We find a sort of wild delight in martyrdom, as, for instance, in the pictures of Ribera—a joy that is perfectly sincere in pain and in the scourging of the body. There are pictures horrible with the sense of death and human corruption. Again and again is enforced the Catholic lesson of humility, expressing itself in acts of charity to the poor, such as exists to-day in the custom of the washing of feet at the Easter celebrations in Seville. There is a childlike sincerity in these pictures which compels us to accept and realize what the painter himself believed in.
I recall the pictures of Zurbaran in the museum of Seville, pictures which carry you into a world of realism, a world in which visions are translated into the facts of life, set forth with a childlike simplicity of statement. Each picture is a scene from the life of old Spain. What honesty is here, what singular striving to record the truth! (The word “truth” is used in a restricted sense. Zurbaran understood nothing of the inner suggestiveness of art; to him art meant facts, not vision.) The peasants in his religious scenes are almost startling in their outward resemblance to life. How simple is his rendering of the Scriptural scenes, his conceptions of the Christ! With what poignant reality he depicts the Crucifixion, a subject exactly suited to his art! His saints are all portraits, faces caught in a mirror, the types of old Spain. No one has painted saints as Zurbaran has done. Before his saints gained their sanctity they must have struggled as men; and as we look at the cold, strong faces we come to know the spiritual instinct that belongs to every true Spaniard.
Among the Spanish priests to-day, and especially in those living in the country districts of Castile, the observant stranger will see the types represented in Zurbaran’s pictures. In the faces of these men, as, indeed, in their whole appearance, there is a profound asceticism, a sort of energy concentrated in a white heat of devotion. I have never seen the same type in Italy, or among the priests of any country. But often when watching a Spanish priest, in the services of the Church or walking alone on the roads, I have felt that I understood the meaning of the phrase, “This man has embraced religion.”
To all the Spanish painters art was serious—a matter of heaven, not of earth. Each painter was conscious of the presence of the Divine life, giving seriousness as well as joy to earthly life. It is this which gives Spanish painting a special interest to the student of Spain. In their ever-present religious sense, in their adherence, almost brutal at times, to facts, as well as in those interludes of sensuous sweetness which now and again, as, for instance, in the facile and pleasing art of Murillo, burst out so strangely like an exotic bloom, the Spanish pictures reflect the temper of Spain.
No one can understand Spanish painting who does not know the Spanish character. I think, too, that nothing reveals to the stranger more truly the Spanish character, which is at once so simple and yet so difficult, in its apparent contradictions, to comprehend, as a knowledge of the art of her painters.
CHAPTER VII—ABOUT MANY THINGS
The Real Spirit of Spain—The Spiritual Instinct of the Race—The Escorial—Spanish Beggars—The Spaniard belongs to the Past, but also to the Future.
What is the real spirit of Spain? We are now in a better position to attempt an answer. The word which I should use to represent the main impression made upon me by the character of the average Spaniard, the soldier, the bull-fighter, the priest, the gentleman, the peasant, is individualism; and it seems to me that this attitude explains Spain’s greatness in the past, and also her position to-day. A love of independence, a kind of passionate egotism, and a clannish preference for small social groups, has always distinguished this race. To his friends, even when they have injured him, the Spaniard is invariably indulgent; but those who are outside his circle he regards with indifference, which quickly rises to enmity.
Spain has always been the country of great personalities. Her brilliant achievements in every department of life—in warfare, in travel, in politics, in literature, and in the arts—have ever been the result of individual, and not of collective, genius. Velazquez is the world’s greatest painter; Cervantes, the world’s greatest story-teller. The Spanish spirit, with its wide-ranging energy for dramatic enterprise and its passion for personal freedom, has filled Spain in the past with martyrs and heroes.
The Spaniard has two devotions: his observance of the traditions of his race, and his religion. The ceremonies of life, which he never forgets to practise, are so real in his hands that they become quite simple and natural. He may commit a crime sooner than forget to behave gracefully. Every Spaniard, be he beggar, peasant, or prince, acts in the tradition of his race, by which every man is equal and a gentleman.