AS WE RODE on a bumpy, jolting train up the Tagus valley, I opened the morning paper. It told me that in the Sierra de Avila, some thirty miles away on the left, a wolf hunt was in progress. The wolves, it seems, have been more than usually troublesome this year, coming down to the villages and killing the sheep and cattle, so that to get rid of them it had been decided to have a large battue. A doctor called Montoro had organised it, five thousand volunteer guns and beaters were taking part and a film company was filming it. A couple of days later I read the result: no wolves had been shot: the total bag was two foxes.
The train was leaving the open cornfields of La Sagra and entering an irrigated region of gardens and tall trees. Then, with much bumping and rattling, it slowed down and pulled up: we were in Aranjuez. We got out and took a very ancient horse bus to the hotel.
Aranjuez is the Spanish Versailles: everything in it speaks the language of pleasure, formality and the eighteenth century. The town is laid out in broad parallel streets and wide parade-ground squares, around which stand in neat rows the lodgings of the palace servants. Beyond are the villas of the nobility. And all these streets, squares and villas are shaded with spreading plane trees.
The palace is a rather dull building with some charming rooms, decorated for the most part in the Pompeian style of 1770. Two of them, the Queen’s dressing-room and the porcelain room, are particularly lovely. The latter is so called because it has its walls and ceiling faced with white porcelain, out of which stand raised figured decorations in a Chinese style in green, blue and rose. Long mirrors inserted in the walls give their endless series of reflections and the result is the setting for a Ronald Firbank story about a princess of perverse and inconsequently naughty tastes.
The palace windows open on a parterre that is planted with exotic shrubs and trees, and beside this flows the river. At the farther end it passes over a weir, and it is the sudden change of level that creates all this fertility. When I was last here in May 1934, the water came down in a rushing, splashing flood that filled the whole garden with its sound. But today there is silence. Every drop has already, before reaching this point, been taken off for irrigation and the bed of the river below the weir has become a chain of green and stagnant pools, fit only for frogs to croak in. I felt that I had never before realised the terrible intensity of the drought.
Beside the river and below the palace lie the gardens of La Isla, where the famous nightingales of Schiller sang. But in Don Carlos’s time there were no trees – it was his father Philip II who planted them – and if we let our imaginations wander to the eighteenth century, we have to remember that Spain did not produce a Louis XV. What the royal family was like one may see from Goya’s portraits. Yet the place seems contrived for a Watteau or a Fragonard. Nowhere else in the world do planes, elms and poplars reach so extreme a height, and in the long avenues and vistas converging on statues and in the clumps and thickets scattered with flowering shrubs one has the ideal garden of the eighteenth century.
That night we went for a stroll down the avenue of gigantic planes – it is more than three miles long – that skirts another and larger garden – that of the Príncipe. The moon was full – is it not always full at Aranjuez? – and the tall blotched trunks rose into an interlaceage of thin branches and of leaves that had not yet spread to their full extent. No nightingales could be heard, though we had listened to one earlier that afternoon, but instead there were cuckoo-voiced owls, called in Spanish cuca, that answered one another with a ringing musical note. When these calls ceased, not a sound could be heard: the moon itself, with the brightness of its light, seemed to be making the silence. We ended our walk with a glass of beer and a dish of fresh strawberries at the café by the bridge.
The broken springs of a Castilian bed do not tempt one to lie long, so we were up early. In the cool air, under the tall trees, walking was pleasant. We followed the avenue we had discovered the previous night as far as the small palace known as the Casa del Labrador. This is a building put up in 1803 by Charles IV and his queen, María Luisa, in imitation of the Petit Trianon at Versailles. After going over it and deciding that its Empire furniture was vulgar and tasteless, we set out to walk back through the Jardín del Príncipe.
I recommend all serious dendrophils – that is, all lovers of trees – to come to Aranjuez. Till they have been there they can have no idea of what a tree can do. Planes in these gardens reach twice the height they reach in London and elms, growing in a loose, graceful form not seen in northern countries, shoot up to a hundred and fifty feet. Besides these there are North American trees such as liquidambars, hemlocks and horse chestnuts, while the flor de amor or judas tree startles one among the undergrowth with its vivid magenta note. The causes of this stupendous growth are a deep soil, a hot sun and water. All these gardens are irrigated and the temperature in August sometimes reaches 115º F in the shade.
How pleasant this little town is with its formal arcaded streets and its shady gardens! To walk in their green labyrinths after travelling for so long through red and yellow steppes was delight indeed. Yet, though this place is only thirty miles from Madrid and has a good train service, few people come here. And of these still fewer spend the night. Is the reason for this the traditional Castilian hatred of trees? (Like the Chinese, the Castilian peasant is a furious dendrophobe.) Or does it lie in their aversion to a foreign sort of amenity – pleasure grounds laid out by kings who had French taste? Or is it simply that, in a land where money is scarce, they cannot afford it? Whatever the reason, we took the morning train to Madrid.
On arriving at the Estación del Mediodía we found the traffic across the city held up by one of the Holy Week processions. There was nothing to be done but to go to a hotel nearby, which an Englishman whom we had met at Toledo had recommended to us. It turned out to be just what we had feared – one of those large international businessman’s hotels where one lives badly at considerable expense. The lounge smelt of varnish, the dining-room had sham oak panelling, the waiters were sulky and the food tasted as if it had been flown over that morning from England. Some elderly compatriots of mine at the next table were thoroughly enjoying it. Had not every dish got bottled tomato sauce poured over it? Were not the ices made with real custard powder? I heard one of them confiding to the other that she had never imagined Spain could be so homely.
After so much travelling it is pleasant to be in Madrid again and to have nothing to do but sit in the shade and drink the excellent Spanish beer and coffee. The weather is hotter than it usually is in this month: even at seven o’clock one finds oneself crossing the street to avoid the sun, but the fond de l’air is cool and there is generally a fresh breeze at midday. No wonder, for this city stands at more than two thousand feet above sea level.
Coming from the south, the first thing that strikes us when we walk in the streets is the sibilant sound of the Castilian accent. There is a continual subdued hissing as from snakes. But listen not for sounds, but for words. Then one will hear, like shots fired off at intervals, a stream of No – No – No – Nada – Nada – Nada. These people seem to be always refusing or rejecting something. If the language of Provence used to be known as the langue d’oc and that of France as the langue d’oïl and that of Italy as the langue de si, then decidedly Spanish should be called the langue de no.
Good Friday in Madrid is like any other holiday: the bars and cafés are crowded with a cheerful noisy population and the streets are packed with men and women in their Sunday best. Many of the girls wear the traditional penitential costume – a long skirt of black satin or watered silk that reaches to the ground, a high comb with a mantilla laid over it and a rose or carnation in their hair. With this goes a heavy black rosary which they carry in their hand and a prayer book with a silver clasp. But there is nothing devotional in their manner: they trip gaily along with their novio by their side, a little over-conscious of their fancy dress and finding their skirts awkward to manage. One has to go to Seville or to look at elderly women to see the mantilla and the long skirt worn properly.
The best way of enjoying the fine weather and the crowds is to go to the Parque del Retiro. Here one may sit under the trees at one of the open-air cafés and watch the endless, leisurely procession of people moving past. How lovely are the women with their splendid, eloquent eyes and vigorous heads of hair and fine carriage! The girls are a perpetual delight, but the older women fascinate me too with their handsome features and their air of dignity. Only in Rome or Florence does one see as many beautiful ones. But if Italian women have better figures and faces of a finer oval, they have decidedly less character and expression.
The Spanish girl places her accent a little differently from the English one. Her face, her hair, her hands, her gestures, her gait are the matters she gives most attention to. Every evening promenade or paseo is a school of deportment and flirtation, but it is a national school in which the movie stars do not, as in England, serve as models. The gait or carriage is the most important thing: Spanish girls carry themselves wonderfully. But even in this there have been changes. In Madrid, at least, the art of walking, or rather pacing, in very high-heeled shoes has declined. There is no longer time or space today for the mannequin steps in which their mothers showed off their qualities. They have gone out with the horse carriage.
Yet Spanish girls do not dress well. Their clothes are either home made or cut by cheap dressmakers, instead of being bought ready-made or cut to Vogue patterns. The long skirt and short coat, which are being worn this year in London and Paris, are never seen, and their tightly corseted waists (all Spanish women corset madly) are put into badly fitting jackets, or worse still into cheap English-type cardigans, which they call ‘rebecas’. The colours too are ugly and badly matched. So awkward and provincial is the general effect that one cannot help feeling that they need some Worth or Paquin of their own race to show them the way they should go. The old national costume was very successful in concealing their bad points – short legs and stocky figures – and in bringing out their good ones. It is a pity that nothing has been thought out on the same lines, but in a modern style.
Yet look at their faces, their necks, their shoulders and hair, and all this will be forgotten. They give a great deal of time to their hair and their make-up, and this time is not wasted. And then there are those large brilliant eyes with their clear whites which can throw a signal as far as one can throw a tennis ball. English girls use their eyes much less deliberately. But what strikes the foreigner most is the fact that they are so conscious of their beauty. They sail along, buoyed up by the admiring glances that follow them, without any of the doubts and hesitations that affect even beautiful girls in England. They know that they are there to be looked at and that men exist simply in order to look at them. For this reason they allow themselves in conversation a range of facial expressions from vigorous pouts to broad grimaces such as in less attractive girls would be thought unbecoming. A heavy frown, which no English girl would dare to be seen with, is part of their regular armoury.
With all this life and animation there goes a great deal of warmth and good humour. Quite obviously the relations of the young with the other members of their family are often happy and unconstrained. And they love children. It is a common sight to see a well-dressed young man playing with a child or making faces at a baby without any feeling of embarrassment. One does not see much shyness or timidity, however much their novelists may write about it. In short, an old-fashioned society – early Victorian or Second Empire – but beginning to crumble and break down.
But if the first impression one gets of Madrid on an Easter holiday is of life and happiness, one must not suppose for a moment that everyone is enjoying himself. The immense majority are engrossed in the problem of making both ends meet. One has to see Spanish life from the inside to realise how very difficult that has become. Yet in this fine city and climate, where people like to take their pleasures in public, the forms of happiness are perpetually open to the eye, as at a fair. And all are in the race. The prospect of enjoyment is continually there, dangling before the eyes, ready at a moment to drop into the lap of even the poorest in the form of a winning lottery ticket. It is only the old who know that they have lost. One of the curious and pathetic things about these old in Spain is the way in which they contract and shrink. At every step one sees old women who are so thin and light that one feels that a breath of air might blow them away. These women are never cheerful. A look of settled melancholy has dropped like a death mask on their faces and they sit motionless on a bench in the park or in some dull corner of a room without any change of expression passing over them, as though they were ferns or plants. Another sort have that round-eyed expression of terror that one sees in Goya’s portrait of the Infanta María Josefa in the Prado. But all without exception are sad, and not only, I think, because they are poor and lonely and shattered by some tragedy proceeding from the civil war or from the repression that has followed it – although, heaven knows, there is cause enough in these things for misery – but because they cannot forget that the possibility of happiness has passed. In this country where youth and vitality are everything, they are the totally defeated because their strength has gone and their days are counted and told.
But all the same what a dramatic city Madrid is! The moral sense may often be shocked by the contrast between riches and destitution, but one will be stimulated in spite of oneself by the feeling for life. Spaniards throw themselves into both pleasure and pain more openly and wholeheartedly than do other races. They run avidly after the one and when they have lost it they make something of the other. One imagines that in limbo there are few souls of Spanish origin, for the greatest evil to them is numbness or loss of feeling. And of course the great vicissitudes they go through leave a residue on their faces, which is all the more noticeable because their features are prominent. The expressions one sees on people over fifty are often extraordinary.
We moved today to a hotel in the Gran Vía, where we pay 50 pesetas (i.e. 10s.) a day pension, have a private bathroom and get tolerable food. Just half the price of last night’s lodgings. This hotel offers no luxuries, but has a gay and friendly atmosphere: its clients are chiefly young people – students, foreigners, actors and so forth. During the afternoon, as we were crossing the town, we ran into two processions: in one of these the Virgin was carried in front and the dead Christ followed in a glass coffin behind: in the other there was a paso of Christ being scourged by the soldiers. In both of these the place of honour was given to a detachment of the city police, who have the reputation of being the toughest of the four different sorts of police in this country.
That night we went to see another and much larger procession. The crowds were very dense, but mounted policemen kept lanes in it, so we struggled forward up the Calle de Alcalá in the hopes of getting a near sight. Before long we saw a large unwieldy object, lit up like a Christmas tree with hundreds of candles, come tottering slowly down the Gran Vía towards us. Then the crowd became denser, knots of people began to shove and push, and my wife was almost thrown down. I put out both arms to hold her up and when she was on her feet again I found that my purse, which I kept in my trouser pocket, was gone. It contained nearly £30. No doubt it was fitting that the thieves, whose patron saint had suffered on the cross on that day, should reap some advantage, but for me the blow was a severe one. We went back to the hotel in a state of great depression without waiting to see any more catafalques.
In the hotel where we are staying there are a number of French girl students. They offer a strong contrast to the Spanish girls. Not one in seven of them is pretty, but they differ greatly among themselves. They have less animal vitality, but their mental processes are more complex. They have a greater range of feeling and character because they have a modern self-consciousness. The truth is that the Spaniards are a simple race in comparison to the English and French. As in their climate and scenery, the half-tones appear to be left out. Or is it that, like music written in an unfamiliar mode, we are unable to take in all the complexities? This seems to me the more probable hypothesis. The deep melancholia, the religious obsession, the abysmal emptiness and nothingness that one so often sees graven on their faces are of a different kind from anything that one sees elsewhere in Europe. And what of the strange blood lust that, as the civil war and the Carlist wars and the Napoleonic war all show, comes over them on particular occasions – that morose, half-sexual, half-religious passion in which they associate themselves with Death and do his work for him? Yes, they have their own brands of cruelty and delicacy and melancholy and extravagance, which are often as difficult for us to see with our daylight-fed eyes as is a night-time landscape.
For there are two sides to the Spanish soul corresponding, as it were, to day and night. The daylight Spaniard is the man one sees – sociable, positive, capable of great bursts of energy and animation, often rather eighteenth-century in character, and not very imaginative. In his ordinary conduct he is rather a simple person, as one can tell from a glance at Spanish literature. It contains no Montaignes, Racines, Pascals, Rousseaus, Constants, Prousts, Blakes or Shakespeares, though it has a Cervantes. Its complexity, when it has complexity, lies as a rule in certain poetic overtones or in the arabesque-like manner in which it treats its material. The other side of the Spanish nature one does not see, because it rarely shows itself clearly on the surface. But one can easily divine it, for it is its silent welling up into the consciousness that gives to Spanish things that strange and unaccountable accent which everyone recognises. I call it the night side of the Spanish soul – though I might equally well call it the seventeenth-century side – because it is associated with thoughts of death and contempt for life.
Menosprecio de la vida, disdain for life! That phrase is like a bell that tolls its way through Spanish history. The Spaniards are great destroyers. Is it their pride – the orgullo for which they have always been famous – that makes them so despise all the detail and humdrum of daily life? Nothing is good enough for them – that is the first stage of their immense egoism: in the second stage nothing is any good at all, since life and the world do not last for ever. Todo o nada. Everything or nothing. It is this attitude that has made both Spanish fanaticism and Spanish mysticism . The Spaniards are great realists – that is what we are always told. Certainly they see things minutely and objectively. But this reality hurts and wounds their pride: too often they look on life as if it were their enemy. And it is precisely the cruelty and precision of their vision (consider Goya) that throws them back into themselves with the desire to transcend what they see. Hence their nobility, their generosity, their extravagance. They have to vanquish their own meanness, exceed and outbid their own egos. To a caballero other people’s opinions do not matter, for other people scarcely exist, but to have a good opinion of oneself – that is what is important. So Philip II built the Escorial and lived in two small rooms. He erected the largest palace in the world to flatter his pride, and then to flatter it still more turned it over to the monks and built a royal pudridero, where he and his descendants might slowly rot in black, unornamented marble coffins. Don Quixote, dismayed by the dullness and insignificance of his life, imagined himself a knight errant and then proved to himself that he was noble indeed. Under the veneer of a nineteenth-century character, one will very often find in modern Spaniards the deep stamp of the Counter-Reformation.
How quickly the time passes in this brilliant sunlight, in this handsome, well-built, but perhaps monotonous city where everything is made for ease of life! Our time is spent in drifting from café to café, drinking coffee in one, eating an apricot ice in another, then having a glass of manzanilla and some potato crisps before lunch and in the evenings ringing the changes on beer and anís, with black olives and those large prawns called gambas. In between we visit the Prado and the museums (among which I must single out a private museum, the Instituto Valencia de San Juan with its fine collection of pottery, tapestries, embroideries and so forth), call on a friend, or turn over the art books in the excellent German bookshop on the Castellana.
As we move about we look at the passing faces, so lovely or so deeply marked – either preternaturally solemn with the leaden solemnity of Spaniards or else more than usually gay and animated. The bald are more bald, the obese more obese, the thin more cadaverous, the one-legged more limbless than in other countries. From this generalisation I except the young men, who do not stand out. Till he is thirty the Spanish male tends to be a tailor’s model of a man, with too much animation and too little character. Then, as he enters middle age, his head begins to swell till by the time he is fifty it is huge and massive – a lion’s head which his short legs and body seem too meagre to support. Seated, they are full of dignity, walking they tend to be ungainly – Roman senators as their portrait busts portray them, without the nobility bestowed by flowing togas. Yes, Roman. The Roman Empire left more of its essential stuff in Spain than in Italy: the coarseness, solidity, stoic strength of character of that great imperial people form the under-structure of Spanish life, on the top of which has been built an edifice of an entirely different sort – a fretted skyline of Oriental minarets and battlements that make up the tight and well-defended fabric of pride and honour. This sense of honour, or rather of self-esteem or pundonor, is one of the things one cannot be an hour in Spain without noticing. It is what prevents one from sharing a taxi or paying for a theatre ticket or buying a drink if one happens to be in the company of a Spaniard. It is a liberating and ennobling quality which, even if it does not go deeper than good manners, does much to raise the tone of social life.
Pleasant though Madrid is at this season, the tourist would probably not wish to linger in it if it were not for the Prado. Here, in a gallery that is just the right size, one may see a large number of masterpieces so freshly preserved in this smokeless mountain air that they look as though they had been painted yesterday. One can have only a feeble idea of the magnificence of Spanish painting if one has not visited it: almost the whole work of Goya, for example, is to be found there. And then there is the superb collection of Titians and Tintorettos, Roger van der Weydens and Rubens, not to speak of a host of lesser Flemish and Italian painters.
The Titians are of every period, from his two Venuses, where one still feels the touch of the spring-like Renaissance air, to his St Margaret and his Danäe, where the age – that of the Council of Trent – has become June-like and sultry. Then there is the equestrian portrait of Charles V, in which, much repainted though I believe it has been, one feels a richness of worldly experience and a mastery of all the varied resources of art such as can scarcely be matched by any other painter. Finally there is his self-portrait, painted in extreme old age, in which he seems to go beyond anything he had previously done. But the Prado has other very great portraits to show. Rubens’s painting of Marie de Medici is one of his finest pictures, while Raphael’s Young Cardinal staggers one by the quantity of life and reality which it contains.
The Goyas will be the greatest sensation for the traveller who has not been to Spain before. Of all painters he is the most approachable, because his combination of irony and raciness with a lovely surface of paint is easily appreciated even by those whose feeling for art is moderate. One might call him the greatest of journalist painters, in the same sense in which Voltaire is the greatest of journalist writers: marvellously quick in eye and mind and swift and incisive in brush strokes, yet when compared to the supreme masters of his art, a little superficial. The etchings and crayon drawings, however, show another side – a fantastic, visionary eye and a power of finding new and surprising compositions that in their speed and variety of improvisation evoke the daemonic art of Picasso. Certainly he caught the look of Spain. He was not only the painter but the novelist of his age, and as one travels about the country one sees his types and gestures still alive today.
Velázquez, however, is a Spanish painter who attracts me more because he is enigmatic. His pictures do not reveal themselves, as Goya’s do, at the first glance. People say ‘He was just an eye,’ but he did not, like Goya, use his eye to see things, but to look through them. What his feelings about the world may have been we do not know, for, as Roger Fry said, he dwells entirely in the realm of pure vision and seems utterly indifferent to the symbolic or emotional meanings of the things that he paints. Now such an attitude in painting, even when judged by the light of modern practice, is extraordinary and in fact the impression his pictures make is often, I think, more deeply disturbing than even that made by Goya’s war etchings. Here, for example, is the representation of a head – say that of Philip IV or of an Infanta – and it is obviously a perfect and complete likeness of the original. Yet this likeness is not the point of the picture at all: it is so far even from being the point that it strikes one as being a little uncanny. Velázquez is looking through the unity of the object we call the king’s face at its material composition, and in this he finds a play of light and colour which he conveys, by very delicate and mysterious means, to his canvas. But, it will be said, this is just what the Impressionists were doing with cruder means. I do not believe that this is really so, for although they claimed to be putting down only the impressions of light and colour that struck their retina, one may see that in fact they by no means rejected the vital and emotional content of the objects they were painting. Velázquez, on the other hand, seems deliberately (though no doubt unconsciously) to undermine the reality of the material objects he paints and to substitute for them a loose texture of light and colour which removes them to some other more tenuous world of pure aesthetics. And at the same time, because the visible appearance or similitude of the things we know is still there, he makes us feel, sometimes in a rather shocking way, their emptiness and nothingness. Such detachment from the values of ordinary life is surely unprecedented.
One must call Velázquez the disillusioned painter of a melancholy and disillusioned age. All his later pictures show an aristocratic form of menosprecio de la vida, disdain for life and a flight from actuality that has some analogy with the more dogmatic flight that has seized on painters today. One can compare him to Góngora, whose long, beautiful, and obscure poem, Soledades, though by no means sad, shows a similar escape into the world of pure aesthetic values. By the time – twenty or thirty years later – that Velázquez was painting his great pictures, the shadows that hung over Spain had sensibly deepened.
Before leaving this painter I would like to single out two of his pictures: one of these, the Villa Medici Gardens, painted in Rome either in 1630 or in 1650, is the greatest landscape in Spanish art and especially interesting to us because it leads straight to the French landscapes of the nineteenth century: the other is a small crucifixion, discovered in a convent during the civil war and previously unknown. It is painted with a most un-Velázquez-like intensity of religious feeling.
Some Spanish painters are poorly represented in the Prado. For the primitives one must go to Barcelona and Valencia: for Zurbarán, who is not sufficiently known outside his country, to Guadalupe, Cádiz and Seville. And where are the moderns? I am told that in the whole of Spain there is not a single Juan Gris, Miró or Picasso. This is surprising, because Spain is the country that produced the conquistadores, and what else are contemporary painting and poetry but colonial adventures – heroic attempts to explore and cultivate new regions of the mind, where the climate is so inhospitable that it seems doubtful if human nature will be able to establish itself.
Madrid, unlike London, is a real capital. Here this great dusty, barren land, with its poverty and its tedium and its insoluble problems, throws up a city that is splendid, spacious and entirely made for human life. Everyone in it either has money or is pretending to have it. The shops are full of luxury foods, every few yards there is a café or a tempting bar, the streets and parks are crowded with people who seem to have nothing else to do but to stroll about. Everything that could remind the people of this city that their land is poor, their villages wretched, their agricultural workers clothed in rags and starving is spirited away. Life is for display and for enjoyment. Youth is a time for pleasure. No reminders of the starkness of the national situation must be allowed. And so all those who can somehow raise a few pesetas throw themselves into the dance and think of little else but women and bulls and cards and endless, endless conversation. We English do not live like this because our cities are sad and sordid places, our food Lenten and the pressure of work on us remorseless, and so it would be hypocrisy for us to throw stones at those who do. But we can note the result. Spain is being gambled away every night by these idle, money-seeking classes who profess to govern it, just as in Regency times young lords used to gamble away their ancestral estates. Money, money, money! By hook or crook money must be found to pay one’s debts, to incur new ones, to breathe in deeper and deeper draughts of this intoxicating life. And so the racket goes on. One must condemn the process, but if one has ever been young or had a taste for pleasure, one must not in honesty be too severe on the perpetrators.
On the last evening of our visit to Spain I chanced on a situation that, trifling and insignificant though it was, seemed to me to sum up the condition of this country. The Café María Cristina is the largest, most expensive café in Madrid. Every afternoon its spacious ground floor and upper floor are filled with a well-dressed population. In the basement, however, there is a dark, mysteriously lighted region, encumbered by billiard and ping-pong tables, where young men and boys play for small stakes from morning to night. In the darkest and most confused corner of this, under a staircase and among a litter of beer bottles and empty soda-water bottles, is a gents’ lavatory, or as Spaniards say, ‘retreat’ – a horrid cupboard, whose doors do not fasten, whose plug does not work and whose walls drip with a continual, oozing moisture. Just outside this – invisible till one has accustomed one’s eyes to the gloom – sits a little old woman on a chair. She has nothing to do but to open the door, which is always open anyway, and to provide those who ask for it with paper. In return for such services she takes any coin that may be offered her. This is the income on which she lives and since the café pays her nothing, I doubt whether she earns more than 3 pesetas (8d.) a day. But she has a post, she has an income, and she thinks herself lucky.
My last observation on Spain – though it might have been my first – is on the subject of women’s hair. The strength of Spanish women appears to lie, like Samson’s, in this feature. Those great jets of wiry locks that spring like cascades from their heads and then are washed and brushed and combed and dressed and set and scented and rubbed up with brilliantine to rival the shine on their shoes and the gloss on their pupils, are the index of the huge animal vitality of this race: a vitality that would be a little crude and monotonous if it had not so often imposed on it a peculiar sort of refinement and melancholy. All vital races feel keenly the existence of the anti-vital principle: it haunts them more persistently than it does the busy, phlegmatic, vaguely worrying English. Those great draughty halls of the mind in which the Spaniards habitually live make it difficult for them to keep out the facts of life or to dope themselves with petty activities. As a lamp wick feeds on oil, so they feed on a secret store of melancholy, which even their family affections or their zest for pleasure cannot dry up entirely. Thus their lives are like sermons by Jeremy Taylor, with the last phase always in view: the narrow box, the niche in the wall, the train of mourners: the turn of the key in the heart’s lock which will shut their thoughts within them for ever.
19 April
The time has come to leave. As we drink our coffee, we read that the drought has broken over the greater part of the country. On our way to the aerodrome a few drops of rain fall and thus we leave Spain as we found it – with high, purplish clouds spreading like enormous hands over the sky and the dry tableland below waiting like a woman on a bed for the expected moment to come.
Then we are in the air. Instantly we are over uninhabited country. The earth below us is magenta red, for the corn that covers it is too thin to hide the colour of the soil. Then come mountains and rivers and after them more mountains, till we reach the sea and so leave the great spread ox hide, as Strabo described this peninsula, behind us.
Yet it seems that we have not left Spain after all. It continues to travel along with us in our minds, affecting and lighting up by its contrast everything that we see. Here is England below us. Neat as a kitchen garden and of a piercing macaw-like green. Then the scale increases, increases, goes on increasing . . . we are down. A thin rain is falling, there is a smell of macintoshes. Voices that are soft and veiled like the grey light. But they convey efficiency.
We climb into a coach to drive through the London suburbs. Here my Spanish sensibilities begin to rage and protest. The ugliness and anarchy of this great sprawling city, grown up like a miners’ town on the banks of the Yukon, appals me. Can a civilised people really live in this low squatters’ settlement? Yet as the rain lifts, I become aware of the April light, as it falls on the elm trees with their young pointed leaves and their black, silky branches and stems. London is ugly and haphazard, I tell myself, because the English are not a race of city dwellers: they are countrymen who are trying to pretend that they are camping here provisionally.
But what is a traveller, fresh from the dramatic features of the Madrileños, to say of the people? As we pass through the packed and sordid streets, I see all about us a throng of plain, rounded faces that lack the distinction of real ugliness. Faces like puddings that seem never to have desired or suffered, smooth vegetable faces, placid cow-like faces, lightly creased and rippled by small worries. Yet there is kindness and good humour in their little birdlike eyes, there is a sense of reassurance in their soft, creaking Cockney tones! My Spanish-conditioned faculties tell me that this is a sensible, fair-minded, humorous people. But not a beautiful or a dynamic one.
That night I went out after dinner into the garden of the Kensington house where I was staying. Heavens, how deliciously soft and moist and heavy was the air! Like a wet sheet laid over the face, like a bath of chloroform. A million cows seemed to be breathing round me, a million rivers of milk flowing sleepily from their udders. And how still it was! No sound here of raucous Iberian voices, tearing the midnight air with assertion and argument. No voices at all, only the incessant dull mumble of the traffic. London, I said to myself, is a city for business, and after business for privacy.
It takes time to readjust oneself. After three days I am still half a foreigner. What I feel most is the absence of the sense for leisure. In London there is the dreadful scramble to get about, the grime, the crowds, the discomfort and inconvenience and ugliness of everything put up by human agency. In other places, the Germanic neatness and fussiness. Our mania for ‘raising the standard of life’ – by which we do not mean eating better food, or having well laid-out cities, or places to sit and talk in, or the freedom to eat and drink when we want to – is making us the prisoners of our conventions. Seen through Mediterranean eyes, we English are a cautious, fussy, elderly-minded people, living without large ideas among a litter of temporary expedients: far too taken up with the problems our muddle creates for us to have much faculty left for practising the arts of life.
The sun had sunk as I said this to myself and in the country lane I was following the slow English twilight was stealing on. Somewhere among the tree tops the doves were cooing: perched by their nests on the tall elms the rooks were cawing, while across the fields came the notes of the blackbirds, sweet and prolonged. Then they ceased, and the countryside sank into its thick silence.
What, I asked myself, continuing the interior dialogue that had obsessed me since my return, what is England? Intellectually and aesthetically it is a rabidly self-destructive country. For three centuries its famous men have been at work, destroying the sense for pleasure, poisoning the wells of faith, draining away spontaneity, impoverishing the language and the literature. All in the name of truth and utility. From Locke to Hume and from Bentham to Ayer our philosophers have been flattening out the hills of the mind and robbing us of our most precious dimension. From Swift to Huxley our writers have been giving us private-tuition courses in self-hatred. We do not dramatise sin because we are not Christians – or if we are Christians, because we belong to the Pelagian sect – yet our bad conscience about ourselves has seeped into our souls and perverted our natural appetites. We are more deeply enslaved than the Russians, because we have our purges and our labour camps inside us.
There is then the class aspect. Our peasantry and artisans once had a culture, as have those of all the European nations. They knew how to cook, to eat, to converse and to enjoy their leisure. But by the destruction of our countryside through the Enclosure Acts and the driving of its inhabitants into the slums of the industrial towns, this culture was torn up and they were reduced to a rootless, amorphous and disease-ridden mass. Now that they are, quite properly, rising to the surface and invading the old, more or less educated classes, they bring with them nothing but a few moral notions founded on the ethics of the football field and the boxing ring.
Yet, I thought to myself, things are not really so bad as they appear on the surface. The pressure of ideas which has destroyed the traditional pattern of our lives (utilitarianism has been the most pernicious of them) has generally been exerted in the name of a sacred principle – that of liberty, the right of everyone to live by his inner light. Thus at the same time that we have been enslaved by our doubts and scruples and herded by them along the dustiest of beaten tracks – that of nineteenth-century materialism – we have in other directions been freed. And this has had two admirable consequences: the first is that we English have developed a stronger sense of responsibility than any other people: the other is that our social pattern has acquired complexity and diversity. In comparison to it, the pattern of Spanish life, at first sight so seductive in its sharpness and vigour, may well appear obvious and monotonous.
For who can sum up or describe this country? Our lives are hushed and private and shut in by laurel hedges with spotted leaves. Our thoughts are obscure and muffled and not to be conveyed in speech or writing. Our philosophies consist of doubts and ideological solvents, but fantasy colours our day-dreams. Neurotic guilt makes us live in fear of one another and in hiding from ourselves. Then so great is our dread of the future that, like people who cannot bring themselves to make their wills, we refuse to plan our cities. We refuse to commit ourselves to anything beforehand, in case we should wish to change our minds. With the obstinacy of the born procrastinator, we camp in the present, because that is all we are certain of. Yet when some threat to our existence crops up, we forget our dithering and fight to the last ditch. What else does this mean but that we are all Hamlets, or that Hamlet is the type of Englishman as he is never found in real life – the Englishman undressed.
Darkness had come on as I walked and the last noises of the village had died away. The stars came out faintly as if wrapped in overcoats, their eyes peering dimly and apologetically through the blackness as though they were English too. A bat fluttered round me, a mouse in the hedgerow squeaked.
If then, I continued, the pattern of English life, seen from outside, seems soft and shapeless, our minds damp and hesitating, and our pulses slow, we are all the same, under our protective covering, an adventurous people, forever feeling our way in new directions, without form or rule to guide us but secure in our own instinct for what is right and fitting. Moreover, though we differ much among ourselves, our sense of national cohesion is so strong that it allows each of us to steer by his own compass. Without a peasantry and without a city life, camping in a landscape that has been wrecked by an industrial tornado, we are necessarily barbarians in our lack of culture, but in the art of getting on together we are supremely civilised.
The cars passed by, lighting up the hedges and then throwing them back into the blackness. The air was heavy with faint animal and insect sounds. One had the impression one could hear the grass growing. Yes, for all its mossiness of mind and its grey philistinism and its dread of reality, this was a country worth belonging to. It was mysterious, it was complex and it was decent. One could anyhow say, as Orwell had done, that it was a country whose people did not kill one another. Coming as I had done from Spain, that was something.