I may remark, in passing, that I did not go to see any bull-fights, for a reason which I explained to my Spanish friends on the spot. I said I should be very much annoyed if one of my Spanish friends came to England and instantly put on pink that he might rush to the meet and be in at the death of a poor little fox and then turn round and say, ‘How hideous! How repulsive! What brutes in human form are the English whose whole lives are passed in this degrading sport!’ We can indulge in all sorts of controversy and casuistry about bull-fighting or fox-hunting and there is a great deal to be said against both. All countries have anomalies that strike us as abnormalities or even abominations; but it is not seeing a country to look for the things that you abominate. Now I know that the Spaniards I saw are a kind people; they are astonishingly kind to children; they are not normally unkind to animals. There is a home for stray cats actually kept in the cloisters of the cathedral of Tarragona; and I have seen crowds of cats gathered round the image of St Ramon Nonato like the crowds of birds round St Francis. There are plenty of ordinary people making friends with dogs and horses in the ordinary way. But if I had preferred a Grand Guignol thrill to a great experience of a great nation, I might have allowed it to get between me and all these things.

  But this is a parenthesis; I was remarking that the celebrated procession at Seville is only the special and supreme example of a custom that is scattered all over these southern lands. The way in which religious mysteries are mixed with merry-making is very shocking to some people — especially, I have noticed, to the people who do not believe in the religious mysteries. Sceptics are so very sensitive on the point of reverence. But as I came in contact with these things, I could not but smile at the thought of those who have again been trying to prove to me that religion has no function but to make men sad. Those who gradually built up the ancient customs of mankind had a better sense of proportion and decoration. They knew, if only by instinct, how things grave and gay can be combined and distributed and where flippancy is fitting and where solemnity fits in with it; what contrast will best bring out a real severity and what is the psychological meaning of that profound phrase ‘comic relief’; just as the people of that southern land have always known, in dress and decoration, how a great blot of black brings out their crimson and their gold.

  THE TRADITION OF TOLEDO

  ONE of the first impressions created by a visit to Spain, in, any person with any historical imagination, is the sense of a world that runs round the Mediterranean rather than of three separate worlds which the sea divides. It is, I suppose, what the old world meant by talking of the round or circle of the lands. The point is that a man might sail from port to port round the whole of that inland sea and find something at least linking all those places together. If he pierced further into the various continents he would doubtless find things very different: very different if he plunged into what we call the African forests; very different if he set out on what we call the Asiatic plains. But a great deal that we imagine to be Asiatic in Lebanon, or African in Algiers, is really of the mixed central civilization, and at least as much European as the more Moorish parts of Spain. I think it is because people see this when they are not expecting it that they can make nothing of it and their descriptions are so unconvincing and conventional. For when people see what they do not understand they do not even believe what they see.

  Thus Toledo looked to me much more like Jerusalem than Jerusalem ever looked like most of the pictures of it. It has a wall crowning a hill whose steep sides have an indefinable look of a ruin and even a rubbish-heap. It is in the sort of country that is spotted with hardy olives or striped with hardy vines. It has that look that we never know in the rich rain and deep grasses of our northern islands — the look of vegetation being an exception. It is a green object and not merely a green background. For we owe our green fields to our grey clouds; and perhaps do not thank them often enough for it. In those splendid Spanish ruins a man feels immediately that he is within a circle or radius of something that lay to the south, and that the same radius also touched Jerusalem at the ends of the earth.

  It is not easy to define what that circle is. Those unduly discontented with the grey clouds may be inclined to say that it is simply the circle of the sun. But I am inclined to think it is also the circle of a culture and a historical tradition, which touches all these places though it varies from place to place. There is something in common between those opposite ends of the earth, or at least of the sea. The Crusaders have been in Jerusalem; the Moors have been in Toledo. But the conventional conception that cut up the world into four quarters in the old style does not look for such a similarity. It does not expect it; it cannot be expected to expect it. It expects Jerusalem to be only an Asiatic bazaar like Baghdad or even Bombay. It expects Toledo to be concentrated on Toledo swords like Sheffield on Sheffield cutlery. In many ways Toledo is very like a sword, steely and of a stern sort of chivalry; but it is warmed from the south; it is in the circle of the sun.

  I know it is customary to talk about the Moorish influence, as if what is really the Mediterranean influence was always a Moslem influence. This I believe to be a complete mistake. The indefinable connexion that links a town like Toledo to a town like Jerusalem existed long before Mahomet was born. It remained essentially a Christian connexion long after Mahomet’s religion had first swept over these places and at last retreated from them. We may call it, if we like, the Roman influence, though even that is insufficient. We may connect it with our own view of the Christian unity, though that will naturally be a matter of dispute. But whatever it is, it did not come out of the desert with the dry negations of a desert creed. It did not plant all those vineyards with the veto of Islam upon wine. It did not carve all those images with the veto of Islam upon statues. It did not find the chivalric devotion to the lady by looking for it in the harem, or all the legends of the Mother and the Holy Child from the arid Arabian dogma of the isolation of God.

  The tradition for which Toledo still lifts its riven crown of roofs and battlements may have been stirred to life by movements out in the East, or mingled to advantage with strange and remote things; it may have gained as well as given something in its contact with the Arab conquerors of Africa; but it is certain, if anything is certain, that when that spirit of Spain and of Western Christianity was touched to new life, it was in the form of its own life that it unfolded and to the height of its own destiny that it rose again; and Islam did not make a new world in such places, but only awakened a world that was asleep. That world is now very wide awake; and if the cathedral of Toledo was not merely modelled on a mosque even when the world was swept by the Moslem, it is now even less likely that featureless mosques will be the only churches of the future.

  TOM JONES AND THE ESCORIAL

  I WONDER how many people have noticed that a famous quotation from Gibbon can now be classed with the fulfilled prophecies — or rather, what is even more mystic and oracular, with the half-fulfilled prophecies. I say a quotation from Gibbon, for I fear it would be more misleading to call it a passage in Gibbon. Gibbon is now a classic; that is, he is quoted instead of being read. The thing most commonly quoted is an unusually stark and startling lie; the story which identifies St George with an Arian who was a swindling contractor. It is still sometimes quoted as a truth; though it is hard to understand how anybody with even the most superficial sense of history could ever have thought it true. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that the Church had been enthusiastically eager to canonize a swindler, it would have been quite impossible for her to canonize a heretic. But more often nowadays it is quoted as a lie; for the historian’s cold hatred of the Christian tradition has begun to be felt and allowed for; but, as it is one of the few things quoted at all, it might be held to imply that the whole history was a tissue of lies. And this would be quite as unjust to Gibbon as Gibbon was to George. But there has been a reaction against that Age of Reason, in which we may lose even those parts of it that were really reasonable. Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason. The later French Pantheists called Voltaire a barbarian, exactly as Voltaire had called Shakespeare a barbarian. And in the same way even the ‘Decline and Fall’ has already declined and fallen.

  But there is one other quotation from it that still deserves to be called a popular quotation. Being a popular quotation, it is probably a popular misquotation. Such a thing is normally misquoted; and I will here, to the best of my humble ability, misquote it. I have not got the book within reach; and I would not be bothered to look through the whole six volumes even if I had. But it is a passage in which he remarks, in a sort of parenthesis, that the family of Henry Fielding was connected in some way with the Imperial House of the Holy Roman Empire; and admits that the great princes of the dynasty might smile at the connexion; ‘but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of life and manners, will outlive the palace of the Escorial and the imperial eagle of Austria’.

  Well, it has already outlived the imperial eagle of Austria. That half of the defiant prediction has already become a definite and rather dull fact; almost in the way of an anti-climax. And it could not but cross my mind, like a cloud of some strange shape crossing the sky, when I stood recently under the ranked and rigid columns of the Escorial, that strange Spanish palace built by the harsh whim of one of the strangest of Spaniards and of men. Philip the Second not only dedicated it to St Laurence, but built it in the shape of a gridiron. And I realized something appropriate in the image, beyond the suggestion of something in the King’s own life of stiffness and of suffering. Señor Junoy, the distinguished Catalan writer, said to me, with great imaginative insight: ‘It seems so cold, and yet it is so ardent.’ Philip’s gridiron, almost like Pickwick’s warming-pan, was a cover for hidden fire. The very coldness of the surroundings accentuates that contained intensity.

  Others besides myself have often remarked on the curious fact that the guide-books and note-books of travel, and all the countless sketches and photographs and similar records, never seem to tell us the thing which seems most striking when it strikes the eye. I had heard about Philip the Second and the Escorial, and other elements in the picture; but I conceived a picture of Spain rather as if it must be a picture of Seville. I thought vaguely that everything would happen in the summer and there would be a background of orange-trees and a hint of Moorish architecture. I had seen hundreds and hundreds of sketches and pictures of Spanish scenes, often probably of these identical Spanish scenes; and yet somehow the primary point of the whole impression had never pierced.

  Nobody had ever told me — at least, nobody had ever told me so that I realized and remembered it — that the Spanish King had done something altogether unique and even unnatural when he built in such a place and in such a style his grim gridiron of stone. Nobody had made me understand that he had built a palace almost on the top of a mountain, far away upon naked and sterile heights only approached by rocky and ruinous roads like mountain passes. He had built a palace where anyone else would have built a hermitage. Like a madman, he had reared his tower of pomp and pride in a howling wilderness, where he might literally hear the wolves howl.

  Yet there was nothing extravagant or fantastic in his architectural achievement; it was too sternly classical to be classed even with the Baroque. It is said that he sat outside watching it being built, with the plans in his hand and his gouty foot on a stool; jealously vigilant to see that not a curve of too much exuberance should soften that terrible triangle. A curious and not very pleasant person though genuine in his way; but he did great harm in one respect. He was a Puritan on the wrong side; that is, he was on what I should call the right side, but it was not the side of the Puritans. He was very unlike most Spaniards but he has come to stand as a type of all of them. And under the shadow of his mere individuality we forget the real light and shade in the whole picture. We forget that his religious enemies were mostly Calvinists and men even more gloomy than he, and gloomy on principle as well as by accident. In his unlucky version of the legend of St Laurence, he was himself so much more like a persecutor than a martyr that he made any martyr look like a saint. We forget that most of the martyrs were Calvinists, who would have built something much more inhuman than the Escorial, only they were too inhuman to build anything at all. Perhaps he also forgot that, in the original legend, St Laurence joked on the gridiron.

  I think the prophecy of Gibbon, like the prayer of somebody in Virgil, will be half fulfilled and half scattered to the winds. I do not anticipate the decline and fall of the Escorial; I think it would take a good deal to remove that formidable object, a good deal more than is needed for the rather artificial revolution that altered an Austrian postage stamp. For Spain is fortunate in having had her decline and fall, and being now (I think) quite clearly rising once more. The Escorial has survived the fall, and there seems no reason why it should fall with the resurrection. But I do certainly hope that in another sense its shadow may grow a little less, as has the shadow of the imperial eagle. For a long time past the Escorial had stood for Philip the Second and Philip the Second had stood for Spain. Whatever is harsh or sombre in this one particular palace of this one particular prince has been associated with a whole people, who are not, in fact, in the least harsh or sombre, but in many ways exceedingly genial and generous. He was not at all a typical Spaniard, any more than Louis XI was a typical Frenchman, or Henry VII a typical Englishman — or even Welshman. But the imperial eagle has come to seem a bird of ill omen, and his castle a ruin fit for the nesting of such fowls of night. I certainly hope that, as an international impression, that error will pass away, and that Gibbon’s prophecy may yet serve to remind us that Spain is the home of the picaresque romance, or rambling comedy, and is not as gloomy as the Escorial, but as jolly as Tom Jones.

  POETRY IN ACTION

  IF I were asked why I think our whole industrial society is cursed with sterility and stamped with the mark of the slave, I could give a great many answers, but one will serve for the moment: because it cannot create a custom. It can only create a fashion. Now a fashion is simply something that has failed to be a custom. It is changed as a fashion because it is a failure as a custom. The rich, who are the most restless of mankind, do one thing after another and prove in the very process that they cannot create anything that is good enough to last. Their succession of fashions is in itself a succession of failures. For when men have made really dignified and humane things they have always desired that they should remain or, at least, that some relic of them should remain.

  We have statues of all schools of statuary and buildings of all periods of architecture. But fashion, in the feverish sense that exists today, is a totally different thing, a merely destructive thing; indeed, an entirely negative thing. It is as if a man were perpetually carving a statue and smashing it as soon as he carved it; as if he were always clumsily fumbling with the day and had never modelled it to his liking. It is as if people began to dig up the foundations of a house before they had finished putting the roof on. This is not activity or energy or efficiency; it is certainly not efficiency, for it never achieves its effect; it never regards it as either effective or effectual. It is simply instability and discontent; and one of the marks of it is that it cannot create a custom. It cannot, for instance, create a ceremonial, still less a legend. It can sometimes attempt a rag or a practical joke; it can attempt that very dismal sort of dinner that the millionaires in America call a Freak. But the thing cannot be repeated; even the stupidest millionaire could not stand that.

  When the traveller visits a place like Spain, the first thing that strikes him is a change from this atmosphere of hard and barren frivolity to the atmosphere of grave and solemn festivity. The Spaniards still have customs rather than fashions; and their customs come natural to them. They do not need to be changed, because to fresher minds they are always fresh. This is particularly true, for instance, about the sort of ceremonial that everywhere gathers round childhood. In such places it is not only children who understand childhood. Grown-up people understand it so thoroughly that they themselves become what the wise call childlike and the foolish call childish. It can be seen in a hundred things that make a system of communication between two generations. But it can be seen in this above all; that the grown-up people are still capable of inventing a ceremony, as children invent a game. The ceremonies vary, not only from place to place, but from century to century. They are not all old, as antiquaries like things to be old; for antiquaries only like things to be antiquated. Just as these living peasantries renew their fields and farms, so they renew their habitations and habits. Just as they restore their churches, by putting new patches on to old buildings, so they renew their games and jokes, putting in many elements in one place which are not found in another.

  What is called the Seville procession exists in many different places besides Seville. But as it is done in many different places, so it is done in many different ways. There are often elements that are in their nature new, that are unexpected in the sense that nobody could possibly expect them. I have heard it said that, sometimes, a man will rush out into the path of the procession and pour out a stream of absurdly spontaneous poetry, like an improvisation on a musical instrument; and that sometimes somebody else (also rather abruptly moved by the Muse) will answer him from a window with appropriate poetical repartees. But the point is that the old framework allows of these new things, just as the old orchard bears fresh fruit or the old garden fresh flowers. These old civilizations give us the sensation of being always at the beginning of things; whereas mere modern innovation gives us the sensation, even in its novelty, of drawing nearer and nearer to the end.