The Spanish Temper Read online

  The traditional fanaticism of the Spanish Catholic is the expression of a people who are naturally prone to scepticism: they go from one extreme to the other. Spanish atheism is as violent and intolerant as Spanish piety. The Basques have a different character. Their Catholicism is solid in all classes and is not in the least fanatical. They have little religious superstition and have little regard—perhaps because they are poor in imagination and poetry—for the image-loving and decorative forms of Catholicism. Their religion is plain; their faith is immovable—Qui dit Basque, dit Catholique—and is married to the sense of tradition which rules them. In this they have the integration of primitive societies. That is to say their religion is racial and dispenses with both the aggressive and the mystical feeling of other kinds of Catholicism. In the Spanish Civil War the Basque Catholics fought for their autonomy beside the Republicans—the so-called “Reds,” who were commonly anticlerical, when they were not irreligious—presumably because the Basques knew their religion could not be endangered. The Basque Christianity is closer to the Old Testament than to the New and is even a little Protestant in its plain, practical simplicity. The Basque novelist Pío Baroja, who speaks of himself as an anarchist and an atheist, goes as far as to question both the traditionalism and the religiosity of his people. He recalls the testimony of mediaeval missionaries who found the Basques at that time completely pagan, and Ortega y Gasset has pointed out that in the Basque language there was no word for God. For this conception the Basques used a circumlocution: el señor de lo alto, the feudal lord higher up, the chief or the laird, a simple idea springing from their tribal organization and not from the religious imagination. The religious spirit of the Basques is exemplified by Saint Ignatius de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. Whatever may have been the visionary experiences of the saint, he thought of his mission in the practical terms of soldiery: the militant company obeying orders from someone “higher up.” Elsewhere in Spain the Church has become separated from the people, in the Basque provinces it is united with them.

  The Basques, like the Asturians and the people of Navarre, live in one of the satisfied areas of Spain—those coastal provinces of mild climate where the rainfall is regular and plentiful. They are either farmers on the family community system in which the property belongs to the family and the head of the family council decides on his successors among his children, or they are sharecroppers—and the success of this system lies in the liberal and reasonable spirit in which it has been worked. Yet every statement one makes about Spain has to be modified immediately. Navarre is a Basque province that has lost its language, and the Navarrese, shut up in their mountains, are in fact fanatical in religion and they are a main source of the ultramontane form of conservatism, called Carlism. Navarrese economy, too, is successful and prospers. But as the train travels south, the rainfall dwindles in Castile, the peasant farmer becomes poor; money, not crops, becomes the landowner’s reward, the religious quarrel begins. We are among a different race of more dramatic, more egotistical, less reasonable men.

  In the rest of Spain the Basque is thought of as insular, obstinate, reserved, and glum, a pedestrian and energetic fatalist, working in his fields, putting his steel-pointed goad into the oxen that plough his land, making the wines of his provinces, and smelting his iron ore; or he is thought of as a sardine fisherman and packer in those reeking little fishing towns of the coast where they stack the tins. These sea towns are clean, prim, dour places. There is a narrow gap between the headlands through which the Biscayan tide races into a scooped-out haven or lagoon—all harbours of the Bay of Biscay are like this from Pasajes, near the frontier, to the mountain-bound harbours of Corunna. It is a coast that smells of Atlantic fish, the sky is billowy white and blue, or the soft sea rain comes out of it. Basques who can afford it drive out of the grey, warm, glum days towards Álava and Castile, to breathe dry air and feel the sun, which reigns over the rest of Spain like a visible and ferocious god. There the Basque in his dark blue beret, which sits square on his stolid forehead, is thought of as an oddity. His family is matriarchal. The breaking of the marriage bond is forbidden. Even the second marriages of widows or widowers is disliked. Rodney Gallop, in his scholarly book, The Book of the Basques, describes the wedding night of a widow. The mockery was kept up with the beating of tin cans, the ringing of bells, and blowing of horns until sunrise. This custom is called the galarrotza (night noise). It occurs, of course, in many peasant countries.

  My own collection of Basques contains indeed one dour character: a man who ran a bar in France, one of the exiles. He was a municipal employee and fought against Franco in Bilbao. He was also obstinately determined to visit his family there and did so twice secretly. But money affairs cropped up. It was necessary to go to Bilbao openly. The matter proceeded in the usual manner of the peninsula. First his relatives used what “influence” they could find, working through the relatives of relatives. He was told to come. This was above seven years ago and required courage, for at that time there were tens of thousands of political prisoners; but in addition to courage this man had the insurmountable Basque conscience. He fought (he told the authorities) because his conscience told him to do so; not necessarily for Basque autonomy, but simply because it was the duty of municipal employees to obey the lawful government. Such a conscience must have maddened and annoyed the Falange who had done just the opposite, but, for all their revengefulness and intolerance, the Spaniards recognize the man in their enemies, and when passions have fallen, maintain their dignity and seek for the modus vivendi in the same glance.

  The other Basques I have known were Unamuno and Pío Baroja, the novelist. In Unamuno one saw the combativeness, the mischief, and pugnacious humour of the Basques. A brief light of unforgettable charm, delicacy, and drollery touches their set faces. In Pío Baroja it is the same. I sat in his dark flat in Madrid and listened to the gentle, tired, clear voice of the very old man talking very much in the diffident, terse way of his books, watched the shy, sharp smile that never becomes a laugh, and the sly naïve manner.

  “But who else painted your portrait, Don Pío?”

  “Many people. Picasso, I believe, did one once.”

  “Picasso! Where is it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It may exist. Perhaps it got lost. It had no value.”

  As evasive as a peasant, but say anything against the Pope or the Jesuits and he is joking at once. I asked about the puritanical Archbishop of Seville.

  “Never trust a Spanish archbishop when he behaves like an Englishman,” Baroja says.

  Baroja once signed the visitors’ book in some place and where he was expected to add his profession, rank, or titles, wrote: “A humble man and a tramp.”

  He sat at his plain oak table in an upright chair, in needy clothes and the same blue beret on his grey hair—it seemed to me—that he had worn twenty years ago when I first saw him. His eyes were pale blue, his face very white—one can imagine the baker’s flour still on it, for he once ran a bakery with his brother. It is a sad sight, the old age of a writer who, in addition to the usual burdens, has to bear the affront of the Franco censorship, which refused to allow him to publish his book on the Civil War.

  “They said it showed the Spanish character in a bad light. And that is true. We see now we are a nation of barbarians.”

  Baroja and Unamuno were broken by the Civil War. Baroja has fallen into melancholy. Unamuno, who came out on Franco’s side as a good many liberals did, heard of the atrocities and rushed out into the streets of Salamanca screaming curses on Franco, the Falange, and his country, and went out of his mind.

  Baroja is an exceptional Basque in his hostility to the Church and in his anarchism; he has lived chiefly in Madrid. But he is thoroughly Basque in his obstinacy and his tenacity and his droll humour. Unamuno had the same obstinacy. His book Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida—The Tragic Sense of Life—is one of the most important works in the last fifty years of Spanish literature. He was the outstandi
ng figure in the movement towards Europeanization, which began after the loss of Cuba in 1898, and he was all the more important because he embodied the ambiguity of the Spanish attitude to the modern world. The Basques live in a prosperous and liberal-minded community; the rhetorical exaggerations and the desuetude of the rest of Spain are alien to them. They are, in fact, “modern” to a degree of modernity which not even the Catalans have attained. All the more, therefore, was Unamuno conscious of the need of Europe, all the more of the price. His life became a battleground for the quarrel between Reason and Faith, between the European consciousness and the mediaeval soul. The Tragic Sense of Life sets out the essence of a profound conflict in the Spanish mind on its opening page, where he describes the subject of his book: not man in the abstract, but “the man of flesh and bone, who is born, suffers and dies—who, above all, dies and who does not wish to die.”

  Unamuno’s book is a search for the solution to the problem which cannot be solved: man’s agonized desire to be assured of personal immortality. We cannot have this assurance, but out of the agony our soul must find its energy. With its pugnacious egoism, and its Quixotic quality, Unamuno’s philosophy described the positive side of the Spanish spirit, and came closer to the positive spirit of the Spaniards in the Counter-Reformation than their reactionary successors have done. There is more than a touch of the Protestant preacher in Unamuno, and the great figures of the Counter-Reformation were, in fact, counter-protesters who had not yet dulled and hardened into an oligarchy. Unamuno’s energy and truculence, his nonconformity before the Castilian mind and authority, were very Basque.

  Chapter II

  None of this has been Spain, so far. Spain begins after Miranda de Ebro, where one sees the last big river of silver water and the last rain-washed, glass-enclosed balconies of the north. The train begins its climb on to the tableland of Castile, which occupies the centre of the country and which stretches east and west from Portugal to the mountains above Valencia and from the Ebro to the Andalusian valleys. The floor rises upwards of 1,500 feet above the sea—Madrid in the middle of it over 2,000 feet up—and it is crossed by saw-edged mountains which rise to 10,000 feet. The train enters the Pancorbo Pass, a place of horror like all the Spanish passes, for the rock crowds in, comes down in precipitous, yellow shafts, and at the top has been tortured into frightening animal shapes by the climate. Nine months of winter, three of hell, is the proverbial description of Castilian weather, the weather of half of Spain: a dry climate of fine air under a brassy sun, where the cold wind is wicked and penetrating, a continual snake-fang flicker against the nostrils. Castile is a steppe. Its landscape is the pocked and cratered surface of the moon.

  For myself, the passage through Pancorbo is the moment of conversion. Now one meets Spain, the indifferent enemy. Out of this clear, rare air the sun seems to strike, the senses become sharper, the heart and mind are excited, the spirit itself seems to clear itself of dreams and to dry out like the crumbling soil; one feels oneself invaded by the monotonous particularity of Spanish speech. It is a dry, harsh, stone-cracking tongue, a sort of desert Latin chipped off at the edges by its lisped consonants and dry-throated gutturals, its energetic “r’s,” but opened by its strong emphatic vowels. It is a noble tongue with a cynical parrot-like sound as it is spoken around one, but breaking out of this mutter into splendid emphasis. It is a language in which one hears each word, at any rate in Castile—in Andalusia whole sentences wash down the throat like the sound of water coming out of a bottle—and each word is as distinct and hard as a pebble. Castilian is above all a language which suggests masculinity, or at any rate it is more suited to the male voice than to the feminine voice, which, in Spain, shocks one by its lack of melody. Spaniards tell one that when they return from northern Europe, where the voices of women are melodious and sweet, they are shocked by the hard, metallic, or gritty, nasal voices of their Spanish women, and by the shouting pitch all Spaniards use.

  On the steppe one is electrified, and one can feel one’s life burn faster. Like the Spaniards, one sinks into torpor in the heat and one wakes out of it in flashes of intensity. So clear is the air, so hard the hard line of the horizon, that when the sun goes down, it seems to drop suddenly like a golden stone. The sun seems to be a separate thing, the sky a thing, the air a thing that can be felt in particular grains in the fingers or that can be caught, as even on windless days it keeps up its continual hard, wing-like flutter under the nose. In the green north all sights are bound together by mist, by the damp, and by greenness itself, and our minds dream on from one thing to another in a delicious vagueness, a compassionate blur; but in the south, and in Spain especially, there is no misting of the sights, everything is separate, everything is exposed, and there is no mercy extended from one sight to another. There is no illusion, no feeding of the imagination, and, in this sense, no perspective. The tree, the house, the tower, the wall stand equal in the sight.

  Dust and yellow earth have begun; the grass, if there are patches of it, is wire, the trees only mark the roads, there are no others, and the roads, too, are rare. It is steppe, not desert, a steppe variegated only by wilderness. And there appear those strange flat-topped hills of the country. A half-mile long, perhaps, and anything from 400 to 450 feet high, they have been planed off at the summit and are water-hollowed in their flanks. They are as pale as china clay. Half a dozen of these dry hills would be a curiosity, like the Wiltshire barrows, but these mesetas stretch in their hundreds, miles deep like some geometry written on the land by wind and drought, an immense, wearying encampment. Some are pocked with tufts of grass: here and there some peasant has tried to cultivate a lower slope, but the water clearly drains off them and most of them are bare. No house or village is on them; they are the ghosts of nature and they pass in pointless fantasy.

  These hills bleach the country and, in the heat, the air trembles over them. Their moment is the evening. When the sun goes down they are transfigured, for first they fall into lavender pools of shadow, then into deep blue and at last violet. For a moment or two the sight is weird and beautiful; then it becomes ghastly, for they take on the colour of bruised bodies, the corpse colour of those dead Christs the Spanish painters like to paint with the realism of the mortuary, the sick skin of the wrung-out stomachs and malodorous mouths of El Greco’s saints. The Spanish painters have dipped their brushes into the death-palette of the steppe, and that night change is one of the frightening sights of Europe.

  Castile is a landscape of hidden villages, suddenly come upon, like crocks of earthenware in the soil, crumbling in the summer heat, sodden in the torrential rains of the winter; it is a place of sunsets in the haze of dust and of short twilights when the sky at the last moment goes green over the sharp violet mountains, which seem to have been cut out by a knife. The towns have no suburbs, but end abruptly in a mediaeval wall or the long wall of some property. The landscape of Castile, Unamuno said, is for monotheism, not pantheism. God is a precise thing like a stone, the Christ is a real man bleeding, and the blood of his wounds stains the mother’s cheeks as she leans against him; the Virgin is a real girl. In this country the cemeteries are lonely, for they lie well out of the towns, with their enormous memorials, like small palaces. The black cypress marks the spot. Here if you die, you die. The peasants of these villages are like dethroned kings, grave in their speech, phlegmatic in their humour, with an irony as dry as Sancho Panza’s, like the voice of the earth itself:

  And so my master, these honours that your Grace would confer upon me as your servant and a follower of knight-errantry—which I am, being your Grace’s squire—I would have you convert, if you will, into other things that will be of more profit and advantage to me; for though I hereby acknowledge them as duly received, I renounce them from this time forth until the end of the world. [Samuel Putnam’s translation.]

  If one stands on the edge of the meseta on the outskirts of some place like Burgos, the first big town, the night comes down to one’s feet. The lonelin
ess is complete. There is the warm smell of the land and its pungent scrub, the trilling of the crickets as numerous as the large stars, which come so low in the plain that one might put out one’s hand to touch them; and, to mark the human isolation, one hears the sound of some labourer tapping through the dust on his donkey and singing one of those songs which are made out of nothing and seem to have half Africa or half India in their melancholy fall, in those final “a’s” and “o’s” which drag on and break into smaller and smaller fragments of sound, till they vanish like sand:

  “Era la noche de la fiesta-a-a-a-a.”

  All songs of desire and jealousy, the reminiscences of the casuistical details of passion. And it is not a night of blackness, but of some dark and luminous substance: that dark silver one sees hanging like a body over Goya’s Dos de Mayo. If El Greco painted out of the day and the land, Goya paints out of the night.

  The hours are long in the sun in Castile. When the table-top hills fall back, one sees the small rivers in the yellow soil, and the miles of cornland where the mattock or the primitive, cattle-drawn plough has granulated the earth. For the steppe is not all desert; parts of it are wheat-bearing, and, like long, low white redoubts, walled in, as one would think for defence, one sees the warehouses of the corn and the olive-oil companies. As in the Basque countries, the land is broken up in the northern parts—around Burgos for example—into small properties which are minutely divided among members of a family. Sons are what a man wants, though when he dies he may have to split his ground equally into patches of an acre or two, even divide one olive tree among all so that they may own no more than a branch each. In these parts the people are very poor, and one would expect to find that hatred of the Church and the landlords which is common in other poor parts. There is no hatred. Their small property, their mercilessly divided crops, make the peasants deeply conservative. And at night, in the harvest time, the back streets of Burgos roar with the shouts and quarrels of the wine-drinkers—a sound of drunkenness I have heard nowhere else in Spain, except in Andalusia, where they drink sherry by the dozen glasses; for outside of Burgos the Castilians are the soberest people in Europe. Only when one leaves Burgos well behind and when the average rainfall is even smaller does one meet the peasants who are hostile to landlord, moneylender, and Church.