of Urania, the muse of astronomy.
Fresh revelations concerning la Ben Plantada's eyes.
I admit that, in saying of la Ben Plantada's glance that it is presided over by the muse of astronomy, one has said quite enough; and yet, there is more to be said. I have a singular fear that definition may lend itself to highly erroneous interpretations. One may, indeed, deduce that it has been my intention to compare the admirable damsel's eyes—as has been done so often before!—with stars or celestial luminaries. Nothing of the sort. Rather than any one star, we should have to take as a basis of comparison a whole heaven, and not precisely a physical heaven, as viewed either by day or night, but, to be strict about the matter, the heavens upon an astronomical map, such as may be be found in an atlas or other books dealing with the subject.
In this guise, the comparison should no longer be taken as metaphorical, but as optical and relentlessly literal. That pale and shiny lithographer's green; those blue, white or glowing points; the mystery of those parabolas and constructive lines; those little vari-colored but precisely colored zones; and finally, the emotion which is to be discovered there, an emotion at once weird, calm and imposing,—all this is reduced to a certain unity and sum in la Ben Plantada's eyes. Which are vast, humid and full of lucid depths. And over them the eyelids weave a light shadow, like that which, upon other maps, maps of the earth, is cast by the calm network of meridians and parallels.
Inasmuch as her face has the delightful pallor of the moon, it happens that the brightness of her gaze is also compared to that light which the planet Saturn diffuses. But as I have already said, the evocation of a particular star impresses me as being inadequate to our text of the day. A star has a sharp, pointed light, very harsh and almost shivering. La Ben Plantada's eyes, on the other hand, are expansively gentle and serene, and appear to be stretching themselves, elastically, like a cat, in a lazy, sultry gesture.
My pen, alas, is not equal to describing a miracle so subtly simple as the one I have just unveiled for you. Would, my readers, that la Ben Plantada's eyes might appear to you in a dream tonight. You would understand, then, all that I have told you and am about to tell you of them. And if, the next day, once you were awake, you should undertake to call up and explain those eyes, you would understand how difficult it is to be precise, how grievously impossible it is to communicate to others that light, which was yours for a while, upon those beautiful lids.
II
THREE STILL-LIFES
Roses and Lemons
The hand,—at present invisible, at present distant,—before closing the door without a sound,—but a sound that was audible would have halted it,—has left, as a testament, three flowers in a Talavera vase. Too languid for roses, and too odorous for peonies: three flowers in bloom.
In addition, resting upon the cloth that is wrinkled about them, there are three yellow lemons, concrete, round, determined, each with its twofold nipple: like those compact little villages in the folds of an orographic system.
In the vicinity of these lemons the roses languish. If they are atrophied and enervated to the point of resembling poppies, it means that something has happened: the magic of lemons.
Returning good for evil, drooping within the neck of the vase, they cut and slice, with delicate breath, that tart and astringent odor.
The Turkey-Hen
No, it cannot be real, the atrocious nudity of this mass of plucked fat. Near to attaining the purity of gold the yellow is stylized in the round protuberances. But there is a doubtful rose-hue in the curves, and a dubious blue in the depths.
And there is the skin. A cold skin which yet seems to be cold. Stretching, to the point of breaking, this way and that, its bathtowel woof. And which rumples, already stiff, in its quadruple-folded joints and in the flaccid wrinkles left by the fatigue of so many hatchings.
And those two wounds. Frightful, amid the feathers, that of the neck, where the blood runs out. And charming, clean, with a few feathers, the one through which the entrails spill.
And the eye. Half-shut, small, round, black, with a little luminous dot that is almost a sign of life, almost a reproach.
Nineteenth-Century Interior
A painter's studio of a half-century ago,—with the secret,—now forgotten,—of little nooks that look so cozy. Like this one, with its garnet-red velvet and its bronze candelabra,—and the reflection,—motionless in intensity,—from a great fire on the hearth.
There are two things that match: the Chinese ivory trinket, and this little pile composed of a pair of long, narrow cream-colored kid gloves, which have here intertwined their weariness at being stretched to the elbow. . . . And the bouquet of sweet-williams, with the violin the color of curdled blood, with the blackness of its holes,—two things more that match.
Two beakers, in which there remains yet, at different altitudes in the glass, a white wine, might be able it would seem to reveal the gallant mystery which has led, at this late hour, to the meeting of gloves, ivory, sweet-williams and violin.
But the mirror, in its storied ebony frame, is very high up, and very dim. All it reflects now is solitude in an emulsion of phantoms.
III
"NOLI ME TANGERE"
"Noli me tangere." . . . Disciple, touch me not. All my mercy is for thee. All my tenderness is for thee. All my doctrine is for thee. All my work, for thee. And I have yet to give thee, if thou followest me, my word, my smile, my glance, my fragrance. But touch me not.
(Here we are once more at the Del Prado Museum, standing in front of the morbid, disquieting composition of Antonio Allegri, known as Correggio; a work thrice holy, in theme, in feeling and in meeting. The Lord, standing, pointing the way to the fallen woman. The Disciple in the presence of the Master. . . .)
". . . Yes, my word, my smile, my glance, my fragrance. ... I have Heaven to give thee also. Thy past, what does it matter? How could the past be in thee, when, already, there is no longer any past for thee? Thou hast lost it, when thou hast found me. Thou hast lost it, in losing the memory of it. Thy memories begin tomorrow. Here, thou art whiter than the lilies. More child-like than children, fresher than those who have never known a yesterday. They say that you are thirty or forty years of age. Perhaps. But you are born at this moment. Come and follow me; it is like going to meet life. . . . And so, let us start—let us start ahead, I leading, to part the thorns and the undergrowth, with my bleeding hands, thou, following in my footsteps. Thou shalt see how soothing to thy foot is each imprint left by mine. In the hollow of each, you will find a little of my warmth. . . . But touch me not.
(Correggio is admirable in conception, drawing, light, and the hands of his figures. The same for their feet. In this he differs from Perugino; there is a canvas of the latter's hanging today in the Museum at Grenoble, in which, in contrast with a celestial countenance and a noble perfection of body, he gives us a naked foot that is, for no apparent reason, abominably ugly and emaciated. . . . But all thy body shall shine, when thy soul shall have been truly set afire.)
"Thou, Woman, thou dost not know. Thou must know. Thou art drifting. Thou must get thy bearings. Thou art dispersed. Thou must collect thyself. Thou fleest. Thou must keep. . . . Submissive form, dazzled eyes, heaving bosom, bent knees, legs bent under, arms apart, fingers spread out like a fan! And a throat ready for the sacrifice! And the restless disorder of half-open garments. All this I take, as a sculptor takes the clay. I would model thee, creature; I shall make of thee a statue for the glyptothecae of God. Each of my gestures shall be an engraving upon a docile plate. The first step my foot takes should be for you a compass-drawing. There is a flaming call in the pupil of my eye. The diagonal of my two arms shapes an upward path. An index-finger upward gently points the goal. The other finger, dropped, is, it would seem, bidding your weakness lean upon my strength.
(Everything in Correggio is an upward impulsion. There is always in his work, visible or invisible, the eagle snatching up Ganymede—as in the picture in the Museum at Vienna—and an outward glimpse of sky—as in the decorations of the cathedral at Parma.)
"And now, through thee, I call upon all Nature, call it to Redemption. In Nature's bosom, thou art, Woman, as thy son one day was in thy belly. Thou art a part of her; she wraps thee, guards thee, suffuses thee. She guards thee while she nourishes thee. Thou canst barely move inside her. All thy flutterings are but the flutterings of Nature. . . . How many landscapes in thine eyes, how many landscapes in thy throat, how many landscapes in thine undone hair, how many landscapes, all too vague and all too pleasing! Plants, waters, clouds, volcanoes are thy brothers and thy sisters; the meteors determine thy secrets. It is exceedingly hard to redeem thyself. Woman. Exceedingly hard to lift thyself to this amorphous beatitude. . . . But the diagonal of my arms is firm. And its firmness, almost geometrical, almost abstract, shall save thee at any price. And it shall save the world, as well, the world that clings to thee, and which, after its fashion, shall follow thee; it shall follow thee, while thou art being saved. And so, touch me not.
(In Correggio, the landscape is likewise feminine. There is something of the maternal in his tenderness. His figures appear to be inert children, suckled on all the sweets of the landscape. The one in the picture in the Del Prado Museum is a joy to the eyes, like a spurt of milk upon a bed of green cress. Caressingly fresh! We may recall Gongora's sonnet addressed "To a Very White Lady Clad in Green," where the water is "whitened with foam" at the passage of a swan, whose down is at once to be swallowed up amid the rushes.)
"I shall bestow upon thy freshness my consistency, O statue of mine! I shall lift thy confusion into light. I shall normalize thine instinct into law. I shall lift thee up to Nature, by way of bringing thee to grace. Thou art a sinner; I shall make of thee a penitent. Thou art Eve; I shall make of thee a Madonna. Thou art a goad; I shall make of thee a rein. Thou art war; I shall make thee peace. Thou art entrails; I shall make thee Angel. But touch me not.
"Touch me not, for thou art yet defiled."
(Translated by S. P.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
Gabriel Miró
Gabriel Miró, born in Alicante, in 1879, may be looked upon as Azorin's successor. Both writers come from that portion of Spain known as the Levant. Aside from his Figuras de la Passion de Nuestro Señor, which stands in the same relation to his other work as Flaubert's Salammbô does to Madame Bovary, L'Education sentimentale, etc., Miró's output is marked by a certain steady abundance which is like that of Nature herself. He is a hermit intoxicated with the sensual. The author of savory novels, dealing with Spanish provincial and clerical life (El Padre San Daniel, El Obispo Leproso, etc.), he is both poet and novelist; and his occasional cruelty of analysis and observation is balanced by an almost Franciscan tenderness of feeling. His works tend to breed a sense of sadness and even of fatigue in the reader. This sadness is to be seen, especially, in El Humido dormido and Niño y grande. Cassou: Panorama de la littérature espagnole contemporaine, pp. 146ff.
The following excerpt is from El Humido dormido, or "Sleeping Smoke."
THE MAN IN MOURNING AND THE SPRIG OF PARSLEY
The plain so smooth, so silent, allowed the whistle of the train to stretch over it and reach us very clear; then came the metallic commotion of the bridge.
On Saturdays, as we sat at our desks in the study-room, we could picture to ourselves that train from Alicante, merely by lending ear. We knew it whistled as a personal warning to us, just before rushing headlong at the river. The commotion died out; and the poor bridge settled down to a sullen and empty night, while the express panted happily because it had brought us our father.
Being unable to glance at each other—we were not allowed to look behind us—my brother would cough, which in our secret language meant, "He's coming!" And I would cough back, "I know."—Soon afterwards Brother Door-keeper would come and summon us.
From the stairs of bare granite we could hear father's quiet steps; he preferred to wait for us in the cloister, because this meant that he would kiss us a moment sooner.
Those evening calls were very brief; yet they are the ones that stand out most vividly. We have a picture of ourselves acting very filial-like; touching and smelling the clothes that were still permeated with the atmosphere of home and the scent of mother's hands among the fresh odors of the road. We explored his gloves, his stick, the inside of his hat. We gazed at him as he stood beneath a claustral arch, against the immobile trees of the closed garden and the stars.
According to Rules and Regulations, visits took place on Sundays only; but on Sundays there were such a concourse of tumultuous families; such a show of elegance on the part of youthful mothers and grown-up girls; such a fusillade of greetings; such a gathering and breaking up of chattering groups; such demonstrations of gratitude for Father Prefect's ceremonious parties; not to mention the feeling of being under observation in the public parlor nor the sensation of Monday being just around the corner and a whole rigid week ahead of us, that it all ended by spoiling the taste of those blissful hours.
Afterwards, in order to escape from dry routine, we would steal out of the room and run all over cloisters, patios, corridors, halls and orchards. At times, some of the families would get together while we, the kids, kept on going and plunged into the academic solitude, hoping for dangers. Our excitement was the greater for seeking the world and adventure within our own building, which for us was a mansion full of zones where its very dwellers might at any time find both mystery and enchantment; and though every nook of it had grown familiar through our having played or walked in it, our being there at that time, so few in number, alone and unprotected, proved likewise an incentive to emotion.
One Sunday morning, when we got to the school's bakehouse, which stood in a corner of the orchard, we felt that we were very far, in some country barn. There was a smell of wood, of peasant bread, of agricultural rest. The ground cracked; and I thought, "A tramp, maybe."
It proved to be a tall man, all in mourning; he stopped captiously, and as he stood there, towering above our whole Sunday, he looked like the figure in an ancient portrait of some unlucky caballero. Very pale, of a frigid, macerated, inner pallor, as though it were protected by glass, the glass of that ancient picture. I do not know today, and perhaps I did not know then, what his eyes looked like, nor his mouth, nose or hands, because he was completely seen under the transparency of a monstrance glass, as if all kinds of bright things were bewitched inside, growing larger, turning into a livid pulp, getting watery over the bones. . . . The man in mourning turned around as he felt us near, like those ferocious sorcerers in the fairy stories who scent the poor hidden creature's "smell of human flesh." Those among us who had already got at Homer, were reminded of Polyphemus. But our Polyphemus was a lanky Cyclops, with two staring eyes and a pallor that seemed to ooze out of an urn. We fled pell-mell; and the monster in black ran after us. . . .
A week went by; and Sunday came as usual. We were tired as we left the study-room; but that morning we sought at once the man in the bake-house. Heedless of relatives' calls, we vanished among the stacks of firewood. Steps drew near; and one of our chums cried in a faltering voice, "Here comes the man we're afraid of!" No sooner had he said this, we realized that we were afraid; and we ran; the black phantom attempted to stop us; we ran all the faster; carrying away with us his stare and his grin as though they clung to us. We were oppressed, we were haunted by the memory of it all, which was as consuming as sin itself. In our study-room we could hear him draw near, and could not help look behind us—even though we had to be punished for it and kneel and kneel—knowing all the time that it was not "he." The "big" boy who was entrusted with the task of reading the evening prayers in the oratory—his name was Nicholas and he had great powers of endurance—would recite in a loud but penitent voice those epiphonemas out of the Anchor of Salvation; "I must die and know not how; I shall be judged by God and know not when. Were it tonight, what account should I give? What sentence would be passed upon me?" . . . And we would close our eyes and meditate and answer the query within ourselves and peer furtively into the depths of the chapel where the pallid gentleman's specter seemed to loom, the color of old wax, looking as though he were inside a tall, invisible lantern. Afterwards, in our dormitory, we would be attacked by hallucinations, and when we recognized the groans of a particular chum of ours, crying out in torment, our blood would thunder, and we would shudder out of fear of his fear. . . .
Harbinger of many a delight, the train's whistle throbbed like a joyous hymn over the plain. My brother coughed twice to convey this news to me, "Father and mother are coming!" I coughed twice, "I know, I know." Others coughed in the room, congratulating us, the master lost his temper. And, in the morning, my parents asked the school authorities to allow those numerous boarders for whom a train never came from home, to join us during our visit. Our crowd was very large and festive. Brother Door-keeper was beside himself worrying about his responsibility. All the severity in his eyes could not restrain us from exploring the isolated nooks in the school.
We, the veterans, told the new adventurers about the discolored gentleman's apparition, warning them against fear, while rejoicing all the time in secret; and when we drew near the bake-house we realized that being more numerous now, the orbit of fear would grow accordingly, and thought with regret that our phantom might not be there. But the phantom was there. His convulsed and angular shadow issued forth from among the woodpiles. Our flight was as noisy as a crowd in a panic. All the families came running; and a gentleman from Caceres, who was the uncle of one of the boys, was heard saying:
"Why, I know that man! He's a landowner back home!"
All the redoubtable marvels and the very ghost itself now seemed to be transferred to and become incarnate in the good man from Caceres. We gathered round him, eyeing him avidly, almost rancorously, and standing next to us was the gentleman of the sinister pallor. Together and in the best of terms we walked back to the cloisters. The man from Caceres was asking him questions about his oil and cereal business and his trips; finally he asked him, didn't we have a son? For many of those gentlemen from Caceres and the rest of the provinces, with placid hearts and efficient brains when trifling memories are concerned, must push the cereals and the oils aside in order to see another man's children. The man in mourning smiled with dry, convulsive lips and said yes, he had had a son; a son so white he was painful to behold, he looked as though he were going to break out of sheer brittleness. Everybody used to say, "Children have got to suffer when they're predestined to become great men. . . . Yours is a predestined one!" When she died, the mother said to her husband, "That son, that son of ours; you'll be left all alone with him. . . ." He was left all alone with him; he would feed him; put him to sleep; comb his hair. He had to comb his hair very slowly; his hair was a mass of blonde curls that seemed to be sculptured upon his large marmorean brow. One day he pulled out a sprig of young parsley. The father tried to take it from him; the child threw it away, and his father insisted, "Give me that plant; I'll show you the leaves that'll never grow on account of what you've done."—"I won't, I won't." "Then," said the man in mourning, "I hit him. I hit his little hands. . . ."
The gentleman from Caceres stared at all of us and praised that kind of education and told us about the tree that must be mended while it is tender and said that vicious habits have a way of beginning with a few leaves of parsley and of finishing with a whole estate.
The pallid man kept on talking about his son . . .
One night, his blonde curls got all wet and parted with the sweat from his brow; his marble forehead was set on fire; the ceiling oppressed him as though it were sitting on his lungs; his lips turned purple . . ."I gave up the mills, the olive groves, the whole business. . . ." And he looked at the gentleman from Caceres. "With a piece of canvas such as boat sails are made of, I made a tent to protect the sick baby's cradle; me with him all the time; the two of us, out in the fields, night and day. A peasant woman cooked our food on a bonfire. We had an old lantern, and pigeons would come flying to the light, and with them tramps, shepherds, mastiffs. . . . The child Jesus lay like that—no doubt. We would tell stories, count the stars, listen to the bells as the steeples told off the hours, listen to the cocks. . . . My son died at dawn, on Easter Sunday. The frozen whiteness of his skin remained forever in my flesh. He never would grow tired of feeling my cheeks, my eyelids, my whiskers. Just before he breathed his last, he said to me, ' 'Member when I would not pick up the parsley?' And once mote back to business, to trips."
His friend praised the virtue of activity; he placed great faith in its fruits of consolation.
"This year I am bringing flout to this school."
"How much flour is consumed here?" interrupted the gentleman from Caceres.
The man in mourning told him; and added that every time he came, he would spend the morning in the bake-house. At first, he thought that he would go to the parlor to watch us, but the sight of so many happy families was more than he could bear. So, when we took to frequenting the out-houses, and Brother Buyer wanted to prevent us, he pleaded with him to let us be. . . .
The man from Caceres could not restrain himself:
"Brother Buyer is a good man from Aragon. I think he used to work for a relative of mine. Isn't his name Espi, Brother Espi?"
But we all said no.
And the man in mourning went on:
"... I begged him to leave you kids alone, so that I might see you and talk with you; but you would run away from me as if I were the wolf. . . ."
. . . Here that man sinks into the thick of the sleeping smoke. For we never went back to the bake-house. Why should we? We were no longer afraid. . . .
(Translated by Victor Llona.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
Ramón Gómez de la Serna
Ramón Gómez de la Serna is an outstanding figure in the writing Spain of today. Born in 1891, his first book bore the title Entrando en fuego (1904). He has since broken practically all records by publishing more than sixty volumes. He has written plays and prefaces,—prefaces for Apollinaire, Lautréamont, Wilde, Colette, etc., etc. His prefaces alone constitute a respectable body of critical work. He travels occasionally, and lived for a number of years in Portugal and at Naples; but outside of that, the Puerta del Sol at Madrid is, as Señor Caballero has observed, "the navel of the world" for Ramón. The Puerta del Sol and the cafe Pombo. Madrid owes much of her charm to Ramón, who goes about transforming her streets into magic and miracle. Ramon has written two big Bible-like tomes on his favorite café, alone.
Ramón (for it is as Ramón that he is affectionately known to the world) represents that modern spirit of play in literature, a play often and closely approaching fumisterie, of which something has been said in the General Introduction to this work. He also may be taken as standing for the cult of the momentary. Endowed with a Whitmanesque vitality, he reminds one of such writers as Giraudoux or Max Jacob in France, while other writers, such as Orio Vergani in Italy, owe much to him. With Ramon, Spanish literature takes an instinctive and illogical leap forward. Fantaisiste, fetichist, mysticist, Ramón's reactions are always unexpected and unpredictable. He is immersed in a constant drama between himself and the world. He has been compared to Rimbaud. The latter found sacred the disorder of his own soul; Ramón finds sacred the disorder of the world.
His output is huge, monstrous, and there is no question in it of artistic perfection. But there is magic in it. M. Cassou compares Ramón to Hans Christian Andersen. The former is like Andersen in his divine sympathy for things, objects. But whereas Andersen's world has the flavor of a Paradise Lost, Ramón's world is a young, a rejuvenated one. The sage of the Pombo is the prophet of future mythologies, the prophet of the impossible, of an imminent Realm of Incongruities. He is in love with a sort of sacred idiocy, and his impetuous temperament saves him from melancholy or despair. He is saved, too, by the fact that he spends his life amid the joys of the concrete, which he loves with a sensuous love, as exemplified in his La Villa de Palmyre. He concludes his El Novelista, which is his "novel of novels," with this sentence:
"It is necessary to utter all the phrases, to dream all the dreams, to note all the realities; one must run as often as possible around the map of this futile old world, a world doomed to go up in a puff of smoke."
See Cassou: Panorama de la Littérature espagnole contemporaine, pp 149ff.THE MADMAN OF THE VILLAGES
The madness of the madmen in Castile is the dryest and most crushing of all, it is real village madness, that is why I choose those particular madmen, and among all the villages in Castile, why I choose Valle as the most typical, although I shall never forget the screams of Segovia's madmen, who howled desperately in the night, yonder in the abyss above which towers Segovia, yonder in the fearful avenues, like voices from the river, like the real obscure clamors of the river Clamores.
I
Valle is a village in the center of Castile's wilderness, where Castile's dramatic mediocrity is most obviously displayed, where Castile is most Castilian, without any unexpected touch, without an oasis nor an attenuation. In Valle what is most common in Castile—her meaning, her essence, her skull—is shown bare and supine, without ostentation or prosopopoeia. In Valle Castile is caught red-handed, neat and clean.
As a village Valle is compact and compressed; it is adobe-built. It boasts none of those stones of great antiquity which feed the vanity and imagination of other villages. It does not even boast that evocative central building "that was burnt down." Valle is monotonous, precarious, in suspense, and its ground alone is ancient—dust of the dead—dry and smooth, totally devoid of curves, of softness, of grace, of any aphrodisiac whatsoever. Valle is the wife to whom its natives are wedded, the wife whom one has finally grown used to, and nothing else, the wife who secretes within herself the irretrievable past, the snapshots of every day, and alt the trivialities and all the shames of a stupid and narrow life. Valle does not endear itself to the heart, neither does it know or alleviate the distress of the heart oppressed by longings for beauty, caprice and passion. It is silent, tyrannical, systematically jealous, though jealous of no one m particular, sober in every way, and its only grace is that of being the foremost among the burgs that have weakened, attacked and lapidated man's extraordinary initiatives.
Valle is impassible and exposed to the sky and to the land that sun and engulf it. The emotion of the landscape is made more leathery and more irritated still by its adobes. The adobe is of a fulminating conceit, and although it seems inconsistent, it is really of an overwhelming consistency. In stone there are richness, power, race and aristocracy; in brick there are color and sufficient industry, and in white or colored plaster there is a festive and eager gracefulness whereby man overcomes the unmovable earth; but in adobe there is nothing, save the sordidness of the arid, ugly and wretched dirt, and the result is that living under adobes is tantamount to living under the dirt that exhibits itself in the adobes—a crude insidious and absorbing show. The aspect of adobes accentuates the idea of the dirt, weighing upon the soul and making it more rugged, more tenacious and thicker, making it more adobe-like, making it more subterranean, sinking and smothering it with a neutral, disengaged, infinite element, deprived of idolatries and of exquisite levities, of arbitrary flowers, of trifles; dirt of a more terreous, of a sadder and more bilious color. O grave and deep jaundice! . . .
So in Valle, although Valle's code of morals is the absurd one that obtains throughout the whole of Spain, life is less bearable than anywhere else, because its dwellers are deprived of the saving grace of an amorous landscape which touches even those who live within crass and painful morals.
In Castile man's free and rebellious sense of life is locked up within his soul, is held there and finds no outlet, no pleasure and no expression.
In Valle the river is waterless and the four poplars that grow along its banks are a mere suggestion of woods, something like a dream that suggests that it were better if no trees grew there at all. Neither are the springs that liberal gift of the earth, that inexhaustible proof of her maternity which gushes forth bubbling and before which, relying upon what it has already given of itself and upon what it will still give, one thinks of a fecund subterranean sea. The springs, in Valle, are superficial wells with visible bottoms that look as if they would run dry as soon as those tiny burros that are drawing near have been loaded with six full jars each. Gloomy springs, painful springs, sad cisterns, water almost undrinkable which is not liberal nor colorful nor gracious. . . .
In Valle summer is infernally hot and winter correspondingly rigorous, with a desolate, wretched, stubborn, boring coldness, with less amusements than ever, that keeps the village as isolated as a lighthouse within a continuous, thick and compact frost. O brilliant, transparent, tormenting and vacuous light-house!
In Valle, in summer as in winter, the days have all an identical character, and in midday only is there a moment when life takes on a little strength. At midday there is a moment of passion in the population, the sense of living becomes intense and firm, but the next instant, as soon as they have sat themselves before the dinner table, they are already convinced that the thing that had been suggested within them in that moment of impatience and of perspicacity, shall not come after all; and full once more of their gross humanity, they sink once more into their material and moral solitariness.
In Valle there are but three consolations: one rose in the springtime, the dovecots and bread.
One rose, for in those Castilian roses and in them alone, with their candid, coagulated and smooth perfume. Spring's venereous depth, its joyful bowels, may be smelt. No rose with a perfume so affecting, so splendid, so full, with flesh so abundant as that rose when smelt of a vernal morn. . . , O most dulcet orphan rose! It was the spring's sole reward when a restlessness, a gaiety devoid of purpose and of gratification, awakened a wish to cry out, to fly away, to yield to an incongruous and frenzied delirium. It was impossible to reconcile such a violent and unbalanced springtime with the insipidity of the rest of the year, and one was torn to pieces by a grateful and radiant pain, a hilarity that wheeled over the empty fields and was frightening. All stared at each other and felt their own sensuality tense, suffocating, with no destination whatever. Only the rose!
The dovecots, for they are Poetry's only monument there, as well as the only sympathetic and benign oratory. They are like round castlets, built of adobes, but topped with a bright, radiant, optimistic, whitewashed crown. In the fields they stand like so many reductions of an ideal, of an exalted presence among the vast pusillanimity, among the sterile perdition of the atmosphere, and although their doves are not white, but mostly of that spiritual grey of Castile, they impart none the less great consolation to the prospect.
And the pure bread in which concurs all the tenderness of the painstaking, incommunicative and untractable earth. Bread is the great sensuality of Castile, her frankness, her sole predilection. Bread is like a soft and exquisite female breast—white and burnt, like a mature breast—and it is tasted and handled with an eager expectation. It is kneaded and baked and its deliciousness and shades of coloring are achieved with a sacred solicitude which is solely fed by that illusion, that short-lived fondness for the sake of which labor was endured a whole year long. Only in Castile—and this is truth indeed—is eaten bread so dense, so pulchritudinous, so fat and so honest.
II
Spain ignores herself. Therefore no symbols are possible and Don Quixote represents no one. Spain's madness is not a romantic and definite one. It is some other kind of madness, less Oriental and more vague, in the midst of a frenzied neutrality. It is the sordid and inconsiderate madness of one deprived of voluptuousness, of that necessary voluptuousness which, when not rightly assumed, nobly assumed, culminates in a shriveling and a routing of the soul.
In Valle this harsh truth shines under a glaring light. In Valle the wings of one's gaze are clipped before the cenereous Castilian waste, and out of that wingless gaze wherein the very wings of life are clipped, comes forth that thing; the madness of Castile. Everything there tends to give back to man his impractical and anxious soul. Woman herself lacks in soft and voluptuous charity. She is untouched by spiritual grace and shorn of color, voluptuousness and aroma. Her flesh is dry, her flesh merely bears or does not bear grain, and no other kind of sweet, diversified, refreshing or beautiful produce. Everything is dried up by the selfish, bachelor-like, yet matrimonial atmosphere. Everyone, while still above the ground, is buried beneath it, buried by it and by a sky which, instead of being fluid, is hard and breaks upon man like a wave, by gusts transparent and subtle, but continuous, a sky which looks like a waste of bluish sand, without any watery quality whatsoever, without airiness, cruel, lofty with hypocrisy, but overwhelming when its heavy torrents, its heavy unexpected downpours beat down man and subjugate him more to himself, his village, his solitude and his austere and thrifty mode of living, the sky acting thus because after all it is but a commentary of what man himself has wished for and achieved socially. In such a sky the clouds alone are indocile, to the common rule and represent levity, although, since everything else will turn sour in those spacious lands, they are like naked women who tantalize man, only to run away from him.
Every man there is the son of palsied parents, whose palsy he inherits. Every face there gets set, especially during the sunny season, when the huddled plain is filled beneath a glaring sun with a lethal, flinty, unbearable lucidity which dazes and terrifies man, causing him to frown and scowl in an indelible manner, leaving his eyes astonished, dry, deep and sunk.
Thus, in Castile, the incommodity of the soul does not turn into melancholy nor into gaiety, when laughter or tears alone might help weather such a crisis. In Castile there are but inordinate ecstasies, painful attention, dry obduracy, stubborn make-believe, absurd firmness, a malady similar to gall-stones—"earth-stones"—insoluble earth within man's bladder, earth which lacerates man with its dull, everyday, massive pain, the kind of pain that kills not, the kind of pain with which one may live for a hundred years.
In the hyperborean North man, subjected to the same unnatural morals, distils his fears somewhat and loosens his instincts in the landscape and in the gentleness of his womenfolk, just as beneath his sunshine, the Andalusian segregates his melancholy within his sensuality, his levity, his placid reminiscences, his sinful languors, somewhat Oriental, in spite of all.
Your Castilians, however, who are possessed of a coarse appetite, and yet are caught as in a whirlpool in their own rigorous and sterile customs, balance themselves perpetually on the edge of madness, of a kind of madness which does not burst out in most of them thanks to the stiffness of their mettle and of their phlegm which are spent in straining to keep off, with supreme vigilance, the unbridled madness, the most elemental of all, which throbs and swells within them, the madness of instincts oppressed by an atrocious ideal, by a visual and carnal abstemiousness. O conflict in suspense, neuralgia of the whole being, which they bear under all their life, gravely holding down the natural and legitimate incontinence of life!
Still, how numerous the half-madnesses that lurk within that strong dissimulation! . . . The half-madness of parsimonious avarice, the half-madness of immobility in the monkish arm-chairs, the half-madness of living nothing but a dining-room existence, leaving the house but seldom and never thinking, full of the dining-room and its stagnation, obsessed by the sarcophagus-like clock; the half-madness of card and domino games; the half-madness of a unique and assiduous gesture; and other excessive but pertinacious half-madnesses.
Ill
In Valle, however, escaping the compulsory equilibrium of all, the urban and smothered madness of all, the accepted and socialized aberration, there are a few revealing madnesses. In these, the unknown, curbed and tacit madness of the others takes its revenge, since madness is a rebellion, despite the identical exterior morals of him who suffers, despite the rabid authority of the austere and scabby customs which rule the village. This is the unexpected, peremptory rebellion, divorced from the very tyrant who suffers from it and would choke it down, with the result that it is he who at last is choked down and reduced to silence. It is the undressing in public of the virtuous, prudish and modest virgin.
This madness which from time to time may undo some poor soft and blind head overwhelmed at last by the unbearable glare of the surrounding scenery, is a thin, prodigious, dull, incongruous, rude madness, an ordinary form of madness, a brown and adobe-like madness, a vast but fanciless madness, a madness more overwhelming than any other, a plain madness devoid of genius, of "decadentism," of satisfaction, of color, a grim madness in which all the mud of which man is made ferments formidably and cracks open beneath the irresistible pressure.
No romance whatsoever in Valle, except perhaps the romance of its madmen. These are the great figures of stationary Castile, now that Castile is shorn of the great bubbling-over of faith, of power, of superstition, of adventure whereby her sons used artificially to cure themselves and to compensate for that exacting need for strong and positive acquisitions, for freedom, for sexual sincerity and varietism, which is common to men the world over. Valle teems with fear of its own madmen because they interpret perhaps the irreducible malady of the village. Nevertheless they are spoken of in low tones and, at times, for the sake of rambling, of covering up the tracks, of freeing oneself from the feeling of being stigmatized with the same stigma, their love story is added to their madness.
IV
Although she was not mad, I remember first of all Sotera's idiotized face, because idiocy also is representative of Castile's spiritual stock-in-trade which is as adequately depicted in Velazquez's squint-eyed and long-snouted Idiot of Soria, as in our contemporaneous Sotera. This idiocy, which abounds likewise in the village, is abortive madness.
Oh, the face of the good Sotera! It looks as though it were continually being attacked by a dazzling glare, stupefied by the aggressive land, with its irresolute and toasted eyes and set mouth! Poor grotesque old woman with an old man's face! She was rich on her own, yet she was dressed as by charity by the relatives who enjoyed her fortune. Her face was dazzling, so full was it of truth. It was plain that she was overcome by the inner conflict of the village, full of its silent headache, drained of her substance, convincing, exemplary in the midst of her idiocy. . . . Unforgettable head of stone!
V
The most astonishing madwoman is the bedridden one. She has kept to her bed for fifteen years, from one day to the next, yonder in the rear of the big house in the plaza of Valle. No one ever calls on her, except her own relatives. Still, some woman who saw her once used to say that she remembered everybody and showed an interest in everybody's loves and children. . . . Oh, aggrandizement of the village, mystery of the absurd law of averages, secured through that voluntary reclusion! A wise woman's game, a deceitful game, a game destined to aggrandize the village. . . . Oh, remote queen, overthrown and full of genius!
We did not know the exact location of that overturned alcove, and were made anxious thereby. . . . Which balcony might be hers? Perhaps her bed-room gave on the back of the patio. . . . At times, perhaps, watchfully, jumping out of bed, she comes up to the cracks in the visillos and, seeing the same old frightening plaza, she retreats fearfully before that crudity of life despoiled of pleasure and the crude and exacting light, and jumps back into bed, covering her face. . . .
That madwoman surrounded herself with mystery. One thought of her in her bed-room, softened, afflicted, made compassionate by her madness—a bed-room half-cabinet and half-sitting-room, filled with a lazy, weak, thin and unpleasant light, a light without leaven, without salt and without vibration.—Everything in her room must have become gradually impregnated with her personality, with her powerful sésame—the small oval picture, the chairs, the chest of drawers and, of course, the bluish mirror—one could see her reclining in her canopied bed, ample, very well kept, very smooth, deep, very soft too, very much ripened by a long, long usage. She also, pathetically ripened like all bed-ridden women, she would have turned white, white, with silvery hair, very pure, the white hair of a madwoman or of a woman who had suffered much, with hallucinating hair, yet respectable in her madness. One felt that she was so quiet and so prostate, like all who take to their beds out of sheer despair and still go on living to excess, more so than any sane person, for sane persons die sooner than they; her every gesture must have been full of a grave serenity, as though she were always in a state of pure trance, with her head tilted back among her many pillows—one of them square and with numerous flounces—her eyes revulsed, her arms covered by the ample sleeves of her matinée and extended with great peace and solemnity upon the long white bed-cover.
The whole village was penetrated with the idea and almost with the significance of that madness which prolonged and fixed before all the wish of the timid, tired and discreet common mind which sincerely would have loved a rest, a resignation and an attitude such as. . . . Oh, fascinating laziness before the impossibility of living!
At times also a question was suggested within us; was she mad or sound, so sound as to have taken once for all this attitude midway between the impotence and the hybridity to which life has been submitted by the cults and the customs enforced for twenty centuries? . . . Might she not have summed up her criterion by such a decision, as a kind of suicide less impetuous, a suicide that would evade the horror of self-destruction?
The great plaza itself was filled with her madness, as though the spirit of her madness, the renunciation of her madness, were bedridden there, grown pale, grey and discouraged, she, the bed and the sky and the bored canopy.
VI
"Theophilus has gone mad," I remember I was told upon returning from a trip. Then I thought of what Theophilus was like before, of what I had never looked for in Theophilus; because Theophilus had become a person who intimidated us like a Minister of State in his office and golden chair. Theophilus—it dawned on me then—even when he still was a somewhat scholarly youth, was possessed of a busy violence and, when deep in thought, had a curious stare, as if he were displeased with the triviality of the matter under consideration, and this gave a second perspective to his ideas and to his joys. He was always farther away than the place where he sat. There was something very stiff in him, which we had taken for brusqueness. His gestures had a decided hardness. His hands and legs moved as though they were holding back a formidable force which roared within them. With it all, we realized that seeing himself with no future more remarkable than madness, he should have gone mad.
His mother, poor dona Theodosia, a widow, suffered the madman in the rear of her house, full of shadows, neat and well kept, thanks to her attentive ministrations. But one afternoon he threatened her with death and, had he not been overpowered, he would actually have killed her. The poor mother wept because her son had to be removed to an asylum for the insane.
VII
Theopista was beautiful, but she was disfigured by her madness which imparted none the less a piquant interest to her good looks.
People had spread an exaggerated legend of her beauty, and in such a village where all faces are homely and chameleonlike, she stood out extraordinarily.
Madness began by prompting her to whistle like a man and to speak in a masculine voice. Then she took to throwing everything she could lay hands on. Then a ferocious hatred for men awoke in her and she refused to see her own father and to leave the big corral in her house, the back-door of which she was continually trying to open, fascinated as she was by that groundless suspicion that backdoors give access to the rear of the world, to freedom, to the road to free and discreet adventure.
Likewise in Theopista's eyes there were that phlegm, that obsession, that melted blackness, that blindness, that repressed horror which are seen in the eyes of all the other dwellers of the village, dilated and sunk by dint of staring continually at the same thing: the earth, the earth-colored houses, the earth-colored people whose faces are like earth.
Theopista's madness degenerated gradually and became frenzied, degenerated into rabidness. She appeared full of a passion somewhat admirable in certain ways. Until one day she had to be taken to a remote sanitarium. This event excited and worried the village in secret, and one could feel for a time all the concentrated and austere sorrow of Valle, all the surprise of a latent madman who sees another madman being taken away, which for him is something like a penetrating wound inflicting an unknown pain.
Theopista remained shut up within that disturbing sanitarium, away in France, until one day, deciding that she was cured, they gave her back to the village which greeted her with joy, as though they were giving back the stolen image of a saint. Everyone went to hear her talk, and she talked clearly, recognizing everything and assuming once more her lady-like amiability as a munificent señorita. But soon afterwards she had a relapse, and the rupture came directly from the town, from the disproportion and the unyielding lonesomeness of the landscape and of the customs. She would recover her sanity in yonder murmuring, wooing, insinuating, vaporous French landscape and in yonder dainty and cocottishly luxurious cosmopolitan hotel life of the wealthy madmen. She persisted in her outbursts, and then she was told of Carmen, the chambermaid whom she recalled continually and of whom she spoke with great fondness. She was told that Carmen would come to see her soon.
And Carmen came at once, for everything had been arranged for beforehand. She arrived in a motor car, fattish, genial and somewhat cynical, together with Louise, another chambermaid, who was sullen, thin and tall, and, pretending that they were taking her out for a ride along the high-road, they carried her away rapidly to her distant destination, dressed in a house costume and with her last ideas, for undoubtedly she hoped that she would end her days in the village.
VIII
Don Severiano was a distinguished man with a terreous and toasted youthfulness. He was in his early thirties. His eyes had always had an inner shadow, as if his glance had withdrawn into them, digging a small cavern as it went back. Although he had never gone out of his dry village, his seemed to be a sailor's eyes, always in the lookout of his ship, like an alert captain. He never failed to look high and far, towards the high seas. He always seemed to be thinking of something more transcending than what he was being told about, perhaps of a boat that would appear, or of a cloud, or of a "puncture" at the edge of the peaceful sea. His close friends called him Severe. He was tall and spare. He used to chew on his mustache slowly and reflectively, while gazing at the horizon, beyond the midget town, beyond the roads, even when he was confronted by a windowless wall. His wrinkled brow looked like a sheet of lined paper upon which his ideas would be scribbled very soon. His thin and yellowed hands were smooth and terse, and suggested a concentrated feeling full of an unquenchable thirst for voluptuousness. He had transparent whiskers, half-blonde, half-lion-russet. Everyone remembered all those noble features of his figure in such a manner that, mad as he was, he was greatly respected and shown great courtesy for the sake of his past.
He was the village notable. Scion of a wealthy family, he had insisted upon remaining in the village out of gratitude for his ancestors. He was the only one there who, although a son of untidy fathers who wore soft shirts and no neck-ties, perpetuated elegance in the village and maintained the tradition of the starched shirt, of the winged collar, of the silk cravat and of the cylindrical cuffs held by short-necked cuff-links. He was a lawyer, which exalted him, and he always pictured himself wrapped up in the prestige of his solemn toga, converted into a surprising and dramatic houppelande. He was often met with as he returned from some hunting expedition—those Castilian hunting expeditions which are a vain and hopeless undertaking—and he was startling with his comprehensive and watchful face, like a sword planted in the midst of the plain, fatally crucified there, unable to go yonder, to that point towards which his eyes were forever gazing. Why, if not because he was fatally rooted there, because he was crucified on the plain, did he not go far away, since he was so rich?
Severe, who was greatly beloved of his parents because he was the only son of theirs who had not gone away "to live their own life," was treated like a spoilt child when he went mad. His father put him in the care of two servants—one for the day and the other for the night. His mother devoted all her time to him, taking care of him as though he were an ailing infant who, though he may be still up and around, is by no means in good health.—The large mansion of the village was converted into a hospital, and the messengers who heretofore used to cross the gay and brilliant gate which mocked the modern and pleasing luxury of lords and kings, now delivered their messages on the threshold, shrinking from listening to the incurable shrieks of the madman or to his stampeding about like an untamable goat. One fancied him in his madness gowned in the black toga with velvet facings of the deepest black and with his lawyer's cap upon his head, full of that incomparable gentlemanliness of his, with hands much too lively, like two restless and angry spiders climbing up and down the soft black velvet on his chest.
His madness was deliberate and quotidian—how, after he had slept, could he arise insane once more every morning?—and it held but one danger: his thwarted anxiety to kill himself. Every measure was taken to avoid this. There was no weapon of any description in the house, and all the other possible dangers were forewarned. The well itself had been covered up with a large and weighty millstone.
He already seemed settled in his madness when one night he disappeared. How could this be? The servant had fallen asleep for one moment only, that brief nodding which prison watchmen themselves are unable to repress. And where had he hidden? . . . They looked for him all over the house, even in the great wine casks, even in the oven, everywhere, examining all the things that looked untouched, and among which the well, which was hermetically closed by the big slab. They made inquiries in the village. The servants rode out on horse-back, followed by the perspicacious hounds, to investigate among the neighboring villages and to scrutinize the fields. They imagined him running wildly, falling, hurting himself occasionally and bleeding, over the lonesome fields. But as they returned at dusk they brought no news. Thereupon, like one who stands once more in the very center of all probabilities and makes his own choice, the father stood and searched again throughout the house and looked carefully where he had carefully looked before (and so that nothing be left unexplored, it occurred to him to move the slab off the well and look inside) . . .
Oh, oh, oh! There he was, floating within the length of the tube, like a foetus within an alcohol jar. He was taken out at once, and he came over the curb-stone as limp as a rag-doll. Everyone was terrified by the smile that recomposed and fed his catastrophe. The scene was clear: with a smile he had moved the slab, with a smile he had leant over the squinting and tremendous abyss which was stabbed by a remote light, with a smile he had smelt the water which he coveted in his thirst for everything, the deep water of those Castilian wells, in which the bucket rope is so long, endless almost; with a smile he had got inside like an acrobat; with a smile he had found, toad-like, a footing on the wall of the well, and with a sharper smile, full of the tragic voluptuousness of him who is going to kill himself, he had carefully replaced the heavy stone above his head with a strength astonishing in those slender and long fingers of his, very slowly, shutting himself up in a stupendous intimacy, in a hiding-place they would not suspect. . . . Did he look through the central hole in the slab, smiling for the last time at the life outside? . . . Superhuman and astonishing hoax! . . . And with a smile he threw himself down, like a swimmer, into the water in which he could not swim, and, with a smile, he became aqueous, aqueous unto death.
After this particular case of madness, the village remained more puzzled and more startled than ever, fighting back with more strength and more awareness, like one who fights back a sob which already has reached the lips, the conscious madness, passion's only recourse in the absence of any remedies and outlets.
IX
Doña Onesifora—O absurd Castilian names, chosen among the strangest ones in the Saints' roll-muster in order to give a little variety to life! . . . (Eleuteria, Estilita, Eufemia, Servanda, Eudosia, Prepedigna, Clemente, Oroncio, Atanasio, Caricio, Teofilo, Deogracias, Silvano, Salustiano, etc., etc.)—Doña Onesifora had been a very gay woman—in the proper sense of the word;—but as such a gaiety was impossible in the village, everybody repulsed it like something indecent, nobody helped her, nobody laughed with her and wry faces met her superabundant laughter. Nevertheless Doña Onesifora became not a whit less gay because she found no one to share her gaiety with, and, independent and valiant, when she realized that she had become a hopeless spinster, she separated herself from her brothers—the richest men in the village—and, shutting herself up in one of the houses on her estate, she took to drink. Being the owner of some extensive vineyards—majuelos, as they are called locally—she could always be seen about them, taking care of them maternally, lifting up a bunch of grapes here, straightening out a shoot there, while acting at the same time as a protecting scarecrow. Her predilection was the thick, deceitful must, which ferments within the breast, which causes the heart to ferment, which attacks the head, first as must, then as it slowly turns into wine, as wine, in a double-action, complicated "drunk." Oh, formidable fondness for the must which colors the lips purple, dyes the blood and besmears the face! . . .
Doña Onesifora went mad as a result of her splendid "drunks"; without lowering herself, however, in the least. She always remained the lady whom no one dares poke fun at, and who is the only drunken female at whom the children do not cast stones. Thus, without prostituting nor lowering herself, she keeps on being gay and playful.
However, she is gradually becoming invisible; still, people always think of her, away in that strange house which looks like a drunken woman too, attended to by her ancient female servant who has become a drunkard herself by dint of carrying upstairs so many jars out of the inexhaustible cellar. But Doña Onesifora has not lost the ultimate good sense which enables her to share in the wealth of hams and rashers. Attractive Doña Onesifora! One pictures her as she compensates and satiates herself, she who never knew the arbitrary and renovating gaiety, the gaiety that enlightens and cheers, she, who, possessor of the virile, huge casks in a rich cellar, goes on exhausting the musty shoots whose stock shall die with her. . . . Wise, cheering and intrepid wine-bibber!
Postscript
Throughout this narrative I have kept wondering, "How shall I say this?" . . . And since the picture of Valle would be incomplete if I left out something which is essential to the village, something which is wonderful in color and in seduction, I will now paint Señorita Florencia's story at the end, though it may be late.
Señorita Florencia was the most passionate and ardent woman I have ever seen.
Señorita Florencia was the only woman in Valle who "had gone wrong." She was not a "free" woman. No. She was a pure young girl who had committed a transgression. The scandal had been hushed up by her parents, but the story had leaked out and people stared at her knowingly, exchanging with her Intense glances of admiration, praise and veneration. She, in good weather, would sit on the threshold of her house which stood alongside the highway, and in her eyes there was a volcanic brownness, a fascinating cavity—like a gypsies' cave—a concentrated look, skeptical, of a prudent and joyful skepticism, of a sacrilegious joyfulness, wholly unexpected in such a village. Not even in Seville have I ever seen any Andalusian brunette who surpassed, who concentrated in herself such tragic, anxious and delectable swarthiness. (Oh, to spend a night lying with her in the secrecy of her house in Valle! What an extraordinary experience it would have been!)
We always went our way towards her house, in order to pass before it, in order to reach somewhat the supreme and free attainment of seeing the heroine in her piece. She was the only woman who had dared, and I believe that the whole village stared at her simultanously with black anger, envy and illumination, as though she were a goddess of some merry and anachronistic cult discovered in some excavation practised in the edge of the village. She was the only sane figure there, full of a satirical and gracious laziness which, to us, seemed to be beyond the madness and the dumb fanaticism of all the others, as though she had achieved in the test a hellenic fire and flavor. In her were all the freshness, all the orientation, all the imagination and all the incontinence. Senorita Florencia would not go mad. She had escaped madness definitely, and she seemed to look with superiority, as though they were a mysterious and refreshing garden in the peace of her soul, at the obscure and supercilious gentry around her. She looked like one of those trees which seem illumined by a roseate electricity and dazzle the wintry gardens, mitigating their grey lonesomeness, replete with greying hairs.
O houri of Castile, who perhaps flat-nosed, and perhaps mustachioed, and perhaps wrinkled, achieved nevertheless in the midst of the depressing atmosphere a splendor, an aroma and an essence that were both enervating and concentrated, and by which we were asphyxiated, carried away and darkened, as by an ardent, dense, mollifying and spasmodic shadow!
(Translated by Victor Llona.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
THE FIRE IN THE BAWDY-HOUSE
The fire in the bawdy-house was something of a revelation.
Who might have guessed that there were so many women in the rear of that narrow house?
For a long time white figures of women in their chemises kept on running out of the door which was lit "al giorno" by the fire. That procession of phantoms with loose hair seemed endless. It was a wonderful show.
"I have lost several thousand beds!" was the picturesque lamentation of the Madame. "I have lost several thousand beds!"
Her excitement was comprehensible. Nothing costs so much money as a bed, and above all a solid and comfortable bed. Therefore: several thousand beds! This was horrible indeed.
Those innumerable women in their chemises, some of them of ample curves, and others of a provocative angularity, together with the fire's brilliancy, imparted to the night an atmosphere of sensuality which was reminiscent of hell. Yet they all looked like college girls routed by the fire out of their chaste dormitory beds.
It all looked impossible! How could they have all found room within—not only standing room, but lying-down room as well?
The discovery had been fantastic, but more fantastic still was the news that came the following day, after the fire was put out, to the effect that the bodies of over a hundred women had been found, burned to a crisp by the fire, in that incredible rear of the small house.
Such is clandestine prostitution.
THE CHILD THAT GOT LOST
Reuben got lost, got lost as he had got lost before on previous afternoons, and he remembered that on those occasions when he had got lost, his mother, upon finding him again, instead of kissing him because he had been found, had whipped him and pulled him afterwards by an arm as though she were dragging him on the ground.
The boy, fearing that the same thing would happen once more, fled as though he wished to get lost further, desperately further, since he had got lost again.
Thus no one ever found Reuben, for he had got definitely lost among those unfrequented dunes at the end of roads, in which anybody might get lost.
(Muestrario.)
NEW "GREGUERIAS" (Outcries)
When we spill an ink-stand, it looks as though we had wantonly spilt the blood of Christ.
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There is something cerebral in a nut. A nut is a tiny brain. We eat it, it is vegetable brain-matter, within the living inclosure of which there were hermetic thoughts that corresponded to the distinct circumvolutions of the nut.
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Let us pray the Lord every day to spare us that illness which must be so dreadful: the Scorbut; more dreadful, no doubt, than the Black Plague.
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The most terrible noise of the world occurs when a silk hat falls down to the ground.
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The aeroplane must not be compared to the eagle, nor to any other majestic bird. . . . It is nothing but a big bat, a bat discolored and transparent at midday, a bat with sharp and angular outlines, what with those outjuttings of the ribs in the wings, like a bat's. At night it looks more like a bat. A man-made bird could be but a mammal bird.
There shall issue forth a new kind of light, a new apparatus, a new bulb, which will render us irremediably obsolete. . . . We shall have no recourse against it. . . . That light shall not be comparable to ours, it shall be sadder, everything shall be filled with it, and thus the night shall be turned into a new splendid midday. . . . Just as we fancy that our ancestors lived steeped in darkness, so the masters of that new kind of light shall fancy that we lived in a darkness just as great.
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There is always a tiny hole in our bedroom through which we are being watched by somebody who never loses sight of us.
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I thought I had already seen that head on some middle-aged woman, on another woman who was tall and fully developed, when I met it on a tiny girl with a narrow body.
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The fellow who, when riding in a carriage or a motor car, slides his arm into those arm-supporters, those slings that hang on either side of the carriage, gives himself away as one who is not used to riding and is maimed of the necessary distinction.
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I've heard a woman utter a dreadful curse upon one of those automobiles equipped with a musical horn: "I wish they'd bury you with your damned music!"
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To gaze at the sky while riding in a cab is like strolling in summer along a river bank.
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From afar comes to me the idea of the breathing of one who is dying, whom it were sufficient to remove in order to save his life. . . . But he is far, very far, he is remote. No one will save him so easily, and he shall breathe thus all the night long—I hear him, I hear him—until morning when the telegraph will announce the news to his relatives here.
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There is a moment in the night when everything is filled with electric light. This is just before our lucidity is extinguished within ourselves. Our inner light factory exhausts its fluid in one ultimate gasp. Everything is flooded under a thick and dull whiteness and afterwards, as though the wick were consumed, the eyes wink dreamily.
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Ships have too many sirens. It is plain that they are in abject fear, with all those sirens pointing everywhere. Sirens to hear, others to call, sirens that are terse and stiff ears full of susceptibility, and sirens that are like yawning and long-snouted mouths made more sonorous yet by those cupped hands of theirs.
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The poor creature who vomits blood has just been murdered by God, murdered with cold steel, stabbed vilely, more vilely than by a stab in the back, for the stab was delivered from within, and in darkness!
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Who would have guessed that you were destined to be the girl who whispers all these things to passers-by! You, who used to listen to no one and would let no one take your hand.
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The petty street hawkers—vendors of peanuts and other trifles—are the only ones who know what actually has taken place in the squares, the parks and the streets where they sit all day long. . . Time drains itself into them. They have seen everything that has gone by: the ambulance, the drunkard and, perhaps, even a royal coach drawn by caparisoned horses, one of those coaches we never see any more simply because we never linger at street corners long enough.
(Translated by Victor Llona.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
Benjamin Jarnés
Benjamin Jarnés one of the newest-comers in Spain. His Paula y Paulita, 1929, is a book remarkable for its lucidity, the white light that plays over it, the broad white surfaces it exposes. The, hook is fantasy, not wholly unreminiscent of M. Giradoux, but in it are some unlooked-for strokes of psychologic observation. We have here a new universe, to be played with joyously, as children play with a toy, to be treated like a "domestic lion." The author is in quest of a new horizon, where sense and spirit may meet, and the result is the conferring of a new and fresh significance upon the object. In this world, beings are no longer to be prolonged, as shadows, into the external universe; the path lies, rather, inward and downward, in the direction of light.
M. Marcel Brion, writing in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, termed the following Preface "an introduction to a new art of reality." It is in the nature of a new Ars poetica. Here, we see the work of art springing from the shock, the outbreak of hostilities, between the artist and the world. (See the General Introduction.) What we have is the inception of a Vita nuova.
Señor Jarnés also has some new ideas on biography, which will be found set forth in the extract, following, from the Preliminary Note to his Sor Patrocinio.—S. P.
PREFACE TO "PAULA AND PAULITA"
1
I have before me a modern building. It is a country-house, a villa. Its facade is a white, neat, rectangular wall, broken here and there by black, precise squares. Each front in the new architecture is yet another square. And another the coping and footing of the balustrade. And the garden wall.
No projecting roofs, no niches, no columns, no stepping-stones, no friezes, no pediments. Planes, planes, planes. And, behind, a few trees. Lines, dry angles—perfect, bare. And, in the background, the baroque volume—gold and green—of the countryside.
I open a book of poems: agile lines, thin lyrical jets, buried pathos, emotions strangled by the implacable string of irony, drawings of smiles. And, behind, menacing, glowering, the schoolmaster's ferule, threatening to fall down upon the naked structure. If the architect is threatened by wild nature, the poet is threatened by the unbearable school.
And, in a painter's studio—let's remember Francisco Bores'—canvases stained with ashen greys, with earthen whites, among which one glimpses dim, tremulous, rudimentary shapes, sketches of beings, larval structures, supportless, without tentacles to enslave attention, without any anxiety to reap laurels: lyrical stems of unknown flowers sticking out of a ground made bare, stripped by the harrow of its ultimate roots.
Art has gone down to the Jordan and cast into it its load of misdemeanors. As it returns from its baptism, it keeps putting off the time to dress up again. Freed of the overwhelming burden of the ages, it takes breath and enjoys the holiday, unable yet to set to work again, to sin again—for in sin alone is it possible to prove original, since virtue prefers the common rule. Art stammers. Staggers. Abstains.
Art is afraid.
It knows not what to paint upon the bare wall.
2
That is the ultimate reason for the bare, virgin rectangle and the grey canvas.
Art is afraid. This is an artistic period which has nothing heroic about it, unless we might call heroism an excess of prudence. The artist has nothing with which to cover up his nudity, thrown as he is out of the fertile paradise of exuberant fancy, of dishevelled caprice. You feel that this facade, this canvas, this page would repulse the least suspicious relief, be it of the most sombre kind. And all out of fear. Out of fear of renewing its broken relationships with the traditional wardrobe.
Indiscretion, frivolity, lightness, impatience are banished. But so great a distrust becomes suspicious. It resembles shy poverty too closely. Azorin has remarked that the young contemporary artists are not sufficiently daring. Corpus Barga had already spoken of the timidity of certain Spanish writers.
True, true. A petrified writer alone could speak of audacities in the juvenile art of the present. The most intelligent among the artists of our day have fallen into that timidity—a graceful sister to fear which is affrighted by any noisy exhibition. Some sentence their work, already extensive, to delicacies, to revisions, to eternal reservations. The boldest artist—and the most timid—take to cover, shrink into themselves. Out of disdain? Out of debility?
Perhaps because they handle the compass much too well. In art it may be necessary to be somewhat blind, to possess the tiniest dose of heedlessness. And in our day the writer knows too well the roads which are to be avoided carefully. Being confronted by the impossibility of inventing new ones, he inhibits himself.
Never before was everything so completely at a beginning. A sincere mind venerates and admires its betters, but does not believe it to be its duty to follow their examples of fecundity.
(Gongora's case is unique and perhaps not as convincing as it is believed to be. A passionate centennial celebration caused his Soledades to be re-read with fervor, and this re-reading—which for many was a first reading—kindled in a number of our poets a nervous anxiousness, like that of a child on a holiday, to repeat the graceful modes and the decayed themes of Don Luis. But the celebration passed away, and with it that curious albeit scarcely fecund mimicry. The splendid past shall continue gravely wheedling the professor and the scholar, but the true artist prefers to be on his way without turning his head.)
Art is returning to its cell. In architecture, to the plane. In the pentagram, to the pure melodic line. In the poem, to the skeleton of the image.
Nudity. Point of departure. Swimming-pool. Sanitarium.
And a great fear, a great fear of committing fresh mistakes. No prodigal son will undertake the match forward. All are too fond of the classical she-calf that keeps sending her father away to be butchered. Only the youngest of all, the younger brother—as in André Gide's poem—will know enough to run out into the fields without saying a word, toward the lands of adventure. Although he may stub his toe against the acorns, against the pigs.
3
A work of art is always an impact against something which was there, near us, living plainly, without presuming that out of itself a miracle might come forth. There is always a breaking out of hostilities between the world and the true artist, when an original work begins to be produced. Of a sudden the easy rhythm of things is interrupted, and a hurried, feverish, intense tempo begins; a new life begins: that of art.
To this state no undetermined artist may arrive, to it timorous art may not arrive. Such an artist is afraid of failing in the execution, and he awaits the impetus of some superior force.
For this reason, he avoids all immoderate acts. He fails to remember that the execution may be a series of unsuspected moments of genius. All preconceived ideas are very doubtful in art. To such a state of exceptional wonders—as Paul Valéry would put it—fear cannot arrive.
And we have come to such a pass that the man endowed with decision is awaited. Things are around us laden with possibilities of beauty, as with a luminous inexhaustible electricity which we could bring forth suddenly by placing our finger near them. Everything, in turn, awaits the rape of the artist. Matter proves always docile to a sincere mind whose vitality is a continuous creation.
And fear can only originate in a scant acquaintance with beings; and this scant acquaintance can only be born out of a lack of love, and such a lack of love can only be the fruit of a fatal cowardly knowledge. A paltry perception of men and things may kindle no passionate light: I mean that perception which neither books nor years may teach. And this flame alone can shorten the distance between the world and ourselves. We shall therefore name fear a certain spiritual coldness—which at times is heedlessly attributed to reason—capable of opening wide empty spaces between the mind and things.
4
We must again fall in love with the world, laughingly, like children. We must become intimate with it. Be disrespectful to it. Pull it by the mane, like a tame lion.
We must remember that an idea can only take shape in what is perceptible to the senses. In that perception which we have made ours, which we have kneaded into a mass where the personal yeast of our mind has taken hold. Without gesticulating. Without shrieking.
Art is afraid, because it has forgotten the road where the world and the mind come together the road of intelligent love, capable of propelling stars, ideas and men.
Only such a love may cause us again to paint something upon the bare wall.
(Translated by Victor Llona.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
A PRELIMINARY NOTE
TO
Sor Patrocinio
A novel is the art of creating a man, a biography is the art of resuscitating one. When the writer has within reach of his hand that wonderful mud out of which was kneaded an original structure capable of thought and of love, he approaches the grave—the museum, the archives, the in-folio—removes the great stone and cries:
"Come forth!"
Voice of an artist, voice of a man capable of transmitting the distant live vibration of a personality. The voice of the people, which was never the voice of God, would evoke a phantom. A popular biography is something unthinkable, because the people nourish themselves with irradiations, that is to say with fables, with shapeless facts. Likewise the voice of the erudite man—the merely erudite man—because he would evoke a Lazarus bound like the Biblical one hand and foot with grave-clothes which are neither rent nor loosened by the sound of the divine voice, leaving the resuscitated one as active and lively as in the days when he actually lived. An amorphous mass of materials cannot produce a biography. No more so than a biography can be produced by a swarm of legends.
And even less by a swarm of prejudices. The true biographer does not intend reconstituting a personality according to the mummified and reiterated opinion of a group. The true biographer must heed no voice whatever, he must behold with serenity the heap of possible documents, and set forth in the company of his Lazarus over the same roads which the latter once trod. Obeying his model, while in the novel, the model must be the obedient one.
It would be absurd to imagine an absolutely impartial biographer. Not so much to imagine a generous one, with wide comprehension, never hostile to tradition, but always on the watch for the excesses of inflated traditions, for one-sided fanatical documents, for eulogies, for derogatory insinuations, for everything which is a consequence of feverish states of mind, of hot turbid moments, of opinions.
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Even so, in a biography there are two things: historical truth, expression of a physiognomy. Historical truth—a tame snake—may slip between our fingers; but we might perhaps sketch a few lines, express a few authentic gestures. (The purpose of biography—says Sidney Lee—is "the truthful transmission of a personality." A difficult task. The work of a scholar and an artist both.)
That is the reason why all biography is incomplete.
With it all, that rich product of the mind: personality, that wonderful product of the earth: man, are again captivating the attention of science and the arts. A desire to confront man is inducing both writers and readers to review bit by bit the vibrant, seductive flood of the human river. Because each biography of a great man is a window out of which we lean to gaze upon the pageant of the ages, through which we appraise any glint of culture, any tension or extreme relaxation of energies.
There are two ways of knowing the past: through texts and through men. These sometimes go together, especially when the distant past is concerned; but the proper study of a good biographer must be—like a good novelist's—that of psychological microscopy. To be able to read in chronicles and in man the things which a first glance usually fails to find in either; to be able to discover that fine net of unaccomplished purposes, of influences, of erotic failures pompously disguised as triumphs of the mind, of diminutive cruelties, of pride dressed up in the vestments of humility. . . .
And so, some fact which we deem over-known—or openly inexpressive—shall offer us a novel foreshortening; we shall draw nearer, in so far as it is possible, to the slow elaboration of great events, to the painful disintegration of tottering structures. We shall become acquainted with the whole family of tiny rodents who keep on digging, while the pick-axe and the bomb-shell repose, joyfully and trustfully.
The vast historical canvas is—in all the arts—a monumental text which can hardly serve us further except as an emotional reminder of altogether old-fashioned costumes. It depicts another act of the "great human comedy," but we wish to see something mote than a group of actors who know their parts. Rather do we seek those who barely know them, those who are rehearsing them and have stage-fright; those who at every step are compelled to improvise and, in the act of improvising, are apt to reveal themselves.
A vacillation is always more significant than a rectilinear act. The curves of character are those a good biographer must study, just as the curves of the road are those a good chauffeur must study. Not the easy straight lines between extreme points, in preference to the winding path.
To know the latter is to know an intimacy.
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Art returns to man. The writer enjoys penetrating into those fields of experimentation, into those fecund hot-houses where the plant—man—is cultivated, which we call biographies.
We have wished to fill out with sincerity the graphic chart of a soul possessing a savory emotional content, if not a great mind.
(Translated by Victor Llona.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
Pedro Salinas
Pedro Salinas is another of the youngest. The Spanish translator of Proust, he prolongs the intimate tradition of Antonio Machado.—J. C.
RAVINGS ANENT THE POPLAR AND THE CYPRESS
Introduction. As you went by in the train, your idle glance was caught by two distant trees, stuck in the deepest indentation of the horizon, identical landmarks, both, like the twin verticals of a gigantic and frustrated H. The somnolent attention of your mind shook itself and, spurred on by a childish celerity and diligence, rushed to its duties and, leaving the train, climbed slopes, negotiated short-cuts, cleared ditches and, having reached the distant horizon, satisfied itself by means of scrupulously meticulous tests of vision and of feeling, that those two trees that looked so much alike, were in fact a poplar and a cypress. Whereupon your mind flew promptly back to the nearest station where the train stood awaiting its return and, settling once more in the inspiring solitude of the carriage which was so nicely balanced by the fugitive and allusive company of the lateral landscapes, it wrote in its American note-book, "Aphorism for the morrow; At a distance, alike; at close range, so parallel that never the twain shall meet." The writing was shaky, either on account of the excitement caused by such a discovery, or of the moving seat which any rolling railroad conveyance offers to the steadiest aphorist.
Poplar. Last night, beneath the concave whisperings of the stars, you were, do confess it, content with your fate and even amused for a few hours in a deep and lustral immobility. But at the earliest dawn doth jump the earliest wind, and once more you threw yourself into the tortured computation of profiles in motion against peaceful horizons, of outlines undone like a tress of hair in their very first intention to live, all full, all replete to overflowing, asphyxiated in your transitory shape by the affluence in your womb of shapes so numerous and so eager already to try themselves out. If you shape yourself one hundred times, one hundred times you unshape yourself, and you live like a chain, from one link to the next. You enjoy but scanty fame in the vicinity, poor poplar, and despite your frantic gesticulations, you shall not escape being a sower of intentions in the midst of this wilful Castilian wilderness which is so keenly aware of what is being done. For you are never very far from that tame and equivocal angel who keeps whispering into your diminutive ears the dangerous advice that your shape never shall become definite except through a tortured sequence of infinite deformations.
Cypress. No one ever caught you learning, so short was your apprenticeship. Your unfailing root hardly sinks into the ground, yet it manages to find the juices of buried discipline. With that lordly dignity which is inherent to all achievements of form, you concentrate your vital efforts upon a proud and confident insistency to cast a straight profile against the soft blue landscape or the abrupt tormented sky. And when it comes, the day finds you toiling over the patient undertaking of your own sculpture, lying in wait for the sole advice of your own shadow as cast upon the ground by sun or moon.
Poplar, water. Every landscape dances to the music of its water, be it sea, river or creek. But where in summer—the seas being so far away, all watercourses without the tiniest trickle and the sierras snowless now—could Castile find her life-waters, if not in the humid and indefatigable mobility of the poplars, in the vast wavebreaking of the distant poplar groves, in the bubbling of the foliage and in that arid drop, the poplar's leaf with which one is spattered of a windy evening? And delusive rivers and seas all dance their water behind that precise and transparent veil which is hung in front of the landscape by the dry Castilian dusk.
Incidental anecdote. For eight days we had walked nothing but the asphalted prairies of the city, and our only solace was the luminous mass of shadows cast by the street-lights, out of their wonderful nocturnal foliage. And as you were homesick for the ground and for the poplars of Castile, I took you to the Art Museum. Neither did you tread ground there, but polished wood whose smell of turpentine tricked you into imagining that you were vaguely crossing strange fields overgrown with grass emitting some penetrating and artificial perfume, in an Australian estate. You saw no sky; instead, wise crystal-hangings where the light of the fiery days was tempered and domesticated. And no horizon other than the four walls pierced by the small window-frames of the pictures, some of which through oversight were deprived of glass-panes, so that one could lean into them with half the body out. I lead you to the portrait room and there, in the tiny eyes of an unknown character (black dress, faded beard, earthly color) stood your Castilian tree, timid and vacillating soul, in love and weeping like a summer poplar immediately after the rain—all shaky before this and that, light, air, smoke, poplar. Jokingly, you wrote in the catalogue: "Identified one portrait of an unknown man by El Greco. Portrait of a poplar with vague physiognomical and vestimentary accessories. To be transferred to the landscape room."
Poplar, autumn. Tumults of silver, fervors of gold, pomp and circumstance of May, pride of October, farewell, farewell. The wintry wind spurs on the dolorous penitences, and all along the paths in Castile the bare poplars twist themselves with the dry rattling of neat skeletons, to flagellate their own white bones, final miseries. Upon the ground, maddened by persecution and agony, closely pursued by the ascetic pack of hounds of the cold northern blasts, the ultimate sensualities go fleeing, golden dry leaves.
Cypress, before Death. The cypress is an irrevocable decision of self-salvation. Not for a single day, imbodied in the withered impulse of an unbreakable outline, its will has swerved away from the celestial goal; and its never-changed sack-cloth, worn out and greyed by rain, sunshine, wind-storms and years, cheerfully offers the best vestments to disinterestedness. In this foggy night, which is a close likeness to Death, which is the very brink of Death, one may see on the cypress, worn down to the bone and spindle-shaped, that long and incorporeal whiteness of the shapes with which the painters represent in their pictures the souls rising to well-deserved heavens, with the help cf two sustaining angels.
Poplar, wood of the Cross. Though you may not die for all, you suffer for all. Neither the sky's leaden cloud, nor the beagle asleep in the ditch, nor those tenuous ringlets of hair, so quiet upon a girlish nape, nor the bells hung and strangled in their spires, nobody, nobody feels that inimical fleeting wind which passes through the air, nobody shudders or sacrifices himself. It merely dashes against your tiny leaves, against yourself, O poplar, and while the entire afternoon is spared anxiety because it is dull, deaf and low, you, sentinel for all, stand in the apparent total calm to defend the desperate duty of delicate longings.
(Translated by Victor Llona.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
José Bergamin
José Bergamin has one of the most unusual turns of mind to be found among the young generation; in him is to be found a singular critical lucidity combined with a tortuous and arbitrary passion that bears the mark of Unamuno.—J. C.
CHARACTERS
The Exacting One
He demanded everything with violence. He accosted everyone, brutally, quick and angry, to demand, were it only a trifle. He did not covet perfection in anything nor in any one, but expected from everything a demand corresponding to his own. At times, without knowing what he wanted or what he did not want, he became wild, demanding that his wants be attended to, and if they were attended to at once, he would become sullen, absorbed, as though he had received a blow in the pit of the stomach; later, he would apologize clumsily and wait a while until something came up, some deficiency in the people around him, that should render his demand without appeal, imperative and absolute.
The Fake Jew
He was not a Jew but he laughed like one. His was the mock laughter of the Jew, who has no laughter and wishes to imitate the laughter of others because he knows that laughter is the antidote to Semitism, that laughter kills the Jew (and the Devil as well).
He belonged to the variety of fat Jews, the most avaricious one, of those Jews who are inflated with water because they shut up their kidneys like their purses and get swollen and whitish with tumefaction.
And worst of all, he had a rabbit's face.
I never put any trust in his friendship; everything in him was falsification, deviousness, duplicity and double-crossing.
Surely he lacked a soul since, though he were not soulless, his thirst-compelling animation was as false as his laughter.
His falsehood was twofold: he was not even a Jew.
The Admirable One
It looked as though the stars were reflected in the depths of his eyes as in the wells of his profound enjoyment. The quiet water of his pupils made creation transparent by reversing it in its magic mirror for the purpose of re-creating it; the universe was a fancy of his which his lyrical zeal improved upon at every turn. He made everything beautiful—poetically—merely by glancing at it. He gazed upon his own thoughts, in solitude, as upon a naked body.
He possessed the diamond-like virtue of cutting crystal without breaking it or hurting himself; he isolated himself upon his crys- tals—a live instrument—to obtain, like a musical sound, beauty pure and exact.
(Translated by Victor Llona.)
(Courtesy of the Author.)
- ↑ The point here lies in Doña Emerenciana's confusion of the two dramatists, Rójas-Zorilla, born in 1607, and José Zorilla, 1818—1893, the author of Don Juan Tenorio, an extremely popular piece in the Spanish romantic theatre. (Translator's Note.)