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The genius of SpainAubrey F.G. BellPublished online: 05 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Aubrey F.G. Bell (1936) The genius of Spain, Bulletin of Spanish Studies,13:49, 4-13, DOI: 10.1080/14753825012331363708

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4 Bulletin of Spanish Studies

THE G E N I U S OF SPAIN

FOR every hundred thinkers who have turned to France or Germany, or for every hundred artists who have turned to Italy, scarcely one perhaps has turned for interest and pleasure and enlightenment to Spain. Possibly the reason for this preference and this neglect is that of all countries Spain's culture is the most blended, broad, and composite. It is the less superficially or immediately attractive; its solid front is apt to be a little formidable. It specializes less than that of any other land, and it thus appears to provide less of pure beauty and pure thought. The emotional, intellectual, ~esthetic and ethical elements are combined and harmonized, sometimes imperfectly, in a living whole. Those who prefer art and literature to life (and as life becomes more and more a whirlwind of atoms, not unlike what it may have been in the beginning, there is something to be said for this view) may not find their heart 's desire in Spain, where life and the people enter so largely into art and literature.

A modern art critic has remarked that " a f t e r the Renaissance, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a reaction against the Italian cult of beauty became general, and it was in Spain that this reaction assumed the most violent character, because in that country the Renaissance was repugnant to the character of the people, as it was in Germany." He might with equal truth have said, "' as it was in England." The Spanish ideal of beauty is indeed essentially different from that of Italy. It consists less in external form and a smooth perfection, more in vital energy and spiritual intensity; it is more integral, perhaps more human and universal; but it has in it less of the purely ~esthetic, the finished, the exquisite. It seeks to unite breadth and harmony, even as the sea rounds a piece of glass into a thing of beauty but does not mould it into a fine point.

Perfect proportion, like unclouded light, Is but a faultless model; small defect, Conjoint with excellence, more moves and wins, Making the heavenly human.

So Bacon demanded in beauty a strangeness of proportion, and Browning:

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for ? All is silver-grey, Placid and perfect with my art: the worse !

There is little of this placid perfection to be found in Spain. It has sometimes been thought that the heights of Spanish poetry, a lyric by Luis de Le6n or St. John of the Cross, are cold and placid. And so they

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are; but only as mountain heights appear shining and tranquil after a cruel whirling of snowflakes. These effects have not been attained by placid means, but through an agony of culture, experience, thought and suffering. Placid is not a word that one can apply to Spanish art, not even to the Madonnas of Murillo. " A l l empty Spanish painter is an impossibility," says Don Salvador de Madariaga.

Yet, for all their strangeness and breadth of content, it is with form rather than with thought that Spanish art and literature are concerned. And it is this perhaps that has led some critics to deny all originality to the Spanish genius. There seem indeed to be three phases. Super- ficially the traveller is struck at the first blush by Spain's original aspects. After further study the originality appears to be merged in the monotonous and commonplace. Years pass, and out of this commonness seems to emerge a peculiar and deeper originality. Mr. Somerset Maugham has not studied Spain and her art and literature superficially, but in his recent book Don Fernando he seems to be hovering between the second and third of these phases. He has an engaging sincerity, too rare in critics: a writer may be Isaiah or ¢Eschylus, Milton or King David, but if Mr. Maugham sees nothing in him, he will say so. Of Spanish litera- ture he says that

it must be allowed that there is nothing else [after Don Quixotel the foreigner can read (except perhaps a few poems by the enchanting Saint John of the Cross) that will leave him spiritually very much the richer. The fact is that the Spanish are not a highly intellectual people. They have added surprisingly little to the great stock of thought that forms the working material of our world. They have produced neither a philosopher nor a man of science of the first rank. Their best poetry, put t ing aside the ballads, was derived from Italy. Their great mystics took their ideas from Germany and the Low Countries.

Of Lope de Vega he writes:

With all his fluency, profuse invention, eye for dramatic effect and nimble sense of life's multifarious scene, he had a commonplace mind. He was a good-natured, normal, sensual man. In fact he was exactly what a dramatist should be if he is to have success.

Vel~zquez

is somewhat superficial, but he is superficial on a grand scale.

" Spaniards have never so far as I know invented anything," he remarks in another connection. Spanish literature "has spontaneity. It has strangeness. It has a savour of the soil. It represents very well those brutal, courageous, passionate, idealistic, earthy, humorous, cruel and humane men who subjected a continent and conquered a world."

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It is a literature not of sustained force but of brilliant beginnings. It is not easy to find in it works that keep a bold and decided line from start to finish. A greater knowledge is required, a larger experience and a more solid technique, to produce a complete work, with its various parts in due relation to the whole, than the Spanish authors often had. Perfection, we know, is not to be reached, but I think it has never been more completely missed than in Spain by writers with such gifts.

It is difficult to stop quoting Mr. Somerset Maugham, for his style is delightful and his remarks are always suggestive. This must be the excuse for a last and longer quotation, the final paragraphs of Don Ferna~do :

In Spain it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the build- ings. Men are its philosophies. They lived, these Spaniards of the Golden Age; they felt and did; they did not think. Life was what they sought and found, life in its turmoil, its fervour and its variety. Passion was the seed that brought them forth and passion was the flower they bore. But passion alone cannot give rise to great art. In the arts the Spaniards invented nothing. They did little in any of those they practised but give a local colour to a virtuosity they borrowed from abroad. Their literature, as I have ventured to remark, was not of the highest rank; they were taught to paint by foreign masters, but, inapt pupils, gave birth to one painter only of the very first class; they owed their archi- tecture to the Moors, the French and the Italians, and the works them- selves produced were best when they departed least from their patterns. Their pre-eminence was great, but it lay in another direction: it was a pre-eminence of character. In this I think they have been surpassed by none and equalled only by the ancient Romans. It looks as though all the energy, all the originality of this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art, in man. But it is thought that has the last word.

One thinks that there must be some flaw in the reasoning here. The great Spanish masterpieces of art and literature are there for all to see. And they have a deep originality. It is true that they are never divorced from life, from man; but are they the less living masterpieces for that ? Is it, after all, thought that has the last word in art or literature ? If we turn to the imperishable things of literature, to the Iliad, the Poem of the Cid, the Agamemnon, the (Edipus Coloneus, the Bacchce, Macbeth, the odes of Sappho or Pindar, the Greek epigrams (which have no epigram- rustic point but have the beauty of passion), the Romancero (such poems as " Count Arna!dos " or " Rosa fresca "), Manrique's "Recuerde el alma dormida " (especially the incomparable first, third and fifth stanzas), the lovely lyrics of Luis de Le6n (so Mr. Maugham rightly characterizes them), the lyrics of St. John of the Cross, Santillana's " Moza tan fer- mosa," the Song of Solomon, Leopardi's "I1 Sabato del Villaggio," Villon's

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Ballad of the Ladies of Yesteryear, Heine's " Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten," Darlo's " Juventud, divino tesoro," Goethe's " Kennst du das Land," Vicente's "Muy graciosa es la doncella," or Wordsworth's Solitary Reaper, we find always that they are concerned, not with thought but with passion, recollected emotion, by means of which they have given an eternal magic to common things. It is not the thought but the art of Milton that has made Paradise Lost immortal; it is not its thought that makes Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality great (to some of its thought Coleridge made pertinent objection); it is not Dante's theology but his passionate concentration that gives an undying fascina- tion to the Divin~ Commedia.

These masterpieces, small and great, could not have been wIitten by men who had not thought and suffered, but their greatness consists in having merged their individual thought and suffering in a common experience, a deeper unity. Talent misses, the connection; it is reserved for genius to embody the individual in tile universal. Tile question of originality or of original thought counts for very little in supreme litera- ture and art. Genius appropriates; one might say that at least a third part o f genius consists in a fine audacity. It takes not only from its own experience but from the experience of others and from the experience of others as expressed in the art of others. Genius has been described as the art of taking infinite pains; the fact is that infinite pains paralyze and kill tile art that is without genius. A genius is one who can drudge and study and suffer, and through it all preserve a fresh and exquisite sensitiveness; in his eyes the common never becomes commonplace; the life of man and the universe around him never cease to be a series of miracles, a continual subject for marvel and mystery. In his passionate individual interpretation he takes straw after straw, brick after brick, and transforms them and makes them one. In his universal sympathy he can light all these purloined sticks into an enduring glow, and in eternal moments embodies the still, sad music of humanity. He is perpetually blending; he takes a little of this vintage, a little of that, till he produces the perfect sherry. Talent is single; it may be exquisite but it has not the mellow humanity, the broad-based rich intensity of the genius whose unity represents not a single unit but a million units.

The Spanish are masters in this art of blending; and far from denoting a lack of originality, it is in this that the greatness and originality of their literature and art consist. No nation excels them in giving a vital signi- ficance to the common things. The commonplace reflection that life is fleeting becomes in the hands of Manrique an artistic possession valuable for all time. It may be said that talent is rarer in Spain than genius; in no country is there greater waste of genius; in none is there less talent to mint the gold into current change. Their literature has suffered

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accordingly, not in intrinsic merit but in wide appeal. They have not the art to present it in a sleek, convenient form; they do not bottle their wine half so cleverly as do the French. They prefer subjects old as the hills, familiar backgrounds, the sort of background that produced Prometheus Vinctus and G~dipus Rex. They do not fear superficial monotony if they can bring subtle and significant variations to the well- worn theme. They often choose titles that repel those who seek after new things. They are unsystematic, and rarely fully think out or round off a plot; as in Don Quixote, they let the reins hang loosely, hoping to arrive at the journey's end "si Dios quiere " - - i f it be the will of God. They have a deep savour of the soil and are untranslatable. Admirable, perhaps unsurpassable as is Longfellow's version of Manrique's immortal stanzas, there are passages in which the good oak of the original seems in the translation to have been covered with smoothest linoleum. The Spanish writers have the copiousness of genius, so that their readers also must labour if they wouId discover treasure. It must be confessed that all this is very discouraging to the modern lover of literature, who likes it disengaged and dapper, nicely presented in neatly labelled phials.

But all this may not affect the literature itself. The true lover of literature knows that here too "much never cost little," as the Spanish proverb assures us; that a writer must be read in the mass, that one cannot take the tongue of the ox and throw away the carcase without great loss. The loss is especially great in dealing with Spanish literature, which is a very mixed affair. To take tears and laughter, life and death, man and Nature, culture and the people, the rational and the absurd, the foreign and the indigenous, lyricism and drama, poetry and prose, the 0esthetic, intellectual and ethical, the material and the spiritual, head and heart, convention and the rebellion against convention, and, ever crowding on more sail, to blend and unite these heterogeneous elements in an artistic whole; to give significant connection to the sharply defined and indeed exuberant details and a rhythm to their combination of life and art : this was the aim and preoccupation of the great Castilian writers, the secret of their successes and of their failures. However great might be their craving to express, to leave nothing essential out of the picture, it was nevertheless an artistic craving and was accompanied by restraint, a classical reserve; the scholastic subtlety in fine distinctions was counter- balanced by a pervading sense of unity. They dwell by choice on the eternal aspect of things, rejecting moods in favour of "e l hombre entero," the complete man ; to accident and fashion they prefer the more enduring types, low figures, the peasantry, nowhere in literature and art so pro- minent as in those of Spain, from the twelfth century to the twentieth. They show a truly epic power of giving vital meaning and artistic value to common things and humble figures, just as the Spanish artists

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preferred to work on the commonest material--wood, iron, stone and leather.

It may be objected that the Spanish writers give us fullness--fullness of life at the expense of art. But it is the crowning glory of the Castilian genius that it can give harmony and uni ty to an amazing breadth of subject-matter and wealth of detail. The most remarkable instance of this in literature is perhaps Do~ Quixote, the unity of which is not lost in its ceaseless flow of invention. It is after all through minuteness of detail that we reach the universal. We know now that we live amid an infinity of subtlest change, that all things, even the atoms and electrons, "flow." Yet there is a unity of the sand beneath its countless grains, of the river perpetually renewed, of the soul in a universe minutely infinite and ever changing. In Spanish sculpture we are often confronted by infinity of detail, but we also find the unity embracing them. The high altar in the Cartuja de Miraflores may require many hours to study its detailed magnificence. The same exquisite minuteness is present in the retablo of the church of St. Nicholas at Burgos, with its subtle in- tricacies, its delicate lacework of sculpture. Yet the figure of St. Nicholas strangely dominates the crowding figures of this wonderful work of art. All great art must have this unity; without it we have but fragments of art or of life; but the art will be the greater in proportion as the difficulty in attaining this unity has been more intense; we may have an empty circle or we may have the shield of Achilles. The wealth of detail due to the generous breadth of Spanish vision and to the passion for clear expression gives richness and exuberance. But if exuberance is charac- teristic of Spanish art and literature, the vitally significant fact is that this exuberance is not sprawlingly horizontal; it is combined with a vertical individual vision, with a sincerity which gives it character, restraint and unity.

All great art, perhaps--certainly all great Spanish art--is funda- mentally religious; in other words it has in it an element of mysticism. It is because the Spanish writers and artists have this mystic sense of a higher unity that they have been able to proceed by flashes, almost at random; to indulge their love of fragmentarism, of particular detail abundant and emphatic till it seems almost (but never quite) to break through the frame, to step out of the picture, as in a painting by Vel~zquez or in a Spanish play. The vertical character of Spanish art and literature may be said to be a thing peculiar to Spain; one might almost narrow further and say peculiar to Castile (and it should always be remembered that the Poem of the Cid, the prose of King Alfonso X., the Romancevo, the Co~las of Manrique, the verse and prose of those two peerless arch- priests, par nobile fratrum; the incomparable tragi-comedy generally known as Za Cetestina, L~zarillo de Tormes, E1 Busc6n (born in a less

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spacious, more cynical age), the History of Mariana, the lyrics of St. John of the Cross and Luis de Le6n, the drama of Lope de Vega and Tirso, Rojas Zorrilla and Calder6n, the criticism and fervent prose of Men4ndez y Pelayo, the novels of Pereda, were all the work of "unliterary "Castile).

This verticalism is a transcendental quality which informs the details and binds them in a vital unity. It bestows an essential dignity, so that, as in all true art, the ugliest portraits and most unpleasant scenes never seem vile or repulsive. And it is not that they are not true to life: they are most lifelike. The drunkards and dwarfs and hunchbacks of Vel~zquez, the knaves and hobgoblins of Goya, the old witch in the Novelas Ejemplares of Cervantes, the unwashed Don Quixote and Sancho, the scenes in the inn when Don Quixote beheads the wineskin giants, the sorrows of Quevedo's Busc6n, Pereda's Tia Sargi]eta: they are all hideous enough, and yet . . . There is an ultimate feeling that this is not all, that there is a soul in things, a soul in each individual, and that the soul in each case is precious; one realizes that beneath these so realistically presented surfaces there remains the individual soul and its relation to its Creator. These cruelly etched figures are part of the eternal order of things, of mysterious Nature; they are objective a n d " exemplary," without naturalistic insinuation. They are described with a certain grave dignity, the ignoble nobly (artistically) presented. As a top is ungainly and lopsided and loses significance without a string to whip it into motion, harmonious motion, so these ugly scenes and figures derive a dignity and significance from being bound, not by gold chains perhaps, but by links of iron, to the feet of God. They are all equally creatures of God, says the dramatist Mira de Amescua. The sin, not the sinner, is held up to obloquy; the individual remains in some sense sacred and is not regarded with contempt. For

he who feels contempt For any living thing hath faculties That he hath never used.

These Spanish writers and artists realistically, even barbarously, em- phasize, gibbet and exhibit the uglinesses, defects, vices and sufferings; but towards the individual they still preserve a respect, and, where this is not possible, an aloofness. One might almost say that Spanish attthors and artists tend to picture dust and ashes in the light of the Light of Light, and they thus frequently attain something other than the light of common day even in their pictures of the life of common day. Modern taste may be inclined to think that this verticalism must be a limitation and a deadness. It is the very reverse of that; it is life. The very dependence of the writer and artist on something outside him gave him a greater liberty, a more individual independence.

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It has been well said by a modern poet that "the difference between the religious and the non-reIigious theme is often that the former includes all the conditions and sources of poetry to be found in the latter and adds to them others besides." To Spaniards of the Golden, Age religion was all-embracing, and it was because they were religious that they were not narrow. The drama and the novel in the hands of the seventeenth- century Spaniard came to be of a most generous, universal capacity; to them we moderns owe the breadth of the modern novel. And the sixteenth-century mystics proved tr iumphantly how in the name of religion the whole of life and literature and art might be included. To the Spaniard art, man and man's surroundings are equally a part of Nature. If Nature has been subordinated to man in Spanish art and literature, it is because the familiar background from which man springs is taken for granted. In few countries do buildings and villages and towns, great convents and castles, spring more harmoniously out of the soil; sometimes in quiet grandeur, almost more frequently in a prolonga- tion, as it were, of the violence of Nature. The Escorial or the walls of Avila, like the Roman aqueduct at Segovia and the Roman bridge at Alc~ntara, seem to be a part of Nature in their rhythmic magnificence. There are whole towns and villages which in other countries might seem apocalyptic visions but which here fit naturally into their surrounding crags and precipices. It is not strange that the Spanish early felt all admiration for rugged scenery and mountain ranges.

Nature thus gave them ready-made the strangeness of proportion which is required by at least some ideals of the beautiful. But the Spaniard, and especially the Castilian, with all his directness and simplicity, his emphasis and craving for expression and hatred of what is mechanical, has a rhythmic sense of proportion, which is constantly evident in the buildings, in the shape of the rooms, in the squares of the towns, as well as in the commonest of implements and furniture, made with an unerring rightness and artistic instinct. They have made and make beautiful things with their hands, eschewing all ugly curves, cherishing an artistic simplicity and faultless rhythm. This rhythmic quality is equally frequent in Spanish literature. It may be fragmentary and imperfect, yet the rhythmic proportion makes itself felt: in the Poem of the Cid, in the comedias, which, overweighted though they be by their contents, move towards their end easily and inevitably as a ship cuts through the sea; in the perfect fragments of the Romamero, in the novels of Pereda, even when they are little more than a series of scenes; in the colossal torsos of Men~ndez y Pelayo's prose.

Character, significance, individuality, life and movement must be considered the Spanish ideal of beauty rather than any Renaissance perfection of external form, the exquisite finish of Cellini or Garci Lasso's

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"final touch of the file." In Spanish works of art the inner intensity is apt to inform and inspire, perhaps even to distend and distort the outer form and tenement. This intensity, welling up from within, enables concrete artistic expression to be given to a wide range of thought and feeling. The object was to emphasize the t ruth of life rather than the truth of beauty; to dwell on the essential things and on those common things of life which are the most enduring and by their very uniformity most capable of original artistic treatment. To crowd as much as possible into the picture without breaking its unity, without losing touch with a supreme controlling principle : this would seem to have been the method of composition of many a Spanish masterpiece of painting, sculpture, architecture and literature. Without an instinctive sense of rhythm, and a sense of what we have called verticalism (the religious or transcendental controlling principle or unity), we may feel that the picture would have fallen to pieces. The component parts are often so distinct and complete in themselves that only a kind of mystic unity can bind them together. We feel this unity even in such a picture as " T h e Topers " o f Vel~zquez, even in the sketches and etchings of Goya. The wealth of content, the rich vitality, ever avid of direct concrete expression, bequeathed to Spanish Baroque a vast abundance of shapes and details when the inner life had receded and emotion had hardened into convention; so that the shapes became fantastic, the forms hollow and the details uncontrolled. The emotional desire for a full expression of life, which ted to the wounded Christs and tortured martyrs and polychrome saints of Spanish art, remained; but an art become external could only multiply details without supplying them with a living unity from within.

In the masterpieces of Spanish genius, in wood, stone, print or canvas, we thus have a wealth and largeness of content, a peculiar distinctness of detail and a rhythmic structure and combination of " h a r m o n i o u s oppo- sites." We have breadth and harmony, not tapering into over-refine- ment or narrowing into unreality, but containing antagonistic elements, often violent and refractory elements, which are harmonized partly by a plastic sense of proportion and rightness, partly by a spiritual intensity, which must indeed underlie and inspire any true sense of proportion. The final harmony is attained as the result of an intense artistic struggle to combine the material and the spiritual, the living impetuous fire and the cold passive clay. " Beauty is life, life beauty," the Spanish might say; and it is an unquenchable intensity of life that informs the most characteristic manifestations of the Spanish genius in every age and region. Even the eighteenth century failed to make the Spanish genius academic or mechanical. The sketches of Ram6n de la Cruz, the etchings of Goya showed that the vital genius was still there, working in rapid studies from life. Ruskin spoke of " t h e piquancy, the half wayward,

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half melancholy mystery of Spanish beauty." There is an inner fire which wears the flesh away, as it is worn away in the intense figures of Berruguete's choir-stalls, as it is worn away in the pictures of E1 Greco. It is the spirit of life itself. The dark colouring of many Spanish pictures betokens not gloom but a living intensity. There is life, not death, in Fray Luis de Granada's word pictures of death and decay, as in Vald6s LeaFs pictures. Spain's art and literature are indeed flamelike. They move upwards as fire. Nature is subordinated to man, man to God, in a great universal chain reaching heavenward. It was because the Spanish ideal of beauty was based in life and the mystery of life that Spanish authors and artists have left us so many masterpieces, or, if you will, masterly fragments, in which "even the portrayal of the ugly and the horrible attract, since it is felt to be still mysterious and individual and human, objectively presented in a few eternal moments of man's strange destiny. The Spanish genius, unassailably genuine, may seek to impose its vision, but has little thought of popularity; perhaps for this very reason it has for some minds an incomparable attraction.

AUBREY F. G. BELL.

G E O G R A F [ A M A N D A : AN IMPRESSION OF SPAIN " lr " ' " He a eady knew enough of Spare and Spamards to hope that m the country

beyond the Pyrenees he might be able to find certain mystical aspects of existence still conserved in space as they had once, in days past, been present in t i m e . " - - ANTHONY ADVI~RSE.

I PERHAPS it was no more than a coincidence that the new Geographical Magazine introduced itself with a Spanish proverb. "Geograffa manda " has indeed a universal application. Yet it is a peculiar fact that of no country is it more certain truth than of Spain itself.

No country has ever been subject to the same degree of pleasing yet futile misrepresentation. That Spain is, and has ever been, "behind the times " is a European platitude. Few go there who do not, in the manner of Mr. Adverse, expect to find those "myst ical aspects of exist- ence," or imagine themselves lapped in the elysian atmosphere of the only true land of Cocagne. And, regretfully it must be added, few have done more to advance it than the English, who can never resist the exquisite compliment they pay themselves in patronizing the past in any shape or form.

I went to Spain last summer not so much an inheritor of unfulfilled renown as of preconceived opinions. It was common property that here was an openly backward country. Its officialdom was inept, its public

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