The bugle signals for the final action. Belmonte has risen; has exchanged the capa for the small muleta with which he covers his steel. Now he withdraws the muleta from the slender sword. It is a flexible two-edged steel, dipped at the end. He stands still before the brute whose sweat rolls red from the heaving rugose flanks. He stands with heels clicked together, holding the brute with his eye, and raises the blade deliberately forward. The steel points not at the head, but slightly above it. In that mountain of flesh beyond the deadly horns there is an unmarked spot which the sword must find. It is the tiny crutch formed by the bones of the shoulder. Within its aperture the blade can strike, unimpeded, to the heart. Anywhere else, the blade will not bring death but a mere ugly plunging rage.
Belmonte has chosen to stand and make the bull plunge on him. He is frail and erect. His shoulders are flexed; his head is slightly forward. Grace becomes subtly rigor. The bull obeys. He leaps. The blade sinks to the gemmed hilt. A wave of blood gushes to the sand, as the dead bull sinks.
. . . . . .
This is the archetype of the Spanish bull fight. It describes a masterpiece. And in an art so profound and dangerous, the masterwork is rare, even as in other æsthetic fields. But if great toreros are rare, one actor in the play is constant and is always masterful. The crowds of Spain, against the agitation of intellectuals and of Church, hold to their dear drama. In the corrida, all the desires which history has bred and then denied an issue, find an issue. Conflict is the stratified peace of the Spanish soul. For too many ages has the Spaniard lived on war to be able to do without it. In war, the lusts of the world and the lust for God became one. Christ and Priapus were joined in its full ecstasy. And in this dumb show of a man and a bull, they are conjoined again.
Gross comedy of blood; sex, dionysian and sadistic; the ancient rites of the brute and of the Christ meet here in the final image of stability. Spain’s warring elements reach their locked fusion—Spain’s ultimate form. For although everything is in the bull ring, and although anything may happen, nothing happens. Circus, blood, dance, death equate to nullity.[25] Like life in Spain, this spectacle is self-sufficient, issueless....
b. Man and Woman
Queen Isabel may rest in peace. She is having her will although she would not recognize its way. Her conscious will was to make Spain one: it has become the unconscious will of every Spaniard. Her concept of the State of Spain has become a universal state of mind. Here was Spain, this sea of elements tossing and titanic. Here was the Spaniard, pressed by the amorphous world in which he lived to establish unity within himself: to become a person, in defense from the chaos that was Spain. In his will to create Spain, he could not change the theater of his action. He must create Spain within himself. The first stage of his endeavor was that of the intense crystallizations which made Spain’s siglos de oro. These saints and sinners are not fragments: they are entire forms of Spanish energy. And the elements which they personify exist in every Spanish soul. If, therefore, Spain was to be unified within each Spaniard, La Celestina must be equated with Saint Teresa, Quixote and Amadis with Lazarillo and the Cid.... Although the energic sum of all these forces might in each individual soul add up to zero!
To the intensely individual Spaniard, Spain became more and more subjective: until at last the boundary to the outer world was lost. Politics, war and church became subjective. The Spaniard saw the world only in terms of himself. This is why he strove to make the State the mentor of conscience: this is why he strove to make the domains of the State a sort of spiritual body. To inculcate faith by Inquisition; to establish truth by the sword; to drive dissenters in spirit from the soil—these were the mad and logical acts of a man who beheld the world in his own image. Willing to create a Spain, each Spaniard remained the anarchic personal creature whose separatism Strabo had noted and Rome endured.
The tragedy of Spain—her reaching of success! First her energy broke up into dominant forms of will: then she equated these forms into the equilibrium she desired. And no energy was left! All of her opponent tensions merge to rest in every Spanish soul. The titanic efforts toward conquest, toward art, toward God which have made Spain great balance each other at the end. The energy is not gone, not weakened: it is equated. And the result is sleep.
The energy of a people is the sum of its personal propulsions. The dynamic race is that in which the individual as an individual is incomplete. Consider the United States. The immigrant in losing his old land loses the completion which he achieved in his own share of its life. As an American he espouses America’s incompletion. He injects his restlessness into America; and conversely America’s lack of final form becomes his lack and his need. The result is a social body moving toward completion, and energetic in so far as it is barred from completion save in the act of moving. In Russia, the incompleteness of the individual soul is a paradoxical result of its consonance with the land. Russia is vast, uncharted, indefinite. The Russian spirit, identified with the soil, becomes imbued with a symbolic sense of vastitude and longing. Spirit is therefore national in Russia: and spiritual energy floods the land, precisely because the land is an incomplete experience in each Russian mind.