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The intrinsic value of such work either as thought or as æsthetic form is very slight. Interest in Unamuno hinges on interest in Spain. The power of this soul, one feels, approaches that of Whitman or Dostoievski. But the substance in which it has clothed itself is less negotiable. Like Don Quixote, Unamuno fails to realize that the modern world can be defeated only with modern weapons. Our multiverse, our chaos of sterile facts, is the result of an abuse of analytic methods. The true savior will have to understand and accept this analytic world, ere he can transform it. Unamuno, believing that he preaches to the world a new Salvation, is merely rousing Spain from her old ordered sleep.[40]
c. The Sleepless Spirit
In this new stir of Spain, it is not wonderful that the land which created Córdoba, Cádiz, Seville, which perfected the Dance and the cante hondo, which gave birth to Gabírol, to Góngora, should lead in the fresh emergence of Spain’s perennial spirit. For Andalús achieved the Spanish Balance without the Castilian rigor; obeyed like every part of Spain the will of Castile to make Spain’s chaos into One and yet contrived to keep that Oneness green. A painter and a poet of modern Andalusia voice so clearly the spirit of the land, that they speak again for the world. They are Pablo Picasso and Juan Ramón Jiménez.[41]
Picasso is a man of Málaga who came to Paris, and by the strategy of time and place conquered the plastic world. To the French, he appeared the Heaven-sent inheritor of Cézanne. Cézanne, naturalistic mystic and lover of El Greco, made of each stroke of his brush a preachment of the sanctity of form. Pure form, in his work, had its ritual of sacrament in its intrinsic stuffs. The Body and the Blood of life were to Cézanne the volumes and the movements palpable to the eye. El Greco, in a devout Catholic Age, was able to retain the legendary forms of Christianity as at least subsidiary means to express his vision. Cézanne was driven back on what seemed to him “primary” matter: the hills and the haystacks and the human body. His work implicitly rejects the concepts of European culture by its refusal of them all, as aids to revelation. Not religion, not ethics, not “beauty” shall be syllables for Cézanne, as for his predecessors, in the spelling of his Word. In this sense, Cézanne aspires to the primitivism which accepts the essences of previous culture and rejects its forms. Ideationally, he created and bequeathed a void: but an expectant and a fertile one. The successor of Cézanne was bound to be a man with concepts to fill in his abstract wording.
Concepts come to Europe from the east. It appears that Western Europe can create no concepts of the Real, although she creates the greatest Forms for concepts.[42] Like Cézanne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dostoievski, Blake, Whitman, Wagner were in this sense inviters of the east; the line of nineteenth century masters was long, who in their rejection of the conceptual forms of their inheritance, filled the world once more with a clamorous hunger for fresh Ideas to make incarnate. It is this hunger that explains, in art, the vogue of El Greco, of African sculpture, of Picasso.
The Idea in Picasso is the arabesque. The Moslem needed to harmonize his love of beauty and his fear of idols. He required a plastic form which would not, like the forms of physical nature, recall the old idolatries of the desert. The letters of his holy Arabic language served him, even as the Hebrew letters served, in the Kabbala, to make a Temple for the medieval Jews. These letters of the Arab held Allah and all the world of Islam, and yet were freed of natural associations. In Picasso, there is a similar impulse. His need also, as an artist, is to make designs; but his fear was an idolatry of another sort. The associations attached to physical forms—religion, sentiment, moral value—were already so unconvincing in the nineteenth century that Cézanne refused them, as Moses the Golden Calf. Now, even the sensory organisms formed by the eye must be rejected. To the hand of a Raphael, a woman’s body is amenable to art through its motherhood, its sanctity, its sexual appeal. These are cogent means for his æsthetic work. To Cézanne a woman’s body is still a woman’s body. Picasso rejects even the associative concept of woman: her body becomes a configuration of planes, densities, colors.
This formal use of transfigured substances is old in Spain. Spain’s wildest excess of sculpture and ornament in the plateresque holds an element of transformed abstraction that recalls Egypt. The Spanish dance resolves dramatic gesture into a formal end. And now, Picasso makes an arabesque of the letters and signs of nature.
Paris has worked perhaps too much upon Picasso. It has made him a “court” painter. This is intrinsically no ill thing: Ronsard and Racine were poets of the Court. The essential dynamism of Picasso has been urbanized; his intellectual stuffs have been turned at times into theory, into impulse. From creation, he has been deflected into analysis which is the antithesis of creation.[43] All this, because Paris is a Court of painters, with the tendency to cultivate the statement which clarifies at the expense of the creation; to address only itself; to polish surfaces rather than plumb new depths. Or, perhaps, the trouble is that this Court of Paris is not Picasso’s. It has needed him, more than he Paris. Too often has Picasso fragmented his invention into sharp annunciations of the theory others builded from his work. Yet for all that, he has brought light to the west: it came with him from Málaga: it rises from Andalusian depths older than Spain and yet forever Spanish.
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