half learned their parts. Every long declamation was a duet, the prompter's rapid undertone charging along beneath the actor's voice like a horse beneath its rider. But the audience understood, forgave, were grateful, and sat with sublime patience through the long pauses between the acts, repeating one to another, "They say Fuentes is studying his speeches." As the caustic old scholar had predicted, most of them, apparently, did not try to understand the allegory. They applauded the obviously poetic touches, the palpably dramatic situations, and when, in the Alhambra act, a gypsy air was sung, the galleries delightedly caught it up and chorused it over again.
But in general that nondescript assembly looked on in passive gravity while El Escultor de su Alma was rendered, as their poet had bidden, in their own theatre and for them. They may have gathered hints and snatches of that mystical message from the dead, whose lofty look, fixed in shining marble, dominated all the house.
The restless Spirit of Man, seeking the perfect Truth, tears himself loose from the bride of his youth, Heavenly Faith, and wanders in beggary through the world. Yet Truth for him can only be the child of his union with Faith, and in parting from one he has parted from both. In old age, almost maddened by his wanderings and woes, he meets his Truth again, full-grown and beautiful, but is so fierce and wild in his desire to possess her that only Death can reconcile them – Death and that Heavenly Faith who could not abandon him, though he had forsaken her.
Ganivet's mother, who, with his brothers, witnessed the play from behind the scenes, is said to have rejoiced in it as a last solemn assurance from her son of his secure repose in the Catholic faith of his fathers. It may not have meant so much to that great audience, many of whom could neither read nor write, but those tiers upon tiers of dark Spanish faces were full of earnestness and of a proud content. However it may have baffled their heads, this legacy of a play, in its Alhambra setting, spoke clearly to their hearts. One ragamuffin said to another, as an all-sufficient criticism, "He was thinking of Granada when he wrote it."
A few days later, I found and eagerly read Angel Ganivet's most significant booklet, Idearium, published in the autumn of 1896, in which he sets forth his dream for the future of his beloved country.
Ganivet claims that the deepest moral element in Spanish character is stoicism, "not the brutal and heroic stoicism of Cato, nor the serene and majestic stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, nor the rigid and extreme stoicism of Epictetus, but the natural and humane stoicism of Seneca." He holds that Seneca, himself a Spaniard, found his philosophy in the inherent genius of the country, and only gave voice to the indwelling soul of Spain. The Spanish church, cherishing this element, became a thing apart from the general Catholicism of Europe. The long warfare and incidental intercourse with the Moors stamped Spanish Christianity with its two other characteristic features of mysticism and fanaticism. "Mysticism was like a sanctification of African sensuality, and fanaticism was a turning against ourselves, when the Reconquest ended, of the fury accumulated during eight centuries of combat."
The author, muy español, is naturally muy católico, yet he protests against violence in the repression of other forms of religion. "Liberty should bring with it no fear." He believes that Spain is, above all, sui generis, independent and individual. The representative Spaniard is a free lance, striving and conquering by his own impulse and under his own direction, like the Cid of old or Cortes in the field of arms, like Loyola in the church, like Cervantes in letters. He lays stress on the achievements of Spanish art – the master paintings of Velázquez and Murillo, the master dramas of Lope de Vega and Calderon, as expressing, better than political history has expressed, that intensification of Spanish life resulting from the struggle against the Arabs "and making of our nation a Christian Greece."
He finds it logical and right that Spain, after her successive periods of Roman influence, Visigothic influence, Arab influence, and her modern era of colonial expansion, should now abandon foreign policies and concentrate all her vitality within her own borders. Not by the sword, but by the spirit, would he have Spain henceforth hold sway over mankind, and especially over the Spanish-descended peoples of South America.
He winces under the monopoly of the term "American" by the citizens of the United States – "a formidable nation," he admits, "very populous, very rich, and apparently very well governed." He notes, in contrast, the poverty and comparative anarchy of the South American republics, but he urges still that the Spanish character, shaped through such eventful centuries, is an entity, clear and firm, with qualities well defined, whereas the Yankees are yet in the fusing pot. He would have all the peoples of Hispanian descent recognize and realize in themselves this Spanish individuality, effecting not a political union, but a "confederation, intellectual and spiritual," whose first aim should be the preservation of Spanish ideas and ideals, and the second, the free gift of these to all the nations of the earth.
The ancient glory of Spain, he says, has vanished like a dream; let a new and whiter glory dawn. Her career of material conquest is ended. Those savage struggles have left her faint and spent. Let her now seek to attain, through purification and discipline, such fresh fulness of life as shall insure the triumph of her spiritual forces – her fervent faith and her unworldly wisdom. "Our Ulysses is Don Quixote."
V
IN SIGHT OF THE GIRALDA
"We were nearing Seville. I felt the eager throbbing of my heart. Seville had ever been for me the symbol of light, the city of love and joy." – Valdés: La Hermana San Sulpicio.
One of the wise sayings of Andalusia runs, "Do not squeeze the orange till the juice is bitter." And so we said good-by to Granada before we were ready to go, and persuaded ourselves, in defiance of maps and time-tables, that our shortest route to Seville led by Ronda. The weather did its very best to dampen our enthusiasm for this wildest of crag aeries, equally famed for romantic beauty of outlook and salubrity of air. Men live long in Ronda, unless, indeed, they hit against a bullet while practising their hereditary trade of contrabandista. They have a saying that octogenarians there are only chickens, but one should not believe all that they say in Ronda. Did we not clamber, slipping on wet stones, down a precipitous path to peer, from under dripping umbrellas, at what our guide declared was an old Roman bridge? "It doesn't look old and it doesn't look Roman," was the artist's dubious comment, but our highly recommended conductor, a Gib, as the English-Spanish natives of Gibraltar Rock are called, assured us that it was built in the days of Julius Cæsar, but had been wonderfully well preserved. We eyed him thoughtfully, bearing in mind that he had already pointed out the statue of a long-dead poet as a living politician; but we meekly continued through the lashing rain to follow his long footsteps over the breakneck ways of that natural fortress where race after race has left its autograph. The Roman columns of the church make the Arab cupolas look young, and put the Gothic choir altogether out of countenance. A bright-shawled peasant woman, who we fondly hoped might be a smuggler's wife, drew us delicious water from a Roman well in a Moorish patio, where a mediæval king of gentle memory used to drink his wine from cups wrought of the skulls of those enemies whom he had beheaded with his own sword. But not all this, and more, could efface our doubts of that Roman bridge, which, indeed, we found, on a belated perusal of our guide-books, had been erected by a Malaga architect in the last century.
The street rabble of Ronda was the rudest and fiercest we encountered anywhere in Spain. Several times our guide wheeled suddenly to confront some gypsyish lad, creeping up behind us with stone all ready to throw, and when, at a glint of sunset through the stormy clouds, we tried to slip out unattended to the neighboring alameda, with its far-sweeping prospect of folded mountain ranges and its vertical view of gorge and rushing river, the children actually hounded us back to the hotel. Their leader was a scrofulous boy, with one cheek eaten away, who had been taught to press his face so closely upon strangers that, in fear of his open sore, they would hastily give money to keep him back. He was a merry scamp and got a world of sport out of his sickening business, laughing at the top of his voice to see himself "avoided like the sun."
Although the tempest had lulled
